What are the main reasons that cause change fatigue and what can organisations and managers do to minimise this at all stages of a change/transformation programme?
 
Today’s corporations are dominated by meaningless activity and unremitting pressure for success. That certainly establishes lofty targets, but fails to define routes for achieving them.

The main thing is to be seen to be doing something. Pressure builds up, as do fear and mistrust.

The results of this instability are substantial. Pointless activity spread
over several months leads to week-ends without a break, and exhausted,
and often resigned, managers. The customers of a firm – which
parades under the claim “High-Speed” – switch over in the click of a
mouse to the competition, because it takes 3 months to get a reply.
Potential investors ask themselves whether they have put their money
into a trading company, a bank, a hedge fund or just into a write-off.
 
The current paradigm of the people at the leadership level and the followers have a serious lack of creative thinking. As i contemplate a whole generation of folks from the last 25 years has been churning concepts revolving around too much in Logical reasoning and less in creative thinking. Too many pipeline management concepts which relate to only fragmented aspects of a corporation with super specialization.

In the process holistic thoughts and imagination oriented creative thinking was brushed under the carpet. Now we see that the entire generation at the top today and leadership with serious lack of a holistic vision that looks at the society as the ecosystem rather than limiting it to the parameters of the dept or the corporation only.

Thereby there is super insensitivity towards resources depletion as we are more busy in the fury of producing more and more. Growing faster and faster.

Its like people are paralyzed in this CURRENT REALITY TRACK and seem to work with hypnotic precision in repeating the same mistakes again and again -again and again. Refusing to stop and think what its doing to them.

I have seen 20 + guys coming out of corporations completely hit by fatigue and numbness and looking like 40+ in their behavior, even completely lost due to the squeezing they undergo without work -life balance working in unhealthy shifts and prolonged durations even up to 14 hours a day due to project completion pressures and conflicting time zones.

In this mindset - belief is very important and also the alignment of the Vision that is holistic

The moment the inner connection to consciously bring change is slowly shifted to mere transactional working then the activity of change becomes a stressful activity thus gradually fatigue sets in as the belief in it has evaporated. People don’t love it any more.

This can be due to many reasons. One of them is too many things happening at the same time or to do at the same time resulting in early burn out.

We need to re-look at our concepts of business with a fresh mind to prevail in the 21st century

Whatever we have seen in the last 100 years especially in the last 60 years has come to an end .Its irrelevant. –One of the reason why there is fatigue button pressed very quickly in CHANGE
 

Vision in Change

Change leadership needs to have a vision that can be and is shared by those executing and being affacted by the change. We tend to think that we can "impose change" on other people but in fact people have to change themselves if things are not to return to another form of the past. As you say people already work hard, are already stressed. They are already, in the main, thoroughly challenged ESPECIALLY because there is so very little direction or hope or vision nowadays.

There is growing cynicism and apathy about change and progress. For whose benefit are changes made? Is it for employees, for society, for directors, or for shareholders? Studies over and over again have shown that incentivisation through financial reward doesn't work yet still financial reward remains the central creed of the system and other factors are addressed only cursorily.

 It seems to me that our organisations have developed to be in something like conflict with society and the environment. And yet we expect people not to sense this disconnect, choosing instead to complain and bemoan the lack of of allegiance of employees. In my opinion there needs to be something more like a partnership both internally and externally if change is to be sustainable. People want to build but they don't want to build houses of cards. People seem often to delight in change but not in change for change's sake. There has to be shared vision and purpose across all stakeholders