The blue glare of the LCD projector is vibrating against the beige wall of the conference room, casting a ghostly grid over the CEO’s face. I am sitting in the third row, nursing a throbbing sensation in my left foot because I just stubbed my toe on the heavy iron leg of the mahogany table while trying to find a seat. It is a sharp, jagged pain that keeps me grounded while everyone else in the room is floating in the ethereal clouds of ‘synergy’ and ‘alignment.’

My team, a group of 9 highly specialized engineers who finally learned how to anticipate each other’s moves without speaking, is being sliced into three different departments. We are being ‘optimized,’ which is corporate-speak for being disassembled by people who don’t know how the machine works.

The Illusion of Decisive Action

There is a peculiar kind of arrogance in the belief that you can solve a cultural or strategic deficit by moving names around on a PDF. It’s the ultimate executive avoidance tactic. If the product is failing or the market is shifting in ways you don’t understand, making a hard choice-like admitting a mistake or cutting a vanity project-is painful. It requires vulnerability.

But a reorg? A reorg looks like decisive action. It allows a new VP to walk into a room and say they are ‘shaking things up.’ It creates a flurry of activity that mimics progress while actually stalling every meaningful project for at least 49 days while everyone figures out who signs their expense reports. We are currently in the ‘Strategic Review’ phase, which is essentially a purgatory where all innovation goes to die. Our current project, a diagnostic tool that took 209 days to prototype, is now ‘on hold’ because the new leadership needs to ‘vet it against the redefined priorities.’ They haven’t even looked at the code. They just don’t like that it was born under the previous regime.

The Bridge Analogy: Tension and Counterweights

I think about Ella B.-L. often in these moments. She isn’t a tech executive or a management consultant with a degree from a school that costs $99,999 a year. Ella is a bridge inspector. I met her years ago during a commute when she was examining the structural integrity of a suspension cable 149 feet above the freezing river.

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She explained to me that a bridge is a living thing. It breathes, it expands in the heat, and it contracts in the cold. You can’t just swap out a load-bearing beam because you like the color of a different one. If you disturb the tension without understanding the counterweights, the whole structure begins to develop hairline fractures.

Corporate organizations are the same, yet the people at the top treat them like a game of Jenga. They pull out a foundational manager because they want to ‘flatten’ the hierarchy, and then they wonder why the ceiling starts to sag. Ella would tell them that you can’t optimize a bridge into a boat just by renaming the parts. There is a fundamental reality to how things are built, and that reality doesn’t care about your quarterly PowerPoint deck.

The Incineration of Institutional Memory

What these frequent reorgs ignore is the ‘Invisible Network.’ This is the underground map of how work actually gets done. It’s the relationship between the person in accounting and the lead developer who share a hobby of restoring vintage watches. It’s the senior architect who knows exactly which server is prone to overheating when the external temperature hits 89 degrees.

When you shuffle the deck every 19 months, you incinerate those networks. You force people back into formal channels where everything takes twice as long and costs 49 percent more. You lose the ‘knowing’ that comes from stability. It’s like trying to grow a forest but digging up the saplings every spring to move them to a ‘better’ patch of dirt. Eventually, the trees just stop trying to grow roots. They just wait for the next shovel to hit the ground.

Crave for Stability in a Culture of Flux

I find myself craving something that doesn’t move. Something that isn’t ‘agile’ in the sense that it’s flimsy and prone to collapse at the whim of a mid-level manager looking for a promotion. There is a profound dignity in permanence. When you build something intended to last, you make different choices. You use better materials. You think about the foundation.

This is why I appreciate the philosophy behind

Sola Spaces. There is a focus on creating an environment that provides a sense of enclosure and clarity, a physical foundation that allows for growth without the constant threat of being dismantled. In the corporate world, we are taught that change is the only constant, but they forget to mention that constant change is indistinguishable from chaos. We need spaces, both physical and organizational, that don’t shift under our feet every time a new executive wants to leave their ‘mark.’

The Real Cost: Lost Heart

This obsession with ‘change for the sake of change’ creates a culture of learned helplessness. I see it in the eyes of my colleagues as the CEO continues his presentation. We aren’t listening to the strategy; we are looking for our names. We are scanning the 39 new sub-departments to see if we still have a job that makes sense.

When you tell people their relationships and their work-flows are disposable, they eventually believe you. They stop caring about the outcome and start caring about the optics.

The Paradox of Constant Movement

The irony is that the most successful organizations I’ve ever seen are the ones that are boringly stable. They have the same leaders for 19 years, not 19 months. They value the boring consistency of a well-oiled machine over the flashy ‘disruption’ of a new org chart. They understand that if you want to move fast, you need a solid floor to run on.

I’m still rubbing my toe. The pain is dulling, but it’s still there, a reminder that the world is made of hard objects that don’t care about my desire to move through the room quickly. We are currently being told that the new ‘Agile Pod’ structure will increase our velocity by 29 percent. No one asks what we are moving toward.

The Quiet Dignity of Endurance

Eventually, the meeting ends. We file out of the room like ghosts. I walk past the CEO’s office, and I see him staring at his new chart with a look of pride. He thinks he has built something. I look down at my foot. My toe is starting to bruise, a dark purple mark that will last for a week or two. It’s a small, tangible consequence of moving too fast in a room full of obstacles. If only the consequences of a corporate reorg were so localized. Instead, we’ll spend the next 109 days trying to find the tools we lost in the move, while the next executive prepares the next slide deck, waiting for their chance to draw their own lines in the sand.

What We Need: Structural Integrity

We don’t need more reshuffling. We need a place to stand. We need the kind of structural integrity that you can’t draw on a whiteboard, the kind that only comes when you stop moving long enough to actually build something that stays put.

As I head back to my desk to start the 299 emails required to explain to the new VP why our project shouldn’t be canceled, I find myself looking out the window at the distant bridge where Ella might be working. It’s still there. It hasn’t changed its structure in 49 years. It just does its job, holding the weight, enduring the wind, and providing a steady path for everyone trying to get somewhere else.