Change support halved in six years. Adaptability didn’t.

Somewhere this week, a leadership team is staring at flat adoption numbers and asking the familiar question: how do we make our people more willing to change?

It sounds sensible. The data behind the worry is real, too. Gartner tracked employee support for workplace change falling from 74 per cent in 2016 to 43 per cent in 2022. A 31-point collapse in six years. Plenty of executives read that as evidence their workforce has gone cynical, or soft, or 'change fatigued' beyond repair.

Here is the issue with that reading: human nature doesn't move 31 points in six years. Adaptability is arguably our defining trait as a species, and the evidence for it is physical. Eleanor Maguire's research at University College London found that cab drivers who memorised the city's 25,000 streets developed a measurably larger hippocampus. The brain grew new structure in response to sustained demand. Carol Dweck's decades of mindset research add the psychological layer: capability expands when the conditions support it.

So if the capability didn't collapse, what did? Trust in the model. The standard playbook (sponsor, comms plan, training rollout, go-live) was designed for stable hierarchies and predictable timelines... a world that has largely stopped existing. What gets labelled 'resistance' is often a workforce declining to back an approach they've watched fail before. That's a design problem, and design problems sit with leaders.

Which suggests a better question than the willingness one: is your programme designed for the capability that's already in the room? Every person in your organisation has navigated profound change in their own life, usually without a readiness assessment in sight. The leader's job is creating the conditions that let an innate capacity do its work.

That premise sits underneath Pragma, the AI change advisor I built for leaders working through complex change (and for the merely curious). If you're wondering what an AI version of a 20-year practitioner can usefully offer, the FAQ is a fair place to start.

The full article makes the case properly, with a 2003 passport photo I probably should have kept to myself, a delivery-room story about capacity arriving with demand, and the neuroscience in detail. Read the full piece on markwinter.com.au.