Change fatigue gets discussed as though it's an inevitable consequence of organisational transformation — teams simply tire of change, and the solution is patience and communication. In my experience running digital adoption programmes, fatigue is considerably more often a sequencing problem than a resourcing or attitude problem.
The pattern I see repeatedly: multiple change initiatives, each individually reasonable and each sponsored by a different part of the organisation, land on the same team within the same quarter, with nobody coordinating the cumulative load. Each initiative's sponsor genuinely believes their change is manageable in isolation, because they're only tracking their own initiative's demands, not the team's total exposure across all of them.
Teams experiencing this don't distinguish between the individual initiatives in their fatigue — they experience it as a single, undifferentiated wave of change, and their capacity to engage meaningfully with any single initiative degrades as a result, including initiatives that were genuinely well designed on their own terms.
The fix requires an organisational function that has visibility across all change initiatives simultaneously, not just within each individual programme — something most institutions don't have, because change initiatives are typically governed within their own sponsoring function rather than coordinated centrally against a shared calendar.
Digital adoption programmes that fail from fatigue are rarely failing because the specific initiative was badly designed. They're failing because nobody was tracking what else was landing on the same team at the same time, and sequencing — not resourcing, not communication — is the lever that actually addresses this.