Jurassic Park and the Change Programme
The helicopter emerges through thick cloud towards a remote tropical island. Dense jungle. State-of-the-art laboratories hidden among the trees. Inside, people in white coats explain their extraordinary breakthrough to visitors in expensive black suits. The mood is electric. The future has arrived.
The investors are impressed. The scientists are excited. Everyone talks about transformation, possibility and what this changes forever.
What could possibly go wrong?
Thirty years later, it feels less like science fiction and more like the launch of a corporate transformation programme.
The opening scenes of Jurassic Park feel strangely familiar to anyone who has sat through a major organisational redesign, AI strategy or digital transformation initiative. The technology is different, obviously. Dinosaurs have largely been replaced by operating model reviews, workforce redesigns and AI-enabled customer journeys. But the atmosphere remains remarkably similar.
Senior leaders unveiling a revolutionary future. Consultants speaking fluent PowerPoint. Executives nodding enthusiastically at phrases nobody would ever use in normal human conversation: “agile transformation roadmap”, “strategic reset” and “reimagining the workforce.”
Not because they are foolish. Most leaders are under genuine pressure to modernise. Markets move faster. Budgets shrink. Public expectations rise. Nobody gets promoted for successfully maintaining the existing visitor attraction.
The problem begins when organisations become so fascinated by change that they stop noticing what it is doing to the people expected to survive it.
In Jurassic Park the warning signs appear early.
A fence loses power. Systems begin behaving unpredictably. Something large moves in the trees.
But everyone is too invested in the vision to slow down.
Modern organisations have their own warning signs: rising sickness absence, emotionally exhausted teams, talented staff quietly disappearing from LinkedIn, middle managers speaking almost entirely in sighs.
Humour is often the first thing to go.
Then comes the organisational version of survival behaviour. Staff agreeing enthusiastically in meetings then quietly updating CVs afterwards.
Yet these signs are frequently dismissed as communication problems or “resistance to change.”
Most employees are not resisting change itself. Most people understand the need for organisations to evolve. During the pandemic they adapted faster than many organisations believed possible. Staff moved services online, improvised under pressure and kept organisations functioning while strategic plans sat abandoned in desk drawers.
What people resist is exhaustion disguised as transformation.
The seventh restructuring labelled urgent. The fourth “new way of working.” The cultural reset replacing the previous cultural reset.
Meanwhile middle managers become the organisational equivalent of park rangers trying to keep visitors calm while the electric fences flicker.
Not senior enough to stop the chaos. Not junior enough to escape it.
They sit through presentations about operating model redesigns, digital futures and the importance of agility, then spend the afternoon translating this into language that will not destroy morale by Friday morning.
Over time many stop reacting emotionally altogether. Not because they lack compassion. Because they are absorbing emotional shock on behalf of the organisation every single day.
They reassure anxious staff while privately uncertain themselves. Defend decisions they did not make. Encourage resilience while running dangerously low on it personally.
Occasionally you encounter the quiet heroes. Managers who know when not to send the email at 9.47pm. Managers who quietly modify unrealistic corporate demands before they hit exhausted teams. Managers who understand that psychological safety is not created by corporate wellbeing campaigns but by whether people feel constantly under threat.
Most organisations survive because of these unofficial acts of translation.
The irony is that organisations pursuing agility often exhaust the very people expected to deliver it.
Fatigued employees become cautious. Initiative disappears. Trust weakens. Staff stop investing emotionally in the latest transformation because experience suggests another one will arrive before this one is fully implemented.
Performance may hold up for a while. Good people can compensate longer than spreadsheets recognise.
But engagement usually collapses long before the data notices.
The real lesson from Jurassic Park was never that innovation is dangerous. It was that human beings consistently underestimate the complexity of the systems they create. Especially when they are excited by their own ambition.
Over time every organisation becomes whatever behaviour its managers reward.
And organisations that reward relentless transformation without protecting organisational stamina should not be surprised when exhausted employees stop running enthusiastically towards the future.
The warning signs were there long before the dinosaurs escaped.
