By Mike Pearson
Most organisations believe they have a reasonable handle on how much change is happening at any given time. They can list the programmes in motion, the systems being implemented, the structures being reshaped. They can point to governance forums, change trackers, and traffic-light dashboards that suggest everything is broadly under control.
But what they rarely see is the work happening in between all of that. Not the formal work of delivery, but the human work of adaptation. The effort people expend to stay effective while things are shifting around them. The thinking, regulating, compensating, and recalibrating that keeps work moving even when clarity is partial and priorities keep colliding.
This work is largely invisible. And because it’s invisible, it’s seldom accounted for.
Adaptation is not automatic
A quiet assumption sits underneath much organisational change: that people will simply adjust. That once something is announced, explained, or trained, the organisation will absorb it. But adaptation is not a switch that you can simply flip; it’s an active, effortful process.
If you look at the research from neuroscience and organisational psychology, the message is clear. When people are required to update mental models, learn new behaviours, or operate with sustained uncertainty, the brain works harder. Cognitive load increases. Decision-making slows. Emotional regulation requires more energy. This doesn’t mean people stop performing. Far from it, in fact, performance often holds up for a long time. But it does so because people are compensating. They’re using more internal resources to achieve the same external results.
The three types of hidden work
Across organisations, this hidden work tends to show up in three consistent ways:
1. Cognitive juggling
During periods of change, people rarely stop doing their core job. Instead, they layer new expectations on top of existing ones. They hold multiple versions of “how things work” in their head at the same time. Old processes that haven’t fully gone away. New ones that aren’t fully embedded. Interim rules that may or may not last. Last year I spoke with a finance manager who was running month-end reporting while simultaneously learning a new ERP system. She was mentally switching between old and new processes all day, making snap decisions about which steps could be skipped without anyone noticing – quietly doubling her cognitive load.
Studies from Harvard Business Review show that frequent task-switching and role ambiguity significantly increase mental fatigue, even when workloads don’t appear to rise. Knowledge workers, in particular, experience higher error rates and slower recovery when cognitive load remains elevated for long periods. This kind of effort is quiet and doesn’t show up as overtime, but it consumes attention, and attention is finite.
2. Emotional regulation
Change is emotionally demanding, even when it’s positive. People manage their own reactions while often containing the reactions of others. Leaders, in particular, do a significant amount of emotional work: projecting confidence, holding uncertainty, absorbing anxiety without passing it down the line.
Gallup data consistently shows that during sustained change, levels of stress and worry rise well before engagement scores fall. In other words, people feel the strain long before organisations see the impact. This emotional effort is rarely recognised as work. Yet it draws on the same energy reserves that people rely on for focus, judgement and creativity.
3. Constant prioritisation
One of the least visible demands of change is decision-making at the micro level. When priorities shift faster than capacity, individuals are left to make daily judgement calls. What gets done well. What gets done quickly. And what quietly slips.
Research from McKinsey suggests that when employees are unclear on priorities, up to 40% of their effort can be misdirected because they’re trying to reconcile competing signals without enough guidance. This continuous prioritisation work is mentally taxing. It’s also rarely discussed explicitly.
Why this effort stays hidden
From the outside, things often look fine. Projects progress. Meetings happen. Outputs are delivered. In many organisations, leaders take this as a signal that capacity is holding. But visible performance can mask invisible strain. People adapt by narrowing focus, delaying recovery, and drawing down personal reserves. Deloitte research on workforce sustainability shows that employees frequently maintain performance by trading off wellbeing, learning time, and discretionary energy. By the time performance drops, readiness has usually been eroding for months.
This is why organisations are often surprised when engagement dips, attrition rises, or change initiatives suddenly stall. The warning signs were there all along, just not visible on the dashboard.
The cost of not accounting for adaptation
The organisational impact of this hidden work is not abstract. Gartner estimates that only a minority of change initiatives achieve their intended outcomes when employee capacity is not actively managed. Other studies suggest that organisations underestimate the human effort required for change by as much as 50%.
What this looks like in practice:
- Slower decision-making as cognitive load increases
- Reduced discretionary effort as energy is conserved
- Higher reliance on a small number of “coping” individuals
- Delayed benefits realisation – even when delivery milestones are met
None of this is because people are unwilling. It’s just that adaptation has a cost – and that cost is rarely priced in.
What change-ready organisations do differently
Organisations with higher change readiness don’t expect people to absorb unlimited demand. They make three deliberate shifts:
1. They pay attention to human demand
Instead of asking only whether change is progressing, they ask what it requires of people. They use qualitative insight, targeted listening, and leading indicators of strain – not just engagement scores – to understand how much adaptation is being asked for at any given time.
2. They reduce unnecessary cognitive load
Clear priorities matter. But so does letting go. Change-ready organisations are disciplined about stopping or simplifying work that no longer adds value. They understand that every additional initiative carries an adaptation cost, even if it looks small on paper.
3. They treat adaptation as shared work
Don’t be fooled into thinking leaders leave prioritisation and sense-making to chance; they make trade-offs explicit. They talk openly about pressure points. They recognise the effort involved in staying effective during uncertainty. This doesn’t remove the challenge of change, but it makes it manageable.
Seeing the work changes the outcome
When organisations start acknowledging the hidden work of adaptation, something important shifts. People feel less alone in the effort they’re carrying. Leaders make better decisions about pace and sequencing. Change stops being something that simply happens to people and becomes something that is actively navigated with them. In a world where change is not slowing down, this matters. Because readiness is not just about capability. It’s about capacity. And capacity is shaped as much by what we ask people to absorb as by what we ask them to deliver.
If we want change to stick, we need to start seeing the work that has been there all along.