Years ago I spent a morning in front of a wall of index cards at a company that had brought me in to help its teams move faster. Each card was an initiative someone in leadership had launched with real conviction. A new operating model. A culture refresh. Two parallel tooling migrations. A reorganization that was itself a recovery from the reorganization before it. I went looking for the column marked done. It held four cards. Everything else sat in the murky middle, and much of it had been there for the better part of a year. The executive walking me through the wall was proud of it. To him it showed ambition.

He also told me, in the same conversation, that his people had become resistant to change. He said it the way a person describes a medical condition, as though resistance had drifted in through the vents and settled into the building. I have heard some version of that sentence in nearly every organization I have worked with since. The word carries a lot of freight. It lifts the problem out of the leader's decisions and relocates it inside the employee's character, where it conveniently stops being the leader's fault.

Ten things at once

McKinsey recently put a number on the wall I had been staring at. The average employee now sits inside ten planned change programs in a year, roughly five times the figure from a decade ago.1 Those are not ten ideas hovering in the abstract. Each one asks for attention and new behavior and a slice of the same finite capacity a person was already spending on the work they were hired to do. Stack enough of them and the arithmetic stops working. The eleventh change does not stall because people have grown stubborn. It stalls because there is no room left to put it.

The reports that photograph well

When McKinsey assesses a portfolio of change inside a large company, very few of the efforts turn out to have an outcome attached to them at all. Leaders get updates on activity. Plans are moving. Milestones are turning green. What rarely shows up is whether the business result the work was meant to produce ever arrived.1 At one firm a human resources leader asked her team to list the function's key initiatives and was handed more than a hundred and thirty. Once they sorted for the ones with a real outcome behind them, six survived. At another company, fewer than one in five initiatives had results anyone could track with any rigor.1

A change that never reaches done is not progress held in reserve. It is capacity that was spent and never came back, and every fresh launch borrows against an account already overdrawn.

What the word resistance hides

Perceptyx reached the same wall from a different road. Across twenty million employee survey responses over ten years, their researchers watched the drivers of engagement reorder themselves. Belonging and feeling valued, reliably the top two from 2016 onward, fell toward the bottom in 2025. What climbed into the top spots was how well the company handles change, with confidence in senior leadership close behind.2 Employees had stopped asking whether they felt at home and started asking whether the people in charge knew where they were taking the place. Perceptyx also found that perceptions of how change is handled have slid for two straight years.2

McKinsey is blunt about the reflex that kicks in once that exhaustion shows up in the numbers. The instinct is to light a burning platform and lean harder, when the actual job is to give people a reason worth running toward, a burning desire rather than a burning platform.1 Pressure on an already exhausted system rarely buys more delivery. It buys quieter meetings and capacity hidden where the next demand cannot reach it. The companies that handle change well do something duller. They decide what they will not pursue and say so out loud, and they get their own leaders aligned behind a short list before asking anyone below to absorb the next thing. When people push back, the useful read is information about capacity rather than a flaw of character. Fatigue does not sort good change from bad. Even a change people want draws down the same reserve as one they dread.

A limit, and a column for done

Anyone who has worked with a real team board knows the discipline that is missing here. You cap how much can be in progress at once, and nothing new begins until something already underway is finished and moved to done. The cap feels like a constraint until you watch what it does. Work stops collecting in the middle. Things complete. The aim was never to do less. It was to make sure the work that starts actually ends, so completion builds on completion instead of everything stalling at the halfway mark.

Most leadership change portfolios carry no such cap. Nothing limits how many transformations run at once, because each new one arrives attached to someone senior who wants it, and telling a peer no costs more in the moment than letting the wall grow. So the cards accumulate. The finishing, the unglamorous business of closing things out and confirming they delivered what they promised, is the part that gets skipped, because starting is what gets noticed and finishing is simply assumed to have happened on its own.

I think about that wall more often than I expected to. The company did not have a resistance problem. It had a leadership team that had confused launching with leading, and a workforce doing the only reasonable thing left to it, slowing down to guard what little capacity remained. The repair was never a motivational push. It needed someone with enough authority to walk the wall, kill most of the cards, and protect the few that survived until they were truly finished.

So here is the question I would put to you. If you sat your team down and counted, how many active initiatives would you find, and how many could anyone honestly move into the done column this quarter? And of the ones still stuck in the middle, which are you holding onto because they matter, and which because no one wants to be remembered as the person who ended them?