The laser pointer is trembling. It is a tiny, jittery crimson dot dancing across a PowerPoint slide that cost $20,003 to produce, and Bill, our CEO, is currently using it to circle a box that didn’t exist 23 minutes ago. I am sitting in the third row, the seat springs poking into my left thigh, wondering if anyone else can hear the high-pitched whine of the projector. It sounds like a chorus of 103 mosquitoes trapped in a chrome box. Bill is talking about ‘synergistic alignment’ and ‘flattening the hierarchy,’ but all I see is a digital game of Tetris where the blocks never actually fit. My hands are still slightly clammy from the three cups of lukewarm coffee I drank while waiting for this ‘town hall’ to begin.

The Exhaustion of Instability

We are currently 13 minutes into Bill’s presentation, and the energy in the room is dropping faster than the stock price did last Tuesday. I can see the heads of the middle managers nodding, but it’s not agreement; it’s a rhythmic, subconscious defense mechanism. They are calculating how many of their 53 direct reports will quit because their new manager is a guy named Todd who thinks ‘Agile’ is a personality trait rather than a methodology. Re-orgs are the ultimate avoidance tactic. It is significantly easier to draw a new diagram than it is to sit down with two people who hate each other and force them to solve a problem. It’s easier to rename the ‘Customer Success Department’ to ‘Client Experience Squad’ than it is to actually fix the bug in the software that has been causing 73% of the complaints since January.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with corporate volatility. It’s a dull ache in the base of the skull. I see it every day in my training sessions. People stop investing in their coworkers. Why bother learning how Sarah likes her data formatted if Sarah is going to be ‘re-deployed’ to the European division in 23 weeks? We become islands. We stop building bridges because the ground keeps shifting. I’ve even seen executives start exploring more holistic approaches to their mounting health issues, seeking out places like White Rock Naturopathic just to deal with the chronic inflammation that comes from living in a state of permanent ‘transition.’ It’s hard to lead a team when your own nervous system is vibrating at the frequency of a tuning fork.

The Butterfly Effect Misapplied

Bill is now showing a slide called ‘The Butterfly Effect.’ He thinks he’s being poetic. He’s suggesting that a small change in reporting lines will lead to a massive increase in revenue. He’s wrong. In a corporate setting, the butterfly effect usually means that a small change in the org chart leads to 433 people spending their entire afternoon updating their LinkedIn profiles instead of working. The amount of lost productivity during a re-org is staggering. I’ve calculated that for every hour spent discussing a new structure, 3 hours of actual work are lost to gossip, anxiety, and the general paralysis that comes from not knowing who your boss is.

Action is the mask of the uncertain.

Culture vs. Diagrams

Is there a better way? Perhaps. But it involves the one thing corporate leaders hate more than anything else: patience. It involves looking at processes that have been broken for 3 years and actually doing the boring, unglamorous work of fixing them. It involves culture, which you can’t draw with a laser pointer. Culture is what happens when the CEO isn’t in the room. You can’t re-org your way into trust. You can’t ‘pivot’ your way into competence. We keep trying to solve software problems with hardware solutions. The ‘hardware’ is the org chart. The ‘software’ is the way people actually talk to each other, the way they share (or hoard) information, and the way they feel when they walk through the door at 8:03 AM.

Bill is wrapping up. He asks if there are any questions. The silence in the room is heavy, a thick blanket of 103 unasked questions. Nobody wants to be the one to point out that we did this exact same thing in 2013 and it resulted in a 13% decrease in employee engagement. We all just stare at the screen. I find myself looking at a smudge on the lens of the projector. It’s shaped a bit like a cloud, or maybe a very sad potato. I realize that I’ve spent the last 43 minutes thinking about everything except what Bill was saying. And I’m the consultant. Imagine how the actual employees feel.

The Aftermath and The Illusion

We will go back to our desks. We will spend the next 3 days trying to figure out which Slack channels are now obsolete. We will have 13 ‘sync’ meetings to discuss the new ‘workflow.’ And in 23 months, another executive will stand at the front of this room with a different laser pointer and a different set of boxes. They will call it ‘Evolution’ or ‘Genesis’ or ‘The Great Leap Forward.’ And I will probably be there, in the third row, wondering if I remembered to buy the 3-ply paper towels. The merry-go-round never stops; it just changes its tune. We aren’t moving forward; we’re just dizzy. The real work-the hard, messy, human work-is still waiting for us, buried under a pile of colorful boxes that don’t mean a thing.