--- title: "The Transformation Deficit: Gartner's Change Research" description: Gartner found employees faced five times more planned change in 2022 than in 2016, while willingness to support it halved. What it means for a CEO. url: https://linusmurphy.com/news/the-transformation-deficit-gartner-research/ language: en-GB type: article author: Linus Murphy author_url: https://linusmurphy.com/about/ published: 2026-10-06 modified: 2026-10-06 --- [News](https://linusmurphy.com/news/) # The Transformation Deficit: What Gartner Found About Change Fatigue By [Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/) • 6 October 2026 ![Empty mountain road winding through evening haze towards a distant pass, a lone guardrail tracing the bends](https://linusmurphy.com/images/news/the-transformation-deficit-gartner-research.webp) Gartner found that the average employee faced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016, while the share willing to support enterprise change fell from 74% to 38%. Gartner calls that gap the transformation deficit. For a CEO it means the next initiative lands on a workforce with far less goodwill than the plan assumes. The research is set out in [Gartner’s “The Transformation Deficit” in the Gartner Business Quarterly](https://emt.gartnerweb.com/ngw/globalassets/en/insights/gartner-business-quarterly/documents/gartner_business_quarterly1q23.pdf), First Quarter 2023, pages 10 to 14, by Cian Ó Móráin and Peter Aykens of Gartner’s HR practice. It is the cover story of that issue, and it is one of the clearest pieces of data I know on why so much change stalls after a strong launch. ## What did Gartner’s Transformation Deficit research find? Gartner found that change demand rose fivefold between 2016 and 2022 while employee willingness to support change roughly halved. The authors argue that unless leaders change how they run change, the gap will “stymie organizations’ ambitions” and feed quiet quitting and attrition. The headline numbers are on page 10. The average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, against two in 2016. Over the same period, willingness to support enterprise change “collapsed to just 38% in 2022, compared with 74% of employees in 2016”. In the authors’ words, “the workforce has hit the wall”. The authors note an irony. Many transformation goals, such as redesigning teams, automating drudge work and reengineering culture, are exactly what would close the gap. The problem is not the ambition. It is the way the change is being driven while that longer work matures. ## How did Gartner measure the deficit, and how far can you trust it? The figures come from Gartner’s own employee and HR surveys, set out in the notes on page 14. Treat them as strong directional evidence, not a controlled experiment. The 2022 numbers rest on a Workforce Change Fatigue Survey of 3,548 employees; the 2016 baseline rests on a Workforce Change Survey of 6,686 employees. The 2022 survey was conducted online from 28 February to 16 March 2022 among respondents from various geographies, industries and functions. The chart behind the headline also draws on a 2016 Gartner HR Change Readiness Survey covering 305 organisations. Change effort is measured as the average number of enterprise changes in the past 12 months; willingness is the percentage of employees willing to change to support enterprise change. The supporting figures come from separate Gartner surveys: - **Top-down change:** 75% of organisations were adopting a top-down approach, from a 2022 survey of 109 HR leaders across 18 countries. - **Pandemic cost:** 55% of employees took a significant hit to their health, team relationships and work environment to sustain performance, from a January 2021 survey of 3,690 employees. - **Trust:** only 36% of employees reported high trust in their organisation, from a 2021 survey of 1,041 employees and managers. - **Overload:** 50% reported struggling to find the right information or people, or an ever-increasing volume of tasks, from a 2022 survey of 3,513 respondents. Three cautions matter for a board conversation. First, the 2016 and 2022 numbers come from different surveys with different samples, so the trend compares two snapshots. Second, this is a short practitioner article rather than a peer-reviewed paper, and the improvement figures later in it are associations Gartner reports without publishing the full method. Third, the same authors’ argument appeared in Harvard Business Review in May 2023 with willingness at 43% in 2022, not 38%. I cover that HBR version, and the extra figures it adds on involving employees and on managers’ capacity, in [why employees are losing patience with change initiatives](https://linusmurphy.com/news/employees-losing-patience-with-change/). Several numbers overlap between the two pieces, including the 10 changes, the 55% and the 36%; where they differ, I flag the difference rather than pick one. ## Why does hitting the accelerator make the deficit worse? Because it spends the very energy the change depends on. Gartner describes leaders trying to build momentum “by hitting the accelerator — hard”, with the centre setting strategy, writing detailed roadmaps and pushing high volumes of communication. On pages 10 and 11 the authors list the short-term fixes they see: top-down planned change, managers asked to act as champions and role models for every change, rallying employees “around the flag” with office mandates, issuing challenges to be “hardcore”, and expecting people to recover through paid time off afterwards. They point out that employees were already working over nine hours of unpaid overtime a week, citing ADP. Their metaphor is a Bugatti Veyron, which at top speed empties its tank in under 11 minutes. Relentless sprinting drains an organisation the same way. Executives who persist, they write, should expect to be “running on fumes”. I have sat in that seat. When a plan is late, the instinct is more pressure, more updates and more sponsors. The Gartner data suggests that instinct is now the problem, not the cure. ## What does Gartner mean by finding your green speed? Green speed is the pace at which an organisation gets the most change out of its available energy. Gartner compares it to fuel economy: too slow wastes effort, too fast and in too many directions burns energy faster than it produces progress. On pages 12 and 13 the authors note that a car’s fuel economy is not linear. City driving uses more fuel than highway driving, yet from around 65 km/h resistance begins to outweigh inertia and economy suffers again. Transformation, they argue, is no different: find your optimal speed, and do not move too fast or in too many directions to hold it. They then update the formula for success. Quality, delivery, and change communication and training remain necessary. Gartner adds two terms: prioritised change and fatigue management. Without those two, the authors’ figure shows a full-speed transformation; with them, an efficient one. This echoes an older lesson. John Kotter, studying more than 100 companies attempting transformation, concluded that [skipping steps “creates only an illusion of speed”](https://hbr.org/2007/01/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail) in his Harvard Business Review article (I have read the publisher’s summary, not the full text). Gartner’s contribution is to put a number on the energy that the illusion costs. ## How should leaders prioritise change, according to the research? Show employees where to invest their energy, and time each change well. Gartner says that without a visible priority list, employees “are likely to give 110% for each change, resulting in a blowout”. The first key is visibility. Executives should share their backlog of priorities with the workforce and include change initiatives on it. Gartner cites IT leaders at The Cooperators, who publish their priority progress list every month so employees can judge where to focus. The second key is timing. IT leaders at Sky Cable created guidelines to limit fatigue from a constant flow of technology changes, including a release calendar synchronised with the changes employees were experiencing outside IT. That let them pick the best moments to deploy. Prioritisation also exposes dead weight. The authors write: “If a change is always at the bottom of your backlog and you continually delay it, it’s probably not that important.” I would put that sentence on the wall of every executive committee. ## What does fatigue management involve? Gartner calls fatigue management “a new change management muscle that executives must build”, and names three actions: proactive rest, open-source change and a new role for managers. Each comes with its own figure from Gartner’s surveys. **Proactive rather than reactive rest.** More time working does not produce higher performance, the authors write, but proactive rest does. Rest that is available, accessible and appropriate contributes to a 26% increase in employee performance and a tenfold reduction in the number of employees experiencing burnout. Options range from meeting-free days to a four-day week. **Open-source change.** Employees take part in planning and implementation, and communication becomes two-way. Gartner reports this produces 1.5 times more change willingness, a 29% reduction in change fatigue and up to a 14-fold increase in change success. The authors add that the size of that last number says as much about how ineffective top-down change is. **Managers as resilience builders.** Managers are overwhelmed with change too, so they cannot role-model all of it. Those who build their teams’ ability to navigate change for themselves can increase employee sustainable performance by 29% and protect their own performance. Gartner’s newsroom has reported related figures from separate work. In October 2022 it said [45% of HR leaders described their employees as fatigued](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-12-gartner-survey-reveals-leader-and-manager-effectiveness-tops-hr-leaders-list-of-priorities-for-2023) by continuous disruption, and that only 43% of employees with above-average change fatigue intended to stay, against 74% with low fatigue. Those last two figures measure intent to stay, not willingness to change; do not mix them up with the headline. In September 2023 Gartner added that involvement alone is “necessary, but insufficient”. It reported that when managers create [a psychologically safe environment, change fatigue can fall by up to 46%](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/topics/human-resources/2023-09-12-gartner-says-hr-leaders-can-reduce-employee-fatigue-with-proactive-change-management), defining change fatigue as negative responses such as apathy, burnout and frustration. ## What is Linus Murphy’s take? My take is that the transformation deficit is a leadership load problem before it is an HR problem. The CEO decides how many changes run at once, and the research says that number has outrun the organisation’s energy. This sits squarely in [the “Set direction” cluster of my Executive Coaching Methodology](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/#set-direction). Gartner’s priority list and release calendar are what I mean by [momentum makers and breakers](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leading-change/momentum-breakers-and-makers/): momentum lives in the rituals you repeat, and initiative stacking is the breaker I see most often at senior level. The research also supports the sequencing in [a roadmap for creating change that sticks](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leading-change/creating-change-a-roadmap/). Open-source change maps directly onto how I [handle resistance by treating pushback as design input](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leading-change/handle-resistance/). A pattern I see often is a leadership team that reads low willingness as poor attitude. Gartner’s numbers suggest a tired workforce carrying change it was never asked about. The priority backlog is also a vision problem. If people cannot tell which of ten changes matters most, the vision has not transferred. That is why I treat [transferring vision so it works without you in the room](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/transfer-vision-effectively/) as the first focus area, and why I have argued that [transferring vision is the CEO’s job one](https://linusmurphy.com/articles/why-transferring-vision-is-the-ceos-job-one/). In [my seven-step coaching process](https://linusmurphy.com/services/impactful-leadership-7-step-executive-coaching-process/), this is the work of step three, Challenges: rank the obstacles by business impact and narrow to the vital few priorities for the next 90 days. Step four, Influence, then cements momentum with early, visible wins, and step six puts leading and lagging indicators on one dashboard so you can see whether the change is moving. Bike racing taught me what the fuel-economy metaphor teaches. You do not win by sprinting every kilometre. You win by knowing the pace you can hold and spending effort where it counts. ## What should a CEO do with these findings? Count your live changes, publish the order, and stop at least one. Then ask your managers to build resilience rather than champion every initiative. A practical sequence I use in [executive coaching](https://linusmurphy.com/services/executive-coaching/): 1. **List every enterprise change** your people are absorbing, including the ones you think are finished. 2. **Rank them** and share the ranking beyond the executive committee, as The Cooperators did. 3. **Kill or defer** anything that has sat at the bottom of the backlog for two cycles. 4. **Put a release calendar** on the table so changes from different functions do not land in the same month. 5. **Give the people doing the work** a real part in implementation planning, and listen before you sell. 6. **Build rest into the plan**, not after it. None of this slows a serious transformation. It stops you running it on fumes. ## Questions I am asked **What is the transformation deficit?** It is Gartner's name for the gap between the change effort organisations demand and employees' willingness to support it. In Gartner's data the average employee faced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016, while willingness to support enterprise change fell from 74% to 38%. **What is the biggest mistake leaders make with change, according to Gartner?** Hitting the accelerator. Gartner reported that 75% of organisations were adopting a top-down approach to change, setting the strategy, the detailed roadmap and a high volume of communications at the centre, which drains the change energy it needs. **What does Gartner recommend instead of top-down change?** Prioritised change plus fatigue management. Leaders show employees where to invest their energy and time changes well, then protect energy through proactive rest, open-source change that involves employees, and managers who build their teams' resilience rather than role-modelling every change. **How much difference does involving employees in change make?** A large one, in Gartner's figures. The Quarterly reports that open-source change produced 1.5 times more change willingness, a 29% reduction in change fatigue and up to a 14-fold increase in change success, based on a 2022 survey of 3,548 employees. **Why does the HBR version of this research give a different figure?** Harvard Business Review published the same authors' argument in May 2023 with willingness to support change at 43% in 2022, not the 38% printed in the Gartner Business Quarterly. I quote each source's own figure and flag the difference rather than choose between them. ## Sources 1. [The Transformation Deficit (Gartner Business Quarterly, First Quarter 2023)](https://emt.gartnerweb.com/ngw/globalassets/en/insights/gartner-business-quarterly/documents/gartner_business_quarterly1q23.pdf) — Gartner, 2023 2. [Gartner Survey Reveals Leader and Manager Effectiveness Tops HR Leaders' List of Priorities for 2023](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-12-gartner-survey-reveals-leader-and-manager-effectiveness-tops-hr-leaders-list-of-priorities-for-2023) — Gartner, 12 October 2022 3. [Gartner Says HR Leaders can Reduce Employee Fatigue with Proactive Change Management](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/topics/human-resources/2023-09-12-gartner-says-hr-leaders-can-reduce-employee-fatigue-with-proactive-change-management) — Gartner, 12 September 2023 4. [Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail](https://hbr.org/2007/01/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail) — Harvard Business Review, January 2007 ![Portrait of Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/images/portraits/linus-headshot.jpg) **[Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/)** Elite executive coach