I counted them last week. The apps on my phone that exist mostly to tell me something about school or something related to my kids.

My two kids are at separate schools, each with their own platform or app for forms and approvals, along with news to read, updates to keep across and the occasional thing I’m meant to respond to.

Then there are appointments. Occupational therapy, physio, doctors and other services often have their own systems for bookings, payments and reminders. Being a neurodivergent family adds another layer, with online services for managing funding, claims and approvals.

And of course there are the Messenger and WhatsApp groups with other parents. A car pool group, a mums group, other parent chats… the list goes on.

I counted seven different places I needed to keep across for one kid in one week.

And the thing is, each one makes complete sense on its own. Someone, somewhere, had a perfectly good reason for every single one of them.

But somewhere around number five, I stopped reading any of them properly. I tend to skim, pick up what looks important and hope the really urgent thing finds its way to me somehow.

It doesn’t always work. I recently missed a dress-up day, and more than once I’ve turned up for pick-up at the wrong time.

If you were the school looking at my read rates or response rates, you could quite reasonably conclude that I don’t care or I’m not engaged.

I do care.

I’m just full.

Quiet is the new loud

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to some of my work, and in particular the way people respond to change.

We still tend to picture resistance as something loud: crossed arms in the town hall, or the person who asks the hard question in the Q&A.

Honestly, I love that person because at least they’re engaged.

What I see far more often is much quieter.

People log in, do what they need to do and gradually drift back to whatever worked before. They’re not necessarily pushing back or making a conscious decision to resist. They just stop showing up in the ways the project expected them to.

From the project’s side, that can look like apathy. Completion rates are low, usage flatlines after week three, or champions who were enthusiastic at the start go quiet.

It gets written up as resistance, and the response is usually to add more: more comms, more reminders, more “lunch and learns” and more urgency from leadership.

Which is a bit like the school sending me an eighth app to remind me to check the other seven.

The bit I promised to come back to

In a previous blog, I said that what gets labelled as resistance often isn’t.

Habits are load-bearing, and changing them makes work effortful and awkward again, at least for a while. We’re asking people to accept something temporarily worse in the hope that it will eventually be better.

I said I’d come back to that properly, so here it is.

Habits are one of the ways we save effort.

When I know how I build a proposal, where a file lives, or which channel the urgent thing will arrive in, I don’t need to think much about it. That leaves more of my attention for the things that actually need it.

Every change asks people to give some of that back.

Suddenly they have to stop and think about something they used to do without thinking. They need to remember where something has moved, look up the new process, try it, get it wrong and try again.

And of course, very few changes arrive on their own.

They land on top of the restructure, the new CRM, the policy update, the AI pilot, and the three tools that were meant to replace each other but somehow all still exist.

So when someone “doesn’t engage”, I think a fairer question is: with what, exactly?

It might not be that they’re unwilling to engage, they may simply have nothing left to engage with.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s a capacity problem.

More comms is more load

This is the part I find uncomfortable because I’ve done it plenty of times myself.

When adoption stalls, our instinct is often to communicate harder.

We add another email, reminder, drop-in session or piece of guidance because surely people just need to understand what’s changing and why it matters.

And every one of those things is perfectly reasonable on its own, just like the school apps.

But for the person on the other end, each one is another thing to read, another decision about whether it matters and another tab left open with good intentions.

So there’s a point where, in trying to solve an engagement problem, we can actually add to the load that contributed to it in the first place.

I don’t think that’s laziness or even necessarily bad practice. It’s partly what our tools and project plans encourage us to do.

A comms plan is visible. A send is countable. We can report that 800 people received an email or 300 attended a session.

“We removed three things from people’s week” is much harder to put in a steering committee update.

And training can do the same thing

I see a version of this in training too.

There’s a lot of focus on getting people to attend the session, watch the video or complete the learning in the platform. And those things have their place. People obviously need enough information to know what to do.

But completion isn’t really the thing we’re after.

We want someone to leave a session and actually try something.

Better still, we want them curious enough to wonder what else they could do with it.

That’s a very different kind of engagement.

Someone can watch every video, tick every box and still go straight back to the old way of working. Equally, someone might learn one useful thing, try it straight away, get a result and start exploring from there.

I think sometimes we design learning as though people need to know everything before they can begin. So we give them the full tour, all the features, every scenario and a library of resources they can come back to later.

Again, every bit of it can be useful on its own.

But curiosity needs some spare capacity too.

It’s hard to experiment when you’re already trying to remember the six things you were just shown while keeping up with everything else you’re supposed to be doing that day.

Sometimes the better learning experience isn’t more content. It’s a small, useful thing someone can try straight away, with enough space to play with it, get it wrong and discover what else it might do for them.

So what helps?

Not a new framework, I promise.

I think it mostly starts with asking some different questions.

• Count before you add. Before launching another communication, session or resource, look at what else is landing on the same people that month. Not just from your project, but across the organisation. Your thing might be reasonable on its own and still be one thing too many.
  
• Take something away. If a change introduces another tool, step or channel, be clear about what it is eventually replacing. Sometimes things genuinely need to overlap for a while, but “nothing yet” shouldn’t quietly become “nothing ever”.
  
• Make the first step smaller, and leave room for curiosity. People don’t necessarily need to understand every feature or possible use case before they start. Give them something useful they can do first. In training, that might mean less time watching and more time actually trying. Let people get a small win and give them somewhere safe to explore from there.
  
• Design for trying, not just completing. Attendance, views and completion rates are useful because we can measure them, but they aren’t the same as behaviour change. If the outcome you really want is someone using a new tool or process, give them an opportunity to do that as part of the learning rather than hoping they’ll remember to try it later.
  
• Let managers filter, not just forward. Managers can make an enormous difference here, particularly when they help their teams work out what actually matters this week. Simply forwarding every project message down the line doesn’t reduce the load, it just moves it.
  
• Treat silence as information. Quiet doesn’t necessarily mean agreement, but it doesn’t automatically mean defiance either. If people aren’t engaging, ask what’s competing for their attention before assuming the problem is their attitude.

None of this is particularly expensive or complicated.

Much of it is about deciding what not to add.

The apps

I haven’t deleted any of the school apps. I can’t, because each one holds something I occasionally need.

But I have noticed what actually changes my behaviour.

It isn’t another notification.

It’s the teacher who sends one short message on a Sunday night saying, essentially, “Here’s what matters this week.”

It’s usually about three lines long, and I read it every time.

Not because I care more about that class, but because someone has already done some of the sorting for me.

And I think that’s a useful way to think about our job in change as well.

It isn’t always about finding another way to make people care more.

Sometimes it’s about doing enough of the sorting for them that they have the capacity to care about the right thing.

And maybe, occasionally, enough capacity left over to get curious about what else they could do.