How fast is too fast? The instinct to accelerate—new structure, new process, new KPI—feels like leadership. But motion is not the same as progress. Inspired by Mike Fisher’s piece When Change Outruns Us, this article argues that many organisations today are caught in an acceleration trap: relentless change that outpaces people’s ability to absorb it. The result is not agility, but exhaustion, brittle judgement and declining capacity to learn.
Why the acceleration trap is so seductive — and dangerous
Leaders are rewarded for visibly doing something about disruption. Announce a reorg, launch a transformation programme, introduce a new operating model: you look decisive. But speed creates an illusion. When every quarter brings a new operating rhythm, teams stop integrating lessons and start simply complying. That’s the core problem Mike Fisher outlines, and it’s echoed in research: the American Psychological Association’s Work in America report notes that employees experiencing recent or ongoing change report significantly higher stress and physical symptoms than those without change.
Put bluntly: change without recovery turns learning into checklist activity. The organisation spins, but the muscle never repairs.
How to tell if you’re in the trap
- High velocity, low judgment — decisions become reflexive; people follow the latest directive without testing it against past lessons.
- Ritualised reorgs — structural change becomes the default response to strategic discomfort.
- Compliance over conviction — teams adopt language and rituals but lack the conviction to take informed risks.
- Hidden health signals — rising churn, frequent sick leave, and stress indicators that standard productivity metrics do not surface.
Nokia’s experience is a warning. The company didn’t fail because it stopped trying; it exhausted itself with repeated reorganisations and competing internal projects. For a careful account see the INSEAD case study “Nokia: The Inside Story of the Rise and Fall of a Technology Giant”, which describes how perpetual motion hollowed out the company’s ability to respond thoughtfully to disruption.
Designing organisations that absorb change
If absorption is the missing ingredient, how do we design for it? Here are practical moves leaders can make now.
1. Make recovery a design principle
Build explicit pauses into your delivery rhythm. This is not slowing for the sake of bureaucracy; it is allowing interpretation, calibration and small social renegotiations. Practical examples:
- Schedule deep retrospectives after every major initiative and protect time for follow-up actions.
- Adopt cadence decisions: limit structural changes to a predictable cycle (for example, one reorganisation window per 18 months) unless urgent.
2. Instrument absorption, not only output
Traditional KPIs emphasise throughput. Add human-centred metrics: psychological safety, cognitive load, health indicators and the percentage of initiatives with documented learning loops. Treat these as leading indicators. When Spotify introduced squad health checks they created space to surface working issues and slow down when needed — a practical model for balancing speed with care (Spotify’s squad health checks).
3. Protect slack as capability
Slack is not laziness; it’s capacity. Reserve deliberate capacity for integration work: rewriting docs, consolidating APIs, upskilling, and closing feedback loops. Fund this as a first-class line item, not as the leftover after delivery.
4. Treat changes as hypotheses, not proclamations
Every operating model, metric or framework should be an experiment with defined success criteria and a fixed window for evaluation. If a change is adopted before the previous one is understood, you accumulate debris. Make reversibility and evaluation explicit.
Practical governance tweaks leaders can implement this quarter
- Introduce a “readiness check” before approving major initiatives: does the organisation have bandwidth to absorb this? Who will own integration work?
- Limit simultaneous enterprise-scale initiatives; coordinate portfolio pacing across leadership to avoid stacking changes on teams.
- Mandate learning artefacts: every project must deliver a short integration plan describing how its outputs will be embedded and who will maintain them.
These are small governance changes with outsized effects. They shift the system from perpetual motion to cyclical learning.
Where product thinking helps
Product leaders are well placed to reframe change as continuous discovery plus deliberate delivery. Fund the product, not the project: long-lived teams with aligned outcomes have time to absorb change and maintain institutional memory. Use outcome-focused roadmaps to keep direction steady while allowing teams the autonomy to adapt their work.
Organisations that practice disciplined product thinking combine speed with depth: rapid experiments, short feedback loops and protected time to turn experiments into reliable services.
If you want to avoid becoming the next cautionary tale
Start by asking a simple question in your next leadership meeting: “Are we changing faster than our people can make it part of their work?” If the answer is anything but a clear “no,” act. Reclaim the intervals that turn motion into meaning: measure absorption, fund slack, and make recovery a visible part of your operating model. The companies that endure will not be those that never change; they will be those that change with enough deliberation to let people learn, repair and then accelerate again—this time with judgement intact.
Credit: Mike Fisher, When Change Outruns Us.
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