That assumption made sense when change arrived periodically - a restructure here, a system migration there, each with space to resolve before the next one began. It does not make sense in an environment where the rate of change is still climbing, with no plateau in sight. Political shifts, economic pressure, and accelerating AI adoption are not arriving in sequence. They are arriving simultaneously and continuously, and the gap between one disruption and the next has all but disappeared.
"I hear the same phrases in client conversations on repeat: 'When can we close this change off?' 'Let's just get through this transition period.' 'We just need a comms plan and some training sessions.' Comments like this are indicators organisations are still treating change as an event with a beginning and an end," says Keren-Amy Laughton, partner at DY|DX and an Industrial-Organisational Psychologist. "That model no longer exists."
For Laughton, this is the core failure of traditional change management: it is reactive by design. It assumes you respond to disruption, manage it, and return to stability. "The greatest risk right now is inaction, but the deeper risk is responding to today's pace of change with yesterday's playbook. Organisations that are still treating change as a once-off project are not protecting their people from disruption, they are simply leaving them less equipped to deal with what's coming next."
This matters more than most organisations realise. Research consistently shows that the majority of transformation programmes fail to deliver their intended outcomes, with credible large-scale studies from McKinsey and BCG pointing to success rates of roughly 30%. Critically, the evidence points not to technology or strategy as the primary culprit, but to people. A 2020 BCG study of 800 senior executives found that while digital transformation inevitably involves technology, the people dimension - organisation, operating model, processes and culture - is usually the determining factor in whether it succeeds or fails.
Laughton sees this pattern play out in how organisations interpret resistance. "When employees push back on change, the instinct is to treat it as an attitude problem that can be fixed with better communication, or a skills gap that can be closed with training on the new system. But it goes much deeper than that. If individuals do not feel fundamentally capable of navigating change, if they lack the internal skills to manage uncertainty and adapt in real time, they will default to what they know, no matter how much training you run."
The shift Laughton is calling for is not incremental. Rather than managing change as a series of projects, she believes organisations need to build change capability: a "change muscle" that strengthens with use and becomes embedded in how the business operates day to day, rather than something switched on when disruption hits.
At DY|DX, this thinking translates into a framework built on three interconnected elements: the environment an organisation creates, the experience people have of change as it happens, and what Laughton calls change efficacy - an individual's belief, and actual capacity to navigate change at all. "Most organisations invest in one of these and assume the others will follow, but they won't. You can build all the individual capability in the world, but if people return to a culture that punishes mistakes or doesn't make space for experimentation, that capability gets switched off. Change muscle is built at the intersection of all three, not in any one of them alone."
Underpinning all of this is a broader shift in how Laughton believes organisations must think about transformation itself. "The question we should be asking is not 'how do we get through this change?' It is 'how do we build an organisation that can move with change continuously, and increasingly quickly?' When change becomes a capability rather than a project, something remarkable happens: you stop merely adapting, and you start innovating instead."
She is direct about what this requires from leadership. "Leaders are still being asked to have the answers. To project certainty. But the leaders who will be most effective in this environment are those who can hold ambiguity without pretending it does not exist, and who understand that the goal is not to get their people through the next change, it is to build people who are ready for whatever comes after that, and after that."
Laughton concludes: "One can only innovate at the speed at which people can absorb and adapt. The organisations that will succeed are not those that launch the most change initiatives. They are the ones that build the capability to change as a way of being, because the pace we're at today is not the pace we'll be at tomorrow."
For more information on DY|DX and the services offered, visit www.dydx.digital.
