Recent research from Gartner reveals a stunning statistic. Seventy-nine percent of employees don’t trust their organization’s ability to change effectively. The majority believe their organization has made poor change decisions in the past and will likely fail in the future. This goes far deeper than poor change management. Organizations have a legitimacy problem.
The same research introduces the concept of “ungovernable change” to describe our current environment. Changes are stacked on top of each other. They’re continuous without clear start or end dates. They’re interdependent in ways that cascade unpredictably. They’re driven by external forces like technology, geopolitics, and economic uncertainty that no organization can control.
In response, the most successful leaders are “routinizing change,” treating transformation as an everyday business process rather than a special event. They help employees develop what Gartner calls “change reflexes” through regular practice in the course of daily work. These reflexes include being open to new experiences, effectively managing time, understanding business context, using technology well, working collaboratively with anyone, and regulating emotions.
What strikes me about this approach is that you cannot develop these capabilities in people who must wait for permission to act.
The Fundamental Contradiction
Traditional hierarchical structures concentrate decision-making power at the top. Leaders make the strategic choices. Middle managers translate those choices into directives. Frontline employees execute according to plan. When something changes, everyone waits for new instructions from above.
Now consider what it actually means to develop change reflexes. Being open to new experiences requires the authority to try new approaches. Managing time effectively means controlling your own priorities rather than having them dictated. Understanding business context demands access to information that hierarchies often restrict. Working well with anyone necessitates the freedom to form relationships and collaborate across boundaries without approval. Regulating emotions becomes possible when you have some agency over your circumstances rather than feeling perpetually acted upon.
Every single one of these reflexes requires autonomy. Every single one develops through practice in real conditions where the stakes matter. You cannot build adaptive capacity in people while simultaneously keeping them dependent on approval from above.
The contradiction runs deeper. Organizations tell people that adaptability is now essential for job security, as EY’s Global Chief Innovation Officer recently wrote in Fortune. Jobs are changing faster than ever, especially with the introduction and integration of AI. Massive upskilling is required. Those who can’t adapt will fall behind.
Then these same organizations design work environments where people have no opportunity to practice adaptation because someone else makes all the decisions.
What Routinizing Actually Requires
If change is truly ungovernable, if it’s continuous and interdependent and externally driven, then the solution cannot be better change management programs. The solution has to be organizational structures that distribute the capacity to sense and respond.
Think about what “routinizing” means. You make something routine by doing it regularly until it becomes second nature. The Gartner research describes “micro-moments of change” in which employees practice adaptive skills in everyday work under less stressful conditions. A leader might ask how the team would adjust a timeline to address new priorities. Employees might research an external trigger, such as AI or new regulations, and share what they learned with the team.
These micro-moments only work if people have real authority to act on what they learn. If every timeline adjustment requires three levels of approval, you’re not building change reflexes. You’re building learned helplessness.
The financial services company in the research that helps employees develop foresight through context-sensing exercises is moving in the right direction. They assign employees to research potential external triggers and teach the team. The group discusses likely scenarios and needed skills. This builds both business acumen and adaptive capacity.
What happens next matters enormously. If employees identify a needed skill and then must wait for HR to design a training program, their manager to approve attendance, and their schedule to accommodate it, they’ve learned that seeing what needs to happen is separate from having the power to make it happen. If instead they can immediately begin developing that skill through practice, peer learning, or self-directed study, they’ve learned that adaptation is within their control.
The Self-Management Parallel
Organizations operating with self-managing structures have been routinizing change all along, often without naming it that way. When there’s no centralized approval process slowing everything down, teams develop change reflexes through necessity.
A team notices a process isn’t working well. They might develop a proposal and run it through a decision-making process, but they’re not submitting it to management and waiting for someone above them to decide. They experiment with improvements, learn from what happens, and adjust. A new technology emerges that could serve clients better. They don’t wait for an innovation committee to evaluate it. They assess the fit, consider the tradeoffs, and make a decision. An external factor shifts the landscape. They don’t look up the chain for direction. They analyze the implications and respond.
This isn’t chaos. Self-managing organizations still have structure, still have accountability, still have ways of coordinating across teams and ensuring decisions align with purpose and values. The difference is that decision-making authority lies with the people closest to the work.
The six change reflexes Gartner identified are not specialized skills that need to be taught; rather, they are natural capabilities that emerge when you stop suppressing them through hierarchical control.
People are inherently open to new experiences when they have the authority to pursue them. They manage time effectively when they control their own priorities. They understand the business context when they have access to information and are responsible for outcomes. They work well with diverse colleagues when collaboration is necessary rather than performative. They regulate their emotions more successfully when they have agency rather than feeling powerless.
The challenge for traditional hierarchies is that they’ve spent decades teaching people the opposite reflexes. People have been conditioned to wait for instructions, not take initiative beyond their role, defer to authority, protect their turf, and manage up. These are adaptive responses to hierarchical environments, and they’re exactly wrong for navigating ungovernable change.
What This Means for Leaders
If you lead in a traditional hierarchy and you genuinely want your organization to become more adaptive, you face an uncomfortable truth. The structure itself is the problem.
You can run change management programs. You can communicate more transparently about why changes are happening and who they impact. You can help people understand their emotional responses and practice adaptive skills in low-stakes situations. These things help at the margins.
The deeper work is redesigning how power flows through your organization. That means examining where decision-making authority currently lives and asking whether it needs to live there. It means identifying decisions that could be made by teams closest to the work. It means building the infrastructure, like accessible information and clear accountabilities, that makes distributed decision-making possible. It means accepting that you won’t control everything, and that’s precisely the point.
This is hard work. It requires letting go of the illusion of control that hierarchy promises. It requires trusting that people throughout the organization have the capacity to make good decisions when given context, authority, and accountability. It requires rethinking leadership as creating conditions for adaptation rather than directing adaptation from above.
The alternative is to continue telling people that adaptability matters while structurally preventing them from developing it. That’s the path to the trust deficit Gartner found, where nearly four out of five employees have given up on their organization’s ability to change well.
Building Infrastructure for Adaptation
Organizations serious about becoming truly adaptive need to start distributing decision-making authority. This is a crucial first step toward what I think of as a self-managing operating system. Most organizations aren’t there yet, which is why this work matters. Right now, traditional hierarchies have extensive infrastructure supporting command-and-control structures: business schools, consulting firms, HR software, and leadership programs. Organizations moving toward self-management need an entirely different infrastructure.
This includes practices for collaborative decision-making that distribute authority while maintaining alignment. It includes transparency mechanisms that give everyone access to the information they need to make good choices. It includes accountability structures that work without hierarchy. It includes ways to develop skills and share knowledge that don’t depend on centralized training programs. It includes technology platforms designed for coordination among equals rather than reporting up a chain.
When this infrastructure exists, routinizing change becomes natural. Teams don’t need special programs to build change reflexes because they’re already exercising them constantly. They’re already open to new experiences, managing their time, understanding context, using technology, collaborating widely, and regulating emotions because that’s what their daily work requires.
The irony is that the very thing many leaders fear about letting go of control is what would actually make their organizations better able to navigate uncertainty. Ungovernable change requires ungovernable organizations, in the sense that change can’t be governed from the top. It has to be navigated by everyone, everywhere, all the time.
You can’t practice that while waiting for permission.
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