Alberto Terol

Nobody takes entropy into account, and then someone ends up cleaning the mess.

This week I saw a wonderful little video from the Norwegian Consumer Council that introduces us to a new professional archetype: the Enshittificator. A proud craftsman whose job is elegantly simple: take something that works perfectly fine, and make it gradually and systematically worse. The video is satirical, of course. But satire only works when it hurts a little, and this one hits very close to home.

The Enshittificator doesn’t destroy things suddenly as that would be too obvious. The method is subtler: lure people in with something genuinely good, wait until they are dependent, and then begin the slow, careful degradation: pop-ups, ad breaks and software updates that remove features. At the beginning it’s funny and then it isn’t.

The physics of decay

There is a principle in thermodynamics that is ruthlessly indifferent to intentions: entropy. Left alone, every system tends toward disorder. Not because someone is sabotaging it, but because maintenance requires energy, and energy is always the first thing we stop spending when the cameras leave.

Your garden doesn’t become a jungle because of malice. Your car doesn’t rust because the universe hates you. Your brilliant change initiative doesn’t collapse because your people are lazy. Things degrade because that is the natural direction of travel when nobody is actively pushing back against it.

The Enshittificator understands this instinctively. He doesn’t need to act aggressively, he just needs to stop maintaining and the system does the rest.

Change Management, at its core, is the discipline of fighting entropy. It is the sustained, unglamorous, frequently invisible work of ensuring that the energy invested in getting somewhere is not immediately lost to the gravitational pull of how things were before.

CAPEX gets the ribbon. OPEX gets the bill.

Here is a pattern that repeats itself with remarkable consistency across industries, geographies, and organizational cultures: everyone loves the launch, but nobody budgets for the morning after.

A new ERP system goes live. There’s a celebration, the project team takes a group photo, the sponsor gives a speech, the steering committee congratulates itself. And then, gradually, quietly, the system starts to degrade. Nobody was assigned to actively sustain adoption, training only happened once, at go-live, or because the people who knew how to use it properly left, and their replacements learned workarounds instead.

Think of a city that opens a beautiful new park. Politicians cut the ribbon and journalists photograph the children playing. Three years later, the benches are broken, the bins are full, and the lights don’t work. Damage is not caused on purpose, it’s just that maintenance was never properly funded, and nobody made it anyone’s specific responsibility.

The change manager is the person who keeps asking the uncomfortable question that everyone else has quietly stopped asking: “And who is responsible for this in eighteen months?”

Change Management is energy management

While you might think a change initiative is a project with an end date, for me it’s more like an energy equation.

You invest energy in moving a system from state A to state B, but state B is not stable by default. Without continuous input, the system drifts back toward something worse: a degraded hybrid that combines the inefficiencies of the old system with the added confusion of an incomplete new one. The worst of both worlds, the Enshittificator’s dream.

This is why the change manager’s job does not end at go-live. It barely begins there, as the real work is:

1. Sustaining adoption: making sure people are genuinely using the new process, not working around it.

2. Managing regression: identifying when old behaviors are creeping back and intervening before they solidify.

3. Maintaining the narrative: keeping the ‘why’ alive when the initial energy of the launch has faded.

4. Renewing capability: ensuring that as people rotate, knowledge and behaviors are transferred, not lost.

None of these is glamorous nor goes viral. None of it gets a ribbon-cutting ceremony. But without it, the Enshittificator wins.

The invisible profession

There is a particular cruelty in the change manager’s professional life: their best work is invisible. When the transition goes smoothly, when adoption is high six months after launch, when people have genuinely changed how they work, nobody calls a press conference. Nobody says “look at all the entropy we prevented today.”

But when it goes wrong, when the CRM has 30% active usage rate two years after a seven-figure implementation, when the new process has been quietly abandoned in favor of the old spreadsheet, when the ‘transformed’ organization looks suspiciously like it did before, that’s when everyone looks for someone to blame.

Sound familiar?

Five Powerful Questions for the Change Maker

If the Enshittificator’s strategy is to let entropy do the work, then the change manager’s job is to actively, deliberately, systematically resist it. These are the questions that keep that discipline honest:

1. When the lights go off, who is still in the room? Who has explicit ownership of adoption and adherence once the project team has disbanded? If the answer is unclear, entropy has already started its work.

2. What is the OPEX of this change, and has it been budgeted? Not the launch cost, the sustained cost of maintaining new behaviors, renewing training, measuring usage, and managing drift. If this has not been planned for, the change has not been planned for.

3. What does regression look like in this context, and how will we detect it early? Every system has its own signature for when old patterns are reasserting themselves. What are the leading indicators (not the lagging ones) that will tell us we are drifting?

4. Is the narrative still alive, or has it become a poster on a wall? The energy of a transformation is carried by its story. If leaders have stopped telling that story, if the ‘why’ is no longer spoken aloud, the initiative is already beginning to enshittify, quietly, from the inside.

5. If I disappeared today, would the change survive? A change that depends on a specific person’s energy is not yet a change, it is a performance. The goal is institutionalization: when the new way is simply ‘how we do things here’, regardless of who is watching.

The Enshittificator is patient. He knows that most organizations will do the exciting part and forget the rest. He knows that budgets shrink after launch, that attention moves on, that the project team gets reassigned. He is betting on entropy,… and he usually wins.

The only antidote is a change manager who understands that their real competition is not resistance at the start, it is indifference in the middle and forgetting at the end. Someone who shows up not for the ribbon-cutting, but for the thousand unremarkable days that follow.

Someone who fights entropy, even when nobody is watching.