Beyond Burnout: Why Meaningful Adaptation Outpaces Continuous Change
Are Your People Running on a Treadmill or Climbing a Mountain They Chose?
Every week, a new transformation initiative. Every quarter, a new org chart. Every year, a new mission statement. For many employees, modern work has become a blur of changes they didn’t choose and outcomes they don’t own.
The result? Burnout. Cynicism. Quiet quitting.
The problem isn’t change; it’s the wrong kind of change. “Continuous transformation,” the corporate buzzword of the last decade, promises agility. But in reality, it often feels like a treadmill: constant motion, no elevation, no meaning.
What if we stopped obsessing over continuous change and started investing in meaningful adaptation?
From Sisyphus to Frankl: Purpose Makes the Struggle Worthwhile
Albert Camus imagined Sisyphus, the Titan condemned by the Olympian Gods to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, as a metaphor for modern existence: endless labor without meaning (Camus, 1955).
Contrast that with Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl argued that the human spirit can endure any suffering if it has purpose. The mountain matters, if we choose to climb it (Frankl, 1946).
That’s the fork in the road for organizations today:
Will you give people something worth climbing for, or just more boulders to push?
The Brain on Change: Stress, Meaning, and Intrinsic Drive
Neuroscience is clear: uncertainty activates the brain’s stress response. When people feel they lack control or clarity, cortisol spikes, cognitive flexibility drops, and emotional exhaustion rises (McEwen, 2007).
But there’s a powerful antidote: intrinsic motivation.
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory shows people thrive when they experience:
Autonomy: having a say
Competence: feeling effective
Relatedness: being connected
(Deci & Ryan, 2008)
These aren’t soft ideals; they’re neurobiological necessities. When work taps into intrinsic motivation, the brain lights up with dopamine and learning centers activate (Immordino-Yang, 2016). We don’t just cope; we grow.
And growth doesn’t come from non-stop motion. It comes from reflection.
As neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang puts it, “Emotions are what organize the mind.” Reflection isn’t wasted time; it’s how the brain sharpens experience into judgment, insight, and wisdom.
Action and Transition: The Psychology of Real Change
In team psychology, researchers like Kozlowski & Bell (2006) and Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro (2001) describe two essential phases of team functioning:
Action phases: where the work happens
Transition phases: where sensemaking, feedback, and recalibration occur
Most organizations over-index on action. We chase output, activity, KPIs. But without transition phases, teams don’t learn; they repeat. People lose track of the thread, and business, for all intents and purposes, becomes busy-ness.
Gianpiero Petriglieri calls this the “leadership industrial complex”: we train managers to execute, not reflect. The result? Change is constant, but meaning is scarce.
To move from fatigue to flourishing, we need to slow down—strategically. Not to stop, but to pause and reflect.
The Anthropology of the Pause
In traditional societies, uncertainty was not met with constant reaction, but with ritualized reflection.
Harvest festivals, mourning periods, rites of passage—all served to mark change, process emotion, and realign the community. These were not delays; they were accelerants. They reinforced identity, belonging, and shared purpose (Turner, 1969).
Anthropologist Victor Turner showed that transformation requires liminality — a structured in-between space where people let go of the old before stepping into the new.
In business, we’ve eliminated these pauses in the name of efficiency and lost the very conditions that make change stick.
AI and the Age of Co-Agents
Generative AI has a role to play; but only if we use it not to accelerate burnout but to deepen learning.
Think of GenAI not as a replacement for people, but as a co-agent: a sparring partner for reflection, ideation, and growth.
Used well, AI can:
Surface patterns across conversations and data
Prompt questions you hadn’t considered
Offer nonjudgmental feedback
Enable personalized development at scale
(Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014)
But if we use AI to simply speed up the treadmill, we’ll burn out faster. If we use it to pause, reflect, and learn, we’ll climb higher together.
Management’s Great Misdirection: Mistaking Motion for Progress
Too many organizations mistake change for improvement. We optimize workflows, gamify performance, tweak incentives but ignore the inner world of work:
Why are we doing this? Does it matter to me? Am I becoming someone in the process?
Industrial psychology told us to manage people like systems: align extrinsic incentives, measure output, repeat. But that model is cracking under the weight of the Great Reconfiguration — a world where old clusters, old companies, and old models no longer dominate (Grote, 2018).
The New Edge: Meaningful Adaptation
The new edge belongs to organizations that cultivate meaningful adaptation:
Foster psychological safety so teams speak up (Edmondson, 2018)
Build brave spaces where reflection is welcomed
Shift from extrinsic carrots to intrinsic purpose
Support continual learning — because reflection needs rhythm, not relentlessness
The Takeaway
The future doesn’t belong to the most agile.
It belongs to the most aligned.
To adapt, organizations don’t need more motion; they need more meaning.
What would happen if you stopped chasing change and started cultivating meaning?
Where could your team pause, reflect, and realign for deeper impact?
Because in an age of exhaustion, purpose is performance.
Works Cited
Brynjolfsson, E, & McAfee, A. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton.
Camus, A. (1955). The Myth of Sisyphus. Vintage.
Deci, EL, & Ryan, RM. 2008. Self-Determination Theory: A Macrotheory of Human Motivation, Development, and Health. Canadian Psychology 49.3.182.
Edmondson, A. 2018. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
Frankl, VE. 1946. Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
Grote, G. 2018. Managing Uncertainty in Work Organizations. Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences 1-14.
Immordino-Yang, MH. 2016. Emotion, sociality, and the brain’s default mode network: Insights for educational practice and policy. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3.2.211-19.
Kozlowski, SWJ, & Bell, BS. 2006. Work Groups and Teams in Organizations. In Handbook of Psychology.
Marks, MA, Mathieu, JE, & Zaccaro, SJ. 2001. A Temporally Based Framework and Taxonomy of Team Processes. Academy of Management Review.
McEwen, BS. 2007. Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation: Central role of the brain. Physiological Reviews 87.3.873-904.
Turner, V. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Routledge.
Want to be part of the (r)evolution?
I’m finalizing a book with Andrew Lopianowski on this concept—HumanCorps. If you have stories or insights about organizations putting these ideas into action, drop me a line or share in the comments.