Iteration Fatigue- When Constant Change Destroys Performance

It's been a trend in business for many years now, this idea of incremental daily change creating a sense of flexibility and adaptability to market circumstances so titanic businesses can adjust course and course correct when markets fluctuate, allowing them to ride out downturns better and capitalize on new trends faster. And it sounds so '4th Edge' that executives that propose these approaches appear to be the bleeding edge of management strategy makers that your company absolutely must jump on board these approaches or perish to the competition that does...right?

Only, in truth a lot of businesses have been doing this stuff for years. Let's take the airline industry for example. The policies and procedures that every airline employee sees a material update on number on average well north of 5-10 policies or procedures a day. On any given day, that's not such a big issue, but add those up over the course of a year and we're talking massive, fundamental change to everything you do in your job and how you interpret everything you do. For a computer, that's not such a big problem, but for human beings, who perform optimally with processes and procedures we can master as skill sets, rather than short term instructions where traditionally we have a tendency to perform less than optimally until we master them, that becomes a source of gross inefficiency when it is compounded across multiple employees, multiple time zones, and multiple technology output frameworks.

On its own, that should be enough to dissuade unnecessary volumes of consistent changes, but when you add in the same issue impacting your customers' expectations, now you have a roadmap to disaster.

But I'm actually only getting started here.

Stop and think for a minute - when you use your computer to do the same kinds of things day after day, it tends to do them with a predictable speed and functionality. Every so often you might need a reboot to free up some memory, but for the most part it does the familiar with ease.

But what happens when you consistently add in new software, additional updates to existing software, new extensions, new APIs, new versions, etc? You get bugs. You get breakdowns, frozen screens, learning curve delays, user errors, timed-out API calls, security certificate errors.... in effect, you get break downs and inefficiencies, right?

Well, the same thing happens to human beings that are subject to consistent, unrelenting change. You see it with employee turnover ratios, you see it with climbing misadvisement rates, you see it with climbing customer disatisfaction rates, you see it with climbing employee healthcare and stress issues. You see it in declining employee productivity, longer call times, more reliance on call assistance from supervisors, and general employee dissatisfaction and disengagement, and that directly hits the bottom line as many studies have clearly shown.

The more I study this phenomenon, the more rampant I'm finding it across businesses everywhere I look, so I came up with a name for it called 'Iteration Fatigue.'

As a project management expert, I absolutely endorse and promote iteration in virtually everything a business or personal development touches, but like all things, this too can be abused and misapplied to the point that it does more harm than good.

Is your team showing signs of Iteration Fatigue? Are your team members making little or no progress towards mastering the ever-changing skill-sets demanded of them? Are 'good enough' habits growing roots where excellence should be evolving? Are staff members showing stress over job performance issues due to rapid policy and procedure changes? Is there increased employee absenteeism or turnover? Or has it all been going on for so long that it has become systemic and you can't even tell how much of an impact it's having at this point?

Iteration Fatigue also plays out with your customers' perceptions and buying habits. Considering how hard it is to instill a brand buying habit with a customer, subjecting them to perpetual policy and product and procedural changes really opens up more reasons for a customer to lose brand loyalty and consider other options where what they buy stays what was bought and they know how to use it each and every time they buy it, everything staying exactly the same. With perpetual change comes a cost not only to your Cost of Customer Acquisition, but also to your Lifetime Customer Value. At one point for airline tickets the industry reported that a $3 price difference was enough for a consumer to change the airline they were buying from, for example, while in prior generations airline brands were critical components of buyers' choices, today price makes a far greater impact for most travelers after travelers were trained to look for small changes to save big money.

Technology has faced the same issue with countless users of traditional brand leading software switching to alternative brands to avoid the endless year after year 'upgrades' that primarily were simply mass changes in the user interface that were more confusing and less productive than ever for the sake of being able to charge for another iteration of the software, whether one was needed or not.

Small Enterprises often suffer the same problem but with different issues, where each employee needs to handle a rapidly changing and challenging list of duties from week to week, never really settling into a groove where they can excel and depend on what they're going to be doing from day to day.

And it takes its toll on everybody sooner or later. Whether you're losing valuable customers or valuable employees or valuable leaders, Iteration Fatigue inevitably claims its costs.

While change is good and inevitable, it needs to be managed change not chaotic iteration that like the brake pads on a car simply wear down faster and faster the more often they're used.