Speaker 1: If you feel like there's more change pouring down on you, if your to-do list feels longer, you're not imagining it. There is more change in the world. In 2022, the average employee faced 10 planned enterprise changes, up from just two in 2016, a 5x increase, right? There is more change and it's happening faster. The pace of change is exponentially more with always-on connection, information overload, constant stimulation. It feels like everything is always in flux. And while change has been a constant forever, the speed, the scope, and the interconnectedness of change is on an unprecedented level. Unfortunately, when faced with the chaos and uncertainty that comes with all this change, we drop into something psychologists call anxious fixing. And we all know what this is inherently. I don't even need to explain it. It's that feeling of having to do something because sitting in the mess of the change is too uncomfortable. Unfortunately, where this often leads us is a lot of half-baked solutions happening all organically that don't have a strategic imperative. And unfortunately, we're seeing so much more organizational change happen as a result of just trying to get out of the discomfort. We all have a limit of change that we can absorb individually. And when an organization hits its limit, it's known as change saturation. This is just when the number of organizational changes exceeds the capacity of individuals to effectively adopt and implement those changes. And the thing is, we're not doing it on purpose. These things pile up, often in small ways. The tiny little mandates to try a new tool or run a content through a new acceptance process or think about the way that we change work getting done. These all pile up, especially on people that sit at the intersection of communication and collaboration in your organization. Those people feel this more intensely, and it can dramatically impact willingness to support your change. In that same time period where we had the 5X increase in the volume of change, we also saw willingness to support organizational change fall from 74% of employees supporting it to just 43% in 2022. That means that whatever you're taking home on Monday and getting your team excited about, less than half of them are on board with you. Change-fatigued employees exhibit much lower intent to stay, responsiveness, and discretionary effort among other negative outcomes. I was talking just last week with a senior leader at a financial services firm, Fortune 100, and he said he lost five key players in the last month and four of them didn't have anything lined up. They are taking radical sabbaticals, and these are mid-career, high-potential employees that just need a break, and they're willing to take radical lifestyle cuts and income cuts in order to just catch their breath. That's painful. It's painful for our organizations in terms of retention. It's painful for our employees. I wanna highlight one of the terms here if you haven't heard it. Discretionary effort is one that I want you to latch onto because I think it's the key to unlocking the harder that you're feeling. Discretionary effort is everything that isn't written in the job description and isn't required. By definition, it's the above and beyond, and also by definition, it's really damn hard to measure and hard to incentivize. It is what they give because they want to, and unfortunately, there's not a lot of want to right now. I like to say you can buy compliance, but you can't buy willingness, and sometimes compliance is even too expensive. One of the organizations I worked with, a $2 billion company, 65 years old, had rolled out a project management system, really fast-tracked this new tool without a lot of buy-in and support, and the tool, as it was explained, was gonna have management have more oversight, get better reporting, more accountability, everyone's gonna work in similar ways, and no surprise, the employees didn't want to do it. They didn't like this particular rollout. Unfortunately, these employees happen to know their value at the organization, and I was in a meeting with a group of people tenured 10, 15, 20 years at the company, and the words came out of the mouth in a group meeting, if I don't use it, are you gonna fire me? And let me tell you, you do not wanna have to be the boss answering that question to a team of tenured employees with a ton of institutional knowledge, right? That was a painful thing. We need to value willingness far more than we value compliance. Employers need this discretionary effort more than ever. It is the essential oil that makes our engines run, and there's no doubt that the world is changing so fast. We talk about it all the time, whether it's the pandemic, rush to remote work, AI, or even just the way that our employees are de-centering work and their identity, right? We're thinking about all these different changes, and these are major disruptors. It feels a lot like when the internet and email came to land and we all had to talk about how our businesses were gonna go online, and I got my first business card with an email, it disrupted everything, and it took a decade to settle. We're in another one of those moments, and the glitter is still settling. Being on the same side is essential to eliminating change fatigue. When we can feel like we're pulling in the same direction, we can actually feel like we're working together, and the only way you're gonna get my discretionary effort is if I feel like my effort is going towards something I value. So if we as leaders and as team members can figure out a way to align what we're feeling and be on the same strategy, we can make sure that we get that above and beyond, that discretionary effort from our team by making them feel aligned. Repairing those bridges is one of the first steps to getting people to believe and trust that the next change is not gonna be awful. That team I was telling you about that had the project management system shoved on them with just a small amount of repair, a couple UX changes, a couple fewer required fields, some transparency about where the data was gonna go and how it was gonna be used, turned what was a compliance disaster into a relaunch that had 100% adoption three weeks after we relaunched it. Not a huge fix, but an understanding of where they were coming from and getting on the same side, rowing together, allowed that to be a success.