You may already be familiar with the famous business management book that gives advice about moving cheese. This is not that. But I don’t like when people move my cheese. Actually, the issue isn’t always people moving my cheese — I’m not generally married to any one location. It’s more the purposeless moving of my cheese that I find so aggravating.

I was recently talking to someone experiencing a lot of changes in their system, and they remarked that the only constant in life is change. I understand this and most cliches about the inevitability of change, and at different parts of my life I’ve even been the radical change leader.

Change is often necessary. But orchestrating change isn’t entirely about making the shift. You should also be ensuring it’s actually necessary. Otherwise, you’re changing and disrupting for the sake of change itself, not to make things better. Driving in Florida you see plenty of this, with drivers making it a constant guessing game of where they’ll go next, since signaling is such a rare sight.

In general, stable and predictable practices for business are the ideal. People should be able to enter their workspace and understand how to do their jobs and use their tools. A good leader will minimize disruptions to this system unless they’re absolutely necessary.

I’m currently on a task force for a project, and it’s like herding cats. It’s fascinating how we can all agree on a path, take a bathroom break, and when we come back, we’re all somehow traveling down totally different routes. Everyone gets pulled into the new because it’s interesting, and we end up spending even more time trying to find our way back to the good path that we were already on.

Strong leaders keep things consistent except when things must change, as indeed many things must at one time or another. A leader is a protector of systems, serving to keep them normal for as long as possible. When change does come your way, whether it’s clearly signaled or barreling out of nowhere at you like a Florida driver, a leader’s strength is reflected in how they manage their response.

If you’re lucky enough to get a clear signal, then it’s your responsibility to inform your organization of what’s coming and what it will likely mean for them. If it’s a crazy swerve out of nowhere, then all you can do is grab the wheel and hope your brakes are in good shape — that, too, is an important part of leadership.

Even when things are crazy, a leader can’t show how upset or unsettled they are, even when they’re really upset and unsettled. Instead, your job is to provide stability in the chaos. You can empathize with your people about the uncertainty and acknowledge how nuts things are, but you also need to assure them that there’s a path forward and you’re working to find it.

Yes, change is absolutely inevitable. It comes for all businesses and systems and communities. It’s how leaders manage through the process of change that makes them leaders and maintains as much stability as necessary as they proactively lead when change becomes necessary.

Dear reader, you’re clearly a savvy internet user if you’re able to navigate the web well enough to be reading this column. So you’ve probably noticed how you can’t go to a single website today without being prompted to take a survey about your experience or answer questions about the type of content you’d like to see.

It’s become common knowledge that anyone you give your email to will send you solicitations asking for help improving their services or begging you for feedback. I’m a regular user of several business management software platforms, and they’ve all drastically increased the presence of pop-ups to recommend additional services and take my temperature on the tools that I already use.

Everybody is trying to help me by improving my experience. And it’s exhausting. At this point, I spend more time in a day turning off the help balloon in the solicitous platform than I do accomplishing tasks. If I have to access five platforms all day, I can be confident that all five will have “new” information to give me and more than likely several questions to ask.

I get it — a lot of people are trying to improve user experience. Swathes of the job market are dedicated to drip campaigns and collecting feedback from users. And it’s nice to think that we can all give just a little bit of information to improve the tools and services we use every day.

But it’s not just a little attention. It may be a few simple questions for one provider, sure, but when you’re receiving these prompts from ten, twenty, thirty businesses a day, suddenly the time investment isn’t as insignificant as these companies seem to suppose. When everyone wants just a little, I’m disincentivized to give anyone anything at all.

Today’s lesson is one in customer experience and marketing. If you are in a decision-making position over how often your organization solicits customers for feedback, be judicious. There is a lot of noise out there, and adding to the din for a frivolous reason isn’t going to earn you any goodwill from your user base.

If you simply must prompt users about an exciting new (or new to them) feature, stick to one singular, simple recommendation. One retailer that I particularly like, whose name rhymes with Mommy Llama, reaches out to me three times one day to alert me to new offerings and query me for comments on an item that I purchased a decade ago.

I know that we all crave data. Feedback and information can go a long way in helping improve your offerings. But it helps to move with a light touch. Here’s a case study for my argument: a business I’ve been working with wanted a cross section understanding of marketing spend. They solicited input from a bunch of divisions, allowing respondents to group their answers into one of a handful of categories.

While this got them a lot of data, they decided that it would be more useful to have more granular information. Six buckets grew to thirty-two. With six they had a crude understanding of where the marketing budget went. With thirty-two, they had absolutely no idea. Perhaps predictably, people didn’t want to spend time dividing down this information into the smallest possible subsections, so they lumped it all into one bucket to make the task go away.

By trying to get more, they gave themselves substantially less. This doesn’t mean you should throw up your hands and lament how you can never collect data, but it’s a sign to be cautious that you aren’t generating the mindless noise that constantly drones throughout the internet.

You already have a relationship with your customers and clients. Don’t abuse it. Nurture that connection, give more than you get, and be very careful with the mindset that you’re helping your customers when you solicit their opinions.