In the corporate world, change is inevitable and organizations that can’t change don’t last long. Oftentimes, change is considered a good thing until you talk to people on the frontlines of it.

“At some point you have to recognize that there is a contradiction between the simplistic idea that change is necessarily a good thing and the lived experience of change on the front lines, which seems to be anything but a good thing,” said Ashley Goodall, a leadership expert and author of The Problem With Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance.

Goodall spoke with Vox's editorial director of tech, climate, and world teams, Bryan Walsh, at From Day One’s October virtual conference. They spoke about how to navigate constant change in the business world.

Uncertainty, Control, and Work Without Meaning

Goodall has had a long career in the corporate world as an HR executive, most recently at Cisco. He's seen major change from the outside and inside and identifies three key themes prevalent in any chaotic change. The first is uncertainty. “We don’t do very well when the future is uncertain and when somebody says there’s a big change coming, that’s almost the definition of uncertainty.”

The next is control. “When you take away our sense of agency, we feel helpless. There’s a phenomenon called learned helplessness, where people just phone it in, because they’ve been trained by their environment that whatever they do won’t make that much of a difference.”

Learned helplessness is the psychological name for a loss of control, Goodall says, but it also goes by another name. “Quiet quitting is probably pretty close in a business context for people saying, ‘Hey, I don't know what I do here. Why am I trying?’”

The last theme is having a sense of meaning. “We have a desperate need for the world to make sense to us,” Goodall said. Organizational change often disrupts the essential social connections that define how people work and identify themselves. Shifting teams or altering org charts can dismantle these "social graphs," leaving employees struggling to adapt. On top of that, humans have an innate need to make sense of their environment. When conflicting messages about the organization’s direction emerge, employees often feel lost and disconnected, unable to contribute effectively.

Goodall noted that while leaders often recognize these challenges, their focus tends to remain narrow—fixing one change initiative at a time. The issue arises when multiple initiatives, driven by different leaders or consultants, pile up, creating chaos. To address this, organizations must rethink change holistically and prioritize creating a work environment that supports human connection and meaningful contribution.

“And it’s the aggregation of all of this that is really pernicious, which means that organizations need to think differently about change, and more broadly about the experience of work here every day, and does it support human contribution,” Goodall said.

"What can leadership do when it comes to actually executing change?” Walsh asked. Goodall says there needs to be a sliding scale to determine when change is necessary. “The first thing to say to organizational leadership is, do less. Change. But do less. If we get through our collective heads that this isn’t an unalloyed good, this is something that can create harm more than it creates good, then I think you pause and set the bar higher on organizational change.”

This doesn’t always happen but leadership can be proactive about “turning the volume down,” he said.

“You can involve employees in telling you where the volume currently is,” Goodall said. "What would happen if a leader came in and said, I’m going to spend the next few weeks learning everything that works really well here, or everything that we should preserve, or everything that’s valuable, or everything that’s special, or everything that you really care about, so that we know what to protect. And once we’ve understood that, then we can think about how to improve things.”

Leaders can help employees navigate change by anchoring on stability and framing it as a clear, process-driven outcome, while taking steps to promote consistency amid the chaos of multiple initiatives.

Stability is a Necessary Precondition for Improvement

“You could say stability is kind of the opposite of change. What does that look like?” Walsh asked.

Goodall distinguished between change and improvement, which he says aren’t the same things and given a choice between the two, people would choose improvement. “The thing that we’re chasing in all of this is improvement. Well, stability is a necessary precondition for improvement.”

People struggling in an organization amidst a sea of instability don’t lend to improvement. Goodall believes that improvement and positive change come from team environments, where employees know what’s going on and are valued. “If we are able to stipulate that organizational value, organizational productivity, organizational innovation, organizational goodness comes from humans working together.”

If you have the above, then you’ll have something like stability, Goodall says.

“What does stability look like? Stability looks like I have space to figure out the best use of my time. I’m given some autonomy.” For Goodall, true stability at work comes from personal confidence, strong team dynamics, and leaders who foster meaningful connections and mutual support.

Digging more into that predictability and stability, Goodall talked about his use of weekly all-hands meetings, something Walsh pointed out that, in his experience, executives tend to despise.

Goodall did not spend a whole lot of time prepping for these meetings. Instead, he used them as a personnel barometer. “It was a conversation for the leadership team that everyone got to tune into and ask questions of us.”

“What we were trying to solve was, if you know what’s going on, you have space, you have agency, [then] you have predictability. You get to see the people leading your organizations when they’re not on script–when they’re not following the talking points that the communications team has put together for the all hands," Goodall added.

The meetings would start with slides of birthdays, service anniversaries, or something random with a photo to spark conversation or a laugh. Then they would move onto business, and different teams would simply talk about what they were working on, what was working for them, areas of difficulty and challenge, what was coming up in the future, and more.

And making things weekly, instead of a few times a year, gives organizations the opportunity to handle change as it’s happening, according to Goodall. All of this is "profoundly stabilizing." “We did this every week for years and years, and it became an organizational ritual, and people still talk about it. All we were doing was ritualizing stability and explaining to people what was going on.”

Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.