How much change can your organisation absorb?

We talk about change resistance. We talk about change fatigue. And we talk about saturation.

What we don't talk about enough is what all three are eroding.

Absorption.

When I was conducting my research, one finding flawed me. 

Many of the Leaders were operating with little to no understanding of how constrained their organisations already were. 

Not because they weren't capable, but because the mechanisms didn't exist for them to look at the whole picture.

And this is a gap that is still showing up in many organisations.

Most organisations have a roadmap. They know what's going live and when. But a roadmap tracks projects. It doesn't track what those projects are asking of the organisation absorbing the changes.

Attention is finite - people can only hold so many priorities before none get real depth. Time doesn't stretch - BAU doesn't pause because a transformation kicked off. And adaptation is cognitive work - even when people are fully on board with the direction.

That's what absorption actually means. And when no one is monitoring it, the load builds silently until execution starts to break.

Projects get tracked. People load doesn't.

Change portfolio management is how leaders close that gap. A leadership discipline that governs the cumulative load on people, sequences competing demands, and makes the trade-offs before saturation hits.

The discipline gives us visibility and supports conversations across a change portfolio i.e., load, impact, and sequencing. The important lens to consider in the leadership conversation is the connection to BAU performance signals, so leaders can see their actual absorption threshold, not just estimate it.

Nobody governs cumulative load because no forum owns it. Every project reports on itself and the organisation absorbing all of them has no representation in the room. Building that view, and giving it enough standing to change the sequence, is part of what Execution sets up.

This is part of lever 5 (Execution Feasibility) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. See the full framework →

Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →

Written by Rebecca Reti, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.

There's a visual map in the carousel setting out the six dimensions I use to assess change absorption. See the carousel on LinkedIn →