Always Leaving, Never Arriving: The Cultural Revolution of Change Management

Reposted from my LinkedIn articles, first published January 2, 2026.

When change becomes permanent, improvement never arrives — only exhaustion, instability, and loss.

There’s a strange kind of revolutionary fervour running through contemporary organisational life. Every year brings a new wave of restructures, rebrands, realignments and “transformational initiatives.” Each one is framed as the moment of renewal that will finally unlock innovation, productivity, or strategic clarity.

But the revolution never ends. Change has become a permanent state rather than an event with a beginning, middle and end. In fact, most organisations never arrive anywhere at all. They live in a condition of perpetual commencement.

And this has consequences — for people, and for institutions.

The logic of perpetual revolution

There is something reminiscent of cultural revolution in the way modern change management operates. Each new initiative begins with the rhetoric of purification: clearing away inefficiencies, dismantling old structures, breaking from the past. The previous plan is quietly discredited; the new one is hailed as the turning point.

Then, before the dust settles, another round begins.

In political revolutions built on perpetual vigilance, nothing is allowed to stabilise. The same is true in today’s organisational culture. Continuity is treated as complacency. Stability is viewed as stagnation. The incessant churn signals energy, movement and transformation — even when nothing of substance changes.

The managerial performance of change

One of the reasons nothing ever settles is that change has become a managerial performance. Leaders and consultants are rewarded for initiating transformation, not for stewarding it to completion. Launching a new strategy demonstrates decisiveness and ambition. Delivering on it is slow, unglamorous and often invisible.

By the time the impact of a change programme could realistically be assessed — usually two to three years down the line — the leadership team has changed, the external consultants have gone, and a new plan has taken its place. Cultural roots barely form before the soil is tilled again.

This creates the impression of progress without the substance. Organisations appear dynamic while quietly avoiding the uncomfortable question: has anything actually worked?

If change is always beginning, then failure never needs to be acknowledged. Evaluation becomes unnecessary — or dangerous.

The human cost: casualties of the revolution

The damage is not just structural. It is deeply personal.

Perpetual change generates exhaustion, anxiety, uncertainty and emotional dislocation. When people are uprooted repeatedly, they lose stability, identity, professional confidence and often their sense of belonging. Research on organisational life already highlights the emotional burden of change: stress, grief, frustration and demoralisation are common responses (Smollan & Sayers, 2009; Smollan, 2015).

But there is a darker dimension here. Chaotic systems create ideal conditions for individuals who thrive in instability — those untroubled by the human consequences of their decisions. Pech and Slade (2007) argue that organisational environments marked by turbulence and aggressive restructuring often elevate people with sociopathic traits, precisely because such individuals are adept at operating without empathy or emotional accountability.

If a system rewards constant upheaval, then those who do not feel the human weight of that upheaval have an advantage.

This is where the revolutionary metaphor bites hardest. These cycles of change leave casualties — redundancies, burnout, broken teams, lost careers — and yet the organisational narrative presents each wave of disruption as noble, necessary and progressive.

Institutional disintegration: organisations that forget how to be organisations

Beyond the human impact, the institutional cost is profound. Perpetual change erodes the very qualities organisations rely on to function:

• cultural coherence
• shared purpose
• institutional memory
• stable relationships
• long-term planning
• trust

When every year brings a new strategy, no strategy has time to take hold. When teams are restructured repeatedly, no team builds the depth to excel. When priorities shift constantly, accountability dissolves.

This is not transformation. It is institutional amnesia.

Lynch, Grummell and Devine (2012) describe this phenomenon as a product of new managerialism: a cultural logic that devalues care, continuity and human relationships in favour of performance indicators and efficiency narratives. In such a climate, care itself becomes seen as an inefficiency, and stability as a sign of weakness.

The result is a paradox: organisations commit to change in order to improve, yet the endless churn ensures they never gain the conditions required for genuine improvement.

Plato’s lesson: why change never transcends its lowest level

There’s a useful parallel here with Plato’s hierarchy of knowledge. At the lowest levels are shadows and appearances — superficial impressions. Above that sit objects and tools. Only at the higher levels does one find deeper understanding, and at the very top, the moral purpose: the Form of the Good.

Sower and Fair (2005) argue that organisations rarely reach these higher levels because they stay trapped in cycles of surface-level activity.

The same is true of change management. Constant reform keeps organisations stuck in the realm of shadows: language, slogans, timelines, coloured arrows on a slide deck. They may occasionally reach the level of tools and structures, but they seldom reach the level of principle, purpose or moral clarity.

To reach that higher level, change would have to stabilise long enough for people to learn, evaluate, refine and embed it. But a culture of perpetual revolution cannot allow that. Its power depends on constant movement. And so organisations are prevented from ever becoming what they claim to be striving towards.

A different vision

Perhaps the problem is not change itself, but the ideology of change without arrival. Real transformation requires continuity, reflection, evaluation and care — qualities that revolutionary cycles see as obstacles rather than foundations.

If we want institutions that genuinely improve, we need to reclaim stability as a virtue, not a vice. We need to recognise that people cannot flourish in a constant state of upheaval. And we need to question whether the zeal for perpetual reinvention is doing far more harm than good.

A revolution that never ends is not a revolution at all. It is a machine that consumes its own people.

References

Lynch, K., Grummell, B. and Devine, D. (2012) New Managerialism in Education: Commercialisation, Carelessness and Gender. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pech, R. and Slade, B.W. (2007) ‘Organisational sociopaths: rarely challenged, often promoted’, Journal of Business Strategy, 28(6), pp. 7–19.

Smollan, R. K., & Sayers, J. G. (2009). Organizational culture, change and emotions: A qualitative study. Journal of change management, 9(4), 435-457.

Smollan, R.K. (2015) ‘Causes of stress before, during and after organisational change: a qualitative study’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 28(2), pp. 301–314.

Sower, V.E. and Fair, F.K. (2005) ‘There is more to quality than continuous improvement: listening to Plato’, Quality Management Journal, 12(1), pp. 8–20.