When Change Has Nowhere to Land

I’ve been noticing how often organizations ask for transformation without changing the conditions people are operating in.

When priorities are stacked and attention is already fragmented, even meaningful change can start to feel like one more thing to carry. And it's so rarely because people don’t care, but because there’s no room to absorb it. The system is already full.

In moments like this, the question isn’t whether the idea itself is good. It’s whether the system around it can actually contain it.

Is the change clearly sponsored? Is it folded into existing ways of working? Is it protected from being diluted by everything else competing for time and energy?

When that container is missing, initiatives rarely fail outright, but they do fade. They lose momentum, get deprioritized, or quietly disappear into the background. What’s left is often a lingering frustration that something important — and something people invested real time and energy in — never had a fair chance to take root.