Are You in an Environment of Constant Change?
In a recent poll we conducted on LinkedIn, we asked professionals which human skill matters most to stay effective amid constant change. Two responses clearly dominated the results: setting healthy boundaries and prioritizing what truly matters. At first glance, this may seem unsurprising. People feel stretched. Work bleeds into everything. But the poll reveals something more precise and more troubling. People are not overwhelmed by the pace of change itself. They are overwhelmed by the absence of decision clarity.
Change introduces choice. More options. More input. More requests. Without strong internal filters, individuals absorb that complexity rather than shape it. The result is fragmentation. Boundary setting and prioritization appear in the poll because they function as decision filters. They determine what enters a person’s cognitive and emotional bandwidth and what does not. When those filters are weak or undefined, people experience work as endless and indistinguishable. Everything feels equally urgent. Nothing feels complete.
Most organizations unintentionally make this worse. They communicate priorities broadly but leave trade-offs implicit. They reward responsiveness more visibly than judgment. They praise people who are always available without examining what that availability costs.
Over time, employees adapt. They stop deciding and start reacting. This is why effectiveness under constant change is not primarily a resilience issue. It is a judgment issue.
Judgment, however, is rarely treated as a developable soft skill. It is assumed to emerge naturally with experience. The poll results suggest that this assumption no longer holds. Experience alone does not teach people how to navigate competing demands when the environment never stabilizes.
So how do organizations build this capability?
The first step is helping individuals identify the values that already guide their decisions, often unconsciously. When people struggle to set boundaries, it is rarely because they lack discipline. It is because multiple values are pulling them in different directions. Loyalty to others conflicts with focus. Speed conflicts with quality. Helpfulness conflicts with sustainability. myGiide makes these tensions visible. By surfacing values explicitly, people gain language for why certain demands feel nonnegotiable and others quietly drain them. That awareness allows boundaries to be framed as principled choices rather than personal refusals.
The second step focuses on building shared language for what good judgment looks like across groups and contexts. Prioritization breaks down when people use the same words but carry different expectations. Terms like urgent, important, high impact, and support often signal different priorities across roles, teams, and cultures. myGiide makes values and soft-skill competencies visible at both the individual and group level, allowing teams to see patterns that usually remain implicit. When those patterns surface, teams can align with respect to what deserves attention, what can wait, and how responsiveness should operate in this specific context. This alignment reduces friction, lowers rework, and preserves decision quality when pressure rises.
The LinkedIn poll points to a quiet truth. In constant change, effectiveness is not about doing more or coping better. It is about choosing with clarity and protecting what matters long enough for it to compound.