A practitioner model for understanding cumulative change, human capacity and the point of overwhelm

Elliot Symonds

Head of Learning and Development

Jarrold Training

September 2026

 

Abstract

The Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve is a practitioner-developed organisational change model created by Elliot Symonds of Jarrold Training in Norwich. It explains how overlapping workplace and personal changes can compete for finite human capacity, interrupt recovery and move a person towards a shared point of overwhelm.

Conventional change curves usually present one journey through one change. The frequently cited Kübler-Ross Change Curve, although developed from work on dying and loss rather than organisational transformation, has become a familiar feature of leadership and management training.

Organisational life is rarely so accommodating. Changes arrive concurrently, resources are finite, and a person who appears resistant to the latest initiative may still be carrying unresolved demands from several earlier ones. Pressures outside work, career drivers and stretched behavioural preferences may also draw upon the same human capacity.

The model emerged through dialogue with delegates during leadership development practice. Jo Ogogo challenged the use of the word ‘depression’ in common versions of the Kübler-Ross Change Curve. In a modern workplace, the term has specific medical and personal significance and should not be used as a blanket label for a difficult response to change.

On a subsequent leadership course, Denise Edens challenged the deeper assumption that people experience change one event at a time. She suggested that additional pressures and changes can pull individuals back towards the lowest point before recovery is complete. That insight led to the competing-curve architecture and to a more careful interpretation of the model’s time axis.

Working with these challenges, I replaced ‘depression’ with ‘overwhelmed’, a word that more accurately describes the workplace condition the model seeks to explore. Work experiences can contribute to clinically significant depression, but diagnosis and treatment sit beyond the purpose and competence of this model.

The model does not diagnose mental illness, predict a universal sequence of human response or replace validated clinical and organisational frameworks. It is a conceptual and conversational model that helps leaders examine cumulative demands, available capacity and the wider circumstances surrounding a person before deciding how to respond.

This model has been presented as part of leadership and management courses with many organisations where delegates are challenged to thoroughly evaluate a range of models in order to decide which is most valid for their own organisations. Reception in programmes with organisations as diverse as Norfolk and Suffolk Constabulary to JDM Food Group suggests that the model speaks to a shared human truth across markedly different situations.

As many of you will know I have a Masters in Jacobean and Caroline Drama and rather like Shakespeare. You may well have heard me say that ‘Nothing is new’, as well, so here are a couple of quotes from Hamlet.

‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’ Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V.

Shakespeare reinforces the concept later:

‘One woe doth tread upon another’s heel, so fast they follow.’ Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII.

It is a genuine desire to create something truly groundbreaking and new but there is great benefit in recognising that the modification, enhancement and redesign of models is a powerful learning experience as outlined in Bloom’s Cognitive Hierarchy. You learn more when you create, above the levels of knowledge, understanding, application and analysis.

Formal empirical testing remains a necessary next stage, but the model continues to generate recognition, discussion and practical insight with delegates across a wide range of leadership and management programmes.

Keywords  Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve, organisational change model, change management, overlapping change, cumulative change, change fatigue, employee overwhelm, human capacity, leadership development, workplace wellbeing, Jarrold Training, Elliot Symonds

What is the Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve?

The Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve is an organisational change model that shows how several overlapping changes can compete for the same finite human capacity. Unlike a single change curve, it allows multiple trajectories to converge at a shared point of Overwhelm before recovery, experimentation, decision and integration. It helps leaders ask what else a person is carrying before labelling their response as resistance.

Model at a glance

Created by: Elliot Symonds, Head of Learning and Development at Jarrold Training, Norwich, with formative challenges from Jo Ogogo and Denise Edens.

Purpose: To support better leadership conversations about cumulative change, change fatigue, employee capacity and overwhelm.

Distinctive idea: Changes do not queue politely. Their demands can overlap, interrupt recovery and compound at the same point.

Status: A practitioner-developed conceptual model supported by repeated use in leadership development; it is not a clinical instrument or an empirically validated predictive scale.

1  The problem with one curve

A change curve is seductive because it turns emotional complexity into a journey that can be seen. A leader can point to a recognisable descent, a low point and an eventual recovery. People often find relief in the idea that discomfort is neither irrational nor permanent. Used carefully, the curve gives language to experience and permission for emotion to exist inside organisational life. Models can be used within the workplace to express a current point in time and open up dialogue in order to assist people to move through the change. Leaders can identify those who have moved through it more quickly and encourage people to present back to those who might be finding themselves in a state of more resistance. This is explored as the room called ‘The Balcony of Bravery’ in The Manor of Change or as the insights derived from Roger’s Innovation Adoption Curve.

The danger begins when the picture is treated as a timetable. The original five-stage work associated with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross arose from conversations about dying and profound loss, not from a controlled theory of organisational implementation. Kübler-Ross did not intend the stages to be a rigid, universal sequence. People can go through the stages in any order for varying amounts of time, but they will go through them. Their later migration into business created a useful metaphor, but not a law of human behaviour.

There is a second limitation which is even more visible in modern organisations. Most versions show one person travelling through one change. Yet the person sitting in front of a leader may be adapting simultaneously to a restructure, a new system, a changed manager, a demanding customer, altered working patterns, uncertainty at home and concern about their own health. A new corporate initiative does not arrive on a blank emotional page.

The central proposition of the Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve is simple: leaders should look beyond the most recent event and examine the full pattern of changes, pressures and resources acting upon the person.

 

2  How the model was created

2.1  Jo Ogogo and the challenge to language

The first decisive challenge came from Jo Ogogo during a discussion of the familiar change curve. She questioned the use of the term depression. It was a deceptively important intervention. In contemporary workplaces, depression has a specific clinical and personal weight. Placing it casually at the bottom of a generic organisational curve can blur the distinction between an emotional response to change and a diagnosable mental health condition. It may also imply that every person must become depressed before adapting.

The challenge forced the question of what is the model genuinely trying to describe at its lowest point? In practice, the people I worked with often spoke of cognitive overload, depleted emotional energy, reduced confidence, uncertainty and an inability to absorb one more demand. The word that fitted their experience was ‘overwhelmed’. This resonated well with the delegates that it was first shared with. It recognises the pressure people felt and the resulting lack of performance and the sense that it could build and build to a position of impactful concern.

This was not cosmetic substitution. Language changes what a leader notices and therefore what a leader does. If the label is depression, an unqualified leader risks amateur diagnosis. The ‘mental health first aider’ might believe they can solve a serious situation rather than sign-posting to more support. If the description is overwhelmed, the leader can begin a practical conversation about demand, clarity, priority, control, support and recovery while still signposting professional help where appropriate. It unlocks the pastoral elements of a business relationship and in a psychologically safe team, one which is open to discussion can lead to quicker positive steps. Of course if you recognise that your team is not in a psychologically safe environment then it might also be one of the contributory factors to why people might be in the stage of being ‘overwhelmed’.

2.2  Denise Edens and the challenge to architecture

Denise Edens then challenged something deeper than vocabulary. She said, in essence, that people do not go through one change at a time, when she had been presented with the Kübler-Ross Change Curve. A person can begin to recover and then be dragged back towards the low point by the next change. That observation broke the neat geometry of the single curve. It also lead to the importance of expressing how that time axis really works.

Once that challenge is accepted, the model must change shape. Changes and pressures can coalesce at the same point, creating an apparently sudden crisis from cumulative demands. The familiar phrase ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ and the Latin gutta cavat lapidem, ‘the drop hollows the stone’, both express the enduring idea of accumulation. In organisational life, the next demand does not wait for the previous one to finish. The curves compete because their demands coexist within the same person, team and organisation, including pressures a leader may not be able to see.

2.3  From conversation to construct

I developed the Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve through an iterative practitioner process: present established models, invite delegates to evaluate them, create space for challenge, listen for language that better represents lived experience, modify the learning into a new form, and test it again in different organisational settings. The name recognises Denise Edens’ contribution to the model’s architecture and the subsequent synthesis and application developed in my own practice. Jo Ogogo’s contribution remains essential to the model’s language and ethical framing, and this paper formalises that contribution.

This route to creation matters. Models are not improved by reverence. They are improved by disciplined use, disagreement and reconstruction. The model is offered as a practitioner construct grounded in repeated organisational dialogue, not as a completed scientific theory. Challenge it. Enhance it. Modify it. Above all else use it to help people and organisations to move more effectively through the complex issues faced in reality.

3  The Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve

Figure 1 is the complete and canonical visual expression of the model. It should be used in full when the Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve is presented, discussed or cited so that its stages, competing trajectories and central point of Overwhelm remain visible together.

Figure 1  The Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve, January 2026. Canonical visual representation. The paths are illustrative rather than predictive and should not be read as a fixed sequence or measured scale.

The curve describes a dynamic rather than a prescribed set of stages. A change event can disrupt wellbeing and perceived competence while a person interprets what has happened and experiments with new ways of working. Recovery may begin as meaning, capability and control increase. If another significant change arrives before integration is complete, it may interrupt that recovery even though chronological time continues to move forward. The trajectories therefore represent possible experience, not a timetable or a score.

Overwhelm is the pivotal condition of concern within the model, but it is not defined by one score or behaviour. It is the point at which perceived demands exceed a person’s immediately available capacity to respond effectively. It may appear as withdrawal, irritability, confusion, rigid thinking, apparent resistance, presenteeism, reduced learning, errors or emotional expression. The model should prompt inquiry, not confer certainty: discussion rather than diagnosis, followed by appropriate support or professional signposting where needed.

4  What the model changes

The conventional question is often, ‘Where are they on the change curve?’

The competing-change question is, ‘Which changes are acting upon them, and how are those demands interacting?’

This is more than a semantic distinction. The first question can locate the person inside a leader’s predetermined programme. The second requires the leader to investigate the person’s actual world.

Single curve assumption	Competing change perspective
One dominant change is being processed.	Several work and life changes may be drawing on the same capacity.
Movement is usually shown as a sequential journey.	Movement can reverse, stall, overlap or accelerate without following one sequence.
The latest initiative explains the visible response.	The visible response may reflect accumulated and unresolved or unseen demands.
The individual must progress through the curve.	The system may need to sequence, stop, clarify or resource change differently.
Resistance is principally a response to the change.	Apparent resistance may be a rational response to overload, loss, external events, personality preferences, career drivers or economic pressure.
Recovery means accepting the intended future.	Recovery means regaining sufficient agency and capacity to function and learn as well as accepting the desired future.

 

5  Human need, motivation and mental health

5.1  Maslow and the return to more basic needs

Maslow’s theory of human motivation remains useful when it is treated with more care than the familiar rigid pyramid sometimes receives. Maslow described needs in a hierarchy of relative prepotency: when more basic needs are threatened, they become more powerful in attention and motivation. Organisational change can disturb safety, belonging, esteem and the possibility of self-actualisation at the same time. A person expected to innovate and perform at the top of their capability may instead be trying to establish whether their job, status, relationships or competence remain secure.

The competing curve explains why the same announcement can produce different reactions. The objective event matters, but so does the need it threatens and everything already occupying the person’s limited attention. Leaders cannot demand self-actualising performance while repeatedly destabilising the foundations upon which that performance depends. How is someone supposed to be all that they can be when the foundations are not in place or other departments are putting demands on an individual which their line manager is unaware of.  Maslow aligns with The Competing Change Curve.

5.2  Stress, load and finite capacity

The model’s idea of accumulation is consonant with established research on stress and work design. McEwen’s account of allostatic load describes the damaging consequences of repeated or prolonged physiological adaptation to stress. The Job Demands-Resources model similarly proposes that strain becomes more likely when demands remain high and resources are insufficient, while resources can support motivation and engagement. The Competing Change Curve does not duplicate these theories. It turns their underlying logic into an accessible leadership conversation about the timing and interaction of change.

The proverb of the final straw still endures because it captures accumulation. That last burden may be small, yet it acts upon a load already being carried. Leaders routinely see the last reaction and blame the last event. The responsible question is what came before it, and before that, and before that. Benjamin Franklin said ‘Little strokes fell great oaks’. A wonderful phrase to be motivational as well…yes a great task can be achieved with smaller actions, but when applied with a less positive prognosis recognises that mental health impact which can also occur.

Leaders need to know their people and remain cognisant of the demands upon them. Too often, however, organisations appear surprised when accumulated pressure culminates in overwhelm and reduced capability.

5.3  Career Drivers and Insights Discovery

A curve alone cannot explain why particular pressures affect particular people. Additional lenses help. Francis describes career drivers as powerful internal imperatives concerning what a person seeks from working life. A change that appears attractive to somebody driven by creativity, influence or expertise may threaten somebody whose strongest drivers concern security, affiliation or autonomy. It is one of my favourite diagnostics to undertake on a regular basis as it is likely to be variable through someone’s career. My drivers are different at 55 then they were at 25. Combine this with the stability of someone’s life at a Maslow level, the support around them and you can perhaps begin to understand why they might be able to cope with change in different ways.

Then there is the world of Jung and Insights Discovery. Adding our favoured language of behavioural preference and adaptation, conscious and less conscious, internal motivations and perceptions of the world, it can help a leader explore how a person prefers to communicate, decide, relate and act, and how behaviour may shift under pressure. It must never become a colour-coded diagnosis or an excuse to stereotype but when combined with Career Drivers, it offers a richer working hypothesis. What does this person value, how do they characteristically engage, and what might stress or repression be doing to the behaviour we can currently see?

At its best, the combined picture helps leaders distinguish broad conditions: a person under sustained stress, a person repressing natural preferences to meet environmental demands, or a person whose capability, motivation and context are aligning towards dedicated involvement because everything is making ‘sense’ to them. They can enter a state of high dedication and motivation, flow, because everything is aligned to them. The purpose of all these models and diagnostics is to understand ourselves, understand others, to open up richer conversations and shape better conditions for performance. The Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve can be seen as a starting point to examine these or sit beautifully beside an understanding of them, or recognising that there is a massive gulf in your understanding of your people.

6  Evidence from practice

The model has been presented within leadership and management development programmes where participants compare several approaches to change rather than accept one model uncritically. Delegates evaluate models against criteria they define and weight, including explanatory power, realism, usability, emotional resonance, ethical language and relevance to their own people. This makes the learner an evaluator rather than a passive recipient and connects directly with the higher levels of Bloom’s cognitive hierarchy.

6.1  Norfolk and Suffolk Constabulary

Work with Norfolk and Suffolk Constabulary provided a demanding context in which change is not abstract. Police leaders and staff operate amid operational pressure, public accountability, cultural expectations and repeated organisational development. The Competing Change Curve created recognition because it did not ask participants to imagine one isolated initiative. It allowed them to discuss the cumulative human effect of overlapping demands while preserving personal responsibility and operational reality. It spoke of the truth of the Policing context.

Discussion also focused on the shape of the illustrative curves. If people experience a flatter response to change, are they more likely to adapt successfully, and might that be connected to experience, preparation or support? These are useful coaching questions, although the curves themselves are not predictive or measurable.

6.2  JDM Food Group

JDM Food Group presented a visibly different environment, with the pace, interdependence and commercial demands of food manufacturing. Yet the model again produced strong recognition. Leaders connected with the reality that operational changes do not queue politely. Production pressures, customer requirements, systems, people movement and strategic priorities can collide within the same period and within the same individual. With three cohorts of senior leaders taken through an Insights Discovery and Change programme, the Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve came out as the unanimous decision as the most relevant model for being apt to their work environment.

These two settings are disparate on the surface, but their response points towards a common human truth. Competing changes are the reality of the working world. This cross-context resonance is meaningful practitioner evidence. While it is not proof of any academic truth it is powerful to see real delegates, in the real world express resonance after deep evaluation and discussion. A future research programme should document participant responses systematically, compare the model with alternative frameworks and test whether its use improves leadership decisions or employee outcomes. A deep Kirpatrick level 4 evaluation, maybe with some Return on Investment work as well. Fundamentally what I am interested in is if it actually leads to better outcomes for people in the workplace because the truth of this model stuck with them and allowed for real application.

7  A practical leadership method

The model is most useful when it changes a conversation. A leader can work through five questions:

Step	Purpose
Map the changes	List current, recent and anticipated changes from the person’s perspective. Include changes outside the formal project where the person chooses to disclose them. Consider deeper diagnostics such as Francis’ Career Drivers and a full Insights Discovery evaluation. Anything to understand the individual in more depth. Create a respectful space where personal disclosure and reasonable adjustments could also be considered seriously. Consider capability diagnostics and openness as explored within Hersey and Blanchard Situational Leadership.
Explore the meaning	Ask what each change threatens, removes, enables or demands. Do not assume that the organisational explanation is the individual experience. Utilise coaching models such as OSCAR. Be authentic in sharing own situation if relevant.
Assess demands and resources	Consider workload, ambiguity, capability, autonomy, time, relationships, trust, wellbeing and practical support.
Choose a system response	Stop, defer, sequence, simplify, explain, resource, involve or redesign. Training may well be a technique to enable people to develop but so may be delegating other tasks to more appropriate areas or to stop doing certain thing. Do all you can to reduce avoidable harm. There is also the internal reward for moving through the changes and succeeding against the organisational goals.
Review and learn	Return to the conversation. Capacity and meaning change over time, and an intervention that helped last month may not be enough after the next event. If there is any learning from the Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve it is that something else might have come out of ‘left field’ and now be an additional pressure that could lead to being overwhelmed.

The most important discipline is awareness. A leader who does not know their people cannot reliably recognise the interaction between change, motive, preference and stress. If that leader continues to pile on pressure, the eventual result may appear sudden but rarely comes from nowhere.

‘When the cup is brim full before, the last, though least, superadded drop is charged alone to be the cause of all the running over.’

So said Thomas Fuller in 1655. The last drop receives the blame, but the cup was already full.

The last drop. The last straw. Nothing is new.

8  Ethical boundaries and limitations

The Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve should be used with four explicit rules.

• It is NOT a clinical diagnostic instrument. It is a conceptual and conversational model.
• It does NOT predict that everyone will follow the same emotional path.
• It must NOT be used to justify harm created by poor systems, excessive workload or badly led change.
• It must NOT encourage leaders to seek personal disclosure that an employee does not wish to give.

9  Creating rather than merely consuming models

The development of this model illustrates a wider educational argument.

Anderson and Krathwohl’s revision of Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy places ‘create’ at the most complex level of the cognitive process dimension, alongside the progression through remember, understand, apply, analyse and evaluate.

A practitioner should understand the provenance of a model, apply it to real circumstances, analyse what it reveals and conceals, evaluate its fitness against explicit criteria, and then modify or create where there is a defensible gap.

That is the standard to which the Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve should be held. The origin of this model is transparent. The contributions of Ogogo, J and Edens, D are named. Its relationship to existing theories is acknowledged. Its limitations are stated. Its practical usefulness has been observed, while its empirical status remains open to investigation. However, the application of the model over 2026 within many educational programmes suggests to the author that this model now exists within the cannon of leadership and management models.

10  Frequently asked questions

Who created the Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve?

Elliot Symonds of Jarrold Training developed the model through leadership and management practice. Jo Ogogo’s challenge shaped the replacement of depression with overwhelm, while Denise Edens’ challenge led to the model’s competing trajectories.

How does it differ from a traditional change curve?

A traditional change curve normally depicts one change journey. The Edens-Symonds model depicts several changes drawing on the same capacity, so recovery can stall, reverse or be interrupted by another demand.

What does Overwhelm mean in the model?

Overwhelm is the point at which perceived demands exceed a person’s immediately available capacity to respond effectively. It is a condition for inquiry and conversation, not a medical diagnosis or a measurable score.

Does the model replace the Kübler-Ross Change Curve?

No. It challenges the uncritical transfer of a model associated with dying and loss into organisational life and extends the conversation to concurrent change. Leaders can compare both models and judge which assumptions are useful in context.

How should leaders use the model?

Leaders should map current and recent changes, explore what each change means to the person, assess demands and resources, choose a system response, and return to the conversation as circumstances change.

Is the Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve scientifically validated?

Not yet. It is a practitioner-developed conceptual model that has generated strong recognition in varied organisational settings. Its empirical testing remains an open and necessary next stage.

Can the model be reproduced?

Yes, provided the complete canonical image is reproduced and attributed. The stages, competing trajectories and shared point of Overwhelm should remain together, and the curves must be described as illustrative rather than predictive or measurable.

11  Conclusion

Organisations do not implement change into empty space. They introduce it into lives already in motion. Every new demand meets a person with a history, a set of motives, preferred ways of engaging, finite resources and other changes already under way. The single curve remains a useful doorway, but it is not a sufficient map.

The Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve makes cumulative change visible. It replaces an inappropriately universalised label of depression with the more workable condition of overwhelmed. It shows why apparent recovery can be interrupted. It challenges leaders to look beyond the latest event and examine the load, meaning and resources surrounding the whole person.

Above all, it relocates responsibility. The employee is not simply expected to travel through the curve more quickly. The leader and the organisation must decide what to stop, sequence, clarify, resource or redesign. When leaders remain unaware of their people and continue to pile on pressure, the eventual fracture is not evidence that the person was weak. It may be evidence that the system failed to notice what it was asking someone to carry.

References

Anderson, L.W. and Krathwohl, D.R. (eds.) (2001) A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman.

Bakker, A.B. and Demerouti, E. (2007) ‘The Job Demands-Resources model: state of the art’, Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), pp. 309-328.

Fuller, T. (1655) The Church-History of Britain. London.

Kübler-Ross, E. (1969) On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan.

Maslow, A.H. (1943) ‘A theory of human motivation’, Psychological Review, 50(4), pp. 370-396.

McEwen, B.S. (1998) ‘Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators’, New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), pp. 171-179.

Shakespeare, W. Hamlet, Act IV, Scenes V and VII.

Symonds, E. (2025) The Manor of Change. Norwich: Fighting Reality.

Suggested citation

Symonds, E. (2026) The Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve: A practitioner model for understanding cumulative change, human capacity and the point of overwhelm. Norwich: Jarrold Training.

About the author

Elliot Symonds is Head of Learning and Development at Jarrold Training in Norwich.

He designs and delivers leadership, management, organisational change, communication and trainer-development programmes across private- and public-sector organisations. He is a keynote speaker at conferences and events and an Insights Discovery Licensed Practitioner. His business book The Manor of Change won an award for innovation at the EEEGR SNS Conference 2026. His work focuses on translating established theory into memorable, challengeable and usable learning experiences.

 

 

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The Edens-Symonds Competing Change Curve is a practitioner-developed organisational change model created by Elliot Symonds of Jarrold Training in Norwich. It shows how overlapping changes can compete for finite human capacity, interrupt recovery and converge at a shared point of Overwhelm. The model is conceptual and conversational; its trajectories are illustrative rather than predictive or measurable.