Momentum Debt: Why Every New Change Feels Harder Than the Last
A leader walks into a meeting prepared.
"We've got an ambitious vision and a new strategy. This is going to make us so much better."
People nod politely.
Someone asks where to find the new documents.
Someone else writes down the action items.
Nobody challenges the idea.
Nobody asks the difficult questions.
The meeting finishes early. On the way back to their desk, the leader feels relieved.
"That went well.
Surely less resistance is a good thing, right?”
Maybe.
But I find myself becoming most curious when a room agrees too quickly.
Because my working theory is this:
When thoughtful people hear an ambitious vision and don't ask difficult questions, they often aren't imagining how to make it succeed. They're more likely protecting themselves in case it doesn't.
When nobody is asking:
"How is this different from the last time?"
"What happens to everything we're already doing?"
"What problem are we actually trying to solve?"
That matters.
Because change only becomes real when people begin testing it against the reality of their work, wondering what it means for their role, their relationships, and the promises they've already made.
That wrestling isn't a sign the change is failing.
It's often the first sign that people are beginning to make it their own.
In my previous blog, I talked about how organizations teach people what is possible through the environments they create. Today I'd like to take that idea one step further.
Because environments don't just teach.
They remember.
The initiative that stopped at 80%.
The "top priority" that quietly disappeared six months later.
The new system that somehow created five more tasks instead of removing any.
The workshop everyone loved but nothing ever came of.
Over time, these experiences accumulate.
We have a name for financial debt. We have a name for technological debt.
But we don't really have a name for the accumulated friction created when organizations repeatedly start change but fail to fully integrate it.
I'd like to call it Momentum Debt.
If you've ever wondered why even good ideas seem to get buried under meetings, workarounds, skepticism, or "one more thing" before they have a chance to take root in your organization, this might explain why.
Let's unpack this dynamic together.
Every Change Carries the Last One With It
One of the biggest assumptions we make about change is that every new initiative gets a fresh start. As though people walk into the room as a tabula rasa - a blank slate.
They don't.
People didn't become who they are overnight. Yet our mental model of change often looks something like this:
Announcement ➡︎ Change ➡︎ Success
It's neat and logical.
It's also not how humans work.
Making sense of change is messy, emotional, and deeply personal.
When organizations mistake announcing change for integrating it, what follows is often implementation rather than transformation.
People sit through the meetings, update the documents, learn the new software, attend the training and carry on with their work.
Because doing something isn't the same as making it part of how people think, work, and make decisions.
Implementation changes behaviour. Integration changes ownership.
The reality often then looks like this:
Announcement ➡︎ Partial Integration ➡︎ Next Initiative ➡︎ Partial Integration ➡︎ Momentum Debt
Every new initiative is layered on top of one that never fully became reality.
Eventually, the organization is carrying several partially integrated futures at once.
What's left behind isn't just unfinished projects.
It's unfinished expectations, workarounds, recurring meetings, old technology, and stories at the coffee machine about "how change happens here."
None of those things seem particularly costly on their own. Together, they create compounding friction:
Hesitation: "Didn't we say that last year?"
Cynicism: "This software was supposed to change everything. Two years later we're still using Excel."
Slower decisions: "Let's wait until we're sure this one is sticking."
Lower trust: "Let's not dismantle the old system just yet."
Like the opposite of a domino chain, where each unfinished initiative becomes another weight the next one has to carry instead of creating momentum to sustain it. I explore that idea further in a previous blog Is Your Team Rock Pushing or Domino Building?
That is how every unfinished initiative ends up borrowing a little momentum from the future.
Until eventually, every new change has to pay interest on everything that came before it.
That is what I call Momentum Debt.
Why Leaders and Teams Talk Past Each Other
By the time a leader announces a new strategy, they've often spent weeks or even months thinking about it, debating it, and imagining the future. So by the time the meeting begins, they've already crossed the emotional bridge.
They no longer need convincing.
They are talking about a future that is already familiar to them.
Naturally, they hope the team will get there quickly too, and maybe skip ahead.
The problem is that you cannot hand someone months of reflection in a PowerPoint.
Every person has to build that bridge for themselves.
Just because the leader has reached the other side of the transformation emotionally, doesn't mean the team gets to skip the uncomfortable part: the uncertainty, the doubt, the confusion, or the questions that come with making sense of something new.
That is why leaders and teams often seem to be talking about different things.
The leader is presenting tomorrow.
The team is trying to connect that future to the reality they are standing in today and the past experiences that they have had to get here.
Imagine two organizations announcing exactly the same restructuring.
One team thinks, "Interesting."
The other thinks, "Here we go again."
The announcement is identical. The reaction is completely different.
The difference is in the emotional history each team brings into the room.
That is why I don't see people's questions as resistance, I see them as clues.
When people ask,
"What happens to everything we're already doing?"
"What do we have to stop doing?"
"Can this actually work here?"
"What does this mean for me?"
They're telling you what still needs to happen before this change can become real for them.
And if those questions never surface, they don't disappear.
People simply answer them for themselves.
Usually through assumptions.
Usually through past experience.
And that is how yesterday is already starting to shape what is possible for tomorrow.
Making space for Wrestling brings Momentum back
Because of this difference in timeline, every leader eventually faces a trade-off.
At one end of the spectrum, the priority is to protect the vision.
The leader spends months refining it with a small group of people, anticipating objections, testing assumptions, and polishing the strategy until it feels complete.
Perhaps because, without noticing it, the leader has started tying part of their identity to the quality of that vision.
When that vision is finally presented to the wider organization, the hope is that implementation will be straightforward because all the difficult thinking has already been done.
That approach often sounds something like this:
"We've involved the smartest people. Now we just need everyone else to execute."
There are situations where this approach is the right fit such as during a crisis, or when compliance is non-negotiable or when speed matters more than ownership.
But when the goal is genuine transformation rather than implementation, this approach comes at a cost.
The thinking becomes separated from the doing.
The people who designed the future are not the people responsible for making it real.
The change is something most people in the organization are simply being asked to accept.
At the other end of the spectrum, the leader chooses something much less comfortable.
Not because the vision becomes less ambitious.
Not because the vision disappears.
The destination is still clear.
But the path is no longer entirely theirs.
Instead of presenting a finished answer, the leader brings the vision into the organization while there is still room for it to be tested by the people who will eventually have to live it.
That means inviting questions.
Disagreement.
Feedback.
The possibility that people closest to the work will notice unintended consequences or opportunities that were invisible from the boardroom.
That prospect understandably makes many leaders nervous.
But I have come to believe that a vision that cannot survive honest questions probably wasn't ready to be implemented anyway.
In practice, those questions almost always emerge later anyway—during implementation, in workarounds, in quiet resistance, or in failed adoption. The main difference is whether you encounter them while there is still time to improve the idea.
Those questions also give people the opportunity to build a relationship with the future instead of simply receiving it.
Because ownership isn't something a leader can hand down.
It's something people build for themselves.
The process of hearing and integrating those difficult questions isn’t slowing down the transformation.
It is a large part of the transformation itself.
Real change asks a great deal of people.
To let go of familiar ways of working.
To rethink what good performance now looks like.
To renegotiate relationships.
To experiment before they feel competent again.
None of that happens because someone delivered a compelling presentation.
It happens because people gradually make sense of what the change requires of them and decide whether or how much they are willing to step into it.
That process is uncomfortable.
But discomfort is not the same as dysfunction.
The real choice for leaders then isn't whether there will be discomfort. It's where that discomfort will live.
Leaders can avoid the discomfort of difficult conversations by presenting a finished answer.
Or they can avoid the discomfort of carrying the transformation alone because nobody else truly owns it.
It is remarkably difficult to avoid both.
That doesn't mean every decision is democratic, nor does it mean waiting for unanimous agreement, but I would argue that allowing that inevitable wrestling to happen in the open is also how organizations begin rewriting the stories people tell over coffee about "how change happens around here."
Not by changing the past.
By creating enough new experiences that the negative past slowly stops being the predictor of the future.
One promise kept.
One project genuinely finished.
One difficult conversation that isn't avoided.
One change that actually sticks.
Like any debt, momentum debt takes time to repay.
But once momentum is no longer spent servicing the past, it becomes available to build the future.
Because beneath every transformation is a quiet hope: that tomorrow can be better than today, and that together we can actually build it.
CLosing
Organizations often ask,
"How do we get people on board?"
I think a better question is:
"Have we created enough opportunity for people to make that future their own?"
If that sounds like the challenge your team is currently facing, our facilitation philosophy explains how we create the space for people to wrestle honestly with complex change, build shared understanding, and move forward together.
