“The term ‘change fatigue’ seems quaint. ‘Perpetual chaos exhaustion’ is more apt.”
— Marcus, describing life inside a large-scale organizational change initiative
When a colleague shared those words with me recently, I recognized them immediately as something worth sitting with. They aren’t just a description of one person’s experience, they are a diagnosis of what is happening inside organizations across industries right now, and they are also a direct indictment of what happens when leadership fails to account for the full human cost of the decisions it makes.
In recent months I have had the occasion to hear from two different colleagues, Marcus and Liz, who are navigating organizationally similar situations in entirely different companies and sectors. Their stories, taken together, map the full arc of what uncompassionate leadership costs, from the high-altitude strategic failures that set a crisis in motion, to the ground-level human moments where those failures finally land on real people with real lives. I am sharing a version of both here, with their permission and with identifying details changed, because I believe the pattern they reveal is too important and too common to leave unnamed.
Marcus: The Suffering That Lives Upstream
Marcus was describing a situation that had been building for the better part of a year: an aggressive, organizationally-mandated timeline for a large and complex technology implementation; warnings about the impossibility of the project (from experienced practitioners) that had gone unheeded; multiple rounds of layoffs mid-project; a failed implementation partner; months lost to course correction. And, most painfully, a team of people being asked to absorb all of it while their roles, their colleagues, and the organizational structures around them continued to shift beneath their feet.
There is a particular kind of injury that comes from being asked to work harder to fix a crisis you predicted and were ignored about, and Marcus and his team had been living inside that injury for months. Expert-level practitioners, the people closest to the actual work, had said clearly and repeatedly that the timeline was unreasonable, that the foundational work needed to happen much earlier, and that without the right resources and sustained focus the project would not go well. Senior leaders responded to these warnings with enthusiasm and cheerleading (“you’re awesome!” “you can do it!”). Then they proceeded to restructure the organization midstream, conduct multiple rounds of large-scale layoffs. Then they brought in an implementation partner who was not up to the task, losing several months to that failed relationship before pivoting to a new team. All the while, they continued piling additional responsibilities onto people whose bandwidth had long since been exhausted.
Marcus offered an analogy that captures the lived experience of this kind of organizational chaos: imagine you are a professional athlete, he said, and your new coach has told you that your team is expected to win the championship this season, but then, without consulting you, management begins trading away key players, and asking several of your teammates to take on custodial duties in the stadium because the facilities staff was laid off. Then management looks at the scoreboard and says, “Why aren’t you winning? Work harder.” That image is not hyperbole, it is an accurate portrait of what happens when organizational decision-making becomes structurally disconnected from the lived reality of the people doing the work. It is also, importantly, a portrait of what compassionate leadership could have interrupted at virtually every stage.
Marcus also shared a second analogy, one that speaks to the specific cruelty of being denied the resources to do preventive work and then being held accountable for the resulting crisis. For years, he said, the team had been raising the alarm that the infrastructure they depend on was aging and would eventually fail, and had been asking for the time and budget to address it before it became urgent. The answer was always “Not yet,” or “Focus on your other priorities.” Now the train is nearly at the broken bridge and senior leadership is standing at the back of the car yelling, “Hurry up! Build the track! Don’t you see this is important?!” To his credit, Marcus acknowledged that the leaders currently calling for urgency largely inherited this crisis and did not create it themselves, which means they too are operating under pressure they did not fully choose. That complexity matters when we think carefully about how leadership failures accumulate across time and across generations of leaders.
Liz: The Compounding Weight of What People Carry
Liz works in a different organization, in a different industry, but the situation she described to me carried a striking and dispiriting resemblance to Marcus’s. Her team, too, had been living inside a prolonged and high-pressure tech implementation, navigating cascading change, absorbing responsibilities that had belonged to colleagues who were no longer there, and doing all of it inside a context of organizational uncertainty that showed no signs of resolving. What Liz brought into focus for me was not the strategic arc of how the crisis developed, but the intimate, daily human weight of living inside it.
The most recent chapter in her story arrived on a Good Friday afternoon, in the form of a message sent not by a person but by a generic project email account. The message informed the team that they would be needed over the holiday weekend. There was no acknowledgment of the day, no personal expression of gratitude, no recognition that Easter weekend carries meaning for many of the people being asked to give it up, and no name attached to the ask at all—just an instruction from a faceless system arriving at the close of a sacred and culturally significant day.
One of the most striking things Liz shared with me was her instinct, even inside all of this organizational pressure, to pause and take stock of the full human reality surrounding her. She thinks about who is sitting next to her in that testing queue and what they are carrying beyond the work itself. She wonders who has children home on spring break and no childcare, who has a sick parent, who has a family member in a region of the world currently at war, who is quietly grieving a colleague they lost to a recent layoff, who is wondering whether their own name will appear on the next list, and who is simply trying to find a foothold in a landscape where the organizational ground keeps shifting beneath their feet.
This is not sentimentality. This is the human landscape inside any organization today, and the research on workforce wellbeing is unequivocal in its finding that people do not perform well, sustain their engagement, or maintain their commitment when they feel invisible to the people leading them. The compounding weight of personal stress, organizational chaos, and global uncertainty is what led Marcus to reach for that phrase, “perpetual chaos exhaustion,” and it is exactly what Liz was describing from a different angle: not “change fatigue,” which has come to feel almost quaint in its inadequacy, but something heavier and more relentless, the cumulative experience of being asked to keep giving more while the ground beneath you keeps moving and no one in a position of authority seems to fully see it.
And yet, amid all of this, Liz had a brief conversation with an informal supervisor that she described, simply, as “sad but good.” The fact that she used both of those words together, and that the conversation was clearly still with her when she shared the story with me, tells you something important about what people are hungry for right now. This manager had stopped and asked her how she was doing. Liz had said she was overwhelmed. The manager said he felt the same way, and the two of them talked for a few minutes, just two people being honest with each other about the difficulty of what they were navigating together. Then the manager said, simply, “We all have stuff going on outside this place. It’s easy to forget that, but I don’t want to.”
That conversation was not a formal intervention, and it did not solve a single systemic problem or change the timeline or undo any of the chaos. But it was a moment of genuine human connection inside a dehumanizing situation, and it mattered in a way that the project dashboard and the anonymous reminder emails and the weekend ask did not and could not.
What Compassionate Leadership Would Have Made Possible
Here is what I want us to sit with: almost nothing in either of these stories had to happen this way. At each decision point there was an alternative available, and that alternative had a name. Its name was compassionate leadership. I want to be very clear about what I mean by that, because compassionate leadership is not about being lenient, or soft, or willing to let critical deadlines slide for the sake of feelings. The confusion of compassion with weakness is one of the most persistent and damaging misconceptions in organizational life. Compassionate leaders are people who bring both genuine care and clear-eyed accountability to everything they do, who are willing to make hard calls, deliver difficult news, and hold high standards, but who are not willing to make those calls in a vacuum, without curiosity about the people involved, without transparency about the reasoning, and without honest engagement with the real constraints on the ground.
A compassionate leader, hearing the early warnings that Marcus and his colleagues were sounding about an unreasonable timeline, asks what it would take to do this well, and then pauses, listens to the answer, and acts on it. A compassionate leader managing through the kind of repeated restructuring that both Marcus and Liz described checks in with the people absorbing that upheaval and asks what they are carrying and how they can be helped to carry it.
A compassionate leader who is facing an unavoidable holiday weekend , as Liz’ organization was, does not delegate that communication to an anonymous system account. Rather, he or she writes the message personally, acknowledges plainly what is being asked and what it costs, names the sacrifice, and expresses authentic gratitude for it. That one act—so small in terms of time and effort—makes an enormous difference in whether people feel seen or invisible, valued or expendable. And that difference compounds over time in ways that show up directly in engagement, retention, and the quality of the work itself.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
I share these stories not to indict any individual leader, because the situations that Marcus and Liz are navigating involve people at multiple levels who are themselves under enormous pressure, many of whom inherited crises they did not create and are doing their genuine best to manage them. Leadership failures of this kind are rarely the fault of one bad actor, but are most often the result of organizational cultures and systems that have not prioritized the human side of the work, that have allowed urgency to consistently crowd out wisdom, and that have, over time, mistaken speed for strength.
We are living through a moment of extraordinary and unrelenting change. The baseline level of stress and uncertainty that people are carrying into work every day is higher than it has been in a very long time, and organizations that continue to treat people as throughput rather than as human beings are going to pay for that in ways that are both measurable and profound, through disengagement, distrust, quiet departure, and the slow erosion of the institutional knowledge and relational trust that makes any complex, high-stakes project possible in the first place.
The Navy SEALs have a saying that I have come to think of as a foundational leadership principle: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” It speaks directly against the instinct that drives so much organizational suffering, the instinct to push harder and move faster and demand more in a crisis, an instinct that is understandable but not always wise, and that often produces the opposite of what it intends. Sometimes the most strategically intelligent thing a leader can do is pause, turn toward the people in front of them, and ask what they need right now–not as a detour from the work, but as the very thing that makes the work possible, sustainable, and worth doing with care.
