The hum of the projector is the only sound. A low, electronic thrum that feels like it’s vibrating right behind your eyeballs. Up on the screen, the slide glows with a terrifying constellation of boxes and lines, a web of names and new titles that supposedly represents the future. Our future. For the next six months, the most common phrase uttered in every meeting, every chat, will be, “Who handles that now?”

A Collective Hallucination

We call it a reorganization, which sounds so clean and intentional. It’s not. It’s a collective hallucination we’ve all agreed to participate in. A grand gesture that mistakes motion for progress. The new Senior Vice President of Synergistic Futures, someone none of us had met 48 days ago, is clicking through the slides, their voice a smooth monotone of corporate certainty. They use words like ‘alignment’ and ‘streamlining’ and ’empowerment.’ But what we all see is a shuffling. A grand, expensive, time-consuming shuffling that will consume the next two quarters in administrative chaos only to land us exactly where we started: doing the same work, with the same underlying problems, but now with a new manager we have to build rapport with from zero.

This isn’t cynicism, though I admit it sounds like it. It’s scar tissue. The truth about the grand corporate reorg is that it is almost never a tool for operational optimization. It is a political instrument. It is the fastest way for new leadership to assert authority, to break existing loyalties, to reward allies with new fiefdoms, and to create the immediate, visible appearance of decisive action. It’s a fireworks display designed to distract everyone from the fact that the foundations of the building are quietly cracking. Productivity doesn’t just dip; it plummets. We once measured it. For the 8 months following our last ‘realignment,’ project velocity dropped by a factor of three. We spent more time updating email lists and figuring out new approval chains than actually building anything.

The Splinter in the Hand

I was dealing with a splinter in my thumb yesterday. A tiny, almost invisible sliver of wood, but it was making its presence known with a sharp, insistent pain every time I closed my hand. I could have put a bandage on it. It would have hidden the problem, maybe even cushioned the pressure a bit. A reorg is a fancy, enterprise-grade bandage. It’s a Powerpoint deck that costs $878,000 in consultant fees and lost productivity. It looks like a solution. But underneath, the splinter is still there.

Changing the lines on a chart does nothing to fix those things.

Organizations are Living Systems

My friend Aisha C.M. trains therapy animals, mostly dogs, for hospitals and schools. I was telling her about the latest corporate reshuffle, and she just laughed. She said,

“You can’t make a pack of anxious dogs calm by redesigning their kennels. You can give them new name tags, move the German Shepherd next to the Golden Retriever, call them the ‘Canine Comfort Brigade’ instead of ‘The Dog Zone,’ but you haven’t changed a thing.”

She told me the real work is in the daily practice. The trust-building exercises. Understanding the deep-seated fear in the rescue who flinches at loud noises. It’s about creating psychological safety for the pack, not rearranging the architecture around them.

🐾

Organizations are living systems, not spreadsheets. They are packs of humans, with all our weird, wonderful, and frustrating dynamics.

Corporate Fast Fashion

I have to admit, I once fell into the same trap. Years ago, I was put in charge of a small team of 8 people. I was young, ambitious, and I’d just read a book on organizational design. I was convinced our structure was the problem. So, I did my own little reorg. I drew the boxes. I created two new “squads” with cool names. I presented it in a team meeting, feeling incredibly strategic and decisive. And for about two weeks, it seemed to work. Then, the old patterns started to re-emerge. The same two people who had trouble communicating before were still not communicating; they just had different titles. The workflow bottleneck I thought I’d designed away was still there, it just had a new name. After 8 weeks, the invisible, informal structure of how work actually got done had completely reasserted itself over my beautiful, logical diagram. I had just created a layer of bureaucratic confusion on top of the real issue, which was a fundamental disagreement on process between two senior members. I put a bandage on a splinter.

We treat these reorgs like they’re disposable. They’re corporate fast fashion, designed to look good for a season and then be replaced by the next trend in 18 months. There’s a profound lack of craftsmanship. We’re willing to spend fortunes on ephemeral structures while the actual work, the product, the service, often suffers from neglect. It’s a strange contradiction, isn’t it? We obsess over the quality of the things we produce for the outside world. We want our work to be durable, reliable, something that lasts. We want to build things with care, whether it’s a software platform or a bridge or even crafting Baby girl clothes that are meant to be cherished and passed down. But the very human systems we use to create these things? We treat them like disposable prototypes, constantly breaking them down and starting over.

The Real Work Ahead

Now, am I saying that a company’s structure should never change? No. Sometimes, it must. When a company of 8,000 people merges with another of 28,000, you absolutely need a new map. A startup that grows from 8 to 238 people cannot operate on the same flat, informal basis. The structure has to evolve. But here’s the critical distinction: in those rare, legitimate cases, the new org chart is not the solution. It is the starting pistol for the real work. The work of merging cultures. The work of defining new processes. The work of building trust between teams that were, until recently, competitors. The chart is the first, and least important, step of a multi-year journey. Too many leaders treat it as the finish line. They unveil the chart, take a victory lap, and wonder why everything is still broken a year later.

The alternative is frustratingly simple and painfully slow. It’s not a grand, all-hands announcement. It’s a series of small, difficult conversations. It’s fixing one broken process at a time. It’s giving a team a clear, ambitious goal and then ruthlessly removing the organizational friction that gets in their way. It’s coaching a manager on how to give better feedback. It’s earning trust through consistency and transparency, not through reshuffling names in a presentation. It’s the unglamorous, patient work of pulling out the splinters, one by one, until the hand can finally do its job without that sharp, distracting pain.