The Expectation of Effort: Why Change Fails (and How to Stop It)

Picture this.

You’re in a room with your team. The whiteboard gleams with ambition: “Let’s be more Agile.” Heads nod. Spirits lift. You’ve committed to a better way of working—faster delivery, better collaboration, and less burnout. Everyone’s excited. Ready.

But a few months in, the energy dips. Stand-ups feel hollow. Backlogs balloon. Old habits creep back like vines through a cracked foundation.

What happened?

Let me tell you: it wasn’t the wrong framework.

It wasn’t your backlog grooming skills.

It was your expectation of effort—and how completely off it probably was.

Change Isn’t a Switch, It’s a Swim Upstream

Here’s what most change journeys look like in the beginning:

• A kickoff workshop.

• A new board (Kanban or Scrum).

• A tool or two.

• Some shiny new roles or meetings.

All good things. Necessary, even. But entirely insufficient.

Because lasting change—especially when you’re changing how you work—requires a type of effort most teams don’t see coming.

We can apply that to effort too:

Teams underestimate the type of effort required to change.

🔍 Two Kinds of Effort: Visible vs Invisible

Think of effort like an iceberg.

The Visible Stuff (Above the Surface):

• Attending the retrospective.

• Learning a new tool.

• Switching from Trello to Jira.

The Invisible Stuff (Below the Surface):

• Choosing to speak up when something feels off.

• Rewriting mental models of what “success” looks like.

• Giving feedback even when it’s uncomfortable.

• Sitting in the awkwardness of “we don’t know yet.”

Agile, at its heart, is about adaptability. But adaptability isn’t a mechanical shift—it’s emotional, cognitive, and social. That’s the kind of effort no one budgets for. And that’s the kind that breaks us if we don’t prepare for it.

🧠 The Theory: Why Our Brains Resist the Hard Part

Kurt Lewin, one of the early thinkers in organizational change, described a 3-stage model:

1. Unfreeze – Loosen up the current way of doing things.

2. Change – Move toward a new way.

3. Refreeze – Make the new way the new norm.

Sounds simple, right?

But here’s the problem: most teams skip the “unfreeze” stage. They dive into new processes without clearing space for new behaviors. They bolt agility onto rigid structures and expect it to flow.

Change isn’t just doing new things.

It’s letting go of old things—beliefs, habits, unspoken agreements—and that takes time, honesty, and sustained effort.

🧗‍♀️ So What Kind of Effort Should You Expect?

Let’s get real. If you want lasting change:

• Expect emotional effort. You’ll have to address conflict. You’ll hit resistance. You’ll see cracks in your culture.

• Expect intellectual effort. You’ll need to reframe “failure” as “feedback,” rethink how value is measured, and challenge assumptions.

• Expect relational effort. Communication gets harder before it gets better. Team dynamics shift. Trust becomes your greatest currency.

• Expect time. Not everything will click in the first two sprints. Or five. Or ten. Agile is not a finish line. It’s a rhythm you build.

🧭 Preparing Your Team for the Journey

So how do you set the right expectations?

1. Talk about effort from day one. Not just the tasks, but the discomfort. The mess. The learning curve.

2. Celebrate persistence over perfection. If your team keeps showing up and adjusting, that is success.

3. Model curiosity. Leaders who ask questions instead of giving orders create safety for experimentation.

4. Make space for meta-work. Time to reflect, re-learn, and regroup isn’t optional. It’s essential.

5. Support the humans, not just the work. You can’t change the process without caring for the people in it.

🪵 The Logjam That Breaks the River Open

Real change often feels like pushing against a logjam. For weeks, nothing moves. Then one small shift—one honest conversation, one change in rhythm—and the whole thing opens.

That’s why we prepare for the effort.

Because we’re not just moving tasks around—we’re reconfiguring the way we think, relate, and collaborate.

So next time your team sets out to “be Agile” or “improve how you work,” ask the question that matters:

“Are we ready for the real kind of effort?”

If you are, then the change you make won’t just stick. It’ll transform.