"Change" now covers everything from a new expense system to a restructure, so it no longer tells anyone what is being asked of them. The volume is documented, and so is the fall in willingness to support it. Here is what to ask instead, read through Ability, Character and Environment.
The word "change" has stopped meaning anything because it stopped carrying information. It now covers a new expense system and a restructure, a software migration and a redundancy round, all in the same sentence and the same all-hands slide. When one word has to hold everything from a minor inconvenience to a threat to your livelihood, it tells you nothing about what is actually being asked of you. That is not cynicism on your part. It is an accurate reading of a word that has been worn smooth.
The tiredness underneath it is real and it is measurable. What is less obvious is that naming the tiredness does not resolve it. What resolves it is specificity: knowing which part of this particular change is hard for you, and why.
Because it is now used for every size of event, so it no longer carries the one thing a word about change needs to carry: scale. A leader who says "we are going through a period of change" has told their team nothing about whether to update a bookmark or update their CV. The listener has to supply the missing information themselves, and in the absence of detail most people fill the gap with the worst plausible version. So the sentence intended to prepare people ends up unsettling them, and the next time the word appears it carries even less weight.
There is a second reason, and it is subtler. Words go dead when the thing they describe becomes routine. Decoding AQ makes this point about adaptability itself, warning that when we make adapting into a scheduled process we can end up "no longer really thinking in a flexible and adaptable way." The book puts it more sharply elsewhere, describing how organisations come to treat adaptability like a badge: run the annual survey, tick the little green checkbox, job done. A word attached to a ritual becomes part of the ritual. People stop hearing it as a description of something real and start hearing it as the noise an organisation makes before something happens to them.
It is real, and the data on it is specific. Gartner research reported by Cian O Morain and Peter Aykens in Harvard Business Review in May 2023 found that in 2022 the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes, such as a restructure, a culture programme, or the replacement of a legacy technology system, up from 2 such changes in 2016. Over the same period, employees' willingness to support enterprise change fell to 43%, down from 74% in 2016. More recently, an April 2025 Gartner survey of more than 2,850 employees found that 79% of employees have low trust in change, and a Gartner survey published in July 2025 found only 32% of mid-to-senior business leaders said the last change they led achieved healthy change adoption. Kayla Velnoskey, a Director in the Gartner HR practice, described the nature of change today as having become "ungovernable."
So the pattern is not that people have become fragile. Volume went up roughly fivefold in 6 years while the explanation of any individual change stayed about the same length, and support fell accordingly. Read that way, the reaction to the word "change" looks less like resistance and more like a reasonable response to being asked to absorb more with no better information about any of it.
The change profession has a name for this state, and naming it genuinely helps: it turns a private feeling into a shared, discussable problem, and there is good practice built around it. But a label for the tiredness still does not tell any individual which part of this specific change is difficult for them. Two people in the same restructure, with the same job title and the same manager, will struggle with completely different parts of it. A shared name for the collective symptom cannot answer a personal question.
Usually three separate things at once, which is exactly why one word cannot carry it. Adaptability Intelligence (AQ) is the measurable, developable capacity to adjust your thoughts and behaviours in response to uncertainty, new information, or changed circumstances, and AQai measures it across three categories known as A.C.E.: Ability, Character and Environment. Those three are a practical way to break the word "change" back into its parts, because each one answers a different question about what a change is really costing you.
Decoding AQ is direct about why this matters at the individual level: "each person adapts in a different way for different reasons" and "adaptability is not 'one thing': it is contextual." The same announcement is not the same event for everyone who hears it. You can see how the three fit together in the AQ model.
This is the doing part, and it is where most change communication stops. Under Ability sit the skills that determine how you handle a new demand, including Mindset, which Decoding AQ defines as "specifically our relationship with change, and our predictions of positive or negative outcomes"; Mental Flexibility, "the ability to accept, appreciate, and embrace competing demands or problems"; and Unlearning, "the ability to intentionally 'let go' of previous knowledge."
Unlearning is often the real cost, and it is almost never the one named in the announcement. A new system does not just ask you to learn something. It asks you to abandon a way of working you were good at, and being good at something is part of how people know who they are at work. Decoding AQ is honest about the discomfort in that: "It is often an uncomfortable process, as we have a relationship with the past, how it made us feel, and the results we once experienced." Naming the unlearning explicitly, rather than describing the new tool and expecting the letting go to happen quietly, is one of the cheapest improvements a leader can make.
This is the part that explains why two people react so differently to the same email, and it is the part the word "change" flattens most. Character in the AQ model is measured as preference rather than competence, so there is no better or worse profile here. One example makes the point well. AQai measures Motivation Style on a continuum that Decoding AQ describes as running from "play to protect" to "play to win," and puts it plainly: "some of us adapt when we experience a burning platform, and others a burning ambition." An individual at the play to protect end "is not more or less adaptable" than someone at the other end, they are "simply motivated to adapt in different ways."
Which means the standard change message, built around either the threat or the opportunity, is landing correctly for roughly half the room and badly for the rest. The person who needs to know what is being protected hears a pitch about upside and concludes nobody has thought about the risk. The person who needs to know what is being built hears a warning and concludes the organisation is in trouble. Neither is resisting. Each is missing the half of the message that would have moved them.
Hope sits under Character too, defined in Decoding AQ as a combination of "agency," meaning goal-directed energy, and "pathways," meaning the ability to see or create alternative routes to a goal when the first one is blocked. That definition is more useful than the everyday sense of the word, because it makes hope concrete and therefore actionable. Someone who has lost hope in a change has usually not lost their optimism. They have lost their sense that there is a route, or that they have any say in it. Restoring a visible route is a different intervention from encouragement, and a far more effective one.
This is the part most often mistaken for a personal failing, and it is where the word "change" does the most quiet damage. Environment in the AQ model covers the conditions around a person, including Work Stress, which Decoding AQ defines as "the sense of general overwork and overwhelm within your organisation," and Team Support, "the extent to which employees feel they can share knowledge, are supported through challenges, and feel they can openly discuss their opinion."
The book is careful about where responsibility sits: "Lack of time may not appear to be an environmental factor, but it is, because employees are not in control of the amount of work they are allocated, this is decided by upper management." Someone with no spare capacity is not low in adaptability. They are at capacity. Asking them to be more adaptable is asking them to solve, personally, a problem that was set elsewhere. Decoding AQ also notes that the absence of pressure has its own cost, and that a balance of healthy stress, or eustress, supports adaptation better than either extreme.
The encouraging part is that Environment moves. Because these results reflect current perception, they shift when the conditions shift, which makes Environment the fastest place for a leader to change someone's actual experience of a change without changing the change itself.
Replace the word with its content. In practice that means answering four questions in the announcement itself rather than leaving them to be inferred.
Say what size it is. Whether this touches a workflow, a role, or a livelihood is the single most useful thing you can tell someone, and withholding it does not soften the news, it just guarantees people assume the worst version. Say what has to be let go. Name the skill, habit or way of working that is being retired, and acknowledge that people were good at it. Say it both ways. Give the message a protect frame and a win frame, so both halves of the room receive something addressed to them. And say what capacity is being freed. If nothing is coming off the list, then the honest sentence is that this is being added on top, which people can plan around, unlike a promise that it will somehow absorb.
For the person on the receiving end, the same move works in reverse. Instead of asking whether you can cope with more change, which is unanswerable, ask which of the three this actually is. Is it a skill I need to build or an old one I need to release, is it landing badly because of how I am wired for this kind of decision, or is it simply that I have no room? Those three have different answers, and only the first is about ability at all. That is the practical value of measuring adaptability rather than debating it: it turns one exhausted word into a specific, addressable picture.
None of this makes the volume go away. Decoding AQ is blunt that "the in-built coping mechanisms of the human brain run antithetical to the idea of constant change," and no amount of better wording fixes that. But it does restore the thing the word lost. When people can see which part of a change is theirs to work on, which part is their wiring, and which part belongs to their conditions, the word stops being noise and starts being information again.
Because it is applied to events of wildly different size, so it no longer tells anyone what is being asked of them or what it will cost. A word used for both a software update and a restructure cannot signal scale, and without scale people fill the gap themselves, usually with the worst plausible interpretation. The frustration is a reasonable response to a word that has stopped carrying information.
The pattern is documented. Gartner research reported in Harvard Business Review found the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from 2 in 2016, while willingness to support enterprise change fell to 43% from 74% over the same period. A further Gartner survey of more than 2,850 employees in April 2025 found 79% have low trust in change. Volume rose sharply while the quality of explanation did not, which looks less like fragility and more like a rational response.
Because adaptability is contextual rather than general. Decoding AQ states that "each person adapts in a different way for different reasons" and that "adaptability is not 'one thing'." AQai measures Motivation Style on a continuum from "play to protect" to "play to win," so the same announcement framed as either a threat or an opportunity will reach one person and miss another, without either of them being less adaptable.
No. Decoding AQ describes adaptability as "improvable" and explicitly "not a psychometric trait, fixed and immutable," comparing it to a muscle that strengthens with training. That is why it is measured across Ability, Character and Environment: each of the three offers a different route to improvement, including changing the conditions around a person rather than only the person.
Say the content instead of the label. State the size of it, so people know whether a workflow, a role, or a livelihood is affected. Name what has to be unlearned and acknowledge that people were good at it. Frame the message both as what is being protected and as what is being built, so it reaches both motivation styles. And be explicit about what capacity is being freed, or admit honestly that this is additional.
If the word "change" has gone quiet in your organisation, the fix is not a better word, it is a clearer picture of what any given change is asking of your people. Start with the AQ model to see how Ability, Character and Environment break the question apart, or measure it directly with AQme to see which part of the next change will be the hard part, and for whom.
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