Our people are tired of change.
How many times have you heard that sentence? I hear it and read it all the time. Last week, I heard it again during a mentoring session from someone whose organisation is running several transformations at the same time.
I asked how many exactly.
Silence.
Then the answer: I don’t know. No one monitors that here.
So I asked whether they had a canvas showing all the changes together in one place.
They didn’t.
They had never been asked to create one.
Each of those changes has a sponsor, a plan, a budget, and a report showing green status.
But no one is managing them as a whole.
And yet the accountant who is dealing with a new system, a reorganisation, a new manager, and an AI pilot starting in spring does not see four separate projects. She sees a year in which almost nothing feels certain. And her capacity is not divided neatly between those projects, because each one assumes it has all of her attention.
That is why I recommend creating a Transformation Canvas.
Half a day. One wall. A flipchart. Sticky notes. And the people leading those changes in one room.
You can do exactly the same online.
Put every change that is currently underway or being prepared onto the wall, including its duration, the departments and roles affected, and the name of the person leading it.
What starts to appear on that wall?
– Two projects going live in the same month and affecting the same team
– Departments carrying three changes at once, while others have none
– Dependencies between projects that their respective leaders are unaware of
– One manager through whom absolutely everything flows
– A change that could be moved by six weeks without costing anyone anything
That last one is often the biggest surprise. Sequencing can be changed. No one is simply making those decisions because no one can see the whole picture.
Change saturation is not solved by better communication or more frequent training. It is solved by having someone who can see how much change is landing on people and who has the mandate to adjust the sequence.
Imagine this in your organisation. If you put every current change onto one wall, how many sticky notes would there be? And how many of them could be moved?
Sometimes we become so immersed in our own reality that we stop seeing the big picture.
A small step back can open up entirely new perspectives and possibilities.