How to beat change fatigue

How early on do you detect that this is what you're dealing with? Is it...

I know, I d- I don't know if you have a kind of full kickoff kind of meeting, or is it even before you get to that stage? A- And, and an understanding of the context that you're delivering this initiative into.

But how soon do you get that feeling from it, and then how does that actually alter your approach as like a proj- project lead or a project manager t- to the, to the program you're seeking to deliver? Um, Kate, how early on do you have, do you normally kind of see this happen?

Well, I think it's probably very early on you start understanding the sort of the area that you're deli- you're delivering into.

So obviously it- it's, it's really, um, it's really key to understand your, your stakeholders.

So who are you, what has happened before? So going back to the point of what has happened before, what is the team like? What is their natural normal? Um, and you'll get that information from the line managers and I think that's really important to understand what is the normal for that team.

Um, we're doing a lot of work around managing for uncertainty within, within, uh, Kings at the moment and, um, going back to the point that what is the normal for that team, um, at a very early stage, understanding how the stakeholders work, how the stakeholders interact, gives you a little bit of a sense at the beginning as to where those stakeholders are currently.

So the, very much like the, the sort of readiness for change, the change readiness phase.

You do that at the outset, and then you monitor that as you move through to see has that changed, has that improved, or actually have we got an issue?

So I guess if you're, you're sort of, um, fixed within a particular organization, you know what's going on anyway, and you understand the bigger context, um, that you're working within.

Um, Sharon, what, what, what's your experience? Is it normally really obvious that this might be the reaction from people before you've even kicked off the kind of program?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, there's, there's certain phases that pe- you can see the fatigue more, or you can see the peaks and, peaks and troughs in people's energy and, um, and their engagement in the actual, um, transformation as well.

So as you go through the different phases, um, you can see how much, um, how much engagement and curiosity you're still getting versus, um, people's cynicism.

So you start to see cynicism as well when the fati- just before fatigue comes in, um, because they can't quite grasp where it is that we're going and it, the, it, it then, um, becomes very much a leadership issue rather than a people issue.

So it's that whole creating clarity around the direction of travel.

Um, so, so there is definitely, um, points at which you s- you see this, um, points at which you see more resistance, that looks like resistance, but actually it's just, um, um, people saying, "Well, what's the, you know, what's the point? 'Cause nobody's listening." It's back what Kate was saying before around that psychological safety piece.

They get to a point where they don't feel listened to anyway, so what's the point in actually speaking up? Um, but yes, there's different phases throughout the actual transformation that you see these things, which is why we tend to do, um, more collaborative design work, um, as we go through a transformation because we can, we, we, we basically say all the data's in front of you.

You can see it when we do that collaboration of where people is on the change journey.

Um, and, and actually it's really good if people are vocal because we can see exactly where they are and what work we need to do to bring them, bring, you know, meet them where they are and bring them to where, um, we, we wanna be as well.

So it's a good data point.

Yeah.

And then it, that ties in with what Kate was saying about psychological safety.

So it's encouraging if you know people feel able to, to speak up about how, how they're feeling.