Too Many Change Initiatives Is a Portfolio Problem, Not a Training Problem

McLean & Company has published guidance for HR leaders on setting up change management offices, and the trigger is plain enough: in the PR Newswire release carried by Morningstar, 70% of organizations report challenges managing change, with too many concurrent initiatives named as the leading cause. The same release says only 19% of leaders are highly effective at change management. My read is narrower than the announcement. This is less a signal about a new structure winning, and more a reminder that many organizations are still treating change as a communications and training task after they have already overloaded the system.

That distinction matters for CHROs, CPOs and transformation leaders because a change office can easily become another coordination layer unless it has authority over the portfolio itself. If the real constraint is too many initiatives landing on the same managers, teams and workflows at the same time, capability building helps only at the margin. The operating issue is sequencing, decision rights and stopping power. Speed without diagnosis scales waste.

What I would want to know before backing a new office is simple: who can delay, combine or kill initiatives, and on what evidence. If no one can do that, then a change management office may still be useful for organizations that adopt one, but mainly as a reporting mechanism, not a control point. For an HR leader sponsoring this, the decision call is to require one portfolio view of active changes by business unit, manager population and role impact before approving headcount, tooling or training spend for the office. That is the smallest evidence set likely to change the decision.

There is a real limitation in the current record. The source is a vendor distributed release about McLean & Company guidance, not an independent validation that a change management office improves outcomes across contexts. So I would avoid treating the office model as proven. Some organizations may need more basic discipline first: common change intake, role impact assessment, manager capacity checks and a rule for what gets deprioritized when demand exceeds absorption capacity.

The mistake to avoid is solving visible change fatigue with more enablement activity when the underlying failure is unmanaged concurrency. If initiative overload is the problem, the answer starts with portfolio governance and only then with change support. For senior HR leaders, that is the judgment worth acting on now.