For decades, we have heard—almost as a mantra of our time—that the only constant is change.
Since the 1980s, when Alvin Toffler warned in Future Shock about the speed of technological progress and its psychological effects, change has become the dominant narrative of progress. Companies adopted it as a creed, leaders repeat it as a virtue, and people experience it as pressure. In fact, we already have a term for it: change fatigue.
From IBM or Microsoft to Netflix, Adobe, or Amazon, many companies turned change into their business model. They reinvented themselves again and again, turning adaptation into a competitive advantage. But we have also seen the other side: organizations such as Meta, General Electric, or Twitter have shown how excessive transformation can generate disorientation, loss of purpose, or cultural exhaustion. Change has become so constant that, paradoxically, many companies no longer know where they are changing toward.
We live in times of technological acceleration, labor disruptions, and artificial intelligence that learns faster than we can fully understand. The future feels like a conveyor belt that never stops, and maintaining balance has become an everyday juggling act.
We live immersed in a culture of change. Companies, institutions, and leaders talk about transformation with the naturalness of those invoking a universal law. Innovation, disruption, and permanent reinvention have become key terms in contemporary business discourse. Entire departments are devoted to managing change, supporting adaptation processes, and promoting new ways of working.
However, the deeper we go into this universe, the clearer a paradox becomes: not everything changes, and not everything should change. Some constants remain as anchors amid speed. And it is precisely those roots that allow transformation to have direction, rather than turning into perpetual, purposeless motion.
Amid the vertigo, something endures: our need for meaning, for belonging, and for trust. The urgency to be heard, to care and be cared for, to build bonds that transcend immediacy. As Viktor Frankl reminded us: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
That human dimension (emotional, relational, ethical) is not obsolete, nor can it be replaced by algorithms or accelerated through updates. It is the compass that reminds us where to go when everything seems to be moving too fast.
Yet we are witnessing a moment in which even companies are beginning to redefine what it means to “create value.” A few days ago, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon stated that artificial intelligence will make it possible to “focus on high-value people,” while the firm prepares layoffs and reorganizes less “strategic” teams. The statement may sound pragmatic, but it contains a paradox: the more we automate processes, the more essential what cannot be automated becomes—empathy, intuition, the ability to connect, to inspire, to create shared meaning. In other words, what truly makes a person valuable is not their ability to keep up with change, but their ability to humanize it.
Because in the end, the question is not how much the world changes, but how much we manage to remain faithful to what makes us human. And the day that stops being true, it will not be because the world changed too much, but because we stopped being ourselves in trying to change everything. Perhaps the future does not depend so much on how much we change, but on how much we remember who we are.
By Gabriel Weinstein, Managing Partner, Europe, Olivia.