It’s Monday morning. Half your team is missing because they’re double-booked in another “urgent” meeting, while also somehow expected to deliver a 20-page report by midday – a request that landed in their inbox at 8:14am. The rest are present in body but not in spirit, juggling three deadlines, two fires, and a half-written email to the one client who might still like you.
The atmosphere? A room full of kindling, where everyone’s pretending everything’s fine… but one wrong word and the whole place will ignite. And just when you think you’ve got control, finance explodes, scattering like pigeons in a KFC parking lot.
And that’s just one morning. Now multiply it by every week, every quarter, every time the market sneezes, and suddenly, you’re not managing a business, you’re running an endless crisis marathon.
Markets shift. Competitors pivot. Tech evolves like it’s been on a steady diet of espresso shots and bad decisions. And yet, somehow, your teams are behind before you’ve even finished announcing the plan.
This isn’t laziness. It’s not apathy. It’s that the pace of change has overtaken them, and the gap in between is where frustration, burnout, and missed opportunities quietly multiply.
Why Change Trips Teams Every Time
Change is almost always done to people, not with them. Leaders announce “the new direction” and teams react with the same enthusiasm they reserve for a surprise Stage 6 load-shedding notice.
And let’s not forget, most people are already stretched thinner than the cheese on a Mango Airlines toastie… back when they still had cheese. Asking them to “embrace change” at that point is like telling a Comrades runner you’ve extended the finish line to Botswana and they’ll need to carry a fridge.
Then there are silos: Marketing thinks Ops is the problem. Ops thinks Sales is the problem. Sales thinks Marketing is the problem. Everyone’s a little bit right, a little bit wrong, and no one’s talking to each other.
And the big myth? That “awareness” equals “readiness.” Spoiler: it doesn’t.
The Gallup Gut Punch
If you think your team’s a little disengaged, Gallup has news: it’s worse than you think, and you’re paying for it whether you know it or not.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report shows:
- 21% of employees worldwide are engaged at work.
- In many emerging markets (including South Africa), it’s likely even lower.
- Disengagement costs the global economy $8.8 trillion – around 9% of GDP.
- Manager engagement is down from 30% to 27% in the U.S., with similar trends elsewhere.
- And 70% of team engagement variation comes directly from manager engagement.
When managers check out, their teams follow, and one of the top three reasons? Change fatigue.
Why Your Brain Isn’t Built for Sudden Change
Management training loves to tell us: Feel → Think → Act.
It sounds neat, sensible, and very PowerPoint-friendly. But in reality, it’s more like a pub crawl through the dodgier parts of your brain.
It starts with the hippocampus – the drunk librarian of your memories. This is the character in your head who’s been living off a steady diet of tequila and conspiracy theories. Their job is to file away every event you’ve ever experienced. Except, if you stress them out, they give up, shove everything into a drawer labelled “Trauma, Probably”, and disappear for the rest of the week. So the moment something happens – say your boss casually announces a “restructure” – this tipsy archivist immediately drags out a dusty box marked “Last Time This Happened”, and you’re already halfway to panic before you’ve heard the details.
From there, your brain hands things over to the amygdala – the bear-in-the-boardroom. This is the part that reacts to a meeting invite as if someone just opened the door and let in a grizzly. Heart rate spikes, adrenaline floods in, and any hope of calm rationality is already on the ropes.
If things are going well, next in line is the neocortex – your smug-but-useless life coach. This is the voice that says, “Technically, you don’t need to freak out. There are better options. We could make a plan.” And that’s fine… right up until a little pressure hits. Then, faster than you can say “keep calm”, it hurls logic out the window and goes full Viking berserker.
Finally, we reach the prefrontal cortex – the budget-conscious time traveller. This is the one person in the group who can actually merge the librarian’s memories, the bear’s emotions, and the life coach’s rational thoughts into a single, coherent plan. In theory, this is where you decide how to act appropriately. In practice, it sometimes decides the consequences aren’t that bad – “Sure, that whisky-fuelled text to your ex at 3:17am might cause nuclear-grade awkwardness… but it might also be hilarious.”
The trouble comes when the sequence short-circuits. Sometimes the bear skips the life coach altogether, speed-dials the time traveller, and launches straight into action with zero rational thought. It’s the mental equivalent of road rage – you’re cruising along, minding your business, and then a rogue wheel spanner comes out of nowhere and firmly wedges itself in your windscreen – “No Karen, I didn’t steal your parking spot a month ago!”
This means, as a leader, you’re not just managing projects, you’re managing a chain reaction inside people’s heads, one hippocampus tantrum at a time.
And that’s the point: if you throw change at people without first considering how it will feel, you’ve already set off the chain reaction. The match is lit. The fireworks factory is about to go up. And productivity? Gone in a blaze of accidental glory.
South Africa’s Special Brand of Chaos
We don’t just have volatility – we’ve mastered it. Policy changes that make your strategy obsolete overnight. Eskom’s surprise-party load-shedding schedule. Currency swings that could make a forex trader cry. And now, AI changing entire industries before you’ve even worked out how to spell “ChatGPT.”
Leading a business here is like playing Jenga during an earthquake – the rules keep changing, the pieces keep shifting, and you’re still expected to win.
In a market like this, reacting to change is too late. The businesses that survive aren’t just resilient – they’re anticipatory. They spot trends early, design adaptable systems, and implement without needing a year, a task force, and twelve steering committees to do it.
The First Step: Measure Before You Manage
You can’t lead change if you don’t know your organisation’s change-readiness score.
That’s where the Titanic Diagnostic comes in. Ten minutes. Three capabilities:
- Anticipate change before it blindsides you.
- Design the right response.
- Implement it fast, without burning out your people.
It’s built on the work of over 200 consultants through the Reinvention Academy, so it’s not just some bloke with a flip chart making it up as he goes.
Your Move
If you don’t know your adaptability score, you’re guessing, and guesswork is a luxury no business can afford right now.
Do the diagnostic today, and you will get an idea of whether you’re change-ready… or change-roadkill.
Worst case: you get uncomfortable clarity. Best case: you stop quietly Titanic-ing yourself while pretending everything’s fine.
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