Change is a strategic weapon — until you use it like a machine gun. The recent piece When Change Outruns Us by Mike Fisher nails an uncomfortable truth many leaders avoid: organisations can die from motion, not just from inertia. Nokia’s story, reproduced in multiple case studies including the Harvard Business Review case, shows how relentless internal churn exhausted capability and smothered the very outcomes change was supposed to deliver.
What the acceleration trap looks like
There’s an easy mistake to make: equate velocity with progress. Board decks full of initiatives, weekly reorgs, new processes and shiny transformation programmes look like action. But action is not the same as absorption. The acceleration trap is when change outpaces an organisation’s ability to integrate it — people, systems and customers are asked to do more change than they can assimilate. The result is fragmentation, rising technical debt, and a slow erosion of morale and focus.
Key symptoms
- Reorg fatigue: teams change reporting lines or objectives so often they lose long-term focus.
- Parallel pet projects: multiple competing initiatives eat the same scarce skills.
- Adoption lag: new features or processes are launched but usage and outcomes stagnate.
- Rising debt: technical and process debt accumulates because there’s never time to stabilise.
Why Nokia matters as more than a cautionary tale
Nokia’s decline is often simplified into a story of complacency. That’s misleading. What Mike Fisher and the HBR case make clear is that Nokia didn’t stop trying — it tried too many things, too quickly. Between leadership churn, new software divisions and competing internal platforms, the company generated motion but not coherent progress. The iPhone’s arrival changed the market; Nokia’s response changed the company — repeatedly — and outpaced its capacity to learn and rewire. For product and technology leaders, the lesson is blunt: if your organisation can’t absorb change, you create brittle motion, not durable advantage.
Practical levers: how leaders build deliberate adaptation
Leaders can escape the trap by designing for absorption as deliberately as they design for speed. Here are concrete steps you can apply this quarter.
1. Measure absorption, not activity
- Track adoption and outcome KPIs for every major change — not just delivery metrics. If a new platform doubles deployment speed but adoption stalls, you’re accumulating waste.
- Introduce an absorption dashboard: adoption rate, time-to-stability, bug backlog trajectory and team wellbeing indicators.
2. Create stability windows
- Limit the number of concurrent major initiatives a product team can own. Depth beats breadth.
- Designate consolidation sprints after big launches to pay down debt and embed learning.
3. Fund outcomes, not activity
- Shift budgets from uplift ‘projects’ to sustained product funding. Fund a team to achieve outcomes over quarters, not to ship a checkbox feature this month.
- Use small rolling budgets for experiments, with clear gates based on adoption and economic value.
4. Protect the learning loop
- Insist every initiative includes a period for adoption measurement, documentation and knowledge transfer.
- Reward teams for stable systems and customer outcomes, not just velocity.
Examples that illuminate the fix
Outside Nokia, firms that survived disruptive shocks tended to slow in the right places. Apple’s early focus on an integrated product and platform for the iPhone wasn’t just engineering brilliance — it channelled company energy into a single, cohesive shift. By contrast, companies that repeatedly reorganise without consolidation (a pattern we’ve seen across industries) lose institutional memory.
Kodak’s failure to turn an invention into a sustained business is another reminder: discovery is one thing, absorption into an operating model is quite another. See the lessons in Kodak’s history for a deeper read.
Design your change portfolio
Treat change like a portfolio problem. Balance big bets with time for integration. For every disruptive initiative, allocate a proportion of resource explicitly for post-launch consolidation and capability-building. That single governance change reduces the temptation to treat reorgs as a substitute for strategy.
Three simple rules to keep on your desk:
- Cap simultaneous major initiatives per team.
- Require an absorption plan with every change request.
- Measure outcomes, not effort.
Leaders who can resist the glamour of perpetual motion and design organisations that absorb change will create durable advantage. The acceleration trap is not a call to stop improving; it’s an argument for pacing and purpose. Read Mike Fisher’s When Change Outruns Us if you haven’t already — then map the changes in your organisation into a portfolio that values recovery and learning as much as speed. Your teams, your customers and your long-term strategy will thank you.
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