Change & Transformation

Beyond change management: Building change fitness

For long organizations have treated change as if it were an isolated project: something with a beginning, middle, and an end. We plan, we launch, we celebrate—and then we assume we’re “done.” But the reality is that change is more constant than ever and therefore we must ‘change our approach to change’.

2 October 2025
Claudia Christensson Gomez, Senior Consultant

Article

Change is part of the rhythm of everyday life. Having long been drawn to Buddhist thought, I’ve always resonated with their perspective on impermanence. Buddhism speak of impermanence – nothing stays the same, and our resistance to change is often what causes the most suffering. The same applies to organizations.

Change isn’t an interruption to business-as-usual; it is business-as-usual. And survival and resilience in a way depends on how well we embrace it.

What happens with the one-and-done mindset and why does it fail

By the time most organizations implement a change, the world has already shifted again. For people, this creates a cycle of frustration, fatigue, and playing catch-up.

The world moves too fast: Disruption now outpaces the speed of traditional change programs. We will see more speed of change in coming years than we have in our entire lives.
Perfection delays progress: Waiting for flawless plans means missing opportunities for learning. Sometimes we need to be comfortable with ‘done is better than perfect.’
Fatigue sets in: Employees burn out from endless initiatives that don’t build lasting resilience. We need to consider employee emotions of change in every process.

To break this cycle, we need to move beyond “change management” and build change fitness instead.

Change fitness: a practice, not a project

Think of change fitness the way you think of going to the gym, meditation, or any other practice. You don’t get strong or mindful from doing it once – you build capacity over time, through repetition, reflection, and discipline.

In the same way, organizations (and leaders) need to treat adaptability and change as a muscle:

A mindset: Recognizing that change is inevitable – and within our influence. While we can’t control what happens, we can control how we respond (locus of control).
A practice: Embedding habits like pilots, testing, and iteration to build learning into the system – the same way you might build a fitness routine.
A path to sustainability: True resilience comes not from resisting change, but from flowing with it without burning people out.
A leadership responsibility: Change fitness leaders model curiosity, agility, and psychological safety, setting the tone for the entire organization.

Building a change fitness organization

So, what does it take to shift from “managing” to “practicing”? A few practical ways to embed:

Accept impermanence: Start meetings or projects by explicitly naming what might change and what is uncertain – creating a shared sense of reality rather than avoiding that things are constantly changing.
Prioritize action over perfection: Run a small pilot this week with a team, even if it’s not perfect, and review the outcomes after three days. Normalise testing and learning.
Empower distributed action: Give a team a micro-project with full decision-making authority and notice the energy it creates. Get real with practicing change fitness behaviours.
Learn and adapt: End each week with a 15-minute reflection: what did we try, what worked, what surprised us?
Lead from the front: Share your own learning moments publicly, including mistakes and pivots, so others see change as safe to experiment with.

The way forward

Change is the only way to survive in today’s world, whether we like it or not. But it doesn’t need to be something we fear or resist. With the right mindset, practices, and leadership, change becomes not a burden, but a source of strength and opportunity.

At Mannaz, we see firsthand that the organizations who build change fitness—rather than chasing one-off initiatives – are the ones that thrive. They adapt faster, sustain momentum longer, and create workplaces where people are not only surviving change, but growing through it.

The question is no longer: How do we manage this change?
The real question is: How are we practicing change fitness every day?

What to know more?

Reach out to me right here:

Claudia Maria Christensson Gomez

Senior Consultant

ccg@mannaz.com
+44 7510 9675 35

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