Chaotic.” “Disruptive.” “Uncontrollable.” “Defeating.”

The words we hear leaders use to describe change today are troubling. While executives are accustomed to leading change in complex environments, we’re seeing even experienced leaders struggling. The typical approach of inspiring employees with an aspirational vision of the future is no longer working.

The reason is because change itself keeps changing in ways that cannot be fully controlled by leaders or their organizations. At Gartner we see this as the convergence of four factors:

• Not only is there a larger volume of change, but changes are stacked, with one happening on top of another.
• Not only are changes happening faster, they’re also continuous without a clear start or end date.
• Not only are changes larger in scale, they also have multiple interdependencies, such as one technology implementation failing to properly integrate with another.
• Not only are changes unpredictable, they’re externally driven, with impacts coming from all sides: technology, politics, economic uncertainty, societal trends, and more.

We call this “ungovernable change,” and in this environment, leaders are struggling to drive needed transformation. A March 2025 Gartner survey of more than 980 global leaders found that only 32% of mid- to senior-level leaders were able to implement their last change initiative on time while maintaining employee engagement and performance.

Leaders are managing ungovernable change at a time when their employees are increasingly skeptical of their efforts: 79% of the 2,900 global employees surveyed by Gartner in April 2025 don’t trust their organization’s ability to change effectively. The majority believe that their organization has made poor change decisions in the past and are unlikely to be successful in the future.

Amid this distrust, Gartner research found that the most successful leaders prepare employees to navigate ungovernable change by routinizing change—treating it as an everyday business process. Leaders who routinize change acknowledge constant transformation is the norm. They embrace an ongoing responsibility to equip employees with well-practiced change skills that feel second nature and the right mindset they need to embrace ongoing change.

Successfully routinizing change means adopting the following three strategies:

Communicate that change is a journey, not a destination.

Traditionally, leaders have looked to inspire change by focusing on the desired outcome and the benefits it will bring. But employees who don’t trust the organization’s ability to change no longer believe that this vision will become reality.

Today’s successful change leaders acknowledge that transformation is a journey without a clear path—or even a fixed destination. Instead of promoting the benefits of changing, they create urgency by highlighting the risks of inaction. They reinforce the value of making progress by clarifying that consistent small wins on the change journey are the metric of success.

Read the full article here.