• First, the backlash and the backlash-to-the-backlash regarding Callaway Golf and media influencer group Good Good Golf’s ad depicting a man shoving a woman to the ground for touching his golf clubs.

• Also, Target’s decision as a purportedly Serious Organization to release this Halloween costume with racist roots.

• And LoveSac’s response to a comedian who posted about receiving a deconstructed couch. The CEO responded by posting an offer to send women’s gardening gloves, “size small,” as a means of mocking his masculinity.

(Okay, I have to say it, right? I have to say as a humanist that an “I don’t see the big deal” response to any of these situations is a great indication of the state of both individual and collective humanities education. I’m convinced that one of the most marketable and valuable intelligences is quickly becoming CONTEXTUAL LITERACY, and I am hoping orgs are paying attention. Read. The. Room.)

Two points I’ll make quickly before turning to today’s related content: One is that the lead actor in the Callaway ad is the Good Good Golf co-founder, which we’ll want to keep in mind because today’s discussion is about power in orgs.

The other point is that I briefly saw an argument suggesting that none of these decisions is an accident, that the brands mean to speak to their base. For the Callaway ad, the aged 18-34 mansophere, for example, but I struggle to believe that any of these moves are deliberate. To deliberately isolate a portion of ANY potential consumer base right now would be….a choice. And I don’t think it was deliberate or strategic; I think other dynamics were at play here.

Any time a public problem occurs in an organization, I am always thinking about the voices that told ‘em….or who wanted to. We always have org members who witness the conversations and decision points in the trajectories situations just like these and who knew it was gonna be bad. I am always wondering two things about people who see the road ahead with clarity:

• Did you say something and those with power ignored you/your feedback?

• Did you NOT say something, and if not, why not?

It’s the latter question that has occupied my mind lately as I work to make sense of the organizational dynamics that produce these outcomes (we can’t ignore the impact of eliminating DEI efforts in organizations, for one thing), and as I contemplate why good people may keep their mouths shut, why people with power don’t always heed good warnings, and the organizational conditions that may suppress dissent, I keep coming back to another question I grappled with in a piece I wrote about thin authority, one that invokes the potentially dramatic condition of authoritarianism:

What happens when authoritarian habits become ordinary organizational habits?

Authoritarianism seems to be having a moment.

We can see it in global politics, in public discourse, and increasingly in institutions. Organizations are not immune to those dynamics, and one concept I kept returning to this summer comes from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

They call it micro-fascism, which sounds dramatic, I know, but it’s supposed to because they aren’t talking only about governments or dictators; they’re interested in the smaller ways people begin organizing themselves around certainty, obedience, conformity, exclusion, and control. More importantly, they’re interested in the uncomfortable possibility that people can become invested in, reproduce, and even desire systems that constrain them.

In this view, authoritarianism doesn’t simply arrive from the top and impose itself on everyone below but finds a home in ordinary relationships and ordinary habits well before anyone would recognize an organization as authoritarian. When many people hear the word authoritarian in a workplace context, they probably picture a domineering executive or a micromanaging supervisor. Those people certainly exist, as we discussed previously in our gaslighting episode. But micro-fascism asks us to look beyond them and confront a harder question: What are the small organizational habits that make authoritarianism feel normal?

The answers are often quite ordinary, and you can see them when a difficult question gets labeled “negativity.” You can see an answer when disagreement becomes evidence that someone is not a “team player.” Or when curiosity looks or feels like resistance, and questioning a decision gets interpreted as undermining.

None of this necessarily begins with some grand authoritarian plan but may begin because disagreement is inconvenient or inefficient and the organization is under pressure, or leaders are exhausted, or because everyone wants a decision made and would very much like to stop talking about it. It also begins because uncertainty is uncomfortable.

Over time, people begin noticing which questions are welcome and which are dangerous. They learn when to speak and, more importantly, when not to. Eventually, the organization mistakes silence for alignment, and consensus stops being the outcome of robust analysis and starts becoming something closer to a requirement for organizational survival. People edit themselves before speaking. Problems that might have been identified early arrive much later because reality has to travel through layers of social risk before anyone is willing to say it out loud. Innovation suffers for the same reason: People learn which ideas are safe, and safe ideas are not typically the ones driving meaningful change.

This is where I think Deleuze and Guattari are especially useful because they push the argument beyond the familiar idea that bad leaders create bad organizations. Their argument asks us to consider why people participate in these systems at all, and one answer is that authoritarian arrangements offer something people desperately want: Certainty.

We are living and working in highly uncertain times. Organizations are dealing with financial pressure, political instability, technological disruption, changing expectations, shifting labor markets, and the general sense that whatever worked five years ago may not work five years from now. It may not work five months from now.

Uncertainty is cognitively expensive, and it is much easier to believe that someone at the top has the answer than to wrestle collectively with ambiguity. It feels efficient to rally behind one narrative, and it can feel reassuring to interpret criticism as negativity rather than ask whether the critic might be seeing something everyone else has missed. Our brains are often uncomfortable with unresolved uncertainty, and we are remarkably willing to attach ourselves to a plausible explanation before we have enough evidence to know whether it’s correct.

Organizations can begin reproducing those same tendencies while genuinely believing they are building healthy culture. They celebrate alignment when they have actually created conformity, reward loyalty more than honesty, value confidence more than curiosity, and confuse agreement with trust. Eventually, they can even begin believing that how things look matters more than how things are.

That distinction is important here because brittle organizations are often quite good at presentation. Everything appears calm. Meanwhile, information is moving more slowly because people have learned to sanitize it before sending it upward. The organization looks stable right up until reality stops cooperating.

And reality, at the moment, is not especially cooperative.

We are moving through a period of extraordinary uncertainty, and I don’t think the organizations that survive it will be the ones most successful at maintaining the appearance of certainty. They will be the ones capable of taking in more information, revising assumptions quickly, tolerating disagreement, and changing course when conditions demand it.

Brittle organizations do the opposite. They reduce uncertainty by reducing what can be said about it. They narrow the range of acceptable interpretations, reward people who reinforce the prevailing story, and gradually lose access to information that might complicate it. That can create the appearance of stability for a while, though it also makes adaptation harder because the organization has weakened its own capacity to notice what is changing.

The danger, then, is beyond simply that these cultures are unpleasant places to work though that’s true, often. More significantly, they become less capable of learning at exactly the time when learning matters most. They become incapable of recognizing that they’re putting legs on a bad idea.

We also need to make a power distinction here because the responsibility is not evenly distributed. Leaders have disproportionate influence over these dynamics because they control many of the rewards and consequences attached to speaking. A leader who punishes disagreement, even subtly, can teach an organization very quickly which truths are safe to tell. At the same time, organizational members can participate in sustaining the culture that emerges. We remain silent and wait for someone else to ask the difficult question. We reward certainty over inquiry, confuse confidence with competence, distance ourselves from the colleague who says the uncomfortable thing because association suddenly feels risky, or simply look away when someone else absorbs the social cost of speaking.

Not everyone has equal responsibility or equal power in this dynamic, so let’s be clear about that: Micro-fascism is not only something leaders do to organizations; it can become something organizations collectively learn how to reproduce.

So what do we do?

If you are an organizational member, one place to start is by paying attention to your own self-censorship and asking why it is happening. Am I staying quiet because I changed my mind, or because speaking has become too expensive? Those are very different reasons. It is also worth paying attention to what happens when someone else raises a difficult question. You do not have to agree with them to support their right to ask it. Organizations need people willing to test reality before reality tests everyone else.

If you are a leader, pay close attention to your emotional response when someone challenges your thinking. Is your first instinct curiosity or correction? Do questions feel like information or insubordination? Can someone disagree with you without having to manage your reaction afterward? Most importantly, can someone publicly change your mind without paying a social price for doing so? Every answer to those questions teaches people what kind of truth it is safe to tell you.

This is also why I keep coming back to trust. Trust and authoritarianism solve the same organizational problem in opposite ways because both, in their own way, reduce uncertainty. Authoritarianism reduces it by narrowing reality until only one version is allowed to exist. Trust reduces it by allowing more reality into the room. One depends on control; the other depends on learning. Trust says that we can tolerate disagreement because we believe the system and the relationships inside it are strong enough to withstand it. Authoritarianism says that disagreement itself is the threat.

That distinction is incredibly important during unstable periods because adaptation depends on access to reality. An organization cannot adjust to changing conditions if people are afraid to describe those conditions accurately. It cannot learn quickly if disagreement is treated as disloyalty, and it cannot innovate if everyone is busy determining which answer is safest before deciding which answer is true. The organizations that navigate uncertainty well will be the ones able to absorb contradiction without treating it as crisis, hear inconvenient information without punishing the messenger, and revise their assumptions without experiencing revision as humiliation.

And the Crash-Outs?

Every meeting, every difficult conversation, and every decision teaches people which model they are actually living within, and most of the time we probably don’t even notice the lesson being taught. Someone raises a concern and watches what happens next. Someone notices a downstream problem and decides whether it is worth mentioning. Someone else watches that person mention it and learns something from the response. Over time, an organization builds a remarkably sophisticated informal curriculum around which truths are safe to tell.

…which brings me back to those organizational crash-outs I mentioned at the beginning.

Whenever one of these stories breaks, we understandably focus on the thing that made it into public view: The ad, the product, the social media response, the inexplicable decision that leaves thousands of strangers collectively asking, “How did nobody see this coming?” But that’s not the question that interests me most.

I want to know who did see it coming.

Somewhere along the trajectory from idea to execution, was there a person who looked at the room and thought, This is going to go badly? Did someone say it? Was the concern taken seriously? Was it dismissed as overthinking, negativity, lack of humor, resistance, or failure to understand the larger strategy? Or, perhaps more troublingly, had the organization already taught its people enough about the cost of inconvenient truth that nobody bothered saying anything at all?

Obviously, we can’t know the internal histories behind every public organizational mistake, and I don’t want to invent them. The point is that these outcomes give us an opportunity to ask better questions about our own organizations. By the time a bad decision becomes a public relations problem, the interesting organizational story may have happened weeks or months earlier, in rooms we will never see, when someone had information or a perspective that could have altered the trajectory and the organization either could or could not hear it.

As many of us head toward a new semester, a new school year, Q4, or simply another season of organizational life, that may be the mindfulness worth carrying with us. The organizations that survive this period are unlikely to be the ones that become best at projecting certainty. They will be the ones that can tolerate complexity, hear inconvenient information, revise what they think they know, and keep learning.

So rather than asking only whether we have good leaders or a healthy culture, we might ask a harder question:

What happens here when someone tells an inconvenient truth?

Because the next time we find ourselves staring at some spectacular organizational crash-out and wondering, Who on earth thought this was a good idea?, it might be worth remembering that someone inside the organization may have been wondering exactly the same thing.

The more important question, then, is whether they could say it because I’ll be thinking, as always, about the voices that told ’em.

The study, “Consensus-building Conversation leads to Neural Alignment” by Sievers and colleagues examined what happens when people watch ambiguous movie clips, discuss what they think happened, try to reach consensus, and then watch the clips again.

Participants first watched ambiguous, soundless movie clips while undergoing fMRI scanning (the “F” is “functional,” and it basically means they’re measuring brain activity by detecting blood flow under different conditions). Then participants met in small groups and discussed the clips with the goal of reaching a shared interpretation.

After that conversation, they returned to the scanner and watched the clips again, along with new clips from the same movies. The researchers found that groups that reached consensus showed more similar brain activity after their conversations and that alignment carried over even when participants viewed new clips they had not discussed.

The finding suggests that conversation does more than produce visible agreement and may provide a shared interpretive frame, a way of seeing that people carry into future experiences1. The researchers are careful not to overstate the finding because we can’t look inside one person’s brain and know the exact content of a thought, of course. The measure here is similarity across participants’ brain activity, not mind reading.

Still, the study gives us a fascinating way to think about private acceptance versus public compliance. People can appear to agree in a room without actually internalizing the group’s interpretation. Are people nodding along or does the conversation change the way they understand what they’re seeing? And further, if their understanding is changed, does it provide an interpretive frame for future information?

The answer to these questions brings us the utility of this study for org life.

The researchers found an important difference between people perceived as high status (perceived by outsiders as “high status” in light of their conversational habits) and people who were socially central in their real social networks (people who were connected across different areas of the organization; these are the bridge-builders in the org. They were identified as such after formal mapping of networks).

High status participants tended to speak more, issue more directives, reject other people’s ideas more often, and contribute to more unequal turn taking. Interestingly, their groups showed lower neural alignment. In contrast, socially central participants tended to encourage others to speak, ask for clarification, and create conditions where more people participated. Their groups showed stronger alignment.

That finding should actually stop leaders in their tracks, especially on the matter of change in organizations.

Many organizations mistake airtime for influence, confidence for credibility, or status for alignment. The person who talks the most, sounds the most certain, and pushes the conversation toward closure may appear to be moving the group forward (I blame our culture for this interpretation: These are the “traditional” markers for leadership). The study suggests a more complicated possibility: That person may be producing compliance rather than actual shared understanding.

The researchers make this point directly. Perceived high status was associated with higher influence ratings from group members, while neural measures suggested lower influence. In other words, people may have experienced the high-status person as influential even when that person did not actually help the group arrive at deeper alignment.

To me, this is really about performance. People often know how to perform agreement. They know how to sit through the meeting, read the room, recognize who has institutional power, and decide whether dissent is worth the cost. They may also unconsciously and uncritically interpret all of that “traditional leadership coding” as actual leadership.

In unhealthy organizations, people become fluent in the gestures of consensus. They nod and say, “That makes sense.” They stop asking questions, quickly learning which conversations are real and which conversations are already over before they begin.

Leadership may interpret that silence as buy-in when in fact it may be nothing of the kind.

A major strength of this study is that it gives us language for something people may experience but feel unable to always prove. The room can look aligned while the people in the room are not aligned at all. A decision can move forward without shared understanding. A committee can produce a recommendation that reflects hierarchy more than meaning making. A leader can believe they have generated consensus when they have actually generated exhaustion or self-protection.

A few caveats about the study’s limits: The sample was small. The fMRI portion included 49 participants, all first-year MBA students at a private university in the United States. That group is not representative of the general population, and the researchers acknowledge that participants likely differed from the broader public in socioeconomic status, general intelligence, and conversation behavior.

The task was also low stakes. Participants were discussing ambiguous movie clips, not layoffs, budget cuts, racism, workload, contract language, policy changes, or the future of an institution. The researchers note that morally charged conversations, adversarial settings, competitive contexts, or groups trying to find one correct answer may produce different results. The observed effects were also relatively small, and the authors explicitly caution that the statistical approach does not guarantee broad generalization.

At the same time, the study is valuable because it highlights a pattern organizational members recognize. Conversation is not neutral and is imbued with power. Who talks, who is interrupted, who asks questions, who feels safe enough to push back. Those are all dynamics that influence what happens after the conversation and, importantly, how people interpret future events.

One of the strongest insights from the study is that socially central people seemed to create alignment by making the room more usable for other people. They asked for clarification and encouraged others to speak. They appeared more flexible in relation to the group. The researchers suggest that high centrality participants may have helped create a psychologically safe environment where people could express themselves and build shared interpretation together.

That idea has implications for leaders, and the first one is very clear: If you want alignment, stop treating communication as delivery.

A message is not alignment, nor is a town hall. A listening session is not alignment. A strategic plan rollout is not alignment. A survey is not alignment. A meeting where people are permitted to speak after the decision has already been made is not alignment.

Alignment requires a process where people can help construct meaning before closure happens.

Leaders who want real alignment should pay attention to the conversation architecture. Who speaks first? Who is invited to interpret the situation? Who is asked to clarify? Who is treated as a problem when they raise a concern? Who gets to say, “That does not match what I am seeing”? Who is translating the decision for everyone else after the meeting ends?

Those informal translators often hold more org power than their titles suggest. The socially central people in an organization are not always the highest-ranking people. They are the people others go to when the official explanation doesn’t make sense. They are the people who can move across groups. These org members are trusted enough to hear the hallway version, the meeting version, AND the private version. They understand where the organization’s formal story collides with people’s lived experience.

Wise leaders find those people and listen to them. Insecure leaders often resent them.

For organizational members, the takeaway is different, and maybe more empowering. You don’t have to be the loudest person in the room to shape the room. You can build influence by improving the quality of the conversation. Ask clarifying questions. Invite quieter people in. Share uncertainty without shame. Help the group slow down when false consensus is forming too quickly. Reflect back what you think you are hearing. Make it easier for people to say what they actually mean.

That kind of influence is easy to underestimate because it doesn’t always look like power. It looks like care, translation, and patience. It looks like someone saying, “Can we pause there for a second?” or “I want to make sure I understand what you mean” or “I don’t think we’ve heard from everyone yet.”

The study also offers a warning to anyone living inside a brittle organization. When leaders confuse compliance with alignment, they become more likely to misread the health of the system, perhaps believing a change has been accepted when people have merely stopped arguing. They may believe trust exists because people are still attending the meetings, or maybe they think communication is working because messages are being sent with no questions in return.

Leaders who are perhaps unwittingly creating an environment of misalignment may ask, “Did we tell people?” The better question is, “Did we create conditions where people could make meaning together?”

Collective sensemaking is the work of leadership and moves leaders away from announcement culture. It asks leaders to understand that people do not align because information has been distributed but they do align when they have had a meaningful role in interpreting what that information means, how it connects to their experience, and what future it asks them to create.

That future cannot be imposed into existence by status or by announcement; it has to be built in conversation and collective sensemaking.

I ended that piece by promising to discuss what happens next because organizational gaslighting damages trust on the org level, but it also changes people, and in my experience, it changes some people more than others.

Ironically, those people are often the very ones organizations value most. Let’s talk about what happens to those people, but first, a loose metaphor to guide us.

This summer I’ve become a novice container gardener, and I’ve discovered something that seasoned gardeners probably find painfully obvious. Plants are remarkably honest. When one isn’t thriving, my first instinct isn’t, of course, to blame the tomato or assume the basil simply lacks commitment or motivation. I start asking questions about the conditions. Is it getting enough sun? Too much afternoon heat? Is the pot too small? Does it need more water, better drainage, or a different location?

Over the past few months I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time moving containers around, trying to match each plant with the environment it actually needs. Sometimes the solution wasn’t fertilizer or a pep talk, even though my spouse did record an epic motivational speech in the spirit of a college football coach (including the notable line, “I want you to produce me some produce!”). Most often, though, the solution was simply changing the conditions.

The longer I work in organizations, the more I wonder why we’re so much better at extending that grace to plants than we are to people.

Organizations love to talk about burnout, and that’s certainly real. Sometimes, though, what leaders are witnessing is something much more relational. An employee who has spent months, sometimes years, raising concerns that are dismissed, documenting decisions that are later denied, hearing one message publicly and another privately, or watching yesterday’s certainty become today’s revisionist history eventually stops speaking up, proposing ideas, and volunteering for the kind of organizational work that makes orgs better.

We often describe that change as disengagement. Personally, I think a better word is disenchantment.

Disengagement is primarily about motivation. Disenchantment is about trust. More specifically, it’s the slow realization that your best thinking no longer seems to have a meaningful place within the organization.

The biggest risk for orgs in this scenario is that the people most susceptible to disenchantment are often high performers. They’re reflective by nature. When something goes wrong, their first instinct is rarely to blame someone else. Instead, they ask what they could have done differently. They revise. They adapt. They assume good intentions. Those are extraordinary qualities in healthy organizations. But in unhealthy ones, they can become liabilities. Here are three primary casualties.

The first casualty of repeated reality distortion is confidence in one’s own perception.

After enough contradictory messages, people stop asking, “What happened?” and begin asking, “Did that actually happen?”

They reread emails before meetings. They keep notes they never imagined needing. They ask trusted colleagues, “Was that your understanding too?” not because they’re trying to build a coalition, but because they’re trying to determine whether they’re still interpreting events accurately.

Several years ago I remember hearing a consultant describe an organization as “email dependent. Y’all are averse to just picking up the phone.” The observation wasn’t wrong, but I don’t think it went quite far enough. In a reality-distorting environment, durable records become a means of preserving reality itself. Documentation isn’t evidence that people have become inherently distrustful but that the environment has trained them. If conversations routinely evolve into, “That’s not what I said,” or “That wasn’t the decision,” people naturally begin preserving the factual record before it has an opportunity to change.

I don’t see that as irrational behavior; it’s simply adaptive.

The second casualty is initiative.

One of the characteristics that distinguishes high performers is that they rarely limit themselves to doing exactly what they’re told. They anticipate problems before they’re asked. They notice patterns. They connect dots other people miss. They identify risks early because they genuinely care about the success of the organization.

Those behaviors are usually celebrated until the observations become inconvenient or threatening to those with power.

If identifying problems consistently results in being labeled negative, resistant, or “not a team player,” thoughtful people eventually learn something important. They stop anticipating. They wait to be asked. They document every instruction. They become more careful about offering unsolicited ideas or identifying problems before they become crises.

Leaders sometimes interpret that change as a decline in ownership, but personally, I see intelligent people adapting to an environment where ownership has become expensive. Silence feels safer.

Perhaps the greatest casualty, though, isn’t confidence or initiative. It’s generosity.

High performers typically produce high-quality work, but more than that, they contribute discretionary thought or effort. They volunteer ideas that aren’t required, mentor colleagues, improve processes that technically aren’t their responsibility, and notice opportunities before anyone asks them to. They care enough to spend cognitive and emotional energy making the organization better than they found it.

Disenchantment slowly erodes that generosity, but the remarkable thing is that their performance often remains strong, and that’s one reason leaders often miss what’s happening.

High performers typically have enough talent and enough internal standards that even after they’ve downshifted, they’re still meeting expectations. Deadlines are met. Objectives are accomplished. Performance reviews remain positive. From the outside, very little appears to have changed.

But inside, almost everything has. They’ve simply stopped bringing the best parts of themselves to work.

That’s a very different problem than burnout, and it’s a much more difficult one to recognize because productivity remains relatively stable. What disappears is curiosity. Creativity. Constructive dissent. Organizational citizenship. The willingness to ask difficult questions before difficult questions become expensive problems.

Once the visible and active investments disappear, orgs may often mistake this version of flawless compliance for alignment, but I think it’s something closer to informational collapse.

The organization hasn’t solved the underlying problem, but what it HAS done is simply taught the people most capable of identifying problems that honesty now carries too much interpersonal risk.

Ironically, this is often the point at which organizations launch engagement initiatives. Leaders can sense that something feels different even if they can’t quite explain why, so maybe they distribute some surveys or start a listening tour where employees are encouraged to “speak candidly.”

The difficulty is that many of the organization’s highest performers have already reached a different conclusion, which isn’t that they no longer have a voice but rather that they no longer believe their voice changes reality.

Previously, I wrote a bit about “losing the clubhouse” and my spouse couldn’t think of a baseball manager who had ever regained it. That often happens in orgs; it’s very difficult to get our high performers back once we have created conditions that elicit these results.

At this point, some readers or listeners may be thinking, This all sounds a lot like burnout.

There is certainly overlap. Both involve withdrawal and diminish performance over time. Both can ultimately lead someone to leave an organization.

But I think they’re fundamentally different phenomena.

Burnout is often the result of giving too much for too long. Disenchantment emerges when people conclude that giving more no longer matters. One is primarily about depleted capacity. The other is about diminished belief.

It’s important to distinguish these constructs because the solutions are different.

We don’t solve disenchantment with a wellness initiative, a pizza party, or a resilience workshop. Those interventions assume the problem resides within the individual. Disenchantment asks leaders to look somewhere far less comfortable: The environment itself.

High performers are remarkably resilient. They’ll tolerate heavy workloads, difficult projects, and long hours when they believe their efforts matter. What becomes increasingly difficult to tolerate is the feeling that reality itself has become negotiable. When yesterday’s decisions are rewritten and revised in the retelling, when legitimate concerns are reframed as negativity, or when candor is welcomed rhetorically but punished relationally, people begin making a different calculation. They don’t necessarily stop caring. They DO stop investing parts of themselves that no longer feel safe to invest.

This is why I think organizations often misunderstand what they’re losing. They assume they’re losing employees but frequently, they’re losing something far more valuable first. They’re losing their employees’ best thinking.

Long before someone submits a resignation letter, they may have already stopped offering the observation that would have prevented a mistake or may have chosen not to mentor a new colleague because experience has taught them that investing deeply rarely changes outcomes. They may notice an emerging problem but decide someone else can point it out this time. They continue doing excellent work because excellence has become part of their identity, but they withdraw the discretionary effort that separates merely functional organizations from exceptional ones.

That loss is almost invisible because it doesn’t appear on a balance sheet or quarterly reports. Performance metrics often remain surprisingly stable because conscientious people continue meeting expectations. Leaders naturally conclude that everything is fine.

Meanwhile, the organization’s capacity to learn and flex and grow and change has been significantly diminished.

As I’ve spent this summer moving containers around my patio, I’ve been struck by how instinctively I look for environmental explanations when a plant struggles. I don’t assume the tomato has become lazy. I don’t accuse the basil of being resistant to change or growth. I ask whether I’ve placed it in conditions that allow it to become what it’s capable of becoming.

Oddly enough, we often extend less curiosity to people than we do to plants. My metaphor here isn’t perfect; plants don’t have agency or emotions, but I think keeping the idea of conditions in mind is important.

When high performers begin changing, our first instinct is frequently to diagnose the individual. We talk about attitude, resilience, adaptability, motivation, or engagement. Those certainly matter, but I wonder how often they distract us from a more important question.

What if the conditions have changed or have simply become intolerable?

What if the organization has unintentionally taught thoughtful people that their perception cannot be trusted, their initiative is unwelcome, and their honesty carries unnecessary risk?

If that’s true, then the problem is actually a result of the conditions the org created.

Gardeners know that healthy plants are rarely the product of better lectures but are simply the product of healthier conditions.

Orgs aren’t much different, quite honestly. And I’ll close here by speaking directly to you if you see yourself in what I’ve described here: If you’re living a work life characterized by disenchantment and feeling some kind of way about it: Don’t worry. You’re good. You didn’t create the situation, so you can’t change it, you can’t fix it, but what you CAN do is to devote your time and talent to causes and organizations outside of work that will welcome what you bring to them.

Do your job; meet expectations. But your extra effort? Your curiosity and desire to truly make a difference? Channel that into places where it’s welcomed, valued, and recognized for the game-change it brings. We face complex problems here in our contemporary social world, and hundreds of organizations in your area would welcome you to devote your time and talent. Find them and do that.

Your spirit will thank you.

Specifically in higher ed, I remember living through the MOOC (massive open online courses) era, the panic that higher education as we knew it was about to experience obsolescence despite the fact that the MOOC structure was at odds with what really matters in learning: The accountability that comes from routine engagement with other humans.

Similarly, I remember sitting through presentations on “Second Life” and thinking, that is never going to be a real thing in a real way. And I remember sitting in an all- hands meeting that was all about how we all needed to go live in the Metaverse and thinking the same thing: That is never going to be a real thing in a real way. It violates everything we know about basic social needs in human life, and I was embarrassed to hear leaders say they wanted to go “all in” on the Metaverse.

Thus, I sat down to list out the technologies inflicted on higher education in the past twenty years and what resulted is an ed-tech graveyard that reveals quite a bit about organizations. I did no research here, so forgive any inaccuracies or omissions (please share what I’ve forgotten!); I’m relying only on my memory and my own notes. Let’s dial it back to 2005, where I’ll share the anxiety of each era as I remember it as well as the tech responses and what the institutional hope each was likely meant to fulfill. Maybe you’ll see some hits you recognize.

2005–2008: “The internet is here and we look obsolete.”

Orgs felt the pressure to appear modern, digital, and competitive, so the following emerged:

• Blackboard/WebCT as the “digital campus”

• Smartboards as visible proof of innovation

• Learning-object repositories

• E-portfolios as lifelong learning infrastructure

• iTunes U course distribution

What I see as the institutional hope in this era: Legitimacy in a digital world without changing pedagogy.

2008–2011 (Great Recession era): “We are too expensive and the funding is unstable.”

• Early OER as a cost-containment strategy

• Publisher turnkey course shells

• Lecture capture as a way to “scale” faculty

• Clickers as efficiency + measurable engagement

Institutional hope? Do more with less labor.

2012–2014 – The MOOC Moment “Higher ed is about to be disrupted like newspapers.”

• MOOCs as full degrees

• Udacity credit model

• MOOC freshman year

• Global star-professor courses

Institutional hope? Scale + prestige + new revenue + lower instructional cost.
Underlying fear? Physical campuses and most faculty become unnecessary.

2013–2016 – The Data Turn: “Accountability, completion rates, performance funding”

• Learning analytics dashboards

• Predictive retention systems

• CRM-style student success platforms

• Automated early alerts

Institutional hope: Retention without rebuilding advising, teaching, or financial aid.

2014–2018 – The Immersion/Innovation Lab Era: “We must look cutting-edge to attract students.”

• VR classrooms (Oculus wave)

• Augmented Reality pilot projects

• 3D printing as general education

• Innovation labs and sandbox classrooms

Institutional hope? Recruitment signaling, donor appeal, branding.

2015–2019 – The Unbundling Threat: “The degree is losing monopoly value.”

• Digital badges

• Micro-credentials as transcript replacement

• Competency-based subscription degrees

• Bootcamp partnerships

• Blockchain credentials

Institutional hope? New markets and faster credentials without restructuring the institution.

2016–2019 – The “Platformization” of Everything: “Students expect Amazon-level service.”

• Chatbots for student services

• AI advising (rule-based)

• Publisher platforms as full learning environments

• Inclusive-access textbook auto-billing

Institutional hope? Solve structural service gaps through software.

2020–2022 – Pandemic Emergency Mythologized as Innovation: “Instruction must continue during institutional shutdown.”

• Zoom as the university

• HyFlex as permanent model

• Remote proctoring as integrity solution

• Cloud collaboration as classroom

Institutional hope? Continuity framed as transformation.
Reality: Emergency practices rebranded as strategy.

2021–2023 – The Metaverse Spike: “We missed the last wave; don’t miss this one.”

• Meta/Horizon Worlds campuses

• “Digital twin” universities

• Return of avatar classrooms

Institutional hope? Media visibility + enrollment signaling.

2023–today: Generative AI

We have an anxiety cluster here:

• Labor cost

• Enrollment decline

• Public skepticism about value

• Assessment crisis

• Productivity pressure

So we get…

AI course assistants
AI tutoring systems
AI grading
AI student-service agents
AI “personalized learning at scale”

Institutional hopes? Do more with fewer people. Restore belief in personalization.
Reassert control via standardized learning outcomes.

The Pattern

I am going to explain the deep pattern across the whole timeline because I see a structural reality beneath all of this: Very few of these were actually about teaching and learning.

They were responses to austerity, enrollment volatility, performance funding, labor costs, prestige competition, loss of public trust. The technology became a coping mechanism for organizational problems situated in our broader cultural and economic policy choices and decisions.

The ed-tech graveyard is not hard to find in the real life. We can walk across almost any campus and see the layers and remnants: You can easily find smart classrooms that aren’t used as designed, a VR lab for touring more than teaching, LMS features we were promised would revolutionize student engagement, etc.

None of these initiatives was foolish (okay, Second Life excluded) and the people who built them were not naïve. Most of the tools still exist in small and perfectly reasonable ways. The pattern I’m talking about shows itself only when you step back far enough to see the sequence. For more than twenty years, higher education has moved from one technological “solution” to another in waves, each one arriving with the promise that it would finally fix cost, access, retention, relevance, or labor. Each one also arrived at a moment of institutional fear.

The graveyard contains tools but it’s really a map of organizational anxiety.

The MOOC moment makes this visible most of all, in my estimation. Publicly, the language was about democratizing knowledge and opening the gates of the university to the world. Internally, the conversation was far more existential. Newspapers had collapsed. The music industry had collapsed. Higher education believed it was next.

MOOCs promised scale, and scale promised survival. What they didn’t do was change the core conditions of teaching and learning because those conditions were never the primary problem they were meant to solve. The same structural dynamic shaped the learning-analytics boom that followed. Dashboards, predictive models, engagement scores. These were framed as tools for helping students, and at times they did help. At the institutional level, they were a response to performance funding, completion metrics, and the growing sense that colleges were being measured to death. Data was supposed to produce control in a system that felt increasingly uncontrollable.

Once you line the waves up against the anxieties that produced them, the pattern looks mechanical to me. Funding becomes unstable, and the sector turns to technologies that promise scale and automation.

Accountability pressures rise, and it turns to technologies that promise measurement and prediction. Enrollment declines, and it turns to spectacle: The innovation lab, the VR classroom, the metaverse campus, because spectacle reassures external audiences that the institution is future-ready.

Students expect Amazon-level service from systems built in the 1970s, and the response is the chatbot. Now, under the combined pressure of labor cost, demographic decline, and public skepticism, the answer is AI and not because AI emerged from a pedagogical need, but because it arrived at exactly the moment the institutional anxiety required it.

The Technology that Actually Matters

From the faculty perspective, I am willing to bet that each wave feels incredibly disconnected from the daily work of teaching and that disconnect is often described by leaders as resistance. More accurately, it’s a structural mismatch.

Most of these technologies were never primarily about improving teaching or learning. They were attempts to solve problems in finance, enrollment management, student services, public relations, and governance. They were organizational coping mechanisms. That’s why the classroom, the place where learning actually happens, often remains the least transformed part of the institution. The work of teaching changes slowly because the tools are not designed to address the conditions under which teaching actually occurs.

This situation is what makes the absence at the center of the story so striking to me from an organizational perspective. The most powerful, proven, scalable technology higher education has for improving student success is not artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, or immersive simulation. It is trust. Trust between faculty and administration. Trust between institutions and students. Trust that allows people to redesign curriculum, take intellectual risks, share governance, and solve problems collaboratively. Trust functions as infrastructure. It produces measurable outcomes, lowers the cost of change, increases adaptability. It makes every other system work better. It’s also the one technology that almost never receives a capital campaign or a task force. Instead, institutions buy platforms.

If this moment is framed only as a question about AI, the pattern will repeat. The sector will ask whether the tool can replace faculty labor, restore personalization at scale, or automate assessment. These are the same questions that were asked of MOOCs, adaptive learning, and analytics. They were the wrong questions then because they addressed the tool rather than the fear that made the tool attractive. The real question is what institutional problem the technology is being asked to manage. Is it the cost of labor, the enrollment cliff, the collapse of public confidence, the brittleness of governance structures? Until that question is answered directly, no platform will solve the problem because the platform is not the problem.

With this lens, the ed-tech graveyard becomes a leadership diagnostic rather than a cautionary tale and allows orgs to ask a different question. Instead of asking what technology should be adopted next, they can ask what problem they are trying to avoid solving in a human way. They can invest in the systems that actually produce adaptation: Shared governance that functions, cross-role problem solving, transparent decision-making, long-term academic planning, real support for teaching. They can treat trust as infrastructure rather than as a by-product of good intentions. That would be a genuine innovation, and it would cost less than the next innovation lab.

AI will not be the last wave. We will see another platform, another environment, another promise of transformation. The open question is whether higher education will continue to use technology as a way to manage its anxieties, or whether it will finally use one of these moments to rebuild the human systems that make institutions work. Not the LMS, not the dashboard, not the bot. The system that determines whether any of those tools can succeed in the first place.

None of this means leaders should become cynical about technology. Quite the opposite. Leaders should be curious. They should experiment. They should pilot new ideas. They should absolutely pay attention to AI because it may well reshape important parts of higher education. The mistake is not trying new things but in confusing novelty with necessity or inevitability.

The next time a technology arrives with promises of transformation, leaders might begin with a different set of questions. What organizational anxiety is this tool actually responding to? What human problem are we hoping it will solve? What evidence suggests this technology changes learning rather than merely changing delivery? Perhaps most importantly, what would have to be true for the skeptics to be right?

Healthy leadership leaves room for those questions because healthy leaders understand that skepticism is not the opposite of innovation but merely one of innovation’s quality-control mechanisms. Orgs need early adopters, but they also need careful observers who ask whether a solution is actually solving the problem it claims to solve. When those voices disappear, organizations lose one of the few mechanisms that prevents expensive mistakes.

The irony is that leaders often ask their organizations to become learning organizations while simultaneously making it unsafe to learn out loud. Learning requires hypotheses, disagreement, failed experiments, and the willingness to revise our thinking when reality refuses to cooperate. If every new technology must be treated as inevitable and every question as resistance, then we have abandoned the very habits of mind we claim to value in higher education.

Perhaps that is the lesson I keep coming back to as I look across this ed-tech graveyard. The technologies themselves are almost beside the point. Some were useful. Most were forgettable. A few genuinely improved aspects of our work. What mattered most, though, was how leaders responded to uncertainty. Did they create conditions where people could think together, challenge assumptions, and test ideas honestly? Or did they demand certainty before certainty was possible?

The next wave is already coming. It always is. We can’t predict it correctly, but maybe we can lead it correctly.

One of the most useful ideas I have encountered in recent years comes from political psychologist Dr. Danna Young. Her work in a book called Irony and Outrage suggests that our aesthetic preferences extend well beyond art, music, or literature and reflect the ways our minds prefer to engage with the world. Some of us are drawn toward ambiguity, irony, novelty, and complexity. Others find satisfaction in order, certainty, familiarity, and closure. These preferences influence our media consumption, our politics, and even the humor we enjoy.

Her framework gave me a deeper understanding not only of the political landscape at the time but also how to make – or avoid making – recommendations for books, movies, comedy, etc. to people in my circle. If, for example, you’re a super hero movie kind of guy, you may not prefer the film I found riveting; the aesthetics and narrative preferences are just different.

I was thinking about this idea this week in the context of the mixed reviews of the movie Backrooms. Some people loved the liminal space, psychological tension, and ambiguous ending. Others found it too slow, confusing, or obscure.

Whether Backrooms ultimately succeeds almost isn't the point. The polarized reactions illustrate the larger idea: Some viewers delight in ambiguity while others experience it as frustration, which has me thinking back to Young’s work.

Pondering these ideas made me think about something related to organizational communication and, specifically, the gaslighting construct we discussed last time. Is it possible that these aesthetic preferences also shape our expectations for conversation itself, both on the micro and the organizational levels?

Though I was thinking about these dynamics within the context of Backroooms, I was also contemplating people in my life who are often genuinely funny, yet whose humor leaves me with entirely different experiences; one experience is always more engaging for me, personally, than the other, and I was trying to figure out why.

You might have friends like these, those who make observations that are insightful, packaged, and often hilarious. By the time I finish reading a text or listening to what they’re saying, however, the conversation feels complete. The text of that conversation has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I smile, appreciate the craftsmanship, and move on. There’s not much left for me to respond to or to co-create. It’s a performance to be appreciated.

Other people approach humor quite differently: An absurd and random situation can become the beginning of a fifteen-minute exchange. A joke made months earlier unexpectedly resurfaces. One absurd premise leads to another until we have jointly created something neither of us could have predicted when the conversation began. The pleasure comes from watching the idea evolve rather than from arriving at a destination. It’s a collaboration to be nurtured over time.

As a researcher, I have to say that neither approach is inherently superior. Each produces laughter. Each reflects intelligence and creativity. Yet they satisfy entirely different cognitive desires, and — admittedly — I do have a clear preference.

That realization led me to consider whether conversations possess aesthetic qualities in the same way that architecture, music, or visual art do. Some conversations feel complete and packaged, like a finished essay or a carefully composed photograph. Others feel improvisational, recursive, and generative, inviting participants to construct meaning together as they go.

I have begun thinking about this idea as conversational aesthetics, which might remind some people of Dewey’s ideas about the rhythm and flow of conversations as contributing to an aesthetic; I’m thinking about it in a slightly different way here, and I’m situating in a broader context. If I were building an academic construct, I’d describe it like this:

Conversational aesthetics may be defined as an individual’s or group’s implicit preferences for the form through which ideas are exchanged, developed, and concluded. Conversational aesthetics shape perceptions of intelligence, collaboration, trustworthiness, and legitimacy independently of the substantive content being discussed.

In other words, people differ not only in what they believe or communicate, but also in what they experience as a satisfying conversation.

The implications become especially interesting inside organizations, and I need to talk about higher education because it presents such a compelling way to understand what I’m describing in light of what I perceive as the conversational aesthetic preferences of different populations within orgs.

Faculty members are trained to interrogate assumptions, entertain competing interpretations, qualify conclusions, and remain comfortable with unresolved questions while evidence accumulates. Intellectual progress often emerges through recursion. Ideas are proposed, challenged, revised, and reconsidered before any conclusion feels sufficiently robust. These are core features of the work we do, and – I would argue – central to who many of us are as people.

Administrative work frequently rewards a different conversational rhythm. Leaders must synthesize competing information, establish direction, communicate decisions clearly, and create enough certainty for an organization to move forward. Completion carries practical value because organizations eventually require action.

As a research oriented person, I need to say this: Neither orientation is inherently better suited to organizational life. Universities are complex places that require both exploration and execution. The difficulty arises when each group unconsciously assumes that its preferred conversational form represents effective communication itself.

Personally, though, I do believe that more time spent in exploration and analysis would lead us to better outcomes. Personal bias speaking! Much as I know my preferences in social communication, I also know my preferences in organizational communication.

But this perspective helps explain a familiar exchange on many campuses.

• Faculty may say they were not consulted.

• Administrators may respond that they communicated.

• Both statements may accurately describe what occurred.

Many administrators may define communication as accurately conveying a decision. Many faculty may experience communication as participating in the construction of shared understanding before decisions become final. The resulting frustration and ensuing tensions have less to do with information than with expectations about what communication should accomplish.

The same lens may help us think differently about psychological safety, something we’ve discussed at length in this space and something I continue to view as foundational to effective change efforts. Discussions of psychological safety often emphasize whether individuals feel comfortable expressing disagreement or uncertainty. Another dimension may deserve some attention: Whether an organization welcomes the manner in which different groups naturally think together. Individuals whose thinking unfolds through exploration may experience varnished announcements as invitations to observe rather than participate. Individuals whose work depends upon decisiveness may experience prolonged deliberation as unnecessary resistance rather than intellectual engagement.

Seen this way, communication failures sometimes emerge despite everyone’s best intentions. Participants may leave the same meeting believing they attended entirely different conversations.

That possibility raises an intriguing question for leaders.

Perhaps communication challenges are not always rooted in poor messaging, insufficient transparency, or interpersonal conflict, though all of that can be true, too. Sometimes organizations contain multiple conversational cultures, each operating from different assumptions about what productive dialogue should look and feel like.

The next time someone says, “We need to communicate better,” I will find myself wondering whether another question belongs alongside it.

What kind of conversation does each group believe they are having?

That question also gives us another way to think about organizational gaslighting. In that previous episode I argued that organizational gaslighting occurs when people are encouraged to distrust their own perceptions of reality. We often imagine this as an intentional act of manipulation, but organizations don’t always arrive there through malice, as I also made it clear that structural matters have a role there, too.

Today I’m wondering if people arrive there because people with different conversational aesthetics unknowingly invalidate one another’s ways of making meaning.

Consider the faculty member who leaves a meeting convinced that no genuine consultation occurred because the discussion never invited exploration before the decision was made. Now consider the administrator who sincerely believes the organization communicated well because everyone received a thoughtful explanation of the final decision. Each person experienced the same meeting, but each leaves believing the other has misunderstood what happened.

Over time, those repeated mismatches begin to erode confidence. Faculty members may start wondering whether they are expecting too much from shared governance. Administrators may begin wondering why people continue asking questions after the answers have already been communicated. Both groups become increasingly frustrated, and both begin attributing motives to the other that may not exist1.

When this pattern repeats often enough, people can begin to question their own instincts. “Maybe I wasn’t really excluded.” “Maybe this is what consultation is supposed to look like.” “Maybe I’m asking for something unreasonable.”

Those are the kinds of questions that should concern leaders, and the practical implications are straightforward.

For leaders, effective communication involves more than producing clear messages. It also requires understanding how different communities construct shared understanding. Some groups need opportunities to think aloud, challenge assumptions, and participate while ideas are still forming. Others need clarity, direction, and confidence that decisions will ultimately be made. Communication strategies that acknowledge both conversational aesthetics are more likely to produce trust than strategies that excel at only one.

For organizational members, this framework offers a different kind of grace. Before assuming bad intent, it may be worth asking whether another person’s conversational aesthetic differs from our own. They may be trying to communicate well while operating from a very different understanding of what communication is meant to accomplish.

Adding this layer of understanding certainly won’t eliminate conflict; universities, businesses, and nonprofit organizations will always contain competing priorities and perspectives. It may, however, allow us to stop interpreting every communication breakdown as evidence of dishonesty, incompetence, or indifference.

We may discover that people aren’t arguing just about a message but operating from fundamentally different assumptions about what a conversation is supposed to be.

And perhaps that’s true well beyond organizations.

Perhaps it explains why one person watches a film like Backrooms and experiences ninety minutes of frustrating ambiguity while another experiences ninety minutes of beautiful uncertainty. Perhaps it explains why one person tells a joke that lands perfectly and leaves everyone laughing, while another creates the kind of joke that refuses to end, evolving through callbacks and absurd tangents over months or even years. One person appreciates the craftsmanship of a finished performance; another delights in participating in its construction.

Neither experience is objectively better; they’re simply beautiful in different ways.

That realization has changed how I think about recommendations. I no longer assume that because I loved a movie, a book, or a comedian, someone else will. Increasingly, I find myself wondering what kind of aesthetic experience they are looking for in the first place.

More surprisingly, it has changed how I think about leadership.

Leaders spend enormous energy crafting messages. Perhaps we should spend just as much energy understanding the conversations our organizations find beautiful because the conversation people are hoping to have often determines whether they feel heard long before the first word is spoken or read.

And now, my friends, having written through all of this, I’m wondering if this conversational aesthetic is part of a larger structure of participatory aesthetics. I’m situating this idea personally as I contemplate these intersecting strands of my own ways of being in the world:

• I don’t just like humor; I like humor that invite participation.

• I don’t just like leadership; I like shared meaning-making.

• I don’t just like classrooms; I like co-constructed learning.

• I don’t just like organizations; I like participatory governance.

• I don’t just like art; I like ambiguity that requires interpretation.

I don’t think these are isolated preferences because they all reflect enjoyment of participating in the creation of meaning rather than receiving finished meaning. And I think that’s why I find certain organizational settings more unsettling or suffocating than others; it’s the level of participatory aesthetics.

I took time to flesh out that last part because understanding our individual preferences and tendencies can help us better contextualize our experiences in org settings. Thanks for listening. Until next time, take good care.

I often think that organizational leaders and org members occupy two separate realities in organizations. In one reality – let’s call it the view from the driver’s seat – the road is smooth and the route predictable. It’s easy to lean into turns and curves because our bodies and brains are at one with what’s ahead, and we make natural and unconscious adjustments as we move along. In the backseat, though, the ride is quite different and not nearly as predictable. Organizational gaslighting is hitting a sharp curve or bump and having the driver tell you it was nothing; meanwhile, your coffee has been dumped all over you.

When I’m talking about org gaslighting, then, I’m trying to keep two things in mind about intention: One is that it may not always be intentional in light of the dynamics I just described; people may simply occupy a separate reality to the point where leaders fail to recognize how their driving affects their passengers or the notion that their passengers aren’t provided with enough information to anticipate and prepare for the trip.

The other is that systems themselves can be gaslighting in their effects, and I’m not sure there’s even a way around that. Personally, I think we live in a gaslighting culture, and here’s what I mean: I’ve spent many years hearing about all the things we cannot do, things that would improve life for citizens (such as raising the minimum wage) because they would “cost jobs.” Meanwhile, I’m sitting here listening to AI discourse about job loss, and the people in charge are like, “oh well.” That’s a gaslighting culture, and orgs aren’t immune to replicating those dynamics.

Let’s back up, though, and just talk for a minute about this word, gaslighting. It can sound dramatic, I know, and I understand why people are sometimes cautious with it. Like many concepts that move back and forth from research into popular discourse, gaslighting can become stretchy through overuse, and these days, I’m seeing it used to describe simple lying, which isn’t really the vibe of the original term.

If you’re hearing that term more, it may be because it was, in fact, the word of the year in 2022. You might remember its origin, which was in a play adapted into a movie in the 1940s whereby our heiress protagonist was manipulated over time by her fortune-seeking husband into thinking she was mentally ill because the gas lights in their home kept dimming under his orchestration as he worked to convince her otherwise. What we’re talking about here is a dynamic whereby manipulation occurs over time, intentionally or not, and the result is that members of an org experience a lived reality that dramatically differs from the reality established by its rhetoric: An org calls itself transparent while making decisions under the cover of darkness, for example.

Much of our research on gaslighting is about interpersonal dynamics and intimate partner dynamics. We have research that links gaslighting to gender, with one gender seeing gaslighting tactics as more acceptable in a relationship, as well as to dark tetrad personalities (quick note: The tetrad is the triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy plus subclinical sadism). Beyond the interpersonal, we have research about how minoritized groups within the workplace experience gaslighting but not a whole lot of research yet on organizational gaslighting EXCEPT in one field.

Are you a nurse? Here’s some research for you. Navigating the challenging complexities of gaslighting in nursing academe; Navigating Toxicity: Investigating the interplay between workplace gaslighting, workaholism, and agility among nurses; Gaslighting in nursing academia: A new or established covert form of bullying?

In other areas, the research on workplace and organizational gaslighting is still emerging, so we shouldn’t necessarily treat the construct as though it has been settled for decades. Scholars are still working through how to define it, measure it, distinguish it from adjacent constructs, and understand its consequences, which is exactly why I find it interesting. We are watching language form around experiences many organizational members recognize immediately, especially when they have worked within systems where the official story and the lived reality simply do not match.

So gaslighting can be on the level of both the individual and the org: In the individual dynamic, we can refer to the gaslighting scale by Kukreja and Pandey to better understand how this works. They describe trivialization, which refers to the ways a supervisor undermines or minimizes the subordinate’s perceptions, concerns, fears, or lived reality. Affliction refers to the pain, distress, or negative consequence directed toward the subordinate.

That last part is the key because gaslighting moves beyond mere disagreement or ordinary conflict, or even a leader making a decision people dislike. Organizational gaslighting becomes visible when power is used to destabilize people’s ability to trust their own perception of reality.

Over time, people begin to experience a widening gap between official language and lived reality. They are told the organization values transparency while information is withheld. They are told the organization values people while people are treated as operational variables. They are told the organization is listening while the structure of decision-making remains unchanged.

That gap between rhetoric and reality is where the gaslighting effect is most apparent.

I am using the word effect carefully because again, I want to separate individual intent from organizational consequence. In many cases, people hear gaslighting and imagine a single malicious person intentionally manipulating another person’s reality. That version exists, sure. Some people know exactly what they are doing when they minimize, distort, deny, or punish.

But on the org level, it can be very slippery, so let’s use an example: Boeing. After the 737 MAX crashes and later quality concerns, an FAA expert panel found a significant disconnect between Boeing’s senior leadership and employees around safety culture. Mistakes were made, sure, but the deeper organizational problem was that the official language of safety, reporting, and accountability did not appear to match the experience of employees inside the system. When workers fear retaliation, reporting channels are confusing, and leaders believe a culture is functioning differently than employees experience it, the organization is no longer operating from a shared reality. Inside that gap is where the gaslighting effect takes root.

This dynamic is also why organizational gaslighting is so harmful to change efforts. Leaders often want to know why people have little trust in their next big idea, strategic plan, listening session, or statement of values. The answer is usually not mysterious. People remember the gap between language and reality. They remember being told the organization cared while they were experiencing harm. They remember feedback that did not matter. They remember conversations they were invited into after decisions had already been made. They remember being told they were partners while being treated as obstacles. They remember being told to move on.

Memory is data.

One of the mistakes leaders make is treating organizational memory as resistance, when it’s more often a form of intelligence. It contains information about what the system has done, what it rewards, what it punishes, what it hides, and what it repeats. Leaders who dismiss that memory lose access to some of the most important data available to them. That data can be painful, but it is also useful.

If leaders want to reduce organizational gaslighting, they have to begin by respecting reality as people experience it. That doesn’t mean every perception is complete or every interpretation is correct. But leaders must stop treating lived experience as a public relations problem.

The first leadership responsibility is to tell the truth as fully as possible. If the organization has financial constraints, say that. If legal counsel has limited what can be shared, say that without hiding every meaningful detail behind the phrase “legal reasons.” If leaders made a decision that had tradeoffs, state the tradeoffs. If harm occurred, state the harm. If a process failed, say what failed. If leadership miscalculated, say so. People can often handle difficult truths better than they can handle tidied-up incoherence.

The second responsibility is to make sure values language matches organizational operation. Values language turns into gaslighting when it is used to make harm sound noble. Simply calling a decision student-centered or patient-focused does not make it so. Calling a process collaborative does not make it collaborative. Calling a workplace a family does not make people safe. Calling a change strategic does not resolve the consequences of the change. Words have to match structures. If they don’t the words become part of the injury.

Another responsibility is to protect sensemaking. People need access to enough information to understand what’s about to happen, what is happening, and what has happened, along with the why, how, the alternatives and constraints, and the future trajectory for the org. When leaders deny people that sensemaking, they create anxiety and distrust. When leaders provide it, they restore some agency.

Organizational members have work to do as well, although I want to be careful with that statement because power is not evenly distributed. It is too easy to tell less powerful people to fix the conditions they did not create, and that framing becomes its own kind of organizational nonsense. Still, people inside organizations can develop practices that help them stay attached to reality.

One practice is describing patterns. Gaslighting thrives when each incident is treated as isolated. Identifying patterns moves the conversation from “this one thing happened” to “this repeated structure keeps appearing.” That shift helps people avoid overpersonalizing harm. The issue may not be one bad meeting or problematic mid-level leader but may instead be a repeated organizational habit.

Another practice is reality checking with trusted colleagues, what I have described before as collective or lateral sensemaking. Gaslighting isolates people because isolation makes self-doubt easier to produce. Lateral conversation can restore perspective. When multiple people are seeing the same gap between rhetoric and reality, that doesn’t automatically solve the problem, but it interrupts the internalization of it.

Documentation matters, too. Dates, decisions, language used, promises made, questions asked, and responses given can all help people preserve reality when the story later changes.

Organizational members can also ask questions that restore sensemaking. What happened? Who decided? What information shaped the decision? What alternatives were considered? What harm has been identified? What will be different next time? These questions are simple, and they are also threatening to systems that rely on vagueness.

The problem, as I see it, is that organizations often operate inside a cultural logic that gives power the first and loudest claim on reality. The leader’s version becomes the official version. The institution’s version becomes the public version. The board’s version becomes the legitimate version. The employee’s version becomes anecdotal, emotional, partial, or biased. That hierarchy of credibility is where gaslighting finds a very happy home.

Getting around that problem requires better reality practices.

Organizations need structures that allow people to contest official narratives without retaliation. They need decision processes that include the people closest to the consequences. They need leaders who can say, “We got this wrong,” without treating that admission as institutional collapse. They need communication that explains rather than manages. They need cultures where people are allowed to describe harm accurately. And honestly, they need fewer slogans. A slogan cannot repair a fractured reality.

If I had to distill the point down, I would put it this way: Organizational gaslighting occurs when power minimizes, distorts, or denies people’s lived reality while retaining the ability to cause them harm. It is sustained by the gap between official narratives and actual experience, and it becomes more dangerous when people are pressured to treat that gap as their own confusion rather than the organization’s incoherence.

We don’t solve this with perfect agreement. Organizations will always contain conflict, complexity, competing needs, and incomplete information. The way through is a stronger commitment to shared reality because people don’t stop knowing what they know or seeing what they see. They simply learn that knowing and seeing have a cost, and that cost eventually comes due.

In a forthcoming episode, I’ll share what happens when org gaslighting gets to a point that people need to seek help dealing with it. I’ll talk about how this effect is especially harmful to self-reflective, self-aware, and competent people. Until then, take good care.

Leadership is not rocket science, it really isn’t, but the effects of doing it badly are so consequential for the health of organizations, the people functioning within them, and — quite honestly — the future sustainability of the org. When it’s going badly, the pain vibrates off the page when I’m analyzing the data.

If you’re interested in reading more about one of the dynamics I’m seeing most these days, it’s organizational gaslighting, and we have some literature around that idea as a research construct. I’m interested in this construct in light of its association with power, of course, and Popat and Pandey say this about it:

I feel incredibly fortunate to be operating in this space as a scholar because the ongoing research provides me with language to conceptualize things that I, too, experience in my professional life. After all, I’m also part of organizations. I also experience things org members experience, and I also bear witness to both light and dark sides of leadership; having this language is helpful for me in separating that which is a “me problem” from that which is a “them problem” from that which is a systemic problem. My goal here in this newsletter is to provide other workers with that language, too, because it’s that shared understanding that helps us avoid replicating problematic aspects of leadership in our own spheres of influence AND give language to those dynamics so that we can deal with them personally and collectively.

(If you have an interest in the idea of org gaslighting as a construct, I do recommend reading that article. One thing I continue to roll around in my mind is the fact that I really do believe that elements of our broader culture, as replicated in org life, create conditions for gaslighting that exist independent of intent. In other words, our culture — by its very nature — can be inherently gaslighting in its effects in a variety of ways).

Back to this data set: What I also know is that soon there will be calls for these org members to “move on” from the harms they’ve experienced and to “leave the past behind,” as is typical in organizations. Unfortunately, the consequences of moving on without addressing harm will create direct challenges for future change efforts. When org members experience moral injury and subsequent mandated forgiveness, the long-term effects are just that: Long-term.

This focus on “moving on” from harm is a common recurring dynamic wherever power exists, which — for the uninitiated — is everywhere: In governments, organizations, families, teams, even intimate relationships. The dynamic is such that harm occurs and if accountability threatens those with power, the response is often the same: A call to “just move on.”

It happens inside organizations when leaders make poor decisions, preside over harm, or fail to protect people and then urge everyone to “close the chapter.” We see it in personal relationships when someone causes harm and wants resolution but no reckoning. The scale changes, but the underlying logic is the same. I want to talk about what’s really going on when this situation unfolds and provide some guidance for leaders and org members alike.

At it’s simplest, “moving on” is about avoiding the discomfort of accountability. At first glance, it honestly sounds pragmatic, alluring, even. “Moving on” or “moving forward” or “looking ahead” is framed as maturity, stability, or progress.

But structurally, this demand of “move on” is less about healing and more about protecting power. Harm creates questions. Who knew what? Who decided what and when? Who benefited? Who refused to intervene? Those questions destabilize authority. Fully answering them risks accountability, the loss of legitimacy, and a disruption of existing hierarchies. For those with power, shutting down inquiry is often safer than engaging it.

The decision to frame our choices this way (“move on” or – unspoken – “stay rooted in the past”) is structural, certainly, but it’s also psychological. Power relies on identity. Leaders, institutions, and systems maintain a self-image of competence, control, and moral authority, so dynamics are operating at two levels here, both the individual and the systemic. Harm fractures the image of competence, control, and moral authority for both individuals and systems. Reckoning requires acknowledging failure, complicity, miscalculation or sometimes, in my own special view of the world, acknowledgement that humans can be just plain dumb. Rather than revise the self-story, many choose to compress the timeline, redefine the harm as “in the past,” and redirect attention forward rhetorically toward the future. The discomfort of reckoning is replaced with the language of closure.

The problem here, as you already know, is that silence does not resolve harm; it does, however, store it.

If those in or with power insist on moving on without reckoning, they create the appearance of stability while embedding unresolved tension into the system. Grievances remain unaddressed as trust continues to erode and degrade. People carry unprocessed anger, fear, or grief. Official narratives diverge from lived experience. People learn which questions cannot be asked, and sensemaking shuts down. Silence becomes a survival strategy rather than a choice.

You heard me talk about brittleness previously. These dynamics I’m describing are part of the root.

Systems that avoid reckoning then become fragile under future stress. When the next disruption or exogenous shock arrives, and that could be financial, political, interpersonal, or cultural, the unresolved harm will certainly resurface. Past wounds get layered onto present challenges. In an unhealed system, change efforts fail not because people resist change for the sake of resistance but in part because they don’t trust the system attempting to lead it. What looks like dysfunction in the present is often unhealed harm from the past.

The paradox is that “moving on” doesn’t actually enable progress but instead can delay or prevent it.

Organizations, governments, and relationships that refuse to reckon with harm lose the capacity for effective change management later; they can’t grow because they haven’t confronted basic truths. Without truth, there is no shared reality. Without shared reality, there’s no coordination. Without coordination, every new initiative becomes another stress test for a system already under strain.

Reckoning does not mean inflicting punishment or dwelling in the past. It means restoring sensemaking. It means saying what happened, understanding why it happened, and clarifying what must be different going forward. That work is uncomfortable because it threatens power; it also builds elasticity.

Systems that heal can bend. Systems that bury harm eventually fracture.

There’s a reason this situation is so common among leaders: Defaulting to “let’s move on” is, in part, about avoiding blame, but it’s also about preserving momentum, authority, and narrative control. Leaders are often rewarded for projecting stability, decisiveness, confidence. Reckoning slows things down and invites ambiguity and opens space for critique. It’s not efficient. In environments already under pressure, leaders may fear that stopping to process harm will expose weakness or invite chaos. Moving on feels like leadership because it looks like action. It looks like progress.

We have structural incentives at play here, too. Many leaders operate inside systems that punish admission more than they reward repair. Legal risk, reputational management, board oversight, donor relations, political scrutiny, and market competition all encourage minimization. In these contexts, reckoning is framed as dangerous rather than necessary. Silence is a sort of organizational stewardship. Closure is encouraged as a responsibility. Over time, this logic becomes habitual. Leaders stop asking whether moving on is ethical or effective and start treating it as the only viable option. It’s not.

Higher education offers a clear and useful example of how this dynamic plays out in research by Liu on crisis management.

When institutions mishandle labor decisions, respond poorly to crises, or enact policies that harm faculty, staff, or students, the pattern is often the same. Leadership acknowledges disruption briefly, frames the moment as unfortunate, and quickly pivots to future goals. Strategic plans, enrollment initiatives, branding campaigns, and morale messaging arrive before the harm has been processed. Faculty are asked to reengage. Staff are asked to stay positive. Students are asked to trust the institution again.

What rarely happens is collective sensemaking. What actually happens is that decisions are explained selectively or abstractly. Constraints are referenced without being fully explained. The emotional and material consequences of the harm are treated as secondary to institutional continuity. Over time, faculty and staff learn that talking about the gap between rhetoric and experience is unwelcome. You heard me describe silence as structural previously and that holds true here; further, in this dynamic, compliance replaces trust.

When the next change initiative arrives, whether curricular reform, budget restructuring, modality shifts, or governance revisions, leaders are often surprised by resistance. From their vantage point, the past issue was resolved. From everyone else’s vantage point, it was never healed. What reads like resistance to change to leaders is often refusal to reenter a relationship that has not been repaired.

Leadership choices at this juncture are critical to the organization.

Leaders who want to avoid brittleness have to resist the impulse to rush past harm. That means slowing down long enough to say what happened, even when the explanation is uncomfortable. It means distinguishing between legal sufficiency and moral sufficiency. It means telling the truth about constraints rather than hiding behind values language that no longer matches reality. It also means accepting that credibility is rebuilt through coherence, not speed.

Most importantly, leaders must protect sensemaking. They must narrate decisions, acknowledge miscalculations, explain tradeoffs, and invite questions that do not have immediate resolution. Reckoning requires sincerity and follow through. When leaders do this work openly, they lower anxiety and restore agency. Elasticity grows from shared understanding.

Organizational members also have a role, especially when power is uneven.

When leaders attempt to move on prematurely, members can resist the pressure to absorb contradiction silently. Noting patterns rather than isolated incidents helps shift the conversation from grievance to structure. Asking what has been learned, what has changed, and what will be different next time keeps sensemaking alive. Building lateral networks for communication and support prevents harm from being individualized or erased.

It is also important for organizational members to recognize that unresolved harm will surface later, whether it is discussed now or not. Addressing it early is not obstruction but just organizational maintenance. Systems that heal can change. Systems that suppress reckoning eventually fracture under the weight of their own silence.

If I had to distill my message down to one thing today, it would be this:

Moving on without reckoning does not preserve stability but creates brittleness. Resistance to reckoning narrows the system’s capacity to adapt, respond, and change well resulting in sclerosis. Whether in governments, organizations, or families, the refusal to process harm is one of the most reliable predictors of future dysfunction.

Healing is not the opposite of progress; it’s not backward momentum. Healing is the condition that makes progress possible.

But Uber stays on my mind a lot, quite honestly, independent of the current discourse because they provide us with some pretty important leadership lessons on matters of org culture, trust, and what happens — or doesn’t — when a new leader arrives on the scene.

In 2017, Uber became one of the clearest public examples of what happens when an organization’s internal culture finally becomes impossible to contain. Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, published an account describing sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and HR failures inside the company. Her account went beyond exposing one bad manager or one ineffective reporting process and revealed a culture in which harm had been normalized, where high performers were protected regardless of their behavior, and where people who raised concerns could not trust the systems that were supposed to protect them. The fallout was pretty significant: Investigations followed, executives departed, and Travis Kalanick eventually resigned as CEO. Dara Khosrowshahi arrived later that year with the unenviable task of leading a company that had problems beyond public relations; it was much worse than that: It had a trust problem.

Uber is useful here because its story is dramatic enough to be recognizable but ordinary enough to be instructive. Most organizations will never become the subject of Silicon Valley scandal coverage or have a whistleblower whose story becomes part of a larger public reckoning. But many organizations do have some version of the same problem: Employees who learned that formal systems were not safe. Leaders who protected results over people. Cultures where candor became risky, silence became strategic, and workers survived by reading every announcement through the memory of previous harm.

When a new leader enters that kind of environment, the organization isn’t beginning anew; it’s not fresh or regenerated or reborn. It’s in a wounded state because organizations have memories.

Those memories aren’t in a single file, meeting agenda, or strategic plan, but they live everywhere, and with careful attention, you can unearth them as someone new to an environment: The way people read email. The pause before someone speaks in a meeting. The number of people who have stopped offering ideas because they have learned, over time, that ideas become liabilities or threats to those with power. You’ll see memories in the calculation people make before deciding whether a question is worth the risk of asking.

That’s why the Uber example remains useful. Khosrowshahi’s arrival mattered, but his arrival was not the repair. THAT had to come through what the organization did next: How it changed its values; how it handled accountability; how it rebuilt credibility with employees, customers, regulators, and the public; and how it demonstrated that the old cultural logic would no longer be rewarded. Uber didn’t “solve culture” because of a leadership transition, but it did take on the hard work of repair that comes after the announcement of a leadership change. The lesson is that leadership transition only opens the door to repair. The hard work comes after the announcement.

And listen, I don’t work there, so I don’t see anything at Uber first-hand. The employees may tell a different story about their experiences on the ground. Nonetheless, we have data beyond the Uber example to help us understand the dynamics and friction when a new leader arrives on a damanged scene.

One dynamic is often a temptation to declare a new day, which is completely understandable, rational even. New leaders want to set a tone. Boards want to signal progress, I mean, assuming they know what’s actually going on, which not all do unless there’s been a Very Public Reckoning, as in the Uber case. Employees want relief. Everyone wants the psychological mercy of a clean break.

The problem, as you well know, is that organizations don’t heal simply because someone new has arrived.

A new leader may create the conditions for healing, and that’s what really matters. The arrival itself is not the repair. A person can bring hope, energy, experience, and a different style of leadership into the room. At the same time, a culture shaped by fear, retaliation, instability, neglect, or dehumanizing decision making will not instantly become healthy because the name on the office door changes.

People who have lived inside toxic organizational cultures often carry what looks, from the outside, like resistance. They may be skeptical, guarded, slow to trust, or unwilling to participate in yet another “listening session.” They may hear ordinary phrases through the memory of previous harm. “We want your feedback” may sound like “tell us what to punish later.” “We are reviewing processes” may sound like “we already decided.” “We are moving forward” may sound like “stop talking about what happened.”

(I’m going to share a piece about this very thing soon: What happens when people with power decide it’s time for the rest of us to “move on”?)

Good leaders know that this kind of information isn’t actually resistance but useful data.

Research on psychological safety gives us one useful way to understand this dynamic. Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Her work connects psychological safety to learning behavior, which means people are more likely to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and share problems when they believe doing so will not harm them. In toxic cultures, people learn the opposite lesson. They learn that silence is safer than accuracy and that compliance is safer than candor. They learn that the person who states the problem becomes the problem. These are hard lessons to unlearn.

Burnout research points in a similar direction. Maslach and Leiter’s work identifies six areas of work life that shape burnout: Workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. That framework is helpful because it moves us away from the tired idea that burned out employees simply need more resilience. The problem is not a lack of individual grit but a chronic mismatch between people and the conditions of their work. When employees have too much workload, too little control, no meaningful recognition, damaged community, low fairness, and a conflict between stated values and lived practices, burnout becomes an organizational outcome rather than a personal weakness.

And when their nervous systems are in constant fight or flight mode, they become exhausted at a very deep level. Bone weary, I would call it.

That point matters for new leaders because toxic cultures are often sustained by the fantasy that morale can be fixed with tone. A friendlier email will not repair an unfair process. A warmer meeting will not fix a history of retaliation. A new slogan or brand campaign will not undo years of being ignored, blamed, or treated as disposable.

Healing requires structural honesty.

New leaders may be tempted to believe that their first task is inspiration, when really, the job is disciplined listening.

Disciplined listening is different from performing listening as theater. People inside a harmed organization can usually detect the difference between listening as extraction and listening as repair. Extraction sounds like, “Tell me everything that’s wrong so I can develop my plan.” Repair sounds more like, “I need to understand what happened here, what patterns people experienced, what promises were broken, and where the organization’s systems created harm.”

A new leader should assume that people are not beginning at zero but beginning with history. They may have sat through previous forums, surveys, task forces, retreats, committees, and announcements. They may have watched people use the language of collaboration while making unilateral decisions. They may have heard leaders invoke transparency while withholding the information people needed to make sense of their own work lives. They may have been asked to show grace to people who never showed accountability.

So the new leader has to resist the urge to be believed too quickly.

That sentence may be the hardest leadership advice I know how to give. A leader entering a wounded culture should want to be credible, not instantly trusted. Credibility is built through repeated alignment between words, decisions, process, and consequence. Trust repair research and organizational justice research both point toward fairness, voice, transparency, and consistency as central to how employees interpret leadership during change. Employees watch not only what leaders decide, but how they decide, whose voices count, what information is shared, and whether the rules apply evenly.

A new leader can start by saying something like this: “I know trust cannot be requested. It has to be earned through practice. I also know that some people in this organization may have good reasons to be cautious. I won’t ask you to pretend otherwise.”

That kind of statement is important because it reflects reality without demanding emotional labor from the people who have already paid too much of it.

Trauma informed approaches offer another useful frame here, as long as we use the language carefully. Not every painful workplace experience is trauma in the clinical sense, and leaders should avoid casually diagnosing their employees. Still, trauma informed principles translate well to organizations that have experienced fear, coercion, instability, public humiliation, or chronic mistrust. The commonly cited principles include safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment and choice, and attention to cultural, historical, and gender issues.

Those principles are practical. They’re not soft. They require leaders to design systems where people have real information, real voice, real options, and real protection from retaliation.

For a new leader, safety begins with predictability. People need to know how decisions will be made, when they will be consulted, what information they’ll receive, and how disagreement will be handled. If every decision arrives as a surprise, people will remain braced for harm, hence the fight or flight I mentioned earlier. If every communication feels like a verdict, people will stop believing in process.

Transparency means more than explaining decisions after the fact. It means showing the work before the decision hardens. It means saying, “Here is the problem we are trying to solve. Here is what we know. Here is what we do not know yet. Here are the constraints. Here is where we need input. Here is what can still change.”

Collaboration means more than inviting people into rooms where the outcome has already been determined. People in toxic cultures often know the difference between participation and decoration. They have served on committees that existed to create the appearance of consultation. They have answered surveys that disappeared into institutional fog. They have watched leaders solicit feedback and then proceed exactly as planned.

Voice without influence is not shared governance. It’s venting…….but with minutes.

I don’t want to sound pessimistic in my advice for leaders entering a damanged culture because I hold the exact opposite position, personally: There is NO BETTER culture to enter as a leader than a damaged one because the fixes are actually quite simple if you bring the kind of awareness I just described. It’s literally the easiest leadership puzzle to piece together because — unlike so many other leadership conundrums — there’s a clear path to success.

Organizational Members

For existing organization members, the arrival of a new leader can create a different kind of challenge. People may feel relief and suspicion at the same time. They may want to hope and also feel foolish for hoping. They may wonder whether they owe the new person a clean slate, even as their nervous systems are still responding to the old culture.

Personally, I don’t think people owe organizations their unguarded optimism.

People who have survived toxic cultures are allowed to move slowly. They are allowed to protect their energy and wait for patterns before offering trust. They are allowed to distinguish between a new leader’s personality and the organization’s systems. A kind person can still inherit harmful structures. A sincere person can still be constrained by a clueless or ill-equipped board, a budget, a cabinet, a legal team, exogenous political forces, or a culture of managerial self-protection. A promising first impression is meaningful, but a first impression is not a repair plan.

For org members, healing begins with refusing to confuse vigilance with bitterness. Vigilance may have kept you safe but now we need to notice when vigilance is still useful and when vigilance starts costing more than it protects. That kind of discernment is hard inside organizations because the workplace keeps asking people to perform normalcy while they are still assessing danger.

And let me speak to you from my personal way in the world: I struggle. I taste the bitterness of betrayal for a very, very long time, and I need to work hard to keep it from corroding the back of my teeth. I work, friends, and one way I get there is through constant intellectual interrogation.

One useful question is, “What evidence would I need to see before I believe conditions are changing?”

That question moves us away from vague hope and vague despair and creates a more concrete standard. Maybe the evidence is a leader admitting harm without defensiveness. Maybe it’s a decision process that includes meaningful worker voice before conclusions are reached. Maybe it’s the removal of a harmful manager or six. Maybe it is a new communication practice that actually changes how information flows. Maybe it is a fairer workload model. Maybe it’s a commitment to stop punishing the people who state the problems plainly and clearly. The point is to identify observable behavior.

A second useful question is, “Where do I still have agency?”

Toxic organizations often shrink our sense of agency. People begin to feel that every action is futile, every decision is predetermined, and every effort will be absorbed into the same broken machinery. Sometimes that assessment is accurate or just partly accurate. Healing requires telling the truth about constraints while also locating the places where action remains possible.

Agency might mean documenting patterns or rebuilding peer relationships. It might mean participating in a union, shared governance body, committee, or informal support network, mentoring newer colleagues so they do not internalize the culture as normal. It might mean choosing where not to spend energy. It might mean declining the performance of institutional cheerfulness and other mandated performances.

Peer support matters here. Trauma informed frameworks emphasize peer support because people often recover safety through relationships with others who understand the experience and who can sensemake from a lateral position. Inside damaged organizations, peer relationships can become a counterculture of reality. They help people test perceptions, resist gaslighting, and remember that the official story is not always the whole story.

For new leaders, that means informal networks should not be treated as threats. In wounded organizations, hallway conversations, union meetings, private group chats, and trusted peer circles may be where truth has survived. A leader who tries to dismantle those networks in the name of unity has misunderstood the situation. Our goal isn’t to eliminate informal networks but to make the formal organization worthy of trust again.

That repair will take time.

A new leader entering a toxic culture should probably spend the first months doing less than they are tempted to do. Listen. Map the harm. Identify the broken systems. Learn who has credibility and why. Notice who benefits from confusion. Notice which people are called “negative” when they share inconvenient truths. Notice which people are always asked to absorb the emotional labor. Notice the gap between the organization’s values language and its daily practices.

Then act, but do it carefully and visibly.

One of the biggest mistakes a new leader can make is to listen indefinitely without making any concrete changes. Listening without action is just another injury. People begin to feel studied rather than respected. The early actions don’t have to solve everything, and quite frankly, they can’t. They do need to show that the leader understands the difference between symbolic reassurance and material change.

Repair often begins with small acts of procedural justice. Publish decision timelines. Explain criteria. Share drafts before final decisions. Stop surprise announcements. Create real feedback loops. Protect dissent. Follow up when people raise concerns. Admit when the organization got something wrong. Say what will change because people spoke up.

Do you see what I mean when I say this is relatively easy work? It isn’t rocket science.

Crucially, though, the early question for a new leader is not, “How do I get people to trust me?” The better question is, “How do I make trust a rational response?”

That question shifts responsibility back where it belongs. Trust is an organizational design problem; it’s an output. If people have learned that speaking up leads to punishment, then leaders have to create systems where speaking up leads to attention, protection, and course correction. If people have learned that decisions are made in secret, then leaders have to build processes where decisions can be understood before they are announced. If people have learned that values language is decorative, then leaders have to connect values to consequences.

For org members, the matching question is, “How do I remain open to evidence without abandoning what experience has taught me?”

That balance is difficult. People can become so accustomed to harm that they can’t recognize repair when it starts. People can also become so hungry for relief that they overinterpret ordinary decency as transformation. Neither response is a character flaw. Both responses make sense in context.

The healthy middle, though, is watchful openness.

Watch what the new leader does with bad news. Watch what happens when powerful people are challenged. Watch whether the leader can tolerate complexity or whether every problem gets converted into branding language. Watch whether the leader distinguishes between peace and compliance-induced silence. Watch whether the leader understands that conflict can be evidence of life in a system, not merely a threat to be managed.

Healthy cultures still contain conflict but it’s permitted to come to the surface without destroying people.

That may be the real test of a new leader in a damaged organization. Can people tell the truth and remain safe? Can employees disagree without being labeled disloyal? Can the organization acknowledge harm without rushing to self-absolution? Can leaders repair processes instead of asking people to adjust their attitudes? Can the organization stop confusing compliance with trust?

Healing from toxic culture is possible, but the work is slower and way less glamorous than leadership narratives may suggest. It doesn’t begin with a new strategic plan, I can tell you that much. It begins with a new relationship to truth.

For new leaders, the invitation is to enter with humility. You cannot demand trust. Do not perform urgency. Don’t mistake politeness for health. Don’t assume that silence means buy-in. Learn the history. Study the harm. Repair the processes. Protect the people who tell the truth.

For existing org members, the invitation is to protect your hope without making it naive. You don’t have to hand over trust on the first day. You also don’t have to let the old culture permanently colonize your imagination. Look for evidence. State what you need. Build peer support. Preserve your agency. Let repair be possible without pretending repair has already happened simply because someone new is at the helm.

Uber’s public culture crisis is often told as a leadership story: A founder leaves, a new CEO arrives, the company tries to grow up. That version isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. The deeper story is about what happens when an organization teaches people that harm is normal and then has to prove, over time, that it has learned a different way to operate.

That’s the part every damaged organization should pay attention to. But no organization heals at the moment of arrival.

Healing begins when people can see, repeatedly and concretely, that the organization’s old rules no longer govern the room. When they see that bad news can travel upward without punishment. When listening changes decisions. When transparency arrives before the decision, not after it. It begins when leaders understand that trust is not a mood they can request from employees.

Trust is a rational response to evidence.

At multiple 2026 commencement ceremonies, speakers who framed AI as an inevitable revolution were met with some well-deserved boos and jeers. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at the University of Arizona after discussing AI’s transformative future; other speakers, including Gloria Caulfield and Scott Borchetta, faced similar responses when they leaned into AI optimism at graduation ceremonies. The pattern is pretty clear: Graduates are booing AI “pep talks” probably because many of them see AI as a threat to their futures, not a gift being handed down from the mountaintop1.

And honestly? GOOD. In a minute, I’ll share what I think those speakers should have said instead.

Grads aren’t anti-tech; that reading is too easy and defensive, unsupported by research, and, quite honestly, too flattering to the tech sector. The students were not saying, “We reject tools.” They were saying, “Stop pretending you are giving us a neutral tool while we watch employers use that tool to weaken our job prospects, cheapen our labor, and reframe our education as obsolete before we even cross the stage.”

And in the case of Borchetta – who gave me BIG bad vibes when he said, “Hear me now or pay me later” – the violation of consent. Our youngest members of society have developed a pretty strong vocabulary and understanding around consent, and the entire AI discourse feels downright abusive.

So the AI evangelists didn’t fail their graduation speech final exam because of students’ bad feelings about tech; they failed because they did what tech culture so often does: They confused scale with wisdom. They mixed up adoption with consent. And as usual, they framed inevitability with moral legitimacy.

They waltzed into commencement ceremonies, spaces designed to honor human effort, learning, memory, family, sacrifice, uncertainty, and hope, and delivered speeches that sounded like investor decks. They talked about disruption to audiences made up of people who are about to be disrupted. They talked about transformation to people who have already spent four years navigating pandemic learning loss, institutional instability, debt anxiety, inflation, a punishing job market, and the creeping suspicion that the rules are changing faster than anyone in power is willing to admit or – importantly – address.

Ironically, a humanist could have told them the speech would fail before the first sentence hit the microphone.

A humanist would have asked: Who is the audience? What emotional condition are they in? What does this ceremonial moment mean? What do the graduates fear? What are they grieving? What are they proud of? What power does the speaker represent? What do we need to acknowledge before we can extend any invitation into a discourse?

A humanist would have noticed that commencement is not a platform for a product launch.

A humanist would have known that “AI will change everything” lands quite differently when delivered by a billionaire to graduates entering a labor market already shaped by automation, layoffs, credential inflation, and wage anxiety. A humanist would have understood that a phrase like “you will use AI to shape the future” may sound inspirational to the speaker while sounding coercive to the listener. A humanist would have known that people don’t generally welcome “the future” when it sounds like something being imposed on them by people who have already cashed out.

This was an important cultural moment for us because the tech sector keeps insisting that the humanities are ornamental, decorative, “soft skills.” Maybe they give cursory attention to ethics, brand storytelling, and enlivening a slide deck with a human touch. But the commencement fiascos show us something else. The humanities are not a garnish. They are the discipline of reading the room.

And the room, my friends, is booing.

If I were advising such speakers, I’d give them this.

Dear graduates, families, faculty, staff, and everyone who helped make this day possible:

Today is not about technology.

That may seem like an odd way to begin a speech in 2026, when artificial intelligence seems to be the subject of every headline, every boardroom conversation, every anxious faculty meeting, and every slightly-to-moderately unbearable LinkedIn post. But I want to begin by saying it clearly: Today is not about AI. Today is about you.

Today marks the culmination of all the work you did when no one was watching and the sacrifices you made to get here: The papers you wrote late at night, the exams you took when your life was already full, the jobs you carefully scheduled around your classes, the families who adjusted their rhythms around your deadlines, the professors who pushed you because they believed you had more to say, and the friends who kept you going when you were not sure you could keep going yourself.

Today is about the human intelligence that got you here.

I know many of you are tired of hearing about AI. I know some of you are angry. I know some of you are worried. I know some of you are curious, too, because those positions can coexist. You can be interested in a technology and still resent the way powerful people talk about it. You can see potential in a tool and still object to the arrogance of those who act as though your consent is irrelevant. You can be open to the future and still refuse to be bullied by someone else’s version of inevitability.

That’s good intellectual practice: We can hold these competing ideas in our minds at once. You’ve been trained to do that here.

So let me say what should have been said more often and much earlier: Your concerns are reasonable.

It’s certainly reasonable to worry about what AI will mean for work. It’s certainly reasonable to wonder whether entry-level jobs will shrink or creative labor will be devalued or human judgment will be outsourced or your degree will be treated as less meaningful by people who maybe never understood the purpose of higher education in the first place. It’s certainly reasonable to feel frustrated when institutions warned you not to use AI in your coursework and then invited speakers to tell you that AI will define your career. It’s reasonable to notice the contradiction. You’re not imagining these tensions.

You’ve been asked to do something deeply unfair: Prepare for a world that is changing while many of the people changing it refuse to take responsibility for the instability they’re creating. Prepare for a world that is changing while the people in power do nothing to erect guardrails to protect our environment, society, and individuals.

That’s a failure of leadership.

For years, the loudest voices in technology have spoken about AI as though its development were a weather system. It’s coming, they say. It’s inevitable, they say. Adapt or be left behind, they say. But AI is not weather. It’s not rain. It’s not gravity. It’s built by people, funded by people, deployed by people, marketed by people, regulated or under-regulated by people, as the case may be, and used by organizations of people who make choices about whose work counts. About whose futures count.

When someone tells you a technological future is inevitable, listen carefully. Sometimes they’re describing reality. Sometimes they’re describing a business model.

You don’t owe anyone passive acceptance of a future for you designed without you.

At the same time, I don’t want to offer you false comfort. AI will be part of your world. It already is. You’ll encounter it in workplaces, schools, hospitals, hiring systems, creative industries, customer service systems, public agencies, and private platforms. Some uses will be helpful. Some will be boring. Some will be exploitative. Some will be dressed up in language so shiny that it will take effort to see the harm underneath.

Right there is where your education will be the most valuable.

The value of your education is not that you memorized facts no machine can retrieve. That was never the deepest purpose of education. The value of your education is that you learned how to ask better questions. You learned how to read. Not just words, but situations. Evidence. Motives. Silences. Systems. You learned how to notice when a claim is doing more than it admits. You learned how to distinguish confidence from credibility. You learned how to sit with complexity without immediately tightening it up into a slogan.

Those are survival skills.

The world doesn’t need you to become smaller so you can fit inside someone else’s machine. The world needs your judgment. Your taste. Your skepticism. Your compassion. Your ability to recognize when efficiency has become a cover story for harm. Your ability to ask who benefits, who pays, who is missing from the conversation, and what kind of life a system is actually producing.

These questions are pro-human.

AI may be able to generate language, images, code, music, lesson plans, legal summaries, marketing copy, and strategic memos and may become more useful than it is now. It may also become more intrusive, more extractive, and more normalized in places where it doesn’t belong. The question before you is not whether AI is good or bad in some abstract, permanent, universal way. The better question is this one: Under what conditions does this tool serve human beings, and under what conditions are human beings being asked to serve the tool?

That question will matter in every field.

If you become a teacher, ask whether AI helps students learn or merely helps institutions process them faster.

If you become a nurse, doctor, or therapist, ask whether AI supports care or gives exhausted systems another excuse to thin out human contact.

If you become an artist, writer, musician, or designer, ask what happens when creative work is scraped, remixed, and sold back to the public without consent or compensation.

If you become a manager, ask whether AI helps workers do meaningful work or becomes a surveillance mechanism with more palatable branding.

If you become a public servant, ask whether automated systems make government more accessible or make it harder for vulnerable people to reach a human being.

If you become a technologist, please ask better questions than many of your predecessors asked. Ask what you’re building, yes, but then ask why. Ask for whom. Ask at whose expense. Ask what happens if you’re wrong. Ask who gets to appeal the decision. Ask whether the people most affected by the outcome had any meaningful say before the system was launched.

You’ll hear many people tell you to “embrace AI.” I want to offer different advice: Evaluate it.

Use it when it’s useful. Refuse it when it’s degrading. Question it when it is oversold. Regulate it when it becomes dangerous. Improve it when improvement is possible. Limit it when limits are needed. And never confuse technological capacity with moral permission.

A machine’s ability to do something doesn’t answer the question of whether it should be done.

You’re graduating into a world that will try to make you feel behind. That feeling is profitable. Entire industries depend on making people anxious enough to buy the next tool, enroll in the next program, chase the next credential, and apologize for not already mastering the thing that was released six weeks ago.

Don’t build your life around that panic.

Learn, yes. Of course. Stay curious, yes. Develop new skills, yes. But don’t let anyone convince you that your worth depends on constant adaptation to systems that feel no obligation to adapt to you.

You’re allowed to ask for a humane future.

You’re allowed to expect technology to be accountable to democratic life, not simply to markets and the richest people among us.

You’re allowed to insist that education is more than workforce training.

You’re allowed to believe that human beings are not inefficient machines.

You’re allowed to protect what is slow, relational, embodied, local, communal, difficult, and real.

And you are allowed to boo, metaphorically or literally, when someone stands on a stage and mistakes arrogance for vision.

Graduates, the future will ask a great deal of you. It will ask you to learn tools you didn’t expect to need. It will ask you to make judgments under uncertainty. It will ask you to live amid systems that are under revision in real time. That’s hard. You deserve leaders who admit that difficulty instead of packaging it as excitement.

So let me close with a promise and a charge.

The promise is that your education still matters. It matters because the central problems of this century will not be solved by computation alone. They’ll require interpretation, trust, courage, cooperation, memory, ethics, imagination, and care. They’ll require people who can read the room and then help the room become more honest.

The charge is that you refuse the false choice between fear and surrender. You don’t have to worship AI. You also don’t have to ignore it. You don’t have to let other people define your relationship to it. You can meet it as educated people should meet any powerful force: With curiosity, caution, moral seriousness, and a very clear understanding that tools are never neutral once they enter human systems.

Today, we celebrate you.

Your intelligence. Your labor. Your questions. Your future.

May you build lives that no machine can counterfeit. May you build workplaces that honor human dignity. May you build institutions that remember people are not inputs. And when someone tries to sell you inevitability, may you have the courage to ask who wrote the script.

Congratulations, graduates.

We need your actual intelligence now more than ever.

A Different Framing

That speech shows us a different theory of audience, and I think it embodies that which the AI evangelists at ALL levels keep missing.

They imagine resistance as ignorance. They imagine skepticism as fear. They imagine boos as evidence that people simply don’t understand the future. But the graduates may understand the future better than the speakers do because they’re the ones being asked to live in it without the safety net of wealth, ownership, autonomy, or executive insulation.

Humanists know that language reveals power. We know that every message carries an implied relationship between speaker and audience. Much of AI evangelism has failed because the implied relationship is terrible. The message beneath the message has been simply, We built this. We funded this. We’ll profit from this. You will adapt.

That’s a threat, and the graduates easily clock it.

The tech sector does need communicators, ethicists, writers, historians, teachers, philosophers, artists, sociologists, labor scholars, and people trained with awareness of what happens when systems meet actual human life. The humanists need to be involved at the beginning, before the product launch, before the keynote, before the policy memo, before the commencement speech, before the public decides, quite reasonably, that the people building the future have no idea how to speak to the humans who have to live there.

AI may be powerful. But power without interpretation is incredibly reckless. Power without humility is brittle. Power without humanistic understanding waltzes into a graduation ceremony, congratulates itself, and gets booed by the very people it thought it was there to inspire.

And then it blames them.

This week has been an excellent lesson in power, my friends.

Obviously, this isn’t a national study or even a published one; it’s just my recreational research project on local data to pressure test a sentiment I keep hearing: “Jobs now require AI skills, so we need to infuse our curriculum with AI.”

I have a question so basic that I don’t even know if anyone who says that in my vicinity can answer it: Which jobs?

So I decided to find out. I live in an area where the vast majority of our college grads are local and end up staying local, and I thought this information would help me not only answer my question but also figure out if the tech inevitability evangelists are correct.

But those jobs aren’t regular jobs that became AI-using jobs; they were actual AI jobs. Titles include AI Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist with machine learning responsibilities, Generative AI Developer, Prompt Engineer, AI Product Manager, MLOps Engineer, Natural Language Processing Engineer, AI Solutions Architect, and Research Scientist in AI or machine learning.

In other words, the jobs requiring AI skills are jobs in the field of AI. The remaining 97 percent of postings did not clearly require AI skills at all. All of them, though, require people who know how to learn and how to think.

That idea is underscored in a short interview with the CIO at global employer Liberty Mutual, Monica Caldas, who talked about their approach to using AI. She says that “employees have to first go through training that makes sure they understand the risks, the hallucinations that may occur, and our expectations of how to use the tool.” What a great example of DSAIL: Discipline (in this case, domain) specific AI literacy.

Does every curriculum, then, need to prepare students with “AI skills”? Or do students need to know how to think critically, read well, learn well, engage with complex ideas, and put their learning in motion?

If we’re going to make labor market arguments, let’s make them, but we need to make labor market arguments responsibly. We should ask what employers in our region are actually requesting. We should ask which students we serve and what kinds of jobs they are likely to pursue after graduation. We should ask whether AI is a central job requirement, a preferred technical skill, a workplace tool, or simply a buzzword attached to an institutional strategy meant to save an organization money.

For community colleges especially, the local labor market isn’t a mere abstraction. Our students often attend college because they’re trying to move into specific jobs, advance in their current workplaces or careers, support families, change industries, or access better wages without leaving the region. If we claim that “jobs require AI skills,” we should be able to show which jobs, where, and for whom.

We can’t allow national narratives to dictate local choices. Otherwise, we risk mistaking a generalized national anxiety for a local curricular mandate.

If it’s appropriate for the discipline, we can teach students about AI without pretending every student is headed into machine learning engineering. We can help students understand AI without letting AI displace writing, reading, discussion, research acumen, critical thinking, collaboration, ethical reasoning, or disciplinary knowledge. We can prepare students for a changing world without treating every employer talking point/tech start-up narrative as an emergency.

But we need to find some honesty rooted in actual data, in what the local and relevant evidence actually shows us.

In this sample of 5,000 jobs, the answer is clear: AI skills were required for jobs in the domain of AI.

That result is a very different finding from “jobs now require AI” or “employers demand AI skills.” Before we redesign curriculum around sweeping claims, we should probably start there, with some actual evidence.

I’ll check back in a year to see where we are.

Very often, organizations face situations where a decision itself matters less than how that decision is made legible to the people who live inside the org. The recent firing of Alex Cora by the Boston Red Sox is one of those moments. On its surface, it looks like a familiar sports story: A struggling team, a disappointing start, a leadership change meant to reset direction. That part is not unusual. What is unusual, and what makes it worth examining more closely, is what followed.

Within hours, players were publicly describing the organization’s direction as unclear. Veteran shortstop Trevor Story noted that the explanation provided to the team was not sufficient. Others described a brief meeting in which leadership spoke for a few minutes, declined to take questions, and closed the conversation.

That was a wasted opportunity.

These details illuminate something deeper about how leadership is being enacted in this moment. The situation isn’t just about changing managers but is a breakdown in how meaning is constructed and shared within the organization. That’s the collective sensemaking I’ve talked about before: Collective sensemaking is a level one leadership skill and one of the most critical activities leaders undertake.

Too often, leaders may assume that once a decision has been made, the difficult work is behind them. The analysis has been completed, the authority has been exercised, and the organization can move forward. In practice, the opposite is true. The moment of communication is where the real work begins because that’s where people determine whether the organization still makes sense to them, whether there is a coherent direction guiding decisions, and whether they themselves are considered part of that direction.

Right now, the players are signaling that those conditions are not being met.

Let’s be precise about what is happening here: The issue is not whether players disagree with the decision. In any organization, there will always be decisions that individuals would not have made themselves. Trust does not require agreement. It requires understanding. People need access to the reasoning that connects a decision to a broader strategy in an explicit way. They need to see how the pieces fit together. Without that, the decision exists in isolation, and isolation invites speculation.

The language coming from the clubhouse is instructive. When players describe the situation as “up in the air” or question the direction of the franchise, they are, in part, reacting not only to the removal of Alex Cora but more significantly to the absence of a clear narrative that explains why this move was necessary and what comes next. In that absence, they’re left to construct their own explanations, and those explanations tend to emphasize instability and magnify the lack of clarity.

Organizations frequently underestimate how quickly that type of shift happens. When people can’t locate the logic of a decision, they begin to question whether that logic exists at all, and that dynamic doesn’t remain contained to a single event. It becomes a lens through which future decisions are interpreted. Over time, that dynamic erodes confidence and trust in leadership, not because leaders lack authority, but because the organization no longer feels coherent.

As always, there’s also a relational dimension to this situation, too, and I talked about it previously when I discussed better ways to do layoffs. Story described Cora as someone who “had our backs” and who absorbed pressure on behalf of the team. That language reflects a form of leadership that is built around protection, accountability, and shared experience. When a figure like that is removed, the impact is huge because it alters the relational fabric of the group. If that change is not acknowledged or contextualized, it feels abrupt and disorienting, even if the decision itself is justified.

The organizational response to that kind of disruption is equally significant. Telling players to focus on playing baseball may appear practical, even necessary, in a performance-driven environment. At the same time, it communicates a narrowing of role and identity. It suggests that the thinking, interpreting, and sense-making aspects of their experience are secondary or unnecessary. Doing so reinforces a division between those who make decisions and those who are expected to execute them.

Such a division has consequences. When people perceive that their perspective isn’t valued, they adjust their engagement accordingly; we can go back to our discussion on discretionary effort for more on that. They may comply with expectations, complete their tasks, meet baseline requirements, all while withholding the deeper level of investment that comes from feeling included in the organization’s direction. It may be a subtle shift at first and one that is often misinterpreted as a performance issue rather than a structural one.

What makes this situation especially instructive is how closely it mirrors patterns seen in many other organizations. It’s common for institutions to emphasize values such as collaboration, trust, and community in their public messaging. Those values are often genuine aspirations. The challenge arises when decisions become difficult or time-sensitive. In those moments, organizations frequently revert to more controlled and opaque approaches, prioritizing speed and authority over inclusion and explanation.

The gap between stated values and enacted behavior becomes visible very quickly.

Once that gap is visible, people recalibrate their expectations. They learn what the organization actually prioritizes, as opposed to what it claims to prioritize. “Shut up and play ball” will shape how people participate going forward. They may become more cautious in offering input, less willing to engage in dialogue, and more focused on protecting their own position within the system. Over time, this produces an organization that is much more constrained in its thinking. It contributes to brittleness. It creates sclerosis.

From a leadership perspective, the key point here is that none of this was inevitable. The organization could have made the same decision and produced a very different outcome in terms of trust and alignment. Providing a clear rationale, allowing space for questions, and acknowledging the relational impact of the change would not have weakened leadership. It actually would have strengthened it by reinforcing coherence and respect within the system.

Authority and leadership can be a blurry distinction among people who aren’t always as thoughtful as they should be when in positions of power. Authority enables leaders to make decisions. Leadership, in a more substantive sense, involves ensuring that those decisions can be understood and integrated by the people who are affected by them. When that integration doesn’t occur, the organization continues to function on the surface, but below that, uncertainty and disengagement take root.

The situation with the Boston Red Sox offers a clear illustration of this dynamic. The decision has been made, and the season will continue. At the same time, the players’ responses indicate that something more fundamental has been disrupted. The organization now faces the task of rebuilding not just its performance, but its internal coherence.

That work is always more complex and time consuming than the original decision, and the task would have been made much easier with more strategy around collective sensemaking.

What I don’t know is whether the change signals a retreat from accessibility or just an acknowledgment that the implementation burden was underestimated at scale, especially for organizations with fragmented systems, legacy content, and limited technical infrastructure. The pressure is certainly about compliance but orgs also needed to meaningfully engage with the deeper questions about who owns accessibility work, how it is resourced, and whether institutions were ever structurally prepared to meet these expectations in the first place. I don’t think most were, hence my own approach of building an infrastructure for this work that worked at multiple levels and required 14 months to implement.

Extending the deadline buys time, at the same time it confirms that MAYBE the original timeline was misaligned with operational reality across sectors or MAYBE orgs did not begin the process of compliance immediately, which they should have.

I still have the plan, by the way, and we now have 12 months. If your orgs are taking the approach of simply placing the burden of a systemic compliance obligation on the backs of individuals, we should probably talk. This work requires must more extensive infrastructure than that.

Here’s the real work of today. Last time we discussed Oracle’s approach to layoffs, which was simply a 6am email of notification and immediate disconnection from all systems. My argument in that piece is that there’s a better way to do things, so I thought we might talk more about that in this episode.

I want to stay with that claim and make it more concrete because from the top of the org, layoffs look like mere organizational decisions. But for the rest of the org, they actually serve as meaning-making events that shape how an entire workforce understands the organization, their relation to it, and their work within it.

Let’s situate the discussion within the idea of a contradiction that organizations actively cultivate: The idea that relationships are at the heart of what we do.

That sentiment cuts across a variety of org and enterprise types. Think back to the return of office (RTO) push. Do you remember how much narrative about collaboration and culture we heard as a justification for forcing people back to the office despite record productivity and profit? Collaboration is so important, they said. Seeing each other is the magic of the enterprise. Relationships are key to our success. This is how work gets done around here.

(Sidebar: My hypothesis is that the real motivations are real estate, the need for mid-managers to demonstrate their value in visible ways, and the need for control.)

At the same time, when layoffs occur, those same organizations often default to abrupt, impersonal separation, and the disconnect, frankly, is embarrassing. Are relationships important or aren’t they? Are they important only when they’re convenient for those making decisions? Treating relationships – the social fabric of the organization -- as expendable the moment they become inconvenient, the organization teaches its workforce that the stated value of connection is conditional. That lesson travels quickly and reshapes trust in ways that are difficult to repair.

People will immediately recalibrate their relationship to the organization because relationships take time and effort to cultivate. They require bandwidth. And, quite honestly, if I’m shown that I’m the one who is a chump for investing in that so deeply, it doesn’t take rocket science to perform a quick ROI on my personal behavior. We are taught the values of the organization through its choices and behavior, period.

Last time I talked about alternatives in a general way, and extending the timeline for separation is one such alternative, something that doesn’t require ideal conditions or unlimited resources. I’m watching an organization manage site closures with a multi-year timeline, and the contrast is instructive. Providing time allows people to process what is happening collectively (sensemaking is social), maintain human connections (those relationships that were so important up to this point), and make deliberate decisions about their next steps.

Even a much shorter window, something as basic as two weeks, would introduce a level of reciprocity that aligns with the expectations placed on employees. Organizations often require notice from workers as a professional norm, a standard. In some cases, you won’t receive certain benefits if you leave without enough notice because you’ll inconvenience the organization. One reasonable question is why that norm does not extend in the other direction, and what it signals when it does not.

The organization’s time is valuable; mine is not. The organization’s orderliness is valuable; mine is not. The organization’s comfort is valuable, mine is not.

These are lessons for the workforce that create downstream effects that contribute to the brittleness organizations often experience in conditions like these. I’m becoming further convinced that this brittleness is what impedes effective org change.

Time is one matter, but let’s assume we can’t offer the benefit of time. Some practical measures should be considered baseline rather than exceptional. At minimum, employees should be provided with verified dates of employment, their most recent job descriptions, and access to transition support such as resume development or job placement services. For many people, these materials are stored on internal systems that become inaccessible the moment separation occurs. Reconstructing years of work from memory adds unnecessary strain at an already destabilizing moment.

And leaders will want to recognize what it takes to find another job here in 2026. Have they tried to do it themselves at the level of the people they’re letting go, I wonder? If not, they should. People who earn enough to hire people to clean their own toilets should take time to experience what those who do not would experience in a job search.

Business Insider reported in January that it takes a month to 51 days to find a food and beverage job, something that formerly could be accomplished in a handful of days (or hours in some cases!). It takes two months to get hired in tech (longer here in April, no doubt; numbers will show that soon).

Outplacement services don’t need to be elaborate to be useful; even a few sessions focused on resume translation, interview preparation, or job search strategy can help people regain a sense of direction and control. This step is all the more critical the longer someone has been at the org.

Finally, I’ll come back to the question of how the organization treats the social fabric that work creates. Offering optional spaces for goodbye conversations, whether virtual or in person, acknowledges that people are not just roles but relationships. Supporting teams in maintaining contact, if they choose, reinforces that the organization understands what it has been asking people to build all along.

None of these practices resolve the difficulty of layoffs. They do, though, shape whether the experience feels abrupt and dehumanizing or structured and respectful; it’s that distinction that has long-term consequences for everyone who remains connected to the organization.

None of this work is complex, and it doesn’t require a full redesign of organizational systems. What it does require, though, is clear alignment between what organizations say they value and how they behave when those values are tested.

Layoffs happen in organizations and when they do, there’s a way to do it. Did you see what happened recently at the tech company Oracle? I saw it unfold because I travel in those organizational circles online, and let me repeat the refrain of this episode: There’s a way to do it.

Reuters reported in March that Oracle was planning thousands of job cuts as data center costs rose alongside its AI buildout, and then reported that the cuts had begun as part of a restructuring effort tied to those investments. Oracle said the restructuring could cost as much as $2.1 billion in fiscal 2026, mostly in severance. In other words, this was not a minor adjustment at the margins but rather a major strategic decision with major human consequences. (Reuters)

Those recent layoffs seem to offer yet another example of a very contemporary executive posture: Move fast, say little, cut deeply, and treat human beings as cost categories while talking grandly about the future.

Here’s what they did to 30,000 employees: “Affected employees received an email signed by ‘Oracle Leadership’ and were immediately locked out of internal systems when the notices went out at 6 a.m. EST, according to HR Executive reporting. The message cited ‘Oracle’s current business needs’ and ‘broader organizational change’ without elaboration.”

And one thing I will never understand is why people default to what they think is best in situations like this instead of accessing the millions of pages of research on organizational and leadership-related subjects like this one. There’s a WAY to do this right, and we have research to help us figure it out.

There’s a way to do hard things. And Oracle? This ain’t it.

The article I linked above also describes a counter example at another company who approached their layoffs completely differently; you can read those details there, but suffice it to say, one approach is far closer to doing it right.

So here is where leaders often fail the moral test while congratulating themselves on the strategic one. They talk as though the necessity of a decision (which, I might add, is nearly always in question) erases responsibility for the manner in which it is carried out. It does not. A layoff may at times be economically “necessary.” Humiliation is not. Opacity is not. Indifference is not. Treating workers like a line item to be erased by email while leadership narrates the future in the glowing language of innovation is not strategic clarity. It’s moral cowardice dressed up as efficiency.

Organizational research has been telling us for decades (literally!) that layoffs do not end with the people who leave. They alter the psychological contract for the people who remain. The older literature called attention to survivor guilt, reduced trust, and disruption in performance after coworkers are dismissed. More recent work continues to show that layoffs affect separated employees, survivors, and organizational functioning all at once. Downsizing is not a discrete financial event but a social event, a meaning-making event, and often a trauma event for the workplace.

For some reason I cannot explain, leaders seem to be under the impression that a focus on legal sufficiency and message discipline is enough. Was notice provided? Was the script reviewed? Did HR approve the language? Were managers told not to deviate? Those questions may protect the institution in a narrowest legal sense. What they do NOT do is to address whether leadership acted in a way that preserved dignity, trust, and the possibility of future organizational coherence and effective organizational change.

An organization can be legally compliant and still behave in ways that are reckless, dehumanizing, and strategically self-sabotaging in the long term. There’s considerable risk involved here.

So I thought we could share some vocabulary around these dynamics so that we can put to words to the experience. This info is for leaders and org members alike.

As we consider major organizational upheaval, one useful term is organizational justice. This line of research examines whether people experience decisions as fair, whether processes are fair, and whether interpersonal treatment is respectful. In layoff contexts, all three matter. People may ask, Was this decision distributed fairly? Was the process transparent and principled? Was I treated like a person while it happened? When the answer to those questions is no, the damage hits morale of the overall org but also extends into commitment, trust, effort, and turnover among the so-called survivors.

An interesting thing about the organizational justice piece is that org members can bear nearly anything….as long as they see the justice in the process. Arbitrary and capricious decisions devoid of data or a clear rationale erode psychological safety.

Another useful term is survivor syndrome. This phrase describes the experience of those left behind after layoffs, including feelings of anxiety, guilt, distrust, disengagement, and a lingering sense that the organization is no longer what it claimed to be. My sense is that leaders often imagine that the remaining workers will feel lucky, then get back to business. Research suggests something far more complicated. The survivors are not merely relieved employees. They are witnesses. They are making judgments about power, safety, trust, and whether their own dignity will matter when the spreadsheet turns against them.

A third term is humanistic leadership. This dynamic doesn’t mean soft language for hard times but is the recognition that organizations are made of people and dignity is not a side issue; responsible leadership includes stewardship of the human consequences of difficult decisions. Humanistic leadership doesn’t mean that we avoid hard choices forever but that we refuse to sever strategy from ethics. Good leaders know that how a leader carries out a painful decision becomes part of the organization’s culture, memory, and future capacity for trust and, by extension, organizational change.

That last point is where many leaders may get confused. They may think humane process is a luxury reserved for good times. In reality, humane process matters most when conditions are bad. Anyone can sound values-driven in a season of abundance. The true test comes when orgs face scarcity, pressure, and risk. Do leaders become more honest or more euphemistic? More visible or more hidden? More accountable or more diffuse in their language? Do they say, “I made this decision and here is why,” or do they hide behind phrases like “market realities,” “current business needs,” “rightsizing,” and “strategic realignment” as if language itself can absorb blame?

If leaders want guidance, it’s not mysterious, my friends. Not anywhere close.

Tell the truth before the rumor mill becomes the real management structure (and I have more to say soon about organizations that want to clamp down on the ever-gendered term “gossip.” The short story is that if you want to avoid informal sensemaking in an org, do a better job in formal communications and trust-building).

Do not let workers learn about their worth from revoked access, calendar cancellations, or a deactivated badge. Explain the business rationale in plain language. Distinguish between actual necessity and executive preference. Make senior leaders visible and answerable. Provide managers with enough information to respond like humans rather than frightened messengers. Treat departing employees with dignity in timing, communication, severance, transition support, and respect for the relationships they built. Then attend to the people who remain because the layoff is not over when the announcement ends.

And for organizational members, we have guidance here too. When something feels wrong, “wrong” is not the only word available. You may be observing a breakdown in organizational justice. You may be seeing responsibility displacement, where leaders treat a decision as though it simply arrived from the market or the board or the future, rather than from human choice. You may be watching the production of survivor syndrome in real time. You may be seeing a leadership culture that mistakes emotional detachment for strength. Vocabulary does not solve the problem by itself. At the same time, it helps people clearly state what is happening and resist the gaslighting – the slow changing of the narrative -- that often follows.

Because that is part of the modern layoff script too. First comes the euphemism. Then comes the insistence that everyone must stay positive, stay focused, and trust the process. Then comes the implied accusation that those who are disturbed by the inhumanity of it all are simply being emotional, impractical, or resistant to change. This is one of the oldest tricks in organizational life: Create harm, narrate it as necessity, then pathologize the people who correctly recognize the harm.

There is a way to do hard things.

Organizations do not become more serious by becoming less humane. Leaders do not become more credible by becoming more mechanical. And workers are not naive for expecting dignity in hard times. That expectation is not weakness but one of the last remaining defenses against a mode of leadership that wants all of the language of vision with none of the obligations of care.

Layoffs may sometimes be unavoidable. Inhumanity is not.

We are out here researching org change and UConn coach Geno Auriemma just comes right out and says it all in a press conference! I love to see it. Let’s get into it.

One of the most predictable failures in organizational change is also one of the simplest to fix: Leaders design solutions in rooms that are structurally removed from the reality of the problem, then seem surprised when those solutions do not work very well in practice.

Basically, the people in charge of the widget factory haven’t ever really meaningfully engaged in the practice of creating widgets.

Geno Auriemma, long-time head coach of the UConn basketball program (for clarity, men’s basketball is coached by Dan Hurley) offers a pretty useful illustration of this dynamic. Speaking about the NCAA tournament setup, Auriemma criticized decisions around scheduling, practice access, and preparation conditions, pointing to the logistical realities teams actually face during competition.

His frustration was quite operational: The people doing the work were navigating conditions that clearly had not been designed with their input or experience in mind. Underneath his comments was a very simple question: Did anyone ask the people who actually have to do this?

I loved that interview because it immediately showed us a very common organizational pattern, especially on the matter of change. It’s a pattern many of us have experienced.

Most change processes follow this pattern: A problem is identified, a solution is developed at a distance, a rollout plan is created, and implementation is pushed downward.

At no point in that sequence are the people closest to the work meaningfully involved in shaping the solution itself….unless you live in a country with low power distance, as I unpacked in this episode:

The change problems in orgs is often described as a communication problem; for me, though, it’s often more accurately a design problem. The people on the ground do not merely “experience” or just “do” the work; they understand the work in ways leadership often does not because they themselves are not in it. Those closest know where the friction points are, what constraints are real rather than assumed, what informal workarounds already exist, and what will break immediately once a new process is introduced.

Change research has been pointing to this problem for a long time, even if it uses less vivid language. Work on readiness for change has shown that people are more likely to support and successfully enact change when they experience it as appropriate, feasible, and credibly supported. One of the easiest ways to destroy those conditions is to design change at a distance from the work itself.

Likewise, implementation research has long distinguished between deciding on a new structure and creating the conditions under which that structure can actually function. Organizations routinely collapse those two things into one, and then seem confused when “good ideas” fail on contact with reality.

When the knowledge of people closest to the work is excluded, organizations tend to produce clean solutions to messy realities. The proposal may look coherent in a slide deck or planning memo. It may even feel strategic and well considered to the people who designed it (and their superiors, who are often even farther away from the realities of the work).

At the same time, the moment the solution meets actual conditions, the cracks appear. The people implementing it aren’t resistant or incapable, but too often the design was disconnected from the system it was meant to improve.

That’s why Auriemma’s comments are so useful beyond sports. If you strip away the tournament context, what he is really criticizing is decision-making without proximity to the work. Structural decisions were made about site setup, practice access, and scheduling rhythms, and those decisions had real downstream consequences for the people expected to perform within them. The people most affected by those decisions were not meaningfully centered in shaping them, a very familiar organizational story.

You can see the same pattern everywhere. New models are implemented for workflow without meangingfully including the people who actually manage that flow. New compliance processes are designed without frontline staff. New technologies are implemented without the people who will actually have to use them. New policies are announced without meaningful input from the people who will absorb the labor, confusion, and disruption those policies create.

And a common refrain happening right now: Use AI, use AI, use AI. In each case, the same thing happens: The system behaves exactly as designed. The problem is that the design was disconnected from reality.

Part of what sustains this pattern is an invisible but consequential assumption that leaders possess enough information to design effective solutions. Often, they do not. What they usually have is summarized information, filtered reporting, abstracted metrics, and secondhand interpretation.

What they often lack is lived friction, timing realities, informal workflow knowledge, and the emotional and cognitive load of actually doing the work. That gap is enormous because when leaders design change from abstraction, they are not solving the real problem. They are solving a representation of the problem, and representations are almost always cleaner than reality.

They are also incomplete.

One way to understand this failure is through sensemaking. The people closest to the work often have the clearest view of where the system is actually straining, what informal adjustments are already happening, and what a proposed “solution” will really do once it hits lived conditions. When leaders bypass that layer of knowledge, they lose useful feedback, one of the organization’s most important interpretive resources.

Organizations often try to patch over this issue by saying they “asked for feedback.” At the same time, feedback collected after a solution is already designed is not the same thing as participation. Feedback that doesn’t result in meaningful alteration to a a plan is pointless.

Once the broad shape of a decision has already been set, the remaining “feedback” process is often little more than validation-seeking. The real question is whether the people closest to the work helped shape the plan before it was finalized as opposed to just giving feedback once it’s nearly finished. Those are entirely different organizational behaviors, and they produce very different results.

If organizations want to avoid this trap, the principle is not complicated: Ask the people on the ground early, and design with them rather than for them. In practice, that means involving frontline staff in defining the problem itself, pressure-testing proposed changes against real workflows before rollout, identifying predictable friction points before they become crises, and treating local knowledge as a primary design input rather than a secondary check. It also requires something that many leaders find more difficult than they should: Accepting that the best solution may not originate from them.

(Further, accepting the realities of their own experiential limitations and the effects of their cognitive biases through which all information filters for human beings.)

When organizations skip this step, the consequences are remarkably consistent. They create rework, frustration, inefficiency, and workarounds. They generate disengagement not because people are resistant to change but because people recognize when a system has been imposed upon them rather than built with any real understanding of their reality.

Over time, that recognition accumulates into a larger organizational lesson: This system is not designed with us in mind. Once people learn that lesson, they begin withdrawing not just from the specific change initiative, but from the institution’s broader claims to competence and care.

The results are pretty predictable; we talked about one of them previously when we examined discretionary effort in a previous episode.

That is why the lesson here matters. Geno Auriemma’s frustration is not really about basketball logistics. Moreso, it’s about a deeply familiar organizational failure: Decisions made far from the work and imposed on the people who must carry them out.

The fix is not glamorous, and it is certainly not novel: Ask the people on the ground. Not after the fact. Not for optics. Not to validate a predetermined answer. Ask them because they know how the system actually functions. And if that knowledge is not built into the design process, what leaders are calling “change” is often just the distribution of a new set of avoidable problems.

(Programming note: I’m using “BS” here to keep it friendly for listeners; the writers use the full expression, which you can see in any of the links contained in this piece.)

Of COURSE I was excited to see this because it gives us the chance to see what’s really going on in this study and perhaps gain some insights about org spaces, but for me, personally, it also addresses a question that I am always carrying around in organizational spaces.

I have always wondered whether people who are very rah-rah about organizational discourse are genuinely all-in or whether they are just playing power….or something altogether different. I’m talking about people who mirror back to org leaders rhetoric that sounds impressive but that doesn’t always say much. Or they mimic that language in their own team meetings. I’m always wondering about the people who are visibly and actively applauding leadership decisions that are – at best – questionable and –worse – potentially harmful. Are they just not seeing what others see, or do they see it but know that in order to “play the game,” they need to play the game.

Honestly, it’s a fascinating question for me because I am completely unable to play the game. I can’t and won’t play power to save my life, so I am really intrigued when people can and do.

So of course I was interested when I saw that a new study might give us a little insight. This study on “corporate BS receptivity” gives us a partial answer, and it’s more interesting than it first appears and more complex than the headlines suggest (of course!). Let’s talk about what’s going on here.

The short version is this: The data from Dr. Shane Littrell at Cornell suggest that some people really do seem more susceptible to empty corporate language. They are more likely to hear buzzword-heavy, semantically thin communication and interpret it as “business savvy,” leadership, or vision. They are also more likely to find corporate mission statements inspiring and to rate supervisors as transformational and trustworthy. At the same time, they perform worse on workplace decision-making tasks.

Interesting.

The paper, called The Corporate BS Receptivity Scale and currently in preprint, attempts to measure whether people are inclined to overvalue jargon-laced, confusing, and largely meaningless organizational language. To measure, the researcher created fake statements that sound like executive-speak and asked participants to rate how much “business savvy” those statements conveyed. He then compared those ratings to ratings of real corporate statements and linked the results to other variables like analytic thinking, open-mindedness, and workplace judgment.

And yes, some of the fake statements are very funny. They read like parody. Yet the study’s most unsettling point is that many people did not distinguish the parody from the real thing. In fact, some real corporate statements were so similar in structure and emptiness that they had to be removed because participants could not reliably tell them apart from the generated nonsense.

There’s a joke in there about bad leadership communication! But more seriously, I think it’s a window into how organizational power works.

The paper frames the issue mainly as a matter of cognition. People who scored higher in “corporate BS receptivity” also tended to score lower on measures related to analytic thinking and fluid intelligence. On one level, that seems straightforward. Maybe some people really are more likely to mistake vagueness for insight.

But I think if we stop there, we miss the more important workplace story.

For me, it’s not enough to know “Who falls for this?” The more important question, organizationally speaking, is “What kinds of organizations reward people for responding to language this way?”

Because in real workplaces, especially large or hierarchical ones, “getting it” is not always about understanding. Often, it’s about recognition, about knowing when to nod. Getting it is hearing a sentence that means almost nothing and correctly identifying that the speaker is signaling status, alignment, or authority. In that sense, what the paper calls “receptivity” may sometimes be less about gullibility and more about social adaptation.

That’s one reason I’m writing about this study: I think it’s useful beyond its own frame.

If an employee hears a leader say something vague like “we need to operationalize stakeholder-centered agility across our strategic ecosystem,” there are at least two possible responses. One is, “This means nothing.” The other is, “I understand what this is doing, and I know how to respond to it.” Those are not the same thing. One is epistemic agreement. The other is political fluency.

The study does not fully separate those two, and I think it matters because many people who appear rah-rah in organizations are not necessarily true believers. They may be playing a game they understand very well. They may know that certain forms of speech signal belonging, promotability, and safety. They may know that plain language and directness can be punished while strategic vagueness can be rewarded.

In other words, some people are not “receptive” because they are fooled but because they are organizationally literate.

And that, frankly, is more troubling than simple gullibility.

One of the most revealing findings in the paper got less attention than it deserves: People who reported perceiving more BS in their organizations also reported engaging more often in persuasive and evasive BS themselves. The author treats this as somewhat ironic and unexpected.

I don’t find it surprising at all.

Of course people reproduce the language ecology they live inside.

If you work in an environment where ambiguity is rewarded, polished vagueness is treated as competence, and direct speech creates risk, you learn to speak accordingly. That doesn’t necessarily mean you believe in the discourse. It may mean you have learned what survival sounds like.

For me, then, this is where the article is strongest as a workplace text, even if it doesn’t quite say so outright. It unintentionally shows us that organizational communication is not just about clarity or meaning, which many of us already know, but it clearly highlights that communication is often about status management, risk navigation, and symbolic performance.

I think that’s why this study shouldn’t be read only as a warning about “bad thinkers.” It should also be read as a warning about orgs that normalize language detached from substance.

Because once that happens, a few things tend to follow.

First, language becomes a substitute for thought. If a statement sounds polished enough, strategic enough, or executive enough, it can move through a room without ever being interrogated. People begin responding to tone, prestige, and format rather than content and substance.

Second, decision-making quality declines. The paper found that higher receptivity to corporate BS predicted worse performance on workplace situational judgment tasks, even after accounting for other work-related variables. That finding is important because it suggests that being impressed by empty managerial discourse may actually interfere with sound judgment.

Third, leadership evaluation gets distorted. People who scored higher in BS receptivity were more likely to see supervisors as charismatic, visionary, transformational, and trustworthy. That means some workers may be mistaking rhetorical style for leadership quality and substance. In workplaces already shaped by image management, this is a serious problem. It helps explain why some leaders continue to be treated as compelling despite producing confusion, fear, and poor outcomes.

So what do these data show us about the original question?

They suggest that “rah-rah” organizational discourse can mean at least two different things, and the workplace often fails to distinguish between them.

For some people, the enthusiasm may be genuine. They may really hear abstract, inflated organizational language as evidence of competence, intelligence, and leadership. The paper offers evidence for that possibility.

For others, the enthusiasm may be performative. It may be a way of signaling alignment with org power, managing impressions, or avoiding the social cost of being the person who says, “This does not actually mean anything.”

In practice, organizations often reward both groups equally.

For me, that’s the larger problem.

Once an org stops caring whether language is clarifying reality or just decorating it, discourse becomes a mechanism of power rather than communication. It helps determine who sounds credible, who gets heard, who rises, and who is marked as “difficult” for insisting on plain meaning.

That’s a governance problem parading as a communication problem.

The most useful takeaway from this study for me, then, is not just that some people are more vulnerable to corporate nonsense but that workplaces may be structured in ways that make nonsense socially useful. And once nonsense becomes useful, it becomes very hard to dislodge.

So if you have ever found yourself wondering whether the most enthusiastic organizational speakers are believers or strategists, the answer is probably both: Some are believers, some are strategists, and the org often cannot tell the difference because it has learned to reward the performance either way.

What do to, then, for mid-level leaders and org citizens?

For mid-level leaders, the practical question is not just how to survive in an environment that rewards corporate BS but how not to become one of its transmission systems. If you work in a culture where vague strategic language is treated as intelligence, you may not be able to opt out entirely without consequence.

What you can do is become a translator rather than an amplifier. When higher-level messaging comes down in abstract, polished language, convert it into concrete implications: What is changing? Who is responsible? What will people need to do differently on Monday? That choice protects your people while modeling substance over performance: One of the key jobs of a mid-level leader is that of shared sensemaker. We need translation.

At the same time, if you want to prevent the creation of this kind of environment in your own sphere, reward clarity every chance you get. Do not praise people for sounding executive. Praise them for making meaning plain, sharing tradeoffs honestly, and saying when something is still uncertain. A great deal of organizational nonsense survives because leaders keep signaling that polish matters more than precision.

For organizational citizens without formal power, the task is a little different. Your job is not to become the office martyr for plain language because that rarely ends well and usually changes very little.

Your job is to stay oriented to reality. When you hear inflated or unclear discourse, ask yourself: What is the actual claim here? What evidence would support it? What concrete outcome is being promised? You don’t always have to challenge the language publicly to resist being shaped by it.

Sometimes resistance is just refusing to internalize vagueness as wisdom. Sometimes it looks like asking one clean, clear, focused question in a meeting. Sometimes it looks like building horizontal trust with other people who also prefer substance to theater.

In workplaces where BS is rewarded, clarity becomes a form of integrity. Protecting your own relationship to meaning is not a small thing. It’s one way of refusing to let the organization colonize your judgment.

I want to start with a situation because it captures, in miniature, the kinds of decisions organizations make every day. To keep the focus on the structure rather than the setting, think of this as a composite. If you are not in higher education, the dynamic may still feel familiar. When I’m talking about faculty to student ratio in the classroom, you can easily imagine that I mean nurse to patient ratio in the care setting or something similar.

In this scenario, IMAGINE that faculty learn that the number of students in each class will be increased starting in the next term and that the decision was imposed without discussion, study, pilot, or assessment; in fact, imagine that decision wasn’t formally announced.

No feedback was requested, no pedagogical investigation was completed; it was just….done. The eventual explanation may likely be framed as operational necessity: Enrollment pressure, budget pressure, efficiency, consistency across departments. The instructional consequences will be treated as downstream implementation details rather than as central academic questions. The move will be categorized as technical.

But in reality, it is a decision about governance, authority, and the location of strategy, not to mention a missed opportunity to access the most important resource in any organization: The partnership between the people actually doing the work and the people overseeing the work.

Now imagine that in place of a change like this one, the situation is bigger and broader: Program cuts and closures, staffing reductions, and other measures meant to mitigate whatever problems leaders have identified.

In a unionized environment like the one at Evergreen State, the conversation then moves to whether org changes violate the contract, whether there is a workload impact that triggers bargaining, and whether the decision can be slowed or mitigated.

What may not end up addressed is the deeper institutional design problem that the moment reveals and magnifies: When the core academic conditions of teaching and learning (or the conditions of patient care) are altered unilaterally, leaders may think they’re simply making a scheduling or room assignment adjustment. What they’re really doing, though, is declaring that strategy lives in one place and labor lives in another. That separation is the most expensive structural choice orgs continue to make.

We have better options, and a living experiment that shows us the opportunity to choose differently.

Evergreen State College

Evergreen State College offers a different model, and what makes it compelling is not that conflict disappears but that the relationship between labor and administration is organized around shared problem-solving rather than sequential authority.

Faced with a significant enrollment decline, Evergreen could have followed the familiar path toward program cuts and layoffs. Instead, the faculty union advanced a different diagnosis: The central problem was not an excess of faculty labor but a shortage of students. That reframing relocated enrollment from an administrative function to a shared institutional responsibility. Job stability, academic vitality, and student presence were treated as interdependent conditions rather than as competing priorities.

From that point forward, the question was how to mobilize the intellectual and relational capacity of the faculty to rebuild enrollment in ways that were consistent with the mission of the college. The agreement that followed recognized recruitment and outreach as real labor, adjusted workload, and compensated the work. Responsibility, authority, and resources were aligned around a common goal. The subsequent enrollment growth is important, but the governance structure that produced it is the real innovation.

For me as an org specialist-type person, this is where trust needs to be understood as an institutional technology rather than as a cultural aspiration. In higher education we routinely talk about trust as though it were a matter of tone, communication style, or leadership disposition, but in practice, trust is produced when the people who are responsible for achieving institutional goals have the formal authority, the time, and the material support to do that work.

This form of trust is built into contracts, workload language, committee structures, and decision pathways. It becomes visible in whether labor is recognized or rendered invisible and in whether participation has consequences. Evergreen’s collective bargaining agreement functions in this way in that it does not position the union as an external constraint on administrative action but creates the conditions under which faculty labor can be directed toward institutional strategy in ways that are transparent and mutually accountable. That is what it means to engineer trust into the operating system of the college.

Vacating Unilateral Leadership

From a leadership perspective, the contrast with the unilateral course size change I described earlier is stark. Unilateral action is still widely defended as efficiency, even though it consistently produces implementation resistance, morale collapse, and strategic drift…..in short, the brittleness I’ve identified previously.

Partnership and collaboration are described as slow, when in fact these are the only mechanisms that produce institutional alignment. When the people who carry out a strategy have helped to design it, implementation is not a separate phase. The work is coherent from the beginning. Evergreen demonstrates that alignment is not a byproduct of goodwill but the result of governance structures that treat faculty as intellectual infrastructure rather than as a variable cost.

For those of us working inside unionized systems, we have an additional lesson about the scope of union leadership. If our work is limited to responding to unilateral decisions after they are made, we will remain structurally reactive no matter how effective we are at enforcement. Protection is essential, but it is not sufficient.

The Evergreen model shows what it looks like when a union brings forward an institutional strategy that is both educationally grounded and financially viable and then bargains to make that strategy real. Saying no to layoffs matters. Designing a framework in which layoffs are no longer the primary response to enrollment fluctuation is a different order of work. It requires unions to build internal strategic capacity and — critically, crucially, most importantly — it requires administrations that are capable of sharing authorship of institutional direction. Neither capacity can be improvised in the middle of a crisis.

In all of this, I also see implications for how we think about leadership development in higher education. The dominant model still assumes a unilateral actor with positional authority who sets direction and manages implementation. That model is increasingly incompatible with collectively bargained environments and with the complexity of the challenges institutions are facing (let’s revisit this piece for more on that). The leaders who will be able to move their colleges forward are those who understand how to design durable faculty–administration partnerships that are written into the structure of the institution.

This is not about collegiality or civility but about system capacity. An institution that treats its faculty as a cost center will continue to manage decline and decay. Period. An institution that treats its faculty as a central strategic resource can build coherent responses to enrollment volatility, retention challenges, and public skepticism about value.

What makes this moment especially significant is that many campuses are simultaneously experiencing enrollment pressure, labor tension, and a rapid increase in unilateral operational decision-making. Course caps, modality assignments, program consolidations, A.I. implementations, and schedule redesigns are being framed as technical adjustments when they are in fact governance choices. The forward path is not simply to slow these changes through grievances and impact bargaining, although that work remains necessary.

The more consequential work is to insist that institutional strategy be relocated into shared structures where the people responsible for the academic mission have real authorship. That means bringing forward proposals that connect labor conditions to enrollment stability, retention, and student experience. It means bargaining for workload language that recognizes strategic institutional work as faculty work. It means developing administrative leadership that understands partnership not as a concession but as the only scalable form of institutional effectiveness.

Change is hard because shared design requires giving up familiar forms of control. The alternative, however, is not stability. It is a prolonged period of managing decline and decay through increasingly unilateral action and increasingly reactive resistance. Evergreen is not a story about a perfect campus or a simple program that can be replicated elsewhere but rather a demonstration that when faculty and administration decide to build structures that allow them to solve core institutional problems together, the range of possible futures expands.

At a time when higher education is investing enormous energy in finding the next tech platform that will save it, it is worth recognizing that the most powerful institutional technology we have is the one that allows us to align the people who are already here around the work that matters most.

Evergreen State, with its historic and ongoing enrollment increases, models the way.

First, let’s understand what it’s not: Fragile leadership is not the same thing as insecurity, self-doubt, or the ordinary learning curve of being in over one’s head. All leaders experience those states. Fragility is a patterned response to challenge in which the leader experiences ordinary disagreement, questioning, or feedback as a threat to identity rather than as information.

Research on defensive leadership, narcissistic vulnerability, low differentiation of self, and psychologically insecure power consistently shows the same cluster of behaviors: An inability to metabolize criticism, a tendency to interpret neutral inquiry as disloyalty, and the use of control or intimidation to restore a sense of safety. As an org member, you may witness outbursts from leaders like this; at the same time, the outbursts themselves may not cause the most severe harm but harm is certainly caused by the system that forms around the leader as people learn, very quickly, what cannot be said. Let me quickly run through some basic types of fragility in leadership.

One form of fragile leadership is evaluative fragility. This is the leader who experiences feedback as a referendum on their worth. Studies on leader defensiveness and feedback orientation show that when a person’s self-concept is tightly fused to their role, even minor critique produces cognitive narrowing. They explain, deflect, reframe, or gather allies instead of engaging the content of what was said. The meeting shifts from problem solving to face saving. Over time, information stops moving upward because the cost of honesty becomes too high.

A second form is interpretive fragility, in which questions are experienced as challenges to authority. Research on power and threat perception demonstrates that some leaders show heightened amygdala activation and threat response when their decisions are probed, even in neutral language. In practice, this looks like a leader who hears, “Can you walk us through the reasoning?” as “You are being undermined.” The conversation moves immediately to tone policing, loyalty testing, or procedural shutdown. Curiosity becomes indistinguishable from insubordination.

A third form is status fragility. This is often misread as confidence because it is accompanied by certainty, rapid decision-making, and a strong need to be the smartest person in the room. The underlying dynamic, well documented in research on narcissistic leadership and dominance-based authority, is a dependence on visible deference. Disagreement is not processed as data; it is processed as disrespect. The leader restores equilibrium through public correction, exclusion from meetings, removal of opportunities, or reputation damage. The bullying that follows is not always loud. It is frequently administrative: delayed responses, shifting expectations, selective enforcement, and the redistribution of resources.

A fourth form is volatility fragility. Here the tell is not constant control but unpredictability. Research on psychological safety shows that inconsistent emotional response from a leader produces the same communication shutdown as overt aggression. When people cannot predict whether a question will be welcomed or punished, they stop asking questions. The organization begins to optimize for mood management rather than mission.

For organizational members, the first tactic is diagnostic rather than behavioral. You cannot coach a fragile leader out of fragility from below, and trying to do so usually increases your own exposure. A better approach may be to recognize the pattern early and shift from a transparency strategy to a documentation strategy. Put questions in writing. Anchor them in shared goals, prior agreements, external standards, or outcomes so that they are harder to reframe as personal challenge. Replace spontaneous critique in public settings with structured input in formal processes where the content is recorded. Fragility thrives in ambiguity and in the informal space where narratives can be rewritten.

The second tactic is collective sensemaking. Fragile systems isolate people and make each person believe they are the problem. Comparing notes with trusted colleagues restores an accurate read of the environment and allows for coordinated, low-drama responses. Instead of one person raising a concern repeatedly, multiple people raise adjacent concerns in the appropriate venues. Then, it’s not confrontation but normalizing reality.

The third tactic is boundary clarity. Do not argue about motives. Do not attempt to win the interpretation of tone. Return consistently to task, timeline, policy, impact, or resource allocation. Fragility feeds on interpersonal framing because it can be turned into a loyalty test. Structural language is harder to personalize.

For mid-level leaders, the challenge is different because they are both exposed to fragility from above and responsible for protecting the conditions below. The most effective strategy, supported by research on buffering leadership and vertical translation, is to convert volatility into process. If decisions shift based on mood, create decision memos that summarize what was agreed to and what the next steps are. If questioning is read as threat, gather input in advance, synthesize it, and present it as a single, solution-oriented brief rather than as live debate. You are not curing the fragility; you simply cannot. All you can do is to build a container that allows work to continue.

At the same time, mid-level leaders have to actively produce psychological safety in their own span of control. That means making disagreement routine, inviting questions, thanking people for raising problems, and demonstrating that feedback changes outcomes. Research is very clear that local climates can remain healthy even inside brittle senior systems when mid-level leaders are consistent in this practice. Your unit, your department, your ecosystem becomes the place where reality can still be spoken.

And I just want to make a note here: Personally, I love toxic senior leaders for the sake of midlevel leaders. It’s very, very easy to be a good leader at the midlevel when senior leaders exhibit this level of fragility: Just do the opposite of what they do, and I guarantee you your sphere of influence will hum along beautifully, people will feel healthy and connected, and your legacy as a leader will be solidified. Granted, you need to absorb a lot from the top; that’s a trade-off. It’s not easy serving as a filter in toxic waters.

Avoiding the hiring of fragile leaders requires slowing down the courtship phase and changing the signals that search processes reward. Fragility often presents as certainty, charisma, and a tightly packaged narrative of success. The tells appear when candidates are asked about failure, about a time their mind was changed by someone with less formal power, or about a decision they made that produced negative consequences. Listen for whether the answer includes learning, redistributed credit, and sustained relationship, or whether it includes blame, exceptionalism, and the reassertion of control. Another reliable indicator comes from how candidates handle unscripted challenge in open forums. Do they become more curious, or do they begin to correct the premise of the question?

Reference checking has to move beyond, “Would you hire this person again?” and into, “What happens in the room when this person is questioned?” and “What happens to people who disagree with them over time?” Patterns of high turnover among high performers, a trail of reorganizations that isolate decision-making, and the consistent use of loyalty language are structural tells. So is the absence of people in the candidate’s past who are willing to speak as independent, respected collaborators rather than as subordinates.

I also want to note a positive hiring tell that might be overlooked. Leaders who are not fragile can describe, in specific detail, how their thinking has been altered by others and how they built systems that made it safe for that alteration to happen. They talk about process more than persona. They name the people who made them better. They are able to recount criticism without narrating it as an injustice.

Fragile leadership is expensive. It produces slower decision cycles because information has to be managed. It produces shadow systems because people route around formal structures. It produces reputational damage because bullying, even when administrative, becomes widely known. Most importantly, it produces strategic error because reality is filtered before it reaches the point of authority.

The response cannot be purely individual because fragility is a relational pattern that becomes institutionalized. The points of action, for those inside it, are to create channels where reality can still move, to protect one another from isolation, and to keep the record. Healthy leadership is not defined by the absence of error but by the capacity to be altered by what is true.

Maybe it’s not deliberate but rather just a product of how systems and organizations operate; whatever the case, it’s worth unpacking this dynamic and creating a picture of how things can be different.

Sensemaking is how people collectively understand what is happening around them, why decisions are being made, and what those decisions mean for their work and their lives. When sensemaking is constrained, people are left to guess. Guessing produces anxiety. Anxiety produces fragility. Fragility is what many organizations are living with right now.

That fragility has a name: Brittleness.

2026 is brittle. For me, that will be the word of the year.

Many people describe their workplaces as exhausted, tense, or unstable. Those words point to symptoms. Brittleness is the underlying cause.

Brittle systems look solid until they’re pressured because they are optimized, monitored, tightly coupled, and rhetorically confident. But under stress, they crack rather than bend. When people say their organization feels brittle, they are describing an environment with no slack, little trust, and a high cost for being human.

VUCA vs. BANI

BANI fits the moment better than VUCA. VUCA is an older leadership framework that emerged from military and strategic planning contexts. It stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. VUCA describes environments where conditions change quickly, outcomes are hard to predict, systems are interdependent, and information can be interpreted in multiple ways.

For a long time, VUCA helped leaders explain why planning felt harder and why certainty was elusive. It assumed motion and adaptation. The world was unstable, sure, but still intelligible. With the right analysis, collaboration, and learning, organizations could respond. We had a level of predictability rooted in somewhat stable underlying assumptions.

But I think we’re facing a shift in those underlying assumptions, and I’ll give you a perfect example: The idea in higher ed that the fed is not going to care about your accessibility under WCAG requirements for ideological reasons. From my perspective, that’s a flawed assumption that I unpacked over in my conspiracy theory episode. VUCA is not going to help us there.

BANI is a newer framework, and it feels a bit different because it describes a different psychological and structural reality. BANI stands for Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, and Incomprehensible.

VUCA focuses on instability; BANI helps us see fragility.

The B in BANI, brittle, means systems that appear strong but cannot absorb stress. They are optimized for efficiency, compliance, or performance under ideal conditions. When pressure hits, they can’t flex. Instead, they fracture.

These systems were perhaps built during long stretches of relative stability in underlying assumptions, where efficiency, compliance, and performance under ideal conditions were rewarded above all else. Over time, slack was engineered out, decision making was centralized, and risk was managed through control rather than adaptability, leaving little capacity to absorb stress when conditions shifted.

Anxious describes the emotional climate inside those systems. Anxiety here is not an individual state of some sort of individual weakness. It’s literally the rational response to environments where expectations shift without explanation. In these environments, consequences feel disproportionate and people are held responsible for outcomes without being informed, included, or empowered.

Non-linear refers to cause and effect breaking down. Small events trigger massive reactions or minor disruptions cascade into crisis. Effort and outcome no longer feel proportionate, which makes planning and prediction unreliable.

Incomprehensible describes the final layer. Official explanations no longer match lived experience. Messages feel abstract, evasive, or disconnected from reality. People stop trying to understand what is happening and start trying to survive it. To me, this is the most dangerous state for an organization, in part because it leads to the erosion of that discretionary effort we discussed previously.

The takeaway here if you’re just hearing about these frameworks for the first time is that VUCA environments strain planning; BANI environments strain meaning.

(And just as an aside, let me predict it now: Sensemaking will be the hottest of skills as we continue to create environments where information is robust but meaning is scarce. Don’t worry, liberal arts people; your time is coming.)

On the matter of meaning, then, when sensemaking is supported, people can tolerate volatility and uncertainty. When sensemaking is stifled, brittleness results and, I would argue, accelerates. Anxiety fills the gaps where explanation should be. Rumor replaces information. Silence becomes structural.

What I mean by that is that silence becomes structural when information is withheld by design, questions are redirected rather than answered, and people learn that clarity is neither expected nor rewarded. In fact, requesting clarity brings with it considerable risk as asking for rationale is read as resistance. Information moves upward, while explanation does not flow downward.

And I also want to be clear when I say that “information is withheld by design.” I am not suggesting that individual leaders withhold information (though, clearly, some do). I’m suggesting that systems are designed in such a manner that this dynamic is the by-product, as unintended as it might be.

(And as another side note, you can see what leaders are made of when this point comes up: If they take feedback about the lack of information or communication personally or engage defensive postures, you know that they do not understand how systems work and how sometimes even the best of intentions create harmful by-products.)

In my mind, then, that’s why many organizations feel brittle rather than merely complex right now. It is not only that conditions are difficult, even though they are. It’s that people are not allowed, invited, or trusted to make shared sense of what those conditions actually are.

And if you’re a reader of this space, you know that I do not give people with positional power a lot of slack because leadership itself is not complicated. It really isn’t.

Clear communication.
Basic honesty.
Following through.
Explaining decisions in plain language.

None of this is hard. None of it requires an annual retreat, a consultant, or a new B-school leadership book.

What fails in brittle systems is not leadership skill. What fails is alignment between rhetoric and reality: Trust collapses when leaders say one thing and operate by another logic.

It’s especially visible in higher education, though it is hardly unique to it. Orgs love to talk about community, shared governance, care, and academic values while being driven primarily by market logics, brand protection, enrollment competition, risk management, and corporate efficiency models. This is not new information. Faculty and staff experience this mismatch daily. Students feel it as well.

The brittleness I’m talking about comes from pretending otherwise.

When leaders insist on values language while making decisions shaped almost entirely by revenue models and reputational risk, people stop believing any of it. Communication fails because people are perceptive, though leaders may say that they’re cynical.

But at the end of it, it’s the pretending that breaks trust. It’s the lack of accurate sensemaking.

Brittle organizations are saturated with performative language.

We value people, followed by austerity.
We believe in transparency, followed by silence and silos.
We care about well-being, followed by policies that assume infinite capacity.

The problem is not that market forces exist but that we often refuse to acknowledge that they’re in the driver’s seat. Organizations can certainly survive market pressure. They cannot survive sustained dishonesty about what is actually driving decisions.

When sensemaking is stifled, people are asked to live inside contradiction without the space to acknowledge it. Over time, that demand produces disengagement, fear, and brittleness.

So how do we deal with it? Elasticity.

Elastic Systems Protect Sensemaking

The antidote to brittleness is elasticity.

Elastic systems absorb pressure, redistribute strain, and return to form without breaking. Please note one thing clearly: This is not individual-level resilience in a busted system. Instead, I am thinking about org design that allows sensemaking to function rather than suppressing it.

Elastic systems tell the truth about constraints. They say we are operating inside market realities, regulatory pressure, political interference, or financial scarcity. Here is what that means. Here is what we can and cannot do. Here is where we still have choice.

That kind of honesty, that level of clarity, lowers anxiety. It restores agency. It gives people something solid to push against instead of leaving them guessing or creating their own narrative about the dynamics.

Clear takeaways for leaders

So here are some steps for leaders. If you want to reduce brittleness, stop trying to sound inspirational and start trying to sound accurate.

Say what is actually shaping decisions (of course, that requires that you’ve actually spent time thinking about it and that you know. It requires a suspension of the cognitive biases that plague us all and the critical examination of our own thinking and behaviors. It requires a deep understanding of our org logics).
State the tradeoffs instead of hiding them.
Admit when values conflict with constraints.
Acknowledge when institutional ideals are aspirational rather than operational.

People do not require perfection. They require coherence. They require procedural justice. They require clarity.

Visible sensemaking is not a threat to authority. It is how trust is rebuilt. Dissent, questions, and early warnings function as load testing not insubordination. Silence is what allows cracks to spread unnoticed.

Organizational Members

When rhetoric and reality diverge, you are not imagining it.

Describing the gap is not disloyal but, to me, is an act of organizational care and a sign that people are still invested.

You are allowed to say the language does not match the experience. You are allowed to ask which values are symbolic and which are actually governing. You are allowed to organize around truth rather than messaging.

(Haha, maybe not in your individual organization, but you get my point. In a healthy, functioning organization, these things are perfectly valid and would be welcomed by good leaders.)

Brittle systems depend on people absorbing contradiction silently. Elastic systems change when contradictions are brought to the surface and worked through collectively.

Chronic anxiety, exhaustion, or hypervigilance are not personal failures in these environments. They are signals. Treat them as information.

Final Thoughts

Leadership is not hard because people are complicated. Leadership is hard because organizations refuse to be honest about themselves.

Brittleness is what happens when organizations demand trust without supporting sensemaking.

Elasticity begins when leaders stop pretending and start speaking plainly about the world they are actually operating in.

That alone would lower the temperature in a lot of rooms right now.

I’ve been using the term discretionary effort a lot lately in my writing and my thinking, and I want to explain what I mean by that because I think understanding this dynamic can be helpful for both org citizens and the people who lead them.

Every organization depends on discretionary effort (here’s a study if you’d like a deeper dive), though I’m not sure leaders realize it. I do wonder if, since it’s mostly invisible, orgs fail to realize the function of discretionary effort, the impact of it, and – even more – I wonder if they can even identify it when it’s missing. I think they can probably identify the effects but maybe not the causes.

I also wonder if leaders perceive org citizens who “go above and beyond” as individual high achievers rather than what they really are: Situated in circumstances that promote and cultivate such behaviors.

I think that when leaders talk about engagement, motivation, morale, or culture, they are often talking around discretionary effort without saying that, specifically. They sense its absence when things feel brittle or slow or joyless. They celebrate it when outcomes are strong, but I think they likely rarely acknowledge the conditions that made it possible.

I think we’re remiss if we reduce this dynamic down to the level of the individual: Discretionary effort is not something people “have” or “lack” as individuals but something people offer when conditions allow it.

And, quite frankly, people withdraw it when conditions do not.

I don’t think even I realized the significance of discretionary effort until I witnessed its asbsence firsthand. I, personally, had to spend a lot of time thinking through my own relationship with organizations, and at one point, I needed to ask this question:

What would I be doing in this situation if I were in a healthy, functioning ecosystem? Would my decisions be different?

That intellectual exercise is what helped me see the dynamics of discretionary effort in motion. When people start to withdraw such efforts, I wonder if it’s often misread as laziness, burnout, or attitude.

In reality, I think it’s a rational response to repeated organizational signals such as unclear expectations paired with high consequences. Or signals like being told to care deeply while being treated as replaceable. Maybe signals like absorbing risk without authority or responsibility without voice.

None of this requires bad actors. It only requires systems that are misaligned and leaders who confuse intention with effect.

For organizational members, it can be clarifying to recognize that a loss of discretionary effort is not a personal failure. If you feel yourself pulling back, that is information. That’s data. It’s worth asking where effort feels meaningful and where it feels extractive. Where care is reciprocated and where it is taken for granted. Where mistakes are treated as learning and where they are treated as moral flaws.

Withdrawing discretionary effort can be a form of self-protection. Sometimes it’s a temporary recalibration or a sign that boundaries need to be erected. Sometimes it’s preparation for leaving. Staying while chronically resentful tends to do real harm to people.

For org citizens then, I would say that the goal is not to force yourself to care more but to understand what the organization is asking you to absorb.

For leaders, discretionary effort cannot be demanded, inspired, compelled, or extracted; it can only be cultivated and then supported.

The fastest way to destroy it is to rely on goodwill to compensate for broken systems. The second fastest is to talk about values while modeling something else. People pay attention to how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, and who ultimately ends up with the consequences when things go wrong.

Leaders who want to preserve discretionary effort need to focus less on motivation and more on coherence; to me, that means clarity in priorities, limits, and ownership. When everything is urgent, people stop investing judgment. When accountability flows downward and credit flows upward, people disengage. When care is met with correction or surveillance, people retreat.

There is also a discipline to restraint. Not every gap should be filled by people working harder. Not every crisis should be normalized. Sometimes protecting discretionary effort means letting systems feel the strain they were designed to hide.

Discretionary effort also does not survive humiliation. Public correction, shifting standards, moralized language, and performative empathy all erode trust. People will still do their jobs, sure; they’ll just stop caring how well the organization does beyond what is required.

(Maaaaan, writing really is thinking, my friends, and I am coming to additional insights as I type this!)

I said earlier that I see discretionary effort as invisible and that I think it is until it’s not; at the same time, once it disappears at scale, organizations can still look functional from the outside. Meetings still happen. Metrics still move. The cost shows up later, though, in fragility, silence, attrition, and missed warning signs. I think it shows up when people stop offering their judgment and start offering only compliance.

Discretionary effort, then, is not extra in org functioning. I don’t think it’s a nice to have. I think it creates the difference between an organization that adapts and is resilient and one that merely plods and persists.

If you are an organizational member, your withdrawal of effort may be a signal worth listening to.

If you are a leader, the absence of discretionary effort is not a motivation problem but a design problem. It’s a leadership problem.

And the work of fixing it starts with asking what it has become unsafe to offer from the perspective of organizational members.

And that obedience taught us something or — at the very least — reinforced that which we already know about organizations while also highlighting a potential path forward, but only if we recognize the game we’re in. I’m not sure everyone does; I outline some of that in my post about the potential for weaponizing compliance with WCAG come April.

A scene from the HBO show Succession has been playing on loop in my mind ever since this debacle started and I watched org after org capitulate to what were very clearly unlawful demands (not all of those orgs, but MOST). Logan Roy, patriarch of a media conglomerate family, looks at his children at one point and says, “I love you, but you’re not serious people” (language warning!).

That’s my personal message to higher education, especially organizations that are rhetorically explicit in their commitments and values: Equity. Critical Thinking. Antiracism. Black Lives Matter. No Hate. Etc.

I watched many orgs that are rhetorically explicit buckle immediately with a sense of exasperation because I know what happens in organizations as a result of decisions like this one. We’ll experience a wave of effects, many of them invisible to leaders, but all of them influential and consequential within organizations.

When higher education leaders roll back DEI commitments in response to political threats, they often frame the move as prudence. We hear the familiar (and corporate) language: Protect the institution. Preserve funding. Avoid unnecessary risk. Live to fight another day.

And listen, that’s not new. Dr. Victor Ray’s theory of racialized organizations is instructive here as we consider these dynamics (you can check out a new Substack from Dr. Ray here).

But organizational citizens experience something very different because what we see isn’t caution but surrender, especially knowing that the initial threat was just that: A threat, and an unlawful one.

The Lesson Organizations Teach when they Capitulate

When leadership folds in advance, organizational members draw several conclusions very quickly.

First, we learn (or are reminded) that the institution will not protect its people when values become inconvenient. If leadership will not defend its own stated commitments, it will certainly not defend individual faculty, staff, or students who act in alignment with them. Full stop.

Second, we learn (or are reminded) that the board will not be a backstop. The myth that governance exists to buffer political pressure collapses. If trustees are unwilling to absorb risk, then risk is redistributed downward.

(Here I would argue that the board should never be viewed as a backstop; I think organizational citizens in higher ed should learn way more about governance in their organizations: Who is aligned with which larger social and economic dynamics — including who stands to directly benefit from the integration of new technologies — for example, and if you’d like a great panel on this subject, check out Theory at the Bargaining Table, featuring higher ed scholar Dr. Dominique Baker. You’ll hear some familiar things there, if you’re a reader of this space!)

Third, we learn (or are reminded) that values language is performative. If commitments disappear the moment they cost something, then they were never commitments at all. They were branding.

And finally, we learn (and are reminded!) how to survive in orgs. Faculty, for example, may stop asking hard questions in classrooms. Staff may avoid initiatives that could draw attention. People take the safe route, not because they lack courage themselves but because self-preservation becomes rational under institutional abandonment.

This isn’t a theoretical discussion, my friends; this is how organizational behavior changes.

Responsibility Displacement

Let’s call it what it is, then, as a means of developing a heuristic for understanding the dynamic: Responsibility Displacement.

Responsibility displacement occurs when institutions respond to external pressure by formally withdrawing support for values-based work while informally expecting individuals to continue carrying the moral and social labor associated with those values. The institution preserves itself by shedding responsibility, and individuals absorb the risk without protection.

Under responsibility displacement, the organization keeps its rhetoric while abandoning its duty. DEI becomes something faculty are encouraged to “care about” but not something leadership will defend. Should we attempt to operationalize those commitments individually, we are on our own.

This dynamic is especially corrosive in higher education because faculty are already positioned as the front line. They teach the material. They facilitate difficult conversations. They respond when students raise questions about race, gender, power, and history. When leadership retreats, faculty remain exposed. And aware of it!

What Preemptive Capitulation does to Trust

This moment, for me, is one where I can say pretty firmly that preemptive capitulation is not a contribution to the erosion of trust in an org but rather a full collapse.

Organizational trust depends on a basic assumption: That when people act in good faith on behalf of institutional values, the institution will act in good faith toward them. Capitulation absolutely shatters that assumption.

Once trust is broken, people stop investing discretionary effort. They stop taking risks. They stop believing that their labor serves anything beyond compliance.

They haven’t changed, though; the people are the people. The organization, instead, revealed itself.

The Higher Education Contradiction

Higher education leaders often describe colleges and universities as engines of social change. They speak about preparing students for democratic participation. They celebrate critical thinking, equity, and civic responsibility.

Then, when those values come under pressure, as we witnessed large scale, they fold.

The contradiction is impossible to miss. Institutions that claim to shape society refuse to defend themselves within it. Leaders who frame themselves as stewards of justice behave like managers of risk exposure.

The worst offenders are those with the clearest rhetoric, sadly: We speak fluently about social justice. We name historical harms. We foreground equity in strategic plans. And yet, when faced with a clear white supremacist policy agenda dressed up as fiscal oversight, leadership capitulates.

Not after a fight. Not after a loss. In advance.

That choice signals alignment, whether intended or not. Again, this information is not new; what’s new is the scale at which we witnessed it.

What Leaders Should Understand

Capitulation is not neutral. It is not merely adaptive. But it is very educational and informative.

Organizations teach their members what matters by what they defend. When leaders refuse to contest unjust pressure, they communicate that justice is optional and expendable. Let’s look back to the last episode on authoritarian leadership!

They also ensure long-term damage; they bake it into orgs. Faculty will remember this moment. Staff will recalibrate their labor. Students will sense the dissonance. The institution will become safer (maybe) and intellectually poorer (definitely).

If leaders want colleges and universities to remain places of courage, inquiry, and moral seriousness1, they must accept that values sometimes require confrontation. Risk cannot always be outsourced downward. Boards exist for moments like this; leadership exists for moments like this.

If higher education cannot model principled resistance inside its own walls, it forfeits any claim to shaping the world beyond them.

And organizational citizens will act accordingly.

But if I may, I want to suggest an alternative to what will feel most natural in moments like this one, retreating into safety. Let me clear about something before I go on: For some organizational citizens, what looks like retreat is not disengagement at all but survival, shaped by race, gender, immigration status, employment precarity, or past punishment for speaking up. The room to choose between engagement and withdrawal has always been unevenly distributed, and that unevenness matters here.

This moment calls for a different kind of action, in my mind, one that is structural rather than symbolic. Advocating for meaningful faculty and student representation on governing boards matters, not as advisory voices but as voting participants with access to information, deliberation, and real power.

You can see, though, that this idea isn’t always terribly popular, as evidenced by one system’s attempt to strip students of a voice on their Board of Regents.

Faculty can also document responsibility displacement when it occurs, creating a visible record that makes institutional retreat harder to deny or normalize. Collective action is essential. Individual bravery is easily punished, while coordinated positions taken through departments, senates, and unions are more difficult to isolate or dismiss.

Faculty can continue to press institutions to close the gap between rhetoric and practice by insisting that commitments to equity be tied to explicit protections, clear policies, and shared risk. And when those protections are absent, it is reasonable to recalibrate how labor is offered. Declining unpaid moral labor, refusing to act as the sole carriers of institutional values, and pushing responsibility back toward those with formal authority are not failures of courage. In my view, they are disciplined, strategic responses to an organization that has clarified where its limits currently lie.

And to be clear, those of us with greater institutional protection, whether through tenure, employment status, or social positioning, have a responsibility to use that protection to absorb risk rather than allow it to continue flowing downward.

This feels like a disappointed dad post, and in part, it is. At some point, though, personal disappointment gives way to organizational clarity. It becomes easy to see why decades of organizational research shows rising cynicism and disengagement across workforces. When institutions fail to stand behind their people, people eventually stop standing up for institutions. That response is merely learned behavior.

Still, I am not ready to concede the field. Collective action offers a way to reclaim some of what has been lost; we don’t need to pretend trust still exists, but we can rebuild leverage, representation, and shared responsibility. If higher education is to be more than a performance of values, it will require leaders willing to absorb risk and organizational citizens willing to insist that values are not optional, conditional, convenient, or disposable. Anything less leaves us with simple compliance, hollow language, and institutions that teach precisely the opposite of what they claim to stand for.