Designing for the Future Self Is a Change Management Problem

Most change initiatives fail for a simple reason: they assume people will remain capable in the same ways over time.

In reality, human capacity changes. Energy fluctuates. Attention narrows. Vision, mobility, and cognitive load shift. Disability, temporary or permanent, enters the picture gradually or suddenly.

When systems don’t account for this, the burden of adaptation falls on individuals rather than on design.

This pattern shows up across sectors.

Training delivered once and expected to last indefinitely.

Products that become harder to use the longer someone relies on them. Services that demand increasing effort as people’s capacity decreases.

These failures are rarely immediate. They appear slowly, through workarounds, disengagement, burnout, and quiet exclusion.

Designing for the future self reframes this problem at a systems level. It treats time as a core condition and continuity as a leadership responsibility. The question shifts from “Did we implement the change?” to “Can this be sustained by real people over time?”

This is where change management often breaks down.

Organizations optimize for launch, not maintenance. They measure adoption at a moment in time, not durability across years. Accessibility and inclusion are treated as requirements to satisfy, rather than conditions that shape how systems must be governed.

With accessibility regulation now in effect in multiple regions, organizations are being required to formalize what has long been true: systems must continue to work as people change.

Designing for the future self is not about predicting every scenario. It is about accepting human variability as a baseline condition and building systems resilient enough to accommodate it.

Across sectors, this shift is becoming unavoidable, not because it’s ethical, but because it’s operational.