The very things that make a business excellent in operations make it fragile during change
Capacity often becomes the biggest friction force hampering change delivery - not lack of ambition, not lack of vision, not lack of support, not lack of skill, not lack of money.
It is very easy to misdiagnose change failure as a motivation problem when actually, it may be a capacity problem.
How so?
Here’s my thoughts.
Most modern organisations proudly run “lean”.
- They minimise waste.
- They optimise effort.
- They use every minute of people’s time.
This is a principle inherited from scientific management, productivity thinking, and operational efficiency.
It works brilliantly for stable operations.
It works terribly for change.
Because lean means:
eliminate or reduce wasteful slack to zero
least amount of buffer necessary
reduce idle time with a steady flow
A lean design purposefully does not leave a lot of capacity for extra stuff - like change.
Lean systems are efficient, so when change arrives, the system needs to ask people to attend workshops, revisit processes, make decisions, learn new systems, adjust behaviours…where does the time for this work come from?
Evenings?
Weekends?
Lower quality service?
Delayed operations?
People cannot deliver change sustainably without relief from existing work. Otherwise, change creates burnout rather than progress.
Change produces value on a different timeline
Change is additional work for a period of time. Not forever, but for long enough to matter.
You need people to:
Think
Redesign
Learn
Experiment
Document
Switch between old and new ways
Adapt
These activities do not create immediate output - they create future capability. This can feel fundamentally wrong to anyone who is used to:
Daily productivity
Operational KPIs
Immediate output metrics
Efficiency measured in hours, not months
Anyone who is trained to maximise today’s performance often struggles to support work where the results appear in:
Three months
Six months
A year
Change work looks slow.
It looks intangible.
It looks like “non‑work”.
This creates suspicion, pressure, and unintentional resistance.
Change must not be viewed as wasteful: it is investment.
Effective Operations rewards efficiency now
Effective Change rewards effectiveness later
Change consumes emotional & Cognitive as well as practical energy
Even positive change creates uncertainty:
status shifts
role ambiguity
fear of incompetence
loss of familiarity
changing social dynamics
Emotional labour consumes capacity just as surely as operational labour does.
Similarly, human cognitive capacity is finite. Even highly capable people can only absorb so much context switching, decision-making, uncertainty, and learning simultaneously.
new terminology
new systems
new relationships
changing priorities
temporary ambiguity
parallel old/new processes
There is only so much available human absorption capacity, and poeple can reach saturation point, which is unmeasurable capacity.
Specialist dependency creates bottlenecks
Change initiatives often rely on the same few people:
senior decision-makers
architects
certain Subject Matter Expert
operational managers
compliance experts
These people become organisational pinch points that often constraint the amount of change initiatives that can be tackled at any one time.
Performance Cultures Often Punish the Temporary Dip Required for Change
Transformation temporarily decreases efficiency before improving it.
People often expect immediate productivity from new systems or processes, but in reality, most change creates a temporary performance dip while people learn and adapt.
This is normal.
But high-performance operational cultures often interpret this dip as failure rather than transition. They may even punish this - it is considered that undesirable.
So people receive contradictory signals:
“Transform the organisation, but do not let performance dip.”
“Innovate, but do not reduce throughput.”
“Learn the new system, but maintain the same response times.”
“Redesign the process, but hit all existing KPIs.”