Organizational Reality

By the time a new initiative arrives, people are often already carrying several others, on top of day-to-day pressure and some uncertainty about their roles. Capacity runs out before the change takes root. Good plans fail this way all the time, and the usual response (more communication, more training) only adds to the load.

What helps is knowing, before you commit to a timeline, how much people can take on right now. Then you can decide what to pause, what to sequence and how to bring in the people who will do the work.

How I can help

Making change more human and more feasible.

Change saturation & fatigue

Human impact of change

Is more change landing on your people than they can absorb? I look at both sides of that balance: how disruptive each initiative really is for each group (a count of projects says little), and how much capacity those groups have left. Then I look at how people are coping, because fatigue shows up differently from one team to the next.

What will this change actually ask of people? For each group affected: what changes in their daily work, what they lose and win, what they need to learn, and when it hits them. And is it realistically feasible?

Change readiness

Appreciative Inquiry

Do teams have the capacity and the support to take this on now? A readiness assessment, team by team, ideally before the timeline is fixed, so the plan reflects what people can realistically absorb.

Bring people into shaping the change, starting from what already works and from times they handled change well. Especially useful when teams are tired of having change done to them.

My Lens

I start with what your change design is asking people to carry

I bring organizational and positive psychology to change, through assessment and Appreciative Inquiry. I usually work alongside your project or change team: they own the plan, and I help make sure people can absorb it. Over time, the organization learns how much it can take on and how to pace it. That is what I mean by human capacity.

Structured Path

Map the load

Assess impact and readiness

Involve people

Set the pace and check again

List what is already landing on each group (initiatives, workload, recent changes), gauge how disruptive each one is for them, and see how people are coping.

For the change you're planning, what it will ask of each group, and whether they have the capacity and the conditions to take it on.

Appreciative Inquiry sessions where the people affected help decide how the change happens, building on what has worked before.

Recommendations on what to pause, sequence or adjust, then a second look at an agreed point to see how people are coping.

Better change starts and sticks with human capacity.

Planning a change, or in the middle of one that's stalling? Tell me where things stand. I'm based in Calgary and work with organizations across Canada in English and French.