Does your business have the coping skills that it needs to adapt quickly and flexibly to an increasingly uncertain business environment?
The Therapy Analogy: Build Flexibility Before the Breakdown
In clinical practice what often compels a person to try psychotherapy is a crisis of some kind. Once the crisis is resolved the client feels better and then terminates. Insurance companies certainly promote this model since most approvals are for an eight-session maximum. If another crisis comes up, the client may return and hopefully be approved for another small number of sessions. Ideally, we can also educate clients that it is not healthy—or adaptive—to jump into therapy and go from crisis to crisis. The real goal is to understand the underlying vulnerabilities and work on those; empower the client to develop more flexible coping skills that can be applied to whatever “slings and arrows” life throws at them.
I’ve always believed the most useful “therapy” happens when the client is not in the middle of a crisis. That’s when fundamental growth and change can actually take root—when the nervous system isn’t in full alarm mode and the person has enough bandwidth to practice new skills, reflect, and build durable strengths and behavior changes.
From what I am reading, organizations are in a similar trap of trying to respond to the immediate national or global crisis or market change and then go back to business as usual. They are not working to build their flexibility and adaptability so that they can withstand future crises. I discovered a great research article that addresses this phenomenon in business and the role consulting psychologists can play.
A Dynamic and Unpredictable Business Life
A research-based overview describes business environments shaped by multiple simultaneous pressures—rapid technological advancement, social unrest, geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions, economic fluctuations, climate change, and shifting consumer preferences. A LOT on one’s plate to manage. The authors point to the International Monetary Fund’s “World Uncertainty Index” as one indicator that uncertainty has meaningfully increased over time. They also cite evidence suggesting strong company performance has become less sustainable than in prior decades.
In response, organizations are not just implementing more change—they’re often running multiple changes in parallel, with employees reporting frequent and overlapping shifts. That is the workplace version of “crisis-to-crisis”: constant activation, constant adjustment, and not enough stable time to consolidate learning.
Why Old Change Model Playbooks Fall Short
The point isn’t that traditional change models are “wrong.” It’s that many of the most common models were designed for a different type of change—planned, episodic change—where leaders can define a future state, follow a sequence, and then stabilize the organization afterward.
Planned change management is rooted in Kurt Lewin’s three-stage model (unfreezing → transition → refreezing), which assumes organizations can move from a current state to a new equilibrium. That approach can be useful when the change is relatively bounded and the destination is clear.
Today’s reality is often continuous, overlapping, and less predictable, which makes it difficult to define a stable end state or “refreeze” for long. In that context, strictly linear, step-by-step approaches can fall short because the environment keeps shifting while the organization is still mid-implementation.
The paper also notes a critique from the organizational development literature: many popular models are prescriptive—they tell leaders what steps to follow—which can help structure a discrete initiative, but may not fit complex, emergent change conditions where adaptation has to be ongoing rather than one-and-done. As change becomes more complex and less predictable, the article describes growing recognition that linear, mechanistic models are increasingly outdated for modern organizational realities.
From my clinical lens, it’s similar to relying only on a crisis plan: it can help in an acute moment, but it doesn’t build the underlying capacity that allows someone—or an organization—to stay functional when stressors keep coming.
The Shift From “Managing Change” to Building Change Capability
What I find most useful in this article is its move away from change as an event and toward organizational change capability (OCC) as a durable, repeatable organizational “muscle.”
The authors define OCC as the ability of an organization to mindfully initiate, manage, and repeat successful change responses in dynamic environments through sustained situational awareness and embedded adaptive processes. Can you say psychotherapy! They emphasize repeatability and reliability—meaning the organization can do this again and again, not as a one-off success driven by heroics.
They also clarify common confusion in the language of change by describing a progression:
- Change capacity (having resources/potential),
- Change capability (using resources to achieve change results),
- Change competency (mastery over time).
That progression mirrors what we see in therapy: insight matters, resources matter—but competence comes from practice and integration over time.
The Human Factor Leaders Can’t Ignore: Meaning and Energy
Two psychological themes in the article stand out as especially relevant to “staying functional” under constant change.
1) Sensemaking: people need a coherent story.
Similar to the change process in psychotherapy, the authors note early evidence that meaning-making during change can predict later engagement and attitudes. They call for more work/research on how leaders can support ongoing sensemaking in constantly changing environments. When employees can’t make meaning, they may comply behaviorally while disengaging psychologically—something leaders often misread as “resistance.”
2) Capacity management: change draws down energy.
The paper discusses “capacity management” as managing energetic resources against competing demands, and warns that failing to balance load and resources can lead to change fatigue—exhaustion that limits future adaptability. It also distinguishes change fatigue from cynicism or resistance: people can recognize the benefits of a change and still feel too depleted to support it.
Clinically, this is the same logic we apply to burnout, depression, and anxiety: you can’t “motivate” your way out of depleted capacity. You have to rebuild margin.
Why Consulting Psychologists Have a Real Role Here
If we accept that change is now continuous, then the question becomes: How do you help an organization build adaptability before it is in full crisis mode?
That’s the consulting opportunity even clinical psychologists can move toward—helping leaders and teams strengthen the underlying vulnerabilities (systems, culture, routines, communication patterns, role clarity, psychological safety) and develop flexible “coping skills” that generalize across changes, rather than overfitting to one initiative at a time.
Questions to Think About
This framework opens a set of practical questions that matter to business leaders right now:
- How do you assess organizational change capability in a way that is behavioral and operational—not just based on sentiment surveys?
- What are the earliest warning signs of change fatigue, and what interventions reliably reduce it?
- What do leaders do (often unintentionally) that disrupts sensemaking during change?
- How do you pace multiple initiatives so the organization can actually integrate learning rather than constantly reset?
- What routines and practices create repeatable, reliable change execution across teams?
If we take the therapy analogy seriously, the goal isn’t to help organizations “white-knuckle” through the next disruption. The goal is to strengthen the underlying coping skills of the system so the organization can respond with flexibility including when the next disruption arrives. Ask yourself if your company has change capability to overcome turbulent times.
Reference
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