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Change Fatigue

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A few weeks ago, I drew a cartoon exploring the nonstop drumbeat of change in business, particularly from a marketing perspective. When everything is constantly changing, it’s easy to lose sight of the power of consistency.

And yet the flip side of that dynamic is resistance to change, even when change is necessary.

A couple years ago, Gartner shared snapshots on the state of change in two different time periods. In 2016, the average employee faced two “planned enterprise changes” (such as a culture transformation, a restructuring, or a tech platform change).

Just six years later, in 2022, the average employee faced a staggering 10 “planned enterprise changes.” And that was even before the arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022.

The result can be change fatigue. Over that same time horizon, Gartner found that employee willingness to support enterprise change plummeted from 74% in 2016 to 43% in 2022.

Gartner identified two primary differentiators in how well teams absorb change: trust and team cohesion. High trust environments have a capacity for change that is 2.6X greater than those with low trust. Companies with strong team cohesion have a capacity for change 1.8X greater than those with low team cohesion.

I’ve often heard that leaders have to evaluate the “pain of change” versus the “pain of same” to decide if and when to act in the face of change. But more important is how to help their teams navigate all of this.

An interview on humor

I wanted to share a fun interview I had with Svilena Keane from MediaCat in the UK about some of what I’ve learned about working with humor in marketing the last 22 years. We found time to talk in the midst of Brand Week Istanbul a few weeks ago.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a related cartoon from 2014.

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-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.