Project Management

Please login or join to subscribe to this thread

How do you deal with "Change Saturation" in your organization?

linkedin twitter facebook   Change Management  
avatar
Francisco Herrera
Community Champion
Program Manager, PPM&PMO Specialist.| Coppel, Mexico. Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico

Colleagues, as Project Managers, we are usually the ones driving change. However, I want to talk about what happens when there is simply too much of it.

Nowadays, organizations are constantly implementing new software, changing internal processes, or restructuring departments—often all at the same time. This leads to "change saturation" or "change fatigue," where teams become overwhelmed, lose motivation, and start resisting even the good projects.

I would love to hear your experiences on this topic.

Questions for the community:

What are the early warning signs you notice when a team has reached its limit for change?

How do you manage a project when the team is already exhausted from previous implementations?

Have you ever had to push back and tell stakeholders, "We need to pause; the organization cannot handle another new initiative right now"? How did that go?

Looking forward to reading your strategies!

Francisco

Sort By:
< 1 2 >
avatar
Francisco Herrera
Community Champion
Program Manager, PPM&PMO Specialist.| Coppel, Mexico. Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico
Sep 03, 2026 12:00 PM
Replying to Sergio Luis Conte
...
If an organization has "change saturation" then it will desapear.
Sergio Luis that is a very interesting and bold statement! Could you elaborate a bit more on why you think this happens? Do you mean the organization will disappear because it loses its market position, or because employees will eventually leave due to burnout?
Francisco
avatar
Francisco Herrera
Community Champion
Program Manager, PPM&PMO Specialist.| Coppel, Mexico. Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico
Sep 03, 2026 8:42 AM
Replying to Fayez Alasiri
...

For many executives, saturation is not simply a by-product of the system; it is the objective itself. The focus becomes maximizing activity, increasing coverage, adding resources, and continuously responding to issues rather than addressing the structural causes that create those issues. From an Operations perspective, however, scale and synchronization are far more attractive and sustainable. Operational excellence is not achieved by continuously adding people, controls, meetings, or interventions. It is achieved when the organization can scale its capabilities while maintaining consistency, coordination, reliability, and control. Synchronization allows Operations to move from a reactive model to a proactive one. It connects planning, resources, maintenance, service delivery, performance management, and decision-making into one coordinated system. The objective is not simply to do more, but to make the entire operation work better together. At scale, synchronization becomes even more critical. Without it, growth creates complexity, duplication, conflicting priorities, communication gaps, and increased operational risk. With it, scale becomes an advantage: resources can be optimized, responsibilities can be clarified, decisions can be accelerated, and performance can be measured consistently. Ultimately, saturation increases activity, while synchronization increases effectiveness. Saturation may provide short-term visibility, but synchronization creates long-term operational capability. For Operations, the real opportunity is therefore not to build a culture that depends on constant saturation, but to build a culture where people, processes, technology, and resources are synchronized to deliver predictable and sustainable performance at scale. The goal is not to create an organization that can work harder indefinitely; it is to create an organization that can scale intelligently, synchronize effectively, and perform consistently.

Fayez Alasiri the contrast you make between executive goals (maximizing activity) and operational needs (consistency and coordination) explains a lot of our daily struggles. It is very difficult to build a proactive environment when top management only rewards short-term saturation. Your point about scaling intelligently rather than just working harder indefinitely is spot on.
Francisco.
< 1 2 >

Please login or join to reply

Content ID:
ADVERTISEMENTS

"Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining."

- Jeff Raskin

ADVERTISEMENT

Sponsors