12 February 2026 · René de Baaij
Structures, processes and routines are continually redesigned. Thanks to technology, this happens quickly and efficiently. Often through pre-configured systems, set up by capable experts who genuinely mean well for the organisation.
And yet it often leaves us, the people within that organisation, bewildered and powerless.
We experience all of this as overwhelming and intimidating, even though we rarely show it. We cooperate loyally, contribute when asked, and preach the new gospel outwardly. But processing takes longer than the change itself. Our logics in word, image and action have not yet caught up with what has already changed in fact. We experience a sense of inadequacy, feel frustration, and develop a longing for how things used to be, even when we know that longing is not realistic.
Eventually this causes friction and tension. Visible in subversive behaviour, in unspoken distrust, in gossip and backbiting that nobody names out loud as a symptom, even though it is exactly that.
These become collective emotions that take root in an organisation's collective memory and behaviour, until we find it normal not to trust each other. Until we find it ordinary to speak ill of one another. Until we find it customary to manipulate and bargain, even when this otherwise normal human behaviour goes so far that it no longer contributes to the organisation's functioning but actively damages it.
When the lubricant of the informal becomes the poison in our system, it also becomes the poison in our own working existence.
Absorbing and processing that poison can, or even must, be a role for the leaders within an organisation. Unfortunately, the opposite is equally true: leaders can themselves, intentionally or not, feed the undercurrent of grief and anger, simply by avoiding what is actually happening just as much as anyone else.
But more is possible. By bringing the conversation back into the organisation, we can search for what is hindering us and what gives us energy again. We can examine our own logics and bring them in line with the processes and structures already in place, instead of clinging to logics that no longer match the actual situation. We can bridge oppositions, bring people together, and create connections that the change itself had caused to be lost.
Everything we previously used to be toxic, we can also use to detoxify. We gossip until we see what helps us and what does not, and then make that discussable rather than letting it simmer. We name our distrust so we can develop trust, instead of letting distrust grow in silence. And we examine our own behaviour to turn undermining elements into informal effectiveness, the positive counterpart of what at first seemed destructive.
This does not happen on its own. It demands commitment, endurance, respect for those involved, and positivity.
It calls for leadership that seeks balance between the hard reality of our processes and systems, and the soft, stubborn reality of our thinking and doing. Those two realities rarely run in sync on their own, especially not in periods of rapid change, and it is precisely that mismatch that feeds anger and grief when it goes unnamed.
Learning together begins with a good conversation, not with a new policy document or an extra training session. Learning together is an antidote, not because it undoes the change, but because it gives back the room to genuinely process the change, rather than merely accepting it on the surface while the poison continues to spread underneath.
Notes for those who wish to read further:
- Christina Maslach, Burnout: The Cost of Caring (1982, Prentice Hall). On emotional exhaustion as a result of long-unprocessed tension within organisations.
- Chris Argyris & Donald Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (1978, Addison-Wesley). On the gap between an organisation's stated theory and the practice actually lived, and the friction that arises from it.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (1969, Macmillan). Classic work on grief processing, relevant to understanding collective grief during organisational change.
- Amy C. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (2018, Wiley). On psychological safety as a precondition for making distrust and friction discussable before they take hold.
- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990, Doubleday). On how organisations build learning capacity through collective reflection on what is actually happening, rather than merely reacting to symptoms.