Creating Space

People cannot adopt new ways of working when every hour is already spoken for. Something has to give, and it's your job to decide what.

Change doesn’t happen during involuntary overtime. If you ask people to adopt new practices while keeping every existing commitment intact, they won’t. They can’t. They’ll be too busy with the old to do the learning and practice required to embrace the new.

Creating space means deliberately reducing the load on teams so they have the cognitive capacity to learn and form new habits. Kurt Lewin called this “unfreezing”: before people can move to a new way of working, you have to loosen the grip of the old one. It’s a time management and workload problem. If every hour is spoken for, there’s no room for the discomfort and slowness that comes with doing something unfamiliar.

Leaders who sponsor change underestimate how much existing work needs to pause or shrink for the new work to take root. We see this in Change Vision & Strategy workshop sessions where the guiding coalition gets excited about the destination but hasn’t considered the time management tradeoffs their people need to make.

A team that just adopted AI development tools doesn’t also have bandwidth for a new testing framework and a platform migration. Something has to give. Your Change Vision should make priorities clear.

Sometimes creating space means canceling recurring meetings or pausing a roadmap initiative (e.g., escaping the “busy is the new stupid” trap), but the highest leverage move lies in giving teams explicit permission to be slower for a while. “Slow down to speed up,” we often advise.

Without that, quick wins never materialize, and your change effort will likely fizzle out.

Resources

• Kurt Lewin’s “Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze” model — the original framing for why change requires disrupting the status quo before new patterns can form
• Cognitive Load — the mechanism that explains why overloaded teams can’t absorb change
• Guiding Coalition — the group responsible for creating and protecting the space
• AI Is Going to Disrupt Jobs. Eventually. — why change takes longer than the hype suggests