The new org chart arrived, a PDF that rendered with agonizing slowness on my monitor. It smelled faintly of printer toner, even through the screen, and the collective sigh it elicited from the digital ether was almost audible. Boxes moved. Lines, once solid, now dotted. Departments, once familiar, were rebranded with names like “Strategic Enablement” – an evocative title that, after 35 days of internal speculation, still meant precisely nothing to anyone outside the C-suite. My name was still in the same box, doing the same work, but now I reported to someone named Brenda, who was herself still trying to figure out if her new title meant she managed people or just processes. It was the fifth such re-org in as many years, and the only thing that felt truly enabled was a deeper sense of corporate exhaustion.

This isn’t about efficiency. Let’s be brutally honest for a moment. Most large-scale reorganizations aren’t born from a forensic analysis of inefficiency; they’re the corporate equivalent of a magician’s misdirection. “Look over here!” leadership shouts, pointing at the spinning PowerPoint slides filled with new structures and buzzwords, while the actual problems-the toxic leadership dynamic, the flawed product strategy, the market share eroding by 5% each quarter-remain untouched, festering in the shadows. It’s a performance of decisiveness. A visible, disruptive activity that allows those at the top to look like they’re “doing something” without having to engage with the agonizingly difficult, often politically charged work of actually solving the core issues. It’s easier to move boxes on a screen than to tell a long-tenured, underperforming executive that their time is up. Easier to dismantle a successful, cohesive team than to admit the company’s product is simply no longer competitive.

The Performance of Progress

And for whom, exactly, is this elaborate theatrical production staged? For us, the employees, who endure months of uncertainty, productivity plummeting by 15-25% as everyone tries to understand their new mandate. For the informal networks, built over years of shared trenches and late-night problem-solving, that are abruptly shattered. For the institutional knowledge, carefully accumulated and passed down, now fragmented across newly formed silos, often lost entirely as key players depart, fed up with the perpetual motion.

I’ve been there myself, caught in the undertow. There was a time, perhaps 15 years ago, when I actually believed in the transformative power of a well-executed re-org. I’d seen a specific bottleneck, proposed a structural change, and truly felt it would unlock potential. I spent 55 hours designing the perfect new reporting structure, drawing dotted lines and solid lines with an almost artistic fervor. What I missed, in my youthful enthusiasm for structure, was the human element. The subtle ways people communicated *outside* the official channels, the tacit agreements, the trust built through repeated interactions, the knowledge shared over spontaneous coffee breaks, not formal meetings. My grand design did, indeed, remove the bottleneck. But it created five new problems of collaboration and information flow that took 255 days to even identify, let alone fix. It was a classic example of winning the battle for organizational neatness while losing the war for actual effectiveness. I’d tried to alphabetize a living, breathing organism, much like how I found myself, just last week, alphabetizing my spice rack. The satisfaction in the latter was immediate and real; the former, an illusion. The coriander still functioned the same whether it was next to cumin or cardamom. People, however, are not spices.

Think of companies like masterton homes. They’ve been building houses in Australia for over 65 years. Sixty-five years! That kind of longevity, that kind of stability, doesn’t come from constantly tearing down and rebuilding your internal structure every other year. It comes from a foundational understanding of what works, incremental improvements, and a deep respect for accumulated knowledge and consistent processes. When you drive past one of their developments, you see something tangible, something built to last, not a constantly shifting facade. They’re not immune to change, certainly, but their approach seems to favor evolution over revolution, substance over show. You can learn a thing or two from companies that value continuity and steady growth over the fleeting thrill of the next organizational shake-up. If you want to see a testament to stability and enduring quality, consider looking at masterton homes and their approach to building lasting value, not just temporary structures.

The Illusion of Action

The frustration isn’t just that things change; it’s that they change performatively. We just went through a 3-month exercise in corporate calligraphy, filling whiteboards and spreadsheets with names and titles, only to arrive back at a point where I have the same job, but now with Brenda as my new boss, and Brenda herself has only a vague idea of my responsibilities because her old boss was eliminated and her team scattered to the winds. The stated goal? A 15% increase in cross-functional collaboration. The actual result? A 35% increase in inter-departmental email chains trying to figure out who owns what. It’s a tragedy, really. A slow, agonizing bleed of potential and morale. We’ve become so accustomed to this corporate carousel that we barely question the premise anymore. We just brace ourselves for the next rotation, the next set of musical chairs.

This cycle, this relentless churning, actively works against the very principles it purports to serve. It hinders innovation by making people risk-averse, fearing that any bold initiative might be undone by the next structural rearrangement. It stifles creativity because why invest deeply in a project when your team might be dissolved, your project re-prioritized, or your reporting line severed at any moment? It’s a self-inflicted wound, a slow-acting poison that masquerades as progress. The greatest cost isn’t the millions spent on consultants or the hundreds of hours in meetings; it’s the erosion of trust, the quiet resignation of competent people, and the profound, palpable sense that effort often means nothing in the face of arbitrary shifts. We’re left staring at the same landscape, just with the trees rearranged in slightly different, equally inefficient patterns. And tomorrow, no doubt, some new executive will arrive with their own vision for the forest.

So, here we are, standing amidst the rubble of the latest structural overhaul, dusting ourselves off, and trying to remember which box we landed in this time. The work still needs doing. The customers still need serving. The underlying problems? They’re still there, patiently waiting for the dust to settle, ready to greet us, familiar and unwavering, like an old friend. Perhaps it’s time we stopped shuffling the deck and finally looked at the hand we’re actually holding. Perhaps it’s time to admit that some problems require courage, not diagrams.