Jenny Evans

This science-backed keynote helps your leaders understand the science of what change does to human performance, teaches them how to recognize what their teams are experiencing, and gives them the tools to lead people through change more effectively.

The Problem

Your organization isn't dealing with one change. It's dealing with a multitude of them, stacked on top of each other, all at once, with no recovery in between.

• 69% of change initiatives fail - a number that hasn't moved in 30 years.
• Change-fatigued employees cost organizations up to 18% of salary in lost productivity.
• Only 43% of highly change-fatigued employees intend to stay, compared to 74% with low fatigue.

The result: decision fatigue, decision paralysis, cognitive overload, and uncertainty hijacking judgment exactly when it matters most. Leadership sees the disengagement, the stalled adoption, the rising attrition - calls it resistance or apathy - and sends more communication. The needle still doesn't move.

The Promise

That's because it's not what people think. It's how they react.

You're not solving a communication problem, a mindset problem, or a "people just need to get on board" problem. It's a performance physiology problem.

Change triggers a measurable, predictable stress response - not a personality flaw or attitude problem. This response reroutes the exact brain functions your people are being paid to use to adopt the latest initiative: judgment, memory, impulse control, decision-making under uncertainty.

In "The Neuroscience of Change," Jenny Evans helps your leaders understand the neuroscience of change and gives them the practical, science-backed tools to successfully lead their teams through disruption instead of just pushing more communication at it.

Keynote Overview

This isn't a change management refresher, and it's not another appeal to "get on board." Jenny combines organizational research - built from measuring resilience and change capacity across real Fortune 500 populations - with the specific, replicated science of how stress moves through people and teams during disruption.

Through a highly interactive session your leaders will discover:

• Why their communication keeps missing its mark, no matter how well it's written
• How stress spreads through a team faster than any announcement can
• Why organizations run out of change capacity long before they run out of initiatives
• How to tell the difference between resistance and a depleted biological system
• A four-part practice, deployable in a single meeting, a 1:1, or a hallway conversation that will help their people adapt to change

Planner ROI: Your leaders don't just understand why change is hard - they leave with a repeatable practice they can apply to every future initiative. This means faster adoption, lower attrition risk, and a leadership team that stops mistaking overload for resistance.

Key Takeaways

After this keynote, your leaders will be able to:

• Spot the early signs of change overload in their teams before it shows up as a performance dip or an attrition spike
• Understand how and why change affects decision-making, focus, and performance - and why that's biology, not character
• Understand what has to happen biologically before rational communication - the FAQ, the town hall, the well-crafted memo - can actually be absorbed
• Feel confident in bringing credible, science-backed strategies into leadership conversations for helping their teams and people adapt quickly
• Build change resilience and mental fitness in their people, countering the cognitive overload that quietly erodes focus and output

Audience: Executives | Leaders | Managers