Why Change Fails? You took your eye off the potatoes…

This might seem familiar if you’d had help cooking a holiday meal. Veggies prepped (although your partner always chops them too small). Oven on (they always have the temp too low). Turkey stuffed (you don’t even what to think about the secret family recipe). But the roast potatoes, your domain, have been par-boiled, prepped and are roasting nicely. Somehow, what comes out 40 minutes later is closer to mash because, unbeknownst to you, your partner also par-boiled them an hour ago and didn’t mention it to you. The resulting sloppy mess isn’t the result of your trusty recipe, it’s because you assumed your potatoes started raw.

Most change plans make the same assumption about people.

Headline-grabbing headlines from a CDC report published last month reported that 71% of American adults had felt very tired or exhausted in the previous three months – a perfect number to unleash a wellbeing campaign. But most of that 71% said they only felt like that on some days which, realistically, is more like a description of adult life than a crisis. The more interesting number was in the shadow of the headline. 

Roughly one in six adults reported feeling very tired or exhausted most days or every day. Among that group, 46% reported difficulty remembering or concentrating, more than double the rate among everyone else, and 36% said they were limited in the kind or amount of work they could do. The report didn’t speculate why. Some of this fatigue will come from work, much of it won’t, and none of it is visible from the outside.

This is important when you think about what a transformation requires from people: learn a new system, unlearn an old process, and stay productive while doing both.  Almost every element draws on the capacities that frequent fatigue erodes. Change plans are typically built for a workforce that arrives with a full tank, but the data shows that in any sizable organization, a meaningful proportion of staff arrives with considerably less, and the plan has no way of knowing who.

In general, the change management field has responded to fatigue by trying to measure it, which has value at the portfolio level, but the closer measurement gets to the individual, the closer it gets to territory leaders have no business entering. Asking employees to report how exhausted they are and why is intrusion dressed as care, and the people most affected are often the least likely to say so.

A better principle is the one an experienced cook uses when unsure what state the ingredients are in: cook for the most-done component. Lower the heat, add things in stages, check more often. In organizational terms, that means pacing rollouts so learning doesn’t stack on learning, designing training for someone whose concentration is compromised rather than someone at their best, and treating stalled adoption as a signal about load before treating it as resistance. None of this requires knowing who is struggling. A change that can be absorbed on a bad week can certainly be absorbed on a good one.

This shifts the leadership question – instead of asking how much change our people can take, which invites guesswork or surveillance, ask whether this plan would survive contact with someone running on empty. That is a question leaders can answer from the plan itself.

When the potatoes turn to mash, the lesson isn’t about the potatoes. It’s about a recipe that assumed they all started raw.