Reconsidering Change

31 Aug 2026

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

We all attribute this great quote to Charles Darwin, right?!

Wrong. Even the California Academy of Sciences fell for it, with a prominent display in the stone floor of their headquarters. The source is Leon Megginson, a Professor of Management and Marketing from LSU, who paraphrased Darwin in various lectures and writing in the early 1960s [1].

In the scheme of things this is trivial, but I’m guessing most of you will have heard it used as part of a strategic planning exercise, or as the rationale underlying an organisational goal that has ‘innovating’, ‘adopting technology’ or ‘continuously improving’ within it.

It is a perfectly reasonable ambition, and one not to shy away from, but, like the origin of the phrase, a key underlying point rarely gets tested:

What if change occurs bigger and quicker than our adaptation?

The pace of change is clearly speeding up

One measure often used to demonstrate the pace of change is the time a technology takes to reach 100 million users:

Whatever you might think of the merits of these technologies, the trend is not in dispute: what used to take years to be adopted now takes weeks.

Now put this together with what has been happening inside organisations. Gartner found that in 2016 the average employee went through two planned enterprise changes. Just six years later it was ten [3]. That’s five times as much change, impacting the same people, in the same working week.

This deserves more attention than it usually gets, because we tend to talk about health reform or technology adoption as though it were a sector problem, or a vendor requirement. First and foremost, in my humble opinion, it is a distinctly human one that, now more than ever, requires leaders to think and act in a different way.

The people we are asking to take up a new digital tool, an improved model of care or be across the latest ‘policy’ have, in the space of a few years, also changed how they communicate and learn, how they shop or consume services, how they talk to their children’s school, and in many cases how and where they work every day.

None of that appears in the transformation plan, yet all of it is being drawn from the same finite capacity.

Scott Brinker gave the different paces between human and technological change a name back in 2013, calling it Martec’s Law. He observed that technology changes exponentially while organisations, and the humans that make them up, change logarithmically [4].

If Brinker is right (which I think he is), then the question is not how we keep pace, but how we make better choices knowing that we cannot.

What we have actually committed to

This made me curious about what health sector leaders and organisations have committed to, so I read the published strategies of six random health organisations across Australia and New Zealand.

All six include innovation, transformation, continuous improvement or leading change prominently through their documents – no real surprise. What did surprise me was the detail when looking through the lens of a system with finite capacity to adapt.

In just two of the strategies there were 63 objectives, and every single one asked the organisation to do more of something. Across 90-odd pages the words innovation, transformation, improvement and future appear more than 350 times. Words that indicate stopping, decommissioning, scaling back or creating more capacity for change appear zero times.

The more interesting point is what happens after these documents begin to be operationalised. Organisational objectives become obligations to executive units, which develop their own plans, flowing down to directorates and operational units writing another layer.

The result is an ever-growing portfolio of change drawing from the same finite pool of organisational capacity.

The budget we don’t manage

If all of this sounds like an argument for stopping things, it is, and I acknowledge how hard that is.

The NHS’s Evidence-Based Interventions programme provides a useful example. It identified seventeen surgical procedures to be stopped or restricted, supported by evidence, governance and commissioning rules. Research subsequently found the programme had little success in further reducing unnecessary healthcare [5].

A national health system, with the evidence on its side, a mandate and resources, could not easily make stopping happen.

Yet the digital record upgrade, the new model of care, the restructure, the accreditation cycle and the AI pilot are all withdrawing from the same accounts: executive attention, middle management capability, clinician goodwill and public patience.

Change is rarely a function with a headcount and a cost line. It is an expectation placed on everybody, on top of the job they already have.

No health service would run a financial year without somebody whose job it is to watch the money, and yet very few have anybody watching this expenditure line on a budget nobody can ever be told they have overspent.

I can hear the counter argument. Health is not exactly famous for moving too fast. Plenty of people would say our problem is precisely the opposite: that we are slow, risk averse and far too good at finding reasons to defer.

So let me be clear about what I am not arguing.

This is not a case for lower ambition, and it is certainly not a case for going slower. It is a simple argument for being honest about what we have already committed to before we sign up for anything more.

An organisation running four things properly will change more than one running twelve badly, and in my experience the latter is far more common.

So where does this leave us?

The first is practical and slightly dull: accountability.

Somebody at the executive table should own total organisational change effort and capacity the way the CFO owns the budget. Not a portfolio office counting project reports, but a person whose role can speak in the same tone and with the same authority as a CFO saying: “we are out of budget.”

The second is building the capability to decide, communicate and implement change alongside the chaos of leading business as usual.

Smart, caring people with the world’s intelligence in their hands find things hard to accept as simply an instruction, even more so if they aren’t informed or can’t fathom the rationale. Turning down something with a credible sponsor, real evidence and a business case that stacks up, on the grounds that there is no adaptive capacity left this year, is a different proposition altogether.

The third is less a skill than a reminder, and it is the one I would most want a new executive to hold.

Whatever adaptive capacity an organisation has, it sits in people.

It does not reset each July because we have published a new plan or a new budget. Healthcare has always been, and will always be, about people rather than metrics, policies or technology. This is not meant as sentimentality – it is the factual constraint to so much of what we need to do.

Incidentally, the California Academy of Sciences has kept those words in its stone floor. What they took away was Darwin’s name [1].

That seems about right to me.

The ambition to adapt is worth holding onto. What is worth letting go of is the assumption that our capacity to adapt is unlimited and that the only thing standing between us and the future is a want of will.

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About the Author

Duane Attree

HG Advisory Board member

Duane Attree is an experienced executive and board director with a diverse career spanning ASX-listed, private, public and not-for-profit organisations. Today, he holds a portfolio of roles that allow him to contribute across boardroom stewardship, advisory and emerging healthcare ventures. With a strong interest in strategy, innovation and transformation, Duane is driven by a simple philosophy: to make a positive difference and leave people, organisations and projects better than he found them.

Sources

[1] Leon C. Megginson, Louisiana State University, 1963; see Darwin Correspondence Project, “The evolution of a misquotation”, and Quote Investigator.

[2] Adoption timings as widely reported; ChatGPT and TikTok figures from a UBS analyst note using Similarweb data, Reuters, 1 February 2023.

[3] Gartner, cited in O Morain C and Aykens P, Employees Are Losing Patience with Change Initiatives, Harvard Business Review, May 2023.

[4] Scott Brinker, Martec’s Law: Technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically, chiefmartec.com, June 2013.

[5] Glynn J, Jones T, Bell M, et al., Did the evidence-based intervention (EBI) programme reduce inappropriate procedures, lessen unwarranted variation or lead to spill-over effects in the National Health Service? PLoS ONE 2023;18(9):e0290996.