Here's one thing I rarely hear anyone say out loud at the leadership offsite: the biggest drag on your team's performance is probably not a process problem. I don't believe it's a tooling problem. I don't even think it's a people problem.
The problem is you.
You are the one changing direction faster than your teams can actually absorb it. My name is Lance Dacy, otherwise known as Big Agile, and I work with product and technology organizations to close the gap between how fast leadership wants to move and how well the system can actually deliver.
This week, we're talking about one of my favorite topics: leadership agility. Specifically, how to stay adaptive as a leader without creating constant whiplash for the people who are counting on your direction.
We're going to cover why unstable priorities quietly kill team throughput, five specific behaviors that reduce thrash, and a simple operating model you can start running next week.
The Real Problem with Change
Change is not necessarily the problem. It's how we handle it.
Let me tell you a story about a VP I worked with a few years ago. She was smart, energetic, genuinely cared about her people. She was a great leader, but her teams were exhausted.
Every Monday, she would come back from an executive briefing or board meeting, all fired up about the new thing. The new customer segment, the new initiative, the new urgent priority that comes straight from the board — you know what those are. She would drop a message in Slack, schedule a few sync-ups with her leaders, and ask everyone to rally around the new thing.
By Wednesday, the teams were in meetings trying to explain why the old thing from a couple of weeks ago wasn't done yet. And by Friday, nobody was sure what actually mattered anymore.
But here's the part that really stopped me. When I started talking to team members individually during my Learning with Lance activities, I kept hearing the same thing. Different words, same sentence:
"We're just going to wait this one out."
This isn't said in a meeting. It's never put in writing. But that was the operating assumption. They had already been through enough pivots and changes to know that if they just nodded, looked engaged, and kept their heads down, that urgency would be replaced by a different urgency in about three weeks.
So they conserved their energy, they hedged their commitments, and they protected themselves. That's not a wrong thing to do. That's what humans do.
What Change Fatigue Really Looks Like
That is what change fatigue looks like from the inside. It's not loud. It's not dramatic. It's quiet, rational, self-protective behavior from people who have learned that full commitment is a bad investment in an unstable environment.
Here is what I want you to hear: this is almost never the team's fault.
The instinct most of us have as leaders in a situation like this is to push harder — schedule the all-hands, rally the troops, roll out another framework, give the initiative a new name. Maybe bring in a consultant for a day. Feel free to bring me in. I've been there.
The team watches all of this happen, and the most experienced people in the room — the ones who have been around the longest — think to themselves, "Here comes another transformation," or "Here comes another priority."
The Death of the Word "Transformation"
Let me say something about the word "transformation." By 2026, people have lived through agile transformations, DevOps transformations, digital transformations, cloud transformations, and now AI transformations. We've gone through it all.
The word itself has been drained of meaning. I don't really like to use it anymore, but we know what it is. When your teams hear "transformation," some of them genuinely hear, "Here comes another rough quarter, and then things will go back to the way they were." They're just tired of it. To me, it's buzzword fatigue.
And the only antidote to buzzword fatigue is not a better buzzword. It's visible, consistent, leader-embedded action over time.
The problem isn't energy. Energy is the byproduct. The problem is trust in the signal you're sending your team.
Here's the reframe I want you to sit with: your teams do not resist change. People do not resist change the way we often think. What they understand, believe in, and feel some ownership over — they embrace that. What they resist is change that was handed to them by someone who won't be around to live with the consequences.
That distinction matters quite a bit and is one of the underlying problems with change fatigue.
What the Research Tells Us
DORA: Stable Priorities Drive Performance
There is a study I keep coming back to every time I have this conversation with leaders, and that is the DORA research. The DORA 2024 report is the most comprehensive longitudinal study of software delivery performance we've ever had. And one of their clearest findings surprised many people.
One of the strongest predictors of both delivery performance and team wellbeing was stable priorities. Not better tooling — those help. Not more sprints, for sure. Stable priorities.
Teams that experience frequent reprioritization show slower delivery, higher change failure rates, and significantly worse burnout scores.
The mechanism makes total sense once you see it. When priorities shift, teams lose flow. Work in progress jumps, context switching grinds throughput to a halt, and people quietly start hedging their commitments because they've learned that the target will eventually move.
That is the silent killer. When your people stop making real commitments, your planning process becomes theater. We're all just sitting there watching. It's a show. It's a performance.
Donald Reinertsen: The Cost of Work in Progress
Another resource that helps us through this is Donald Reinertsen's Principles of Product Development Flow. He did some of the most important work in product development economics, and what he figured out is that WIP — work in progress — is the real enemy of cycle time.
It's not lack of effort. It's WIP. When too many things are active at one time, everything slows down. Queues grow, lead times stretch, and the system looks busy. Nothing ships fast, but we're usually comfortable because everybody's busy, and that's what we think we want.
Here's the part most leaders miss: every time you add a new priority without removing something, you've just increased system WIP. You haven't made a priority decision — you've made an addition. And that inventory has a carrying cost that compounds every single day it sits there.
Joiner and Josephs: Leadership Agility Levels
Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs have spent decades studying what actually separates leaders who adapt well from leaders who create chaos when they try to adapt. Their research found that fewer than 10% of managers operate at what they call a "post-heroic agility" level — the level where leaders can hold real complexity without collapsing into a fast, confident directive.
Most leaders operate at what they call the "achiever" level. They're goal-driven, results-focused, highly capable. That's not criticism — they're great people. But achiever-level leadership tends to handle complexity by asserting a clearer direction faster. In a complex adaptive system, that instinct often makes things worse.
The more agile leader does something different. They stabilize what they can. They create space for the team to learn and change direction based on evidence rather than the anxiety the team is feeling.
John Kotter: Why Change Efforts Fail
John Kotter spent decades studying why change efforts fail. One of his most durable findings is that transformation efforts collapse most predictably when the "guiding coalition" — the group of people with the actual credibility, authority, and genuine commitment to carry the change forward — is too small, too junior, or simply not present in the day-to-day work.
He's not just talking about project managers. He's talking about the senior leaders who need to be visibly, consistently present in the change — not just at the launch, but all throughout.
Sponsor vs. Catalyst: A Critical Distinction
There's a meaningful difference between being a change sponsor and being a change catalyst. A sponsor funds the initiative and approves the charter. A catalyst shows up in the retrospectives, asks the hard questions in the sprint review, and removes structural blockers publicly so the team can see it happen.
A catalyst changes their own behavior first, before asking anyone else to change. And critically, a catalyst can tell you in two sentences why this change matters, why it matters right now, and what happens to the organization if it doesn't happen.
Detractors Are Not the Enemy
When detractors start hardening, here's something I want you to think about differently. Detractors are not always bad actors. Some of them are the most skeptical people in the room, and they're skeptical for very good reasons. They've been here a long time. They've watched three versions of the same movie play out. Their resistance is institutional memory doing its job.
If you're not addressing them directly, you're leaving some of the most experienced people completely unpersuaded. They can be your biggest champions if handled correctly. They have every reason to wait you out.
The Practical Playbook: Five Behaviors That Reduce Thrash
So what do you actually do with all of this information? Here are five behaviors I consistently see move leadership from high theater to high throughput. No framework name, no acronym. Just the things that work.
1. Decide What You're Not Doing
Most leaders are genuinely good at prioritizing. Very few are good at deprioritizing.
Before you add something to your team's plate, say it out loud in a meeting: what comes off the plate? If you can't name what stops, you haven't made a priority decision. You've just made an addition, and that's not exciting for anyone perceiving it.
2. Sell the Why Before the What
This one is harder but more important. Sell the why before you sell the what — or better yet, let the team come up with the what. Tell them, "Here's what needs to happen and why," then let them figure out how to do it. Self-manage, self-organize around it.
Before you announce a change, you need to be able to answer three plain-language questions:
- What's happening in the environment that makes the current approach unsustainable?
- What does success look like in specific, observable terms? Not just "get better faster" or "do more with less."
- What is the cost of staying where we are?
If you can't answer all three in under two minutes, you're not ready to lead that change. You'll be asking people to trust you in uncertainty without giving them a reason to trust you.
3. Stay in the Work, Not Just the Launch
This is the behavior most leaders underestimate. Change does not die at the announcement. It dies three months later when the daily delivery pressure crowds out all the new behavior, and the leader is nowhere to be seen in that friction because they're busy too.
That's exactly when the detractors win. Not because they're louder, but because the people who were willing to try the new thing look around and realize nobody above them is still invested.
If you kicked off a change six months ago and haven't checked in, removed a structural blocker, or visibly changed your own behavior, your team has already filed it away. They're just waiting for the next announcement.
4. Create a Clarity Interval
Rather than forwarding every new piece of strategic information to the team the moment it hits your inbox, hold onto it. Batch it. Bring it to your regular weekly cadence. You're protecting the team's flow state. You're not hiding anything — you're being a responsible filter.
Worry about the cumulative effect of the information. If you're hitting your team with new information three times a day, you're not being responsive. You're flooding the queue. "Look at this great article. Go do this. Why aren't we trying this?" It's fatigue.
5. Make Your Reasoning Visible
This one compounds everything else. When you change direction, explain the evidence.
Not just the what — tell your team the why. "We are focusing on enterprise customers now because our last two experiments showed activation rates under 5%, and the unit economics don't work."
When people understand the reasoning, they can apply it to their own decisions. When they only receive the output, they just comply or don't. Compliance is slow. Judgment is fast.
The Scrum Connection
A lot of what we've just talked about is exactly why the Scrum framework builds inspection and adaptation into the operating model. Retrospectives, sprint reviews, and the cadence of the sprint itself — these are not optional ceremonies. They are the mechanism by which the organization gets smarter on a cadence. The leader's job is to protect that cadence and actually show up for it.
If you're transitioning to Scrum, where are you in this process?
A Simple Weekly Operating Rhythm
If I were to hand you a simple weekly operating rhythm that holds all five of these behaviors together, it would look something like this:
Before planning next week, take five minutes to review everything your team is actively carrying and make sure nothing has landed without a conscious trade-off. If something was added, name it out loud: what did it replace?
Midweek, collect any new strategic input into a single note. Sit on it for 48 hours. If it still feels urgent by Friday, bring it to the next planning cadence. If it doesn't, maybe it was noise. I like the Eisenhower quadrant: delay, discard, or do. Protect your team's focus.
End of each week, review one outcome signal. Not just "did we ship?" but "did we ship anything that changed anything? Does anything matter with what we shipped?"
Once a month, count your active initiatives. If it's more than three, something on the list is probably being driven by anxiety rather than strategy.
Once a quarter, ask your team directly: "Where did I create confusion this quarter, and what would have helped?" That conversation alone will teach you more than any leadership assessment ever will. They will open up, and you'll start building psychological safety.
Your Challenge: Start Next Week
My advice to you is to start next week. It only takes 15 minutes. You can do it before your first meeting on Monday.
Write down every initiative your team is actively carrying. Not the roadmap — the actual live work. Things people are in meetings about, designing, building, coordinating. Count them all up.
If it sums up to more than three things, you have a work-in-progress problem. And it almost certainly didn't happen on purpose. Pick the two or three with the highest business impact right now and schedule a five-minute conversation with the team to explicitly park everything else, giving them permission with this sentence: "This is not canceled. It's waiting for capacity."
Send that message to your stakeholders as well. We have to be adults about our team's capacity, just like your own personal budget. You don't make infinite money every month.
Parking has to be stated explicitly, or people will keep working on it in the background — which means you still have a WIP problem, just without visibility.
Then do this one thing before your Monday morning planning meeting: take your top priority change and ask yourself, "Could my most skeptical team member explain in two sentences why this matters and why it's interrupting our flow?" If the answer is no, you don't have an execution problem. You have a clarity problem.
Lead the Change You Want to See
Leadership agility is not about how fast you can change your mind. It's about how well you can hold clarity under pressure, make decisions from evidence instead of anxiety, sell the reason for change in a way that people actually believe, and then stay embedded in the work long enough for it to matter.
Change fatigue is real. Buzzword fatigue is real. The team member who has quietly decided to wait you out is not being difficult — they're being completely rational based on their experience.
The leaders who understand that and respond with consistency rather than more urgency are going to be the ones who build the most durable, high-performing product organizations.
Your teams are not waiting for a better process. They are waiting to see if this time the direction actually holds.
That's on you, not them. Run the rhythm, stay in the work, and give them something worth committing to.
Ready to build leadership agility across your organization? Explore the classes and training programs that Big Agile offers — from Scrum certifications to hands-on coaching that goes well beyond a slide deck.