The one thing common to almost every conversation I have with CIOs of the largest organizations in the region is a quiet sense of overwhelm — at the sheer number of transformation and change efforts running at once, often in parallel, each demanding attention, budget, and the energy of the same finite set of people. The pace of change in the AI world has added fuel to a phenomenon that was already playing out.

That overwhelm leads to burnout. And burnout, more than any technology gap, is becoming the single biggest reason these efforts fail to deliver on their ambition.

Here’s my argument: we’re overwhelmed because we’re still managing transformation the way we always have — with a start date and a supposed end date. And the end-state is a comforting lie.

The Liminal state

Every playbook we inherited assumes the same shape: a stable present, a disruptive middle, a new stable future. Unfreeze, change, refreeze. We tolerate the discomfort of the middle because we’re promised the refreeze at the end.

That era is over. Technology vendors, specially the frontier AI Labs, now deliver path-breaking capability in weeks, not years, and businesses are expected to adopt and adapt on that cadence. MIT Sloan Management Review has a name for this: steady-state disruption, a condition with no terminal point, where the ground never settles long enough to refreeze against.

I’d go further. I think we’ve entered a liminal state, neither here nor there. We’re certain our old practices no longer work, and we haven’t yet figured out what will. To be clear, individual projects still finish, a system migration still has a go-live. It’s the state of transforming itself that no longer ends. And you cannot run a permanent condition as a traditional project or a program.

When leaders feel the finish line shifting faster than the team can reach it, the reflex is to push harder, add a workstream, compress the timeline, get there before it shifts again. This is exactly the wrong move to make. It leads to fatigue and burnout. People stop believing the destination is real and quietly disengage from the very change you need them to own.

The leaders who win the next five years won’t transform fastest. They’ll be the ones who can keep transforming indefinitely without exhausting their people. That takes four shifts.

1. Do fewer things on purpose

The most direct cure for overwhelm is not better project management, it’s fewer projects. Most organizations have no ceiling on how many transformations run concurrently; they only ever add.

As leaders, we need to make a judgement call on how much transformation can our teams handle without getting overwhelmed and burnt out. Then decide to cap the number of active transformation efforts based on that. Make a rule that nothing new starts until something is finished, paused, or killed — one in, one out.

Run a quarterly stop, pause, continue review where every initiative has to re-earn its place, not just report status. The courage to say “not now” to a good idea is the scariest and the most valuable leadership act in a liminal moment.

2. Run split cadences

Not everything should move at the speed of the latest model release, and pretending it should is how you burn people out.

Draw an explicit line. Your core, the systems, controls, and processes that give you your competitive advantage and where a failure breaches trust, compliance, or revenue, should change deliberately and rarely.

Your edge, where you test new tools, agents, and workflows, should change constantly, cheaply, quickly and with permission to fail.

A simple test: if this breaks, do we lose trust or just lose a bet we can cheaply reverse? The first is core; the second is edge.

Staff them differently, too.

Put your operators, people who execute consistently and value reliability, on the core.

Put your explorers, those who thrive on ambiguity and risk, on the edge.

The two cadences protect each other: the stable core gives everyone something solid to stand on while the edge churns and provides the energy, innovation and momentum when done well.

3. Reinvent from what you already have

“Permanent transformation” sounds like permanent upheaval. It isn’t. The organizations that renew best don’t burn everything down and start from scratch. They find what MIT’s researchers call kernels of reinvention: existing capabilities repurposed for the new context.

Ørsted is the example I keep returning to. It didn’t stop being an energy company when it decided to pivot from fossil fuels to offshore wind. It redirected decades of engineering, project-management, and offshore capability towards a new end.

Before you fund anything net-new, run a capability audit: what strength do we already own that this could be built on? Your next transformation is often hiding in plain sight. Starting there is faster, cheaper, and doesn’t ask people to disown who they’ve been, what they’ve done and who they are.

4. Invest in people as much as in technology

In the old model, capability-building was just a phase, train everyone near go-live, then move on. In a steady state of transformation, that’s useless. The skills expire before the training finishes. As HBR argued recently, transformation has to become a learning journey, its destination continuously refined rather than fixed on day one.

So, build learning into how work is done, in short cycles with real feedback loops, and commit to it with the resources that the trainings need. Ring-fence a fixed share of every technology investment for the people who will decide whether that technology ever delivers. Today most organizations spend millions on the tools and not a fraction of that on the people who will decide the impact of the tools.

The data should give the cost-cutters pause. Gartner now expects roughly one in three roles eliminated by AI to be restored by 2029, at higher cost, and firms like Meta are quietly rebuilding the very management layers they stripped out.

The lesson is blunt. Treating technology as a way to replace people is the wrong move. Treating it as a way to give your people the reach they’ve never had, and you create a culture where they and the organization both flourish.

The leaders who accept the fact that we are living in a liminal moment, where transformation seems to be a permanent state and act accordingly, will create teams that outperform and will come out of the liminal moment stronger than when they entered the moment.

For those of us trying to be leaders worth following, what are we doing to overcome the overwhelm and the change fatigue in our teams?

I’d genuinely like to hear how you’re thinking about it.

PS: This post was originally published on SAP Community Networks and has been republished here.