28 Jan 2026
From Change Fatigue to Change Fitness
From Change Fatigue to Change Fitness
A Brain-Smart Agenda
Increasingly we are seeing leaders ( our learners) getting to the limit of their capacities and using their number one coping strategy REACTING to what’s happening day to day. Its an understandable response and I liken it to keeping plates spinning on poles or keeping the balls in the air when juggling.
It’s a self-limiting construct as anything new is seen as an additional plate of ball to deal with.
We see this reactive habits everywhere, however there is definitely a variation between individuals, organisational cultures and work load.
Across New Zealand and Australia, many organisations are attempting to accelerate internal change while quietly exhausting the people expected to deliver it. AI adoption, cost pressure, regulatory shifts and workforce constraints are now permanent features of the landscape. Yet neuroscience would suggest the capacity to absorb and execute change is shrinking, not growing.
At the same time, leadership teams are tired. Not the end-of-year tiredness that comes with a hard push, but a deeper fatigue. Leaders describe being constantly “on”, moving from issue to issue, decision to decision, with little space to think, reset or get ahead of what’s coming next.
The result is a growing mismatch between the volume of change organisations are attempting and the cognitive and emotional capacity available to lead it well.
I think two concepts sit at the heart of this: change fatigue and leadership fatigue. They’re often spoken about as if they’re the same thing, and treated with the same solutions. A neuroscience lens shows why that’s a mistake – and why many current responses are missing the point.
If we try to take a systems view it might not be that organisations are changing too much. It’s that many are trying to run a high-performance change agenda on a system that was never designed for sustained intensity.
In other words, we’re demanding endurance from a system built for sprints.
- Change Fatigue: When the System Is Running Hot
Change fatigue shows up when people are exposed to repeated, overlapping change without enough clarity, control or recovery. Engagement drops. Resistance hardens. Energy drains away.
In 2025 surveys across ANZ, change fatigue consistently ranks among the top barriers to execution. What’s striking is that it often appears even when individual initiatives make sense. People aren’t objecting to the change itself; they’re reacting to the cumulative load.
A useful analogy here is air traffic control. Each individual plane may be manageable. The problem arises when too many aircraft are in the sky at once, flight paths overlap, and visibility drops. Errors increase not because the controllers are incapable, but because the system is overloaded.
In NZ and Australia, this overload is amplified by:
- Technology and AI changes layered on top of unfinished transformations
- Chronic workload pressure
- Change processes that feel transactional rather than participative
Change fatigue is not a mindset problem. It’s a design problem. It tells you the organisation is asking for more adaptation than its people can reasonably supply with the resources and certainty available.
- Leadership Fatigue: The Human Cost of Holding It Together
Leadership fatigue is what happens when that system pressure becomes personal.
Most senior leaders can cope with intensity. What wears them down is sustained intensity without relief. Over time, this shows up as:
- Emotional depletion and thinner empathy
- Decision fatigue, where choices feel heavier and harder
- A quiet isolation: being the container for uncertainty while being expected to project confidence
Many leaders describe this as “losing their edge” or “running on empty”. In reality, it’s closer to running critical infrastructure without scheduled maintenance.
One might ask:
If a leader’s role requires consistently good judgment, why do we design their days to exhaust the very brain systems judgment depends on?
Leadership fatigue is not a failure of resilience. It’s what happens when capable people operate too long in an environment that assumes unlimited cognitive capacity.
- The Brain Under Load: Why Good Leaders Struggle
Neuroscience helps explain why both change fatigue and leadership fatigue are so pervasive.
Leadership relies heavily on the prefrontal cortex: the brain’s planning, prioritising and sense-making centre. It’s powerful, but it’s not built for constant demand.
Think of it like a high-performance engine. It delivers incredible output, but only if fuel, cooling and maintenance are right. Run it hot for too long, and performance drops before the warning lights come on.
Three things quietly degrade this system in modern leadership roles:
- Decision overload: As decision volume rises, decision quality falls. Leaders default to avoidance, overly conservative calls or impulsive fixes.
- Constant switching: Moving rapidly between strategy, people issues, risk and operational detail leaves cognitive residue behind. Nothing gets full attention.
- Chronic stress: Sustained pressure strengthens threat responses and weakens perspective. Leaders become more reactive precisely when calm judgment is most needed.
Change amplifies all of this. Uncertainty and loss of control activate the brain’s threat systems. When change is constant and poorly framed, those systems stay switched on. Over time, motivation drops and cognitive flexibility narrows.
Leaders experience this twice over: once personally, and once through responsibility for others. That’s why leadership fatigue often surfaces before organisations recognise a wider change fatigue problem.
- Same Loop, Different Signals
It helps to be precise here.
- Change fatigue is a system-level condition: the pace, volume and design of change exceed adaptive capacity.
- Leadership fatigue is an individual-level state: cognitive and emotional depletion in those leading that system.
They reinforce each other. Overloaded systems create resistance and noise. Leaders respond by working harder, intervening more and carrying more themselves. Fatigue grows, clarity drops, and uncertainty spreads.
A simple but uncomfortable truth:
When leaders are tired, organisations feel it. Even when no one names it.
Breaking this loop requires more than resilience training or better communications. It requires rethinking how change and leadership are designed.
- From Change Fatigue to Change Fitness
Change fitness is not about coping better. It’s about building an organisation that can change repeatedly without degrading performance or wellbeing.
It rests on three things:
- Mindset: Change and ambiguity are expected conditions, not failures of planning.
- Muscle: Sense-making, prioritisation and reflection are built into how work happens, not added during transformations.
- Connection: Trust is strong enough for people to speak up early, reducing threat and rework later.
Change fitness is closer to physical conditioning than a single training program. It’s built over time through consistent practice and smarter load management.
- Brain-Smart Practices (and Why They Matter)
Rather than listing tactics, it helps to name the principle behind them.
- Protect thinking time because strategy is not a side activity
- Reduce unnecessary threat because anxious brains don’t collaborate well
- Treat recovery as infrastructure, not indulgence
- Standardise the trivial to preserve judgment for what matters
- Make progress visible because motivation needs evidence
- Build regulation skills because composure under pressure is now a core leadership capability
If we trained leaders’ cognitive skills as deliberately as we train financial or technical skills, how different would leadership look?
- Designing the System, Not Just the Leader
Individual behaviour change will always be limited if the system keeps generating overload.
Over the next 6–12 months, HR and executives can make real progress by:
- Treating change capacity as a hard constraint, not a soft consideration
- Sequencing initiatives based on cumulative load, not just strategic merit
- Making energy stewardship and sense-making explicit leadership expectations
- Building regular forums where leaders can speak honestly without performing
This is less about adding programs and more about removing friction.
Change fatigue tells you the system is overloaded. Leadership fatigue tells you the people holding that system are nearing their limits. Neither is a weakness. Both are information.
A genuine question I’m hearing more often in leadership rooms:
“If change is now constant, why does it still exhaust us every time?”
The answer isn’t more grit or better comms. It’s that many organisations are trying to deliver continuous change using systems and leadership expectations designed for occasional disruption.
Change fatigue and leadership fatigue are not failures. They’re feedback.
The strategic question for NZ and Australian leaders is not “How do we push harder through change?” but “How do we build an organisation that can change without breaking its leaders?”
Tired leaders can become a strategic risk.
If change is now constant, then change fitness needs to become a core leadership capability, not a nice-to-have. A minority of leaders already adapt well, the challenge is how do we extend that to most leaders!
Like to know more about how to use practical neuroscience to drive more impact?
Register for one of our Public leadership Programmes. Leadership Collective – Mantle
Connect with us on LinkedIn, or sign up to our e-newsletter