I’m squinting at a pixelated PowerPoint slide titled “Agile-Forward Ecosystem 2.0” while the cooling fan on my laptop screams like a jet engine, struggling to render a chart that has 49 translucent boxes connected by dotted lines that signify nothing but hope. I’ve force-quit the application seventeen times today. It’s not the software’s fault, really; it’s the weight of the nonsense. The document represents the fourth major structural shift in 19 months, and as I scroll through the names, I realize I am looking at a graveyard of common sense. My name is now under the “Synergy Incubation Unit,” a title so profoundly vacant it feels like a slap in the face of anyone who has ever actually built a physical object with their hands.

We are shuffling deck chairs. The ship is hitting the iceberg-not an iceberg of financial ruin, necessarily, but an iceberg of pure, unadulterated apathy-and the leadership’s response is to make sure the chairs are arranged in a more ‘collaborative’ circle. The belief we are fed in these town halls, usually by a man in a $999 sweater who hasn’t used a spreadsheet in a decade, is that these re-orgs are strategic masterstrokes designed to unlock hidden efficiencies. But anyone who has been in the trenches for more than 129 days knows the truth. Re-orgs are the primary tool for leaders who have run out of ideas but still have a mortgage to pay. It is a dramatic, disruptive maneuver intended to create the vibrating appearance of action without actually addressing why the product is late or why the customers are leaving in droves.

Severing the Invisible Threads

It’s a form of institutional amnesia. Every time you move the reporting lines, you sever the invisible threads that actually make a company function. I’m talking about the informal networks. The fact that I know Sarah in Accounting can bypass a 9-day approval process if I bring her a specific type of herbal tea. Or the way the engineering team knows that the ‘Legacy Server’ isn’t really legacy-it’s the only thing holding the entire database together, and you shouldn’t touch it after 4:59 PM on a Friday. When you re-org, Sarah is moved to ‘Strategic Resource Management’ and the engineering team is ‘integrated’ into a cross-functional pod. The tea doesn’t work anymore. The server crashes. The history is deleted.

I spent last weekend talking to Isla K., a soil conservationist who looks at the world through the lens of deep-rooted systems rather than top-down hierarchies. We were standing in a field that looked, to my untrained eye, like a mess of weeds. She explained to me that the problem with modern industrial farming is the same as the problem with modern corporate management: constant tilling. If you keep turning the soil every few months, you destroy the mycorrhizal fungi. You break the networks that allow plants to share nutrients and resist disease. You’re left with dirt that looks clean and organized from a distance but is biologically dead.

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You can’t just move the dirt around and expect a forest. The roots need time to find each other.

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In the corporate world, we are the fungi. We are the ones creating the underground connections that keep the project alive despite the leadership’s best efforts to kill it with ‘process optimization.’ When a VP decides they need to ‘make their mark,’ they pick up the plow. They till the organization. They move the 19 developers from the basement to the third floor, change their manager to someone who previously worked in supply chain, and call it ‘Internal Knowledge Cross-Pollination.’ What actually happens is that the developers spend the next 29 weeks trying to figure out where the coffee machine is and who has the admin rights to the GitHub repository.

I’ve been guilty of this myself, once. Years ago, I thought a restructuring would solve my team’s communication issues. I spent weeks drawing lines, thinking I was an architect of human potential. I wasn’t. I was just a guy with a Sharpie avoiding the fact that two of my lead designers hated each other. The re-org didn’t make them friends; it just meant they now ignored each other in a different Slack channel. It was a cowardly way to avoid a difficult conversation. Most re-orgs are exactly that: a coward’s way of avoiding the reality of failed strategy or interpersonal friction. If the strategy isn’t working, don’t change the strategy-just change who reports to whom and hope the confusion masks the lack of growth for another two quarters.

This cycle of constant upheaval creates a profound sense of burnout that isn’t about the workload. It’s about the futility. People can work 59 hours a week if they feel like they are building something that will last. But when you know that the team you’re building today will be dissolved in 18 months, you stop investing. You stop building the deep roots. You become a transient in your own career, keeping your resume updated and your emotional walls high. You look for stability wherever you can find it, usually outside the walls of your own company. You start to value the things that don’t change, the services that remain consistent, and the tools that actually perform the task they were designed for without trying to ‘disrupt’ your entire workflow every time there’s a full moon.

What People Value When Stability Fails

There is a massive cost to this that never shows up on a P&L statement. It’s the cost of the ‘lost half-year.’ Every re-org effectively deletes six months of productivity. The first two months are spent in a state of anxious speculation (the pre-org). The next two are spent in the chaos of the transition (the mid-org). The final two are spent trying to figure out what the new expectations are (the post-org). By the time the dust settles and people start actually working again, it’s almost time for the next announcement. It is a perpetual state of starting over. We are obsessed with the ‘new’ at the expense of the ‘effective.’ We value the ‘pivot’ more than the ‘perseverance.’

I’ve started looking at companies differently lately. I’m no longer impressed by the ones that are constantly announcing new ‘transformation initiatives.’ I’m impressed by the ones that have had the same core structure for a decade. The ones where the people in the room actually know each other’s names and the history of the mistakes they’ve made together. There is a quiet power in consistency. It’s why people gravitate toward a reliable

Push Store

experience when the rest of their professional life is a shifting mosaic of meaningless titles. You want the thing to work. You want the transaction to be simple. You want to know that the person on the other end isn’t going to be ‘re-aligned’ into a different department by Tuesday afternoon.

I remember a specific meeting where a senior director spent 49 minutes explaining why ‘de-siloing’ the creative department was the only way to save the company. He had a laser pointer and a very expensive haircut. He talked about ‘fluidity’ and ‘organic growth’ as if he were Isla K. tending to her fields. But he wasn’t tending; he was tilling. He was breaking the very silos that allowed the creatives to focus and do their best work. Two years later, that director was gone, the company had reverted to its original structure, and the creative team had lost half its senior talent. The ‘efficiency’ gained was a negative number. We spent $1009 on new desk nameplates that were eventually thrown in the trash.

Isla told me that the most successful ecosystems are the ones that are left alone long enough to develop a memory. The soil remembers the rain. The trees remember the wind. In a company, the memory is held in the people who have seen the cycles, who know why the 2019 initiative failed and why we shouldn’t try it again. But if you keep shuffling the deck, you erase the memory. You end up making the same mistakes over and over, just with different team names. You become a company that is perpetually 19 months old, no matter how long you’ve been in business.

The Plea for Roots

I’m tired of the shuffling. I’m tired of being a ‘resource’ that gets ‘leveraged’ into a ‘vertical.’ I want to be a human being who works with other human beings to solve actual problems. I want to build roots. I think about that force-quit application, the seventeenth time I’ve seen the spinning wheel of death today, and I realize it’s a perfect metaphor. We are trying to run too many conflicting programs on an architecture that was never designed for this level of unnecessary complexity. We need to stop adding layers. We need to stop drawing lines. We need to stop tilling the soil and let the roots grow.

If your organization is currently undergoing its third ‘strategic alignment’ in two years, take a look around. Are the problems being solved, or are they just being renamed? Is the efficiency increasing, or is everyone just busier with the act of being reorganized? We’ve become so obsessed with the ‘architecture’ of the company that we’ve forgotten the purpose of the work. We are building the most sophisticated deck-chair arrangement in the history of the North Atlantic, and the water is already at our ankles. Does it really matter if your new title is ‘Senior Orchestrator of Collaborative Flux’ if the ship is still pointed at the ice?