“Change is happening so fast there’s no time for people to crawl out of the valley of despair.”
We recently heard this quote from one of our clients, an HR director at a global food and beverage company, who was speaking at a roundtable on resilience for senior learning and development leaders.
Her words resonated deeply with the others on the call. Most of them had learned traditional ways to support change management in their careers.
But what’s happening today doesn’t follow the traditional models they’ve learned. Instead of managing one disruption at a time, our people are navigating multiple, overlapping waves of change with no chance to recover in between. And the impact on performance, engagement, and wellbeing is undeniable.
In this piece, we’ll look at how the traditional Change Curve has shifted to a Compounding Change Curve, what that does to the human brain and workplace performance, and three practical practices you can apply today to help your teams build resilience.
The traditional Change Curve
For decades, leaders have relied on some version of the Change Curve to anticipate how people respond to disruption. The model shows morale, energy, and performance dipping into a “Valley of Despair” before rebounding as people accept and integrate the change.
This curve works when you’re managing one change at a time. But in most organizations, that’s no longer the case.
What’s really happening: the Compounding Change Curve
Today, changes don’t arrive one by one; they pile on top of each other. A reorganization might be followed by a system rollout, just as market conditions shift and AI reshapes job roles.
When changes compound:
- Each new disruption starts from a lower baseline of morale, energy, and performance.
- Valleys deepen, and the window for recovery shrinks.
- Gains from earlier changes are rarely realized, as the next disruption quickly steals focus and capacity.
For L&D leaders, this isn’t just an abstract concern. It shows up in the metrics we track daily: quality, safety, time to productivity, engagement, and regrettable attrition.
The brain’s math during nonstop change
So why does this compounding effect feel so heavy?
The human nervous system is constantly doing what psychologists call “threat-detection math”: demands minus resources.
When resources outweigh demands, we feel capable, curious, and motivated.When demands overwhelm resources, the brain signals danger. Cortisol floods the body, attention narrows, memory and decision-making decline, and performance slips.
When that imbalance continues day after day, people slide into learned helplessness. They believe no action will change their situation.
The consequences are serious: Decision fatigue rises. Error rates climb. Engagement declines. And burnout skyrockets (which is at the highest rate in a decade, according to Glassdoor).
This pattern is well documented. Martin Seligman’s foundational research on learned helplessness has been linked to workplace burnout and disengagement. Other recent studies confirm that chronic stress without recovery undermines both individual wellbeing and organizational outcomes.
As the labor market has shifted in many industries, some organizations are treating these trends with a shrug, assuming they can replace talent. But the reality is that turnover adds to the turmoil, further shifting the entire organization’s culture into learned helplessness and fatigue. And that can be a difficult hole to crawl out of.
The only way forward is to rebalance the math by adding back mental and emotional resources.
From curve to capacity: building emotional resilience
The pace of change is not going to slow down. But L&D teams can make a big impact by helping people expand their emotional capacity so they can navigate compounding disruptions without burning out.
Emotional capacity is the ability to stay steady and adaptive even when demands are high and the future is uncertain. It’s the difference between employees feeling crushed by the Valley of Despair or moving through it with perspective and resilience.
For L&D, this means designing training and development experiences that:
- Build awareness. Help employees understand the science of change—the stress equation of demands minus resources—so they can recognize what’s happening in their own minds and bodies. Awareness reduces fear and creates a sense of agency.
- Empower managers. First and foremost, remember that leaders are humans too, and are likely struggling with the constant change themselves, while simultaneously carrying the emotional weight of their teams. Support them with programs that help them first manage their own emotions. Second, develop their confidence to model resilience practices, normalize conversations about stress, and foster connection in their teams.
- Train teams together. Live sessions where teams learn resilience skills as a group create multiple benefits: everyone walks away with a common framework for dealing with change, and the shared experience strengthens connection among colleagues. That social support is one of the strongest predictors of collective resilience.
- Embed habits. Encourage micro-practices—short, repeatable behaviors that fit into daily workflows. Whether it’s one breath before a meeting or a quick team check-in, consistent small actions build long-term resilience.
- Track emotional energy like a lead indicator. Equip leaders with ways to thoughtfully and measurably consider the emotional energy of their team, especially during periods of change.
By focusing on emotional capacity, L&D shifts the narrative from waiting for change to end, to preparing employees to thrive within it. This is the lever that helps organizations avoid the downward spiral of the compounding change and instead create a culture where resilience is renewable.
Most changes fail. But L&D can make a difference.
Tariffs, AI breakthroughs, reorganizations—more change is always coming. And the reality is that the vast majority of changes fail.
Over the past decades, McKinsey research has consistently shown that about 70% of major changes fail. And new research from MIT has shown that about 95% of new AI projects are failing.
The numbers are discouraging. But there’s a path to winning, and it’s through the development of your people.
Research from Oxford University’s Said Business School shows that leaders are 12 times more successful in driving change when they take a human-centered approach.
With the right development programs - especially those that extend to the entire team - your organization can be one of the few that win.
Develop leaders who can address the emotions of change.
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About the Author: Ryan Heinl, CEO of SIY Global
Ryan Heinl is the CEO of SIY Global and a trailblazer at the intersection of emotional intelligence, neuroscience, and AI-enhanced learning. With over 15 years of experience leading product innovation in the leadership development space, Ryan has scaled multi-million dollar platforms, built award-winning learning solutions, and transitioned entire companies from old-school models to digital-first disruptors. His current mission? To redefine what it means to lead in the age of AI—where human insight is the new power skill. Equal parts strategist and scientist, Ryan brings a research-backed, results-obsessed approach to everything from executive coaching programs to mindfulness-based learning tools. Also: recovering philosopher, relentless rucker, and low-key data nerd.