The blue light from the 81st slide is vibrating against the back of my retinas, a neon web of solid and dotted lines that supposedly represents our collective future. It is 10:01 AM on a Tuesday, and we are being told, for the 41st time in my tenure, that we are being ‘aligned.’ The presenter, a man whose smile has the practiced rigidity of a porcelain doll, is explaining how the transition from a vertical reporting structure to a hybrid-matrix-circular-nexus will unlock synergies we didn’t know we possessed. I look around the room. There are 21 people in the front row, all nodding with a rhythmic desperation, as if they can keep their jobs through sheer physical synchronization with the executive’s cadence.
We all know what this is. It is not strategy. It is not efficiency. It is the corporate version of a dog marking its territory, only instead of urine, they use Calibri font and arrows that point toward an inevitable middle-management graveyard. This is about power. A new Senior Vice President has arrived, and to justify the $501,000 salary and the relocation package, they must dismantle the architecture of their predecessor. If they leave the boxes where they are, they are merely stewards. If they move the boxes, they are ‘architects of change.’
The New Hierarchy and Localized Pain
For the next 21 days, no one will actually do any work. We will spend our hours updating LinkedIn headers, hovering over the shared drive wondering where the ‘Invoices’ folder went, and engaging in the delicate, high-stakes diplomacy of the new kitchen hierarchy. My title has changed from ‘Senior Digital Strategist’ to ‘Principal Experience Lead.’ I am doing the exact same thing I did yesterday-processing spreadsheets that no one reads-but now I report to a man named Marcus who is based in a different time zone and seems to believe that ‘iterative’ is a noun.
JAR SEALED
The jar remains sealed. That is the re-org in a nutshell: a massive expenditure of friction, a significant amount of localized pain, and at the end of the day, the jar remains sealed.
We are straining against the lid of a culture that refuses to budge, convinced that if we just change our grip, the vinegar will somehow turn into wine.
The Sourdough Standard
June Z., a third-shift baker I know who works the 11:01 PM to 7:01 AM slot at the sourdough place on 5th, doesn’t have this problem. I saw her last week as she was coming off her shift, her forearms dusted with flour, looking at a corporate office building with a kind of detached pity. She deals in physical realities. If the yeast doesn’t rise, she doesn’t rename the dough; she checks the temperature. She doesn’t draw a diagram showing how the salt reports to the flour. She understands that the quality of the bread is a result of time, heat, and the integrity of the ingredients. In her world, you can’t re-organize a croissant into being delicious. It either is, or it isn’t.
The Pathology of ‘New’
But in the climate-controlled purgatory of the modern office, we believe we can rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and call it a breakthrough in nautical buoyancy. We are obsessed with the ‘new.’ We have a pathological fear of the settled, the aged, and the proven. We treat a department like a software update-buggy, forced, and requiring a reboot every six months. We have lost the ability to value things that stay the same because staying the same looks like stagnation to a shareholder who only understands the upward slope of a line.
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The boxes change, but the ghosts in the machine remain the same.
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from learning a new set of acronyms for old problems. It’s like being forced to learn a new language just to describe the fact that the roof is leaking. When the ‘Content Excellence Hub’ becomes the ‘Storytelling Engine,’ the leak doesn’t stop. The water still drips into the same plastic bucket, but now we have to file a ticket with the ‘Infrastructure Harmony Group’ instead of the maintenance guy. It is a shell game played with human capital. The goal is to keep the ball moving so fast that no one notices the table is empty.
The Power of the Unreorganized Barrel
This is why we find ourselves longing for something that doesn’t change every time a new executive needs to prove they exist. We crave the permanent. We want the things that have been sitting in the dark, getting better, while we were busy renaming our Slack channels. There is a reason people find solace in legacies, in the deep, charred history of Old Rip Van Winkle 10 Year Old where the process hasn’t changed for generations. You don’t re-org a barrel. You don’t tell the oak to ‘pivot’ to a new flavor profile. You trust the wood, the grain, and the slow, agonizing crawl of the clock. It’s the antithesis of the 10:01 AM all-hands meeting. It is a refusal to move the boxes just for the sake of the movement.
The Irony of ‘Breaking Silos’
I watched Marcus, my new boss, try to explain our ‘new North Star’ on a Zoom call that lasted 101 minutes. He used a graphic that looked like a kaleidoscope having a seizure. He spoke about ‘breaking down silos,’ oblivious to the fact that he was currently building 11 new ones with every sentence. The irony is that re-orgs are the ultimate silo-builders. They create a climate of fear where everyone huddles in their new, poorly-defined territories, guarding their remaining resources like scavengers in a wasteland. You don’t collaborate when you don’t know if your desk will be there on Monday. You hide. You document. You wait for the next earthquake to move the furniture again.
The Re-Org Efficiency Metrics
Operational Success
Operational Success
I think back to the pickle jar. If I had spent that energy actually cooking something, I might have had a meal. Instead, I have a sore hand and a closed jar. The corporate world is full of sore hands. We are a culture of high-functioning friction. We mistake the heat of our own frustration for the fire of productivity. We are so busy ‘optimizing’ the structure that we have forgotten how to perform the function.
The Cost of Consultancy
Last year, they spent $2,001,001 on a consultancy firm to tell us that we needed more ‘cross-functional transparency.’ The result was a new software platform that 91 percent of the staff refuses to use because it takes 11 clicks to send a single message. That’s the ‘efficiency’ we bought. It’s a beautiful, expensive maze that leads nowhere. But the consultants got their fee, the SVP got a promotion for ‘digital transformation,’ and the rest of us just got more tired.
What would happen if we just… stopped? What if we decided that the current reporting lines were ‘good enough’ and spent those hundreds of hours actually talking to customers? What if we valued the institutional knowledge of the person who has been in the same box for 21 years instead of trying to ‘disrupt’ their workflow? We treat tenure like a disease to be cured by a fresh perspective, not realizing that the fresh perspective often doesn’t know where the fire extinguishers are kept.
The Quiet Dignity of Staying Still
There is a quiet dignity in the things that remain. There is a power in the distillery that doesn’t change its recipe because a new marketing director watched a TED talk. There is a soul in June’s 3:01 AM loaves that comes from a lack of ‘innovation.’ The world is moving faster and faster, a blur of re-brands and re-orgs and re-alignments, but the things that actually sustain us are the things that have the courage to stand still.