Excerpted from Too Much, Too Fast: Constant Change Creating Corporate Burnout, February 4, 2025

‘Things Are Not Getting Better’

Her clients ability to adapt to change began to wane around 2017, recalls Jenny Magic, founder & CEO of Build Better Change, an Austin, Texas-based consultancy and co-author of “Change Fatigue: Flip Teams From Burnout to Buy-In.”

“Top leadership was interested, but middle managers and the people who do the work were less capable of carrying it out,” she recalls. A recently published report by her firm “validates that things are not getting better.”

Some evidence shows them getting worse.

“The average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016,” a Gartner report notes, “and there is no reason to expect the pace to slow. But the workforce has hit the wall; the share of employees willing to support enterprise change collapsed to just 38% in 2022, compared with 74% in 2016.”

In response, some organizations are getting creative; examples can be found among both corporate giants—Danone, Liberty Mutual—and relative upstarts. Companies opt for either change management consultants employed by big name consultancies or specialized emerging competitors. In addition to advising executives, these increasingly high-profile professionals hold conferences, provide training, and draft articles with titles such as “Three Ways to Minimize Change Fatigue Among Financial Teams.”