Adaptation is usually triggered by some irritant or threat.

Discomfort, disruption, and destruction are what drive an organization to adapt. If these forces did not exist, then nothing would change, year after year.

But that’s not the way the world works—especially today.

Let’s talk about the first level of threat—discomfort.

Among many leaders, the rapid pace of change is causing discomfort and an associated loss of trust. As a recent Edelman Trust Barometer reported, business leaders report a profound concern about the pace of change. “By a two-to-one margin,” said Richard Edelman in his preface, “respondents in all nations feel the new developments in business are going too fast and there is not adequate testing. Even worse, 54 percent say business growth or greed/money are the real impetuses behind innovation. That’s two times more than those who say business innovates because of a desire to make the world a better place or improve people’s lives.”

It would be one thing if business growth and innovation came primarily from the desire to make better products or improve people’s lives. That’s something anyone could get behind—after all, who wouldn’t want progress in science and technology? Who wouldn’t want a more fuel-efficient car or a smart phone that could tell you if your heart had an arrhythmia? But the lingering suspicion among the general public and business leaders is that organizations are innovating to boost profits, which isn’t always the same thing as making people’s lives better.

Insight: Discomfort Is Often Self-Inflicted

If change is pursued relentlessly and for no apparent reason, considerable discomfort results. As Elizabeth Doty pointed out in her article “Leading Teams through Change at the Speed of Business” for Strategy-Business.com, change is not one event but a constant presence. The resulting discomfort often internal and self-imposed. “Following a merger,” she wrote, “one leader I work with was asked to integrate new teams six times in nine months, until her department began calling themselves ‘the island of misfit toys.’”

A risk to companies equal to complacency is overreach—the frenetic, headlong quest for change that exceeds what leaders can manage effectively. As leaders scramble to keep up with changes they themselves may have instituted, teams can be reorganized so often they find themselves chasing conflicting priorities, working longer hours than ever but not building sustained success. This leads not to profitable innovation, but to wasteful chaos.

What do innovation leaders know about discomfort? They know it’s up to the leader to get out of the echo chamber and find out what’s going on in the trenches, and then make policy based on reality. When employees or managers balk at moving forward, it’s often because they do not feel they are valued, the changes asked of them do not make sense to them, or they are not convinced of the opportunity to improve. The innovation leader will avoid these common traps by making positive change part of normal, everyday life.

Productive Vs. Damaging Discomfort

Normalizing change is good, but carefully controlling change—and the resulting discomfort—is one key to staying one step ahead in the innovation race. Human beings have a finite ability to adapt. You can’t keep throwing new directives at your people at a pace they can’t keep up with. It’s inefficient. After all, remember that efficiency comes from repeating a task over and over again while eliminating waste. This harks back to Toyota’s legendary lean manufacturing system based on waste minimization (“muda”) within the manufacturing system without sacrificing productivity, which takes into account waste created through overburden (“muri”) and waste created through unevenness in work loads (“mura”). You can’t possibly refine a system if you’re constantly tearing it apart and reshuffling its components.

Innovation leaders know you have to achieve a balance between productive discomfort, which is a cause of innovation, and damaging discomfort, which is the result of poor management and which impedes innovation because your people—the human beings who have to figure out how to turn the ideas of leaders into reality—are too confused and too busy spinning their wheels to be fully productive.

Leadership has the responsibility to prioritize changes, initiatives, and responses to discomfort. Failure to identify the most important priorities can be costly, and funds and manpower allocated to spurious projects can lead a company into a hole.