The Iceberg Beneath the Grievance

Change management literature has long understood, at least in theory, that organizational change is an emotional phenomenon before it is a logistical one. What practice has been slower to absorb is just how indirectly those emotions tend to present and how easily leaders, focused on execution, mistake the surface symptom for the actual problem.

William Bridges, whose 1991 work, Managing Transitions, remains one of the most practically useful texts in this field, drew a distinction that deserves far more traction in executive education than it typically receives: the difference between change and transition. Change, he argued, is the external event, the new policy, the restructuring, the return to office. Transition is the internal psychological process that people undergo in response to it. Change can happen on a specific date. Transition happens on its own schedule, at its own pace, differently in every person. Critically, as Bridges observed, transition begins not with a new beginning but with an ending, with loss.

In our case, the losses were plural, overlapping, and not always legible, and they were being felt across the entire organization, not just by those returning to office. At Stillwater, officers and program staff who had worked together for decades, who had built something that functioned like a family, who knew each other’s children’s names and had covered each other’s shifts and shared meals in the break room for twenty years were coming to understand that the closure meant the end of that. They would scatter to different facilities. The team would not survive the transition intact. That loss was profound and it was specific, and it did not have an easy container.

Elsewhere, staff who had seen the budget headlines and knew what a $15 million deficiency looked like were quietly doing the math on their own futures. Newer employees with family members undergoing medical treatment worried in private about health insurance about what a gap in coverage would mean, about whether a layoff would arrive before a treatment course was complete. Staff without family support networks worried about whether a facility reassignment would mean a new shift they couldn’t staff with childcare. Staff who had been building toward promotions, who had put in years positioning themselves for the next level began to understand that a compressed, consolidating organization would have fewer rungs on the ladder than it used to.

None of those people came to our leaders and said: “I am trying to hold together my team while they grieve what is ending, and I don’t know what to tell them.” They talked to us about donuts. And critically, it was mostly senior leaders, people carrying the emotional freight of their own staff’s fear and grief, who brought those donut conversations to me. They were not, in the main, raising these concerns for themselves. They were raising them as proxies for everything roiling beneath the surface of the people they were responsible for leading.

This is the central emotional challenge of leading through change: people rarely name what they’re actually experiencing. They reach for the proximate, the concrete, the grievance that feels speakable. The rumored $200,000 in donut costs was, at its root, a story about distrust: distrust of leadership’s judgment, distrust of the institution’s relationship with its workers, a question about whose comfort was being prioritized when decisions were made. The worry about looking like you didn’t have enough to do was, at its root, a story about belonging and professional worth in an organization that had just signaled its employees were needed back in a building. The forgotten offsite team was not really upset about pastries. They were expressing something older: the fear of being overlooked, of mattering less, of being peripheral to the core.

The donuts were not the threat. The donuts were the shape the threat took when it needed to be spoken aloud.

An organization carrying high ambient anxiety is an organization in which the smallest thing can crystallize that anxiety into a specific grievance, because people need somewhere to put it. The job of the leader in those moments is not to solve the grievance. It’s to recognize that the grievance is a container for something larger.

This is exactly what we eventually named with the phrase “it’s not about the donuts.” Months later, sitting with the team working on the Stillwater closure, I told the story of the donut week. The room recognized it immediately: that feeling of having raised something that seems small and having been met with mild puzzlement, when what you were really raising was enormous. The phrase became a kind of organizational shorthand: “before we respond to this, what is this actually about?” It moved us from problem-solving mode to diagnostic mode, which is almost always the more useful place to start.

The Spectrum of Emotional Needs

One of the more demanding realities of leading large organizations through change is that your workforce does not process emotion uniformly. In any team of significant size, you will find people who need, and perhaps demand, to process their feelings before they can work, people who need to work before they can acknowledge their feelings, and everyone in between.

This is not a failure of professionalism on either end but rather, a feature of human diversity that leadership frameworks seldom take seriously.

As leaders, we often develop a strong implicit preference for one end of this spectrum or the other, usually in the direction of our own processing style. Leaders who are highly task-oriented can experience emotion-forward colleagues as inefficient, as obstacles to momentum, as people who need to be managed past their feelings so the organization can move. Leaders who are highly emotion-oriented can experience task-forward colleagues as defensive, suppressed, or in denial about what the change really means, when in fact those colleagues may simply be processing through doing rather than through talking.

Research on change management has found that managers who attended to the emotional reactions of employees during change implementation achieved greater employee commitment, higher levels of customer service, fewer cost overruns, and shorter time to implementation than managers who did not attend to emotions or who did so only after the change had taken place. The key words are “attended to” - not resolved, not indulged, not fixed. Attended to. There is a meaningful difference between making space for an emotion to exist and being obligated to satisfy it.

The task-forward person on your team who comes to you and says, “I just need to know the plan and I’ll be fine,” is telling you something true about themselves. Forcing them into a feelings circle will not help them and may embarrass them. The emotion-forward person who comes to you and says, “I just need to know you understand how hard this is,” is also telling you something true. Handing them a project timeline in response will feel, to them, like dismissal.

What both of them share, beneath their different processing styles, is the need to feel that the person leading them understands what this particular change means. Not change in the abstract: this change, to their work, their relationships, their sense of themselves as professionals. The task-oriented person wants that understanding expressed through thoughtful logistics: “we planned well for this, here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, here’s how we’ll handle what comes up.” The emotion-oriented person wants that understanding expressed through acknowledgment: “I know this is a lot. What you’re carrying is real.” Neither is asking you to solve their inner life but both are asking you to see it.

The mistake leaders most commonly make at the emotion-sensitive end of the spectrum is conflating acknowledgment with agreement, or with permission to delay. I have made it plenty of times. You can say “I hear you, this is genuinely hard,” and still move forward. You can hold space for grief while also holding the organization’s forward momentum. These are not in conflict. What is in conflict, and what breeds the deepest resentment, is telling people their feelings are welcome while making clear through every subsequent action that those feelings are an inconvenience.

The Leader as a Thermostat

There is a dimension of this that leaders often underestimate about themselves: the degree to which their own emotional state radiates through the organization. The implication for leaders is uncomfortable: you are never a neutral party in the emotional climate of your organization. You are either a source of steadiness or a source of anxiety, and your people are watching you at a resolution you cannot always perceive.

During that compressed summer, I was managing the emotional labor not just of the return-to-office but of the budget crisis and the Stillwater closure simultaneously. There were meetings where I had to walk in carrying the weight of one crisis and perform calm about another. There were moments when I genuinely didn’t know how things were going to resolve, but my job was to project enough confidence that the people around me could keep working. 

The hardest thing I learned that summer was not a concept. It was the distance between understanding something and actually living it. You can know, intellectually, that a leader’s emotional state is contagious. And still find yourself, in the wrong meeting on the wrong afternoon, proof of the very thing you thought you understood. Knowing the theory, it turns out, is not the same thing as having the capacity. Some days the understanding was available to me. Some days I was just another person in the building carrying too much.

Effective leaders have long managed the emotions they display at work, projecting optimism and confidence when team members feel thwarted and discouraged, or carrying the company flag and working to rally the troops even when harboring private skepticism about the direction.

I have heard younger leaders call this  “emotional labor” and I think it is the right term for it. It is labor and it has costs. It depletes resources that leaders need to think clearly, to be generous with colleagues, to make good decisions under pressure. Leaders now must handle more emotional labor than before, expect to attend to employees’ mental and physical health and burnout while also addressing their own, demonstrate bottomless sensitivity and compassion, and provide opportunities for flexibility.

The donut week was, in this sense, a kind of stress test I hadn’t anticipated. I went into it focused on logistics: had we planned the space well, communicated clearly, made the day feel welcoming for people coming back? What I encountered instead was five different types of anxiety that had attached themselves to a box of pastries. And each one of those conversations required a different kind of emotional presence: curiosity in one meeting, reassurance in another, genuine concern for equity in a third, a kind of patient frustration management in a fourth.

The leaders who struggle most in those moments, I’ve observed, are the ones who have a single register: who can only be either task-focused or empathetic, either efficient or present. The ones who navigate it well are those who can shift between modes quickly and without visible effort, who can recognize which register a given conversation is calling for and inhabit it without performing it.

That last word is important. There is a difference between performed empathy and genuine engagement. People under stress are exquisitely sensitive to the difference. If you are going through the motions of emotional engagement while being privately impatient for people to get over it, your people will sense that, and the trust you are trying to build will erode. I say that from experience. 

What “It’s Not About the Donuts” Teaches Leaders

The phrase has become a genuine part of how our team at the department approaches emotional friction. It’s earned its place not because it’s clever but because it’s true in a way that applies more broadly than any specific situation we’ve encountered.

When a high-performing team member suddenly becomes combative in meetings about a procedural change that seems minor, it’s not about the procedure.

When a rumor spreads through an organization at a speed that seems wildly disproportionate to its content, it’s not about the rumor.

When a group that has never raised complaints before suddenly raises three in the same week, it’s not about the complaints.

The practical diagnostic question that the phrase invites is: “what is this actually a container for?” Not in a dismissive sense, not “what is this person really upset about so I can explain why they shouldn’t be,” but in a genuinely curious one. What loss is this proximate grievance expressing? What uncertainty is this small conflict standing in for? What larger change is this person trying to find language for, and what would they actually need in order to feel more settled?

The answer to those questions does not always change what leaders do. The return to office was happening regardless of donut optics. The Stillwater closure was proceeding regardless of the feelings it generated. But the way leaders proceed, what they say, how they listen, what they acknowledge, where they slow down, changes enormously when they understand that they’re operating in an emotionally activated organization where every surface-level concern is carrying freight from below.

Leaders must fully engage and connect with their staff in order to bring about change through higher performance, and can improve organizational effectiveness by responding to coworkers with empathy. What that looks like in practice is rarely the grand gesture or the carefully crafted all-hands message. More often, it looks like five conversations about donuts, and having the presence of mind to understand that those conversations, handled with curiosity and care, are doing real work on the organization’s ability to absorb change.

Leading Across the Emotional Spectrum: A Practical Framework

I want to be concrete about what this has actually taught me, in a form that might be useful to other leaders navigating overlapping change in complex organizations.

1. Listen for the freight, not just the freight car. When someone brings you a concern that seems out of proportion to the stakes involved, resist the impulse to correct the proportion. The mismatch between the size of the expressed concern and its apparent importance is itself diagnostic. Slow down. Ask what else is going on for them. Often you won’t even need to ask; if you’ve created enough safety, they’ll tell you.

2. Name what’s ending, not just what’s beginning. Leaders in change are trained to sell the future, to paint the vision, project confidence, make the destination sound better than where you are. What Bridges understood, and what I’ve come to believe deeply, is that you cannot skip the ending. If you don’t acknowledge what people are losing, even when what they’re losing is something that needed to go, they will carry that loss forward into the new beginning and it will undermine everything you built there. The explicit acknowledgment of an ending is not defeatist. It’s a form of respect for the reality of what transition costs.

3. Hold the full spectrum without collapsing it. Your team contains people who need to talk about their feelings before they can move, people who need to move before they can acknowledge their feelings, and everyone in between. A leader who can only serve one end of that spectrum will always be leaving someone behind. Build teams and processes that create multiple modes of processing: the town hall *and* the small group conversation, the FAQ document *and* the open door, the celebration event *and* the private channel for honest feedback.

4. Recognize your own emotional labor as real labor. The work of managing the emotional climate of an organization, of being steady when things are uncertain, of listening generously when you’re depleted, of finding the right register for five different conversations in a single afternoon is the work. It costs something. Leaders who don’t acknowledge this to themselves run the risk of burnout, or of the kind of compassion fatigue that makes them brittle precisely when their teams need them most. This is not a call for self-indulgence but one for self-awareness.

5. Create shared language. One of the most lasting things to come out of that summer for our department was not a policy or a process but a phrase. It’s not about the donuts. Five words that have become a diagnostic tool, a permission structure, a shared commitment to looking beneath the surface of organizational friction before reacting to it. Leaders who can give their teams language for the emotional work they’re doing together, who can name patterns in a way that the team then owns, create something that outlasts any specific change event.

The Box of Donuts and What It Held

The donuts themselves were unremarkable. They were the kind you get at any chain bakery in any midwestern city on a Tuesday morning and, to set the record straight, they cost a fraction of $200,000.

What they held, in that compressed week, was the cumulative emotional weight of an organization carrying more than it could easily name: the grief of Stillwater staff facing the dissolution of a community they had built over decades; the quiet fear of employees doing math about health insurance and childcare and whether their careers would survive a consolidation; the fatigue of senior leaders who were absorbing all of that, daily, from the people they managed, and needed somewhere to put it. The donuts were the available object. They could have been the new parking policy, or the cubicle assignment process, or the meeting room booking system. The specific container matters less than the emotional content that fills it.

The leaders who spend that week frustrated by the irrationality of their colleagues are making a category error. The donuts are the real problem, just expressed at one remove. The weight of a closure that will end twenty-year teams, the fear of a budget crisis that could cost someone their health insurance, the grief of staff who can feel the future narrowing around them, none of that is easy to bring directly into a leadership conversation. A concern about a box of pastries is.

The gift of that experience, for me, was the recognition that this is always the terrain. There is no version of leading large organizations through significant change in which the emotional content is orderly, proportionate, or clearly labeled. The job is to stay curious in the face of what seems absurd, to remain diagnostic when you’d rather be efficient, and to understand that the conversation you’re having is almost never the conversation you’re actually in.

It’s not about the donuts.

It’s rarely about the donuts.

Ask yourself: what is it about?

Then lead from that answer.

It lit up on the table in the middle of a meeting, the name of someone I know well from a partner agency, someone who would be involved if something went terribly wrong. And in the two or three seconds before I picked it up, my mind had already completed the whole narrative. Someone released from our custody had hurt someone. Maybe killed someone. Maybe a police officer. I told the colleagues I was meeting with who it was and that I had to take it, and braced for the version of the day where that was true.

None of it was true. The call was about a slide, a detail for a joint presentation going into a briefing. He’d phoned because I was listed as the out-of-office contact for his counterpart on my team. The easiest ask I faced that day. Five minutes tops.

I returned to the conversation with my colleagues and blurted out what had gone through my mind. And one of my colleagues said, quietly, that she had thought the same thing I had. She had gone there too, in the same few seconds, by the same wordless route. And our third colleague, who had been watching both of us, paused and said in her matter of fact manner, “Well, that sounds like a trauma response.”

What unsettled me was not that my mind went there but how quickly it arrived. There was no panic, no conscious reasoning, no dramatic leap from a ringing phone to the murder of a public servant. My brain simply reached for the outcome it had been trained, over years, to consider most plausible, the way you reach for a light switch in your own house, without looking, certain of where it is.

That is a strange thing to discover about yourself. I hadn’t noticed it because it no longer felt unusual. That is one of this work’s quietest achievements: it convinces you that adaptation is simply personality.

What Changes Is What You Expect

We talk a great deal about resilience. We talk much less about adaptation, and I have come to think the distinction matters, because resilience suggests a return, a bending under load and then a springing back to the shape you held before. But some work does not return you. It changes the baseline. You don’t simply witness suffering and recover from the witnessing; eventually you begin interpreting the world through it. The suffering stops being something you look at and becomes something you look with.

We name the emotional cost of this often enough: the heaviness, the burnout, the slow erosion of feeling. I think the cognitive cost is just as profound and far less discussed. Because eventually the work changes more than what you feel. It changes what you expect. It rewrites your sense of what is likely, what is normal, what a ringing phone probably means. Trauma doesn’t only change what you remember. It changes what you anticipate. And a mind quietly recalibrated to expect catastrophe is not a broken mind. It is a mind that has been paying attention.

This is not unique to corrections. Every profession that lives close to human suffering develops its own version of this fluency: the ER nurse, the homicide detective, the hospice worker, the child protection caseworker, the war correspondent, the emergency dispatcher who can hear the difference between the calls that will fade and the ones that will stay. Corrections simply happens to be one of the places where the language is spoken most fluently, by the most people, for the longest stretches of a working life.

Laura van Dernoot Lipsky gave me the words for this years ago, in a book called Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others. She calls it the trauma exposure response; the transformation that occurs in people who remain present, year after year, in rooms most people never enter. When I first read it, I laughed and I cried, and I recognized in its pages a hundred conversations I’d had with colleagues and a version of myself I wasn’t sure I’d wanted anyone to name. I read it differently now. What I recognize in it now is not only who I used to be, but the person who picked up that phone last week.

Before I Was Here

Before I was here, I was on the other side of this work.

I sat with the mothers of daughters who had been killed. I sat with children old enough to understand what had happened to a parent but not old enough to have anywhere to put the understanding; it just moved through them, that knowledge, looking for somewhere to land. Every year I helped produce the state’s domestic violence report, the document that turned loss into data, that counted people who had died and named the ones who killed them, because counting and naming felt like the least we could do and sometimes like the most.

In those years I mistook urgency for virtue. I lived between two poles with no ground in between: either I was going to fix it, personally, immediately, because if I didn’t return the call or show up or stay until midnight, someone might die, and that was not a figure of speech. Or I was so flattened by everything that could not be fixed that some days, I could barely move. Lipsky has a name for the first of those states. She calls it grandiosity, though not the kind that announces itself. It is the kind that grows in the soil of long exposure, when a person absorbs so much for so long that the self quietly rearranges around the urgency and begins to mistake its own overwhelm for indispensability. The work becomes the whole of who you are. And so, of course, there is always more work.

I thought I was dedicated. I was. I was also caught in the grandiosity Lipsky describes, and for a long time I could not tell the two apart.

When Horror Becomes Administrative

Later, I sat for a period in monthly parole hearings for people who had life sentences. The folders were thick and exact in the way legal records of violence are exact, the kind of detail that doesn’t leave your imagination once it has moved in. And bound into the same folder, always, was the other half of the story for some: years of a person becoming someone different, slowly, in the unglamorous incremental way real change actually happens, like light working its way through a curtain, getting in where it can.

Then the victim families would speak to us. Sometimes twenty-five years had passed, sometimes thirty, and they arrived carrying grief that the decades had not softened at all, as immediate as if the call had come that morning. They came to say what had been taken and what the taking had cost. The words were never adequate. They came anyway, because inadequate words were all the process offered and the process was all that was left.

We listened. That was the work. And then we would get into the hearing and hear from the offender. Ask questions about who they were, why they did what they did, how they feel, knowing the pain they caused still lives on. Then, the hearing would end, and an hour later I would be in a grocery store, pushing a cart through the cereal aisle, while deciding what to make for dinner.

I remember saying something over dinner once that, to me, had become almost procedural. My husband stopped eating. And watching his face, I understood that I had forgotten this was not normal conversation. Somewhere along the way, without my noticing the threshold as I crossed it, horror had become administrative.

I had lost the “oh my God” moment, that catch in the chest when something terrible is still allowed to be terrible, and I did not know it was gone until I saw it intact on someone else’s face. In Lipsky’s book, there is a quote from an HIV/AIDS caseworker that spoke to me: “It goes from those ‘oh my God’ moments when I used to read files to now they’re just another file. You never wanted to get to that point.” That is it precisely. Not the loss of caring, the people who do this work care enormously, often at the cost of everything else, but the loss of the signal that tells you how much you are carrying. The gauges go quiet. And you keep driving.

The Loneliness Nobody Names

There is a loneliness in this that almost no one names, and it is not the loneliness of being unsupported. It is the loneliness of carrying things that cannot travel.

Prisons are, in every real sense, small cities; thousands of people in close quarters, staff on rotating shifts around the clock, the weight of everyone’s safety resting on decisions that institutional culture would rather were made without ever appearing to strain. An officer finishes a shift that required him to stay calm inside something that was not calm, something that would stop most people cold if he described it plainly, and then he picks his kid up from school and stands in line at the pharmacy and says nothing, because the people who love him do not have the context to hold it, and the confidentiality laws are real, and even if neither of those were true, the telling would only hand them a weight they were never prepared to carry. So he doesn’t. And the thing stays in him, looking for somewhere to go, finding nowhere.

You process it alone and then you walk out into a world that is entirely ordinary and is asking how your weekend was. Sometimes you catch it in a colleague’s voice, a certain economy around something serious, the fluency of people who have been in the same rooms, and there is a flash of recognition, warm and wordless. But it passes. It dissolves back into the shape of a working day. And we are, so many of us, the same people who take a private pride in never being the one who couldn’t handle it, who have so thoroughly absorbed the reward system for endurance that we don’t notice we are running on empty until someone says something gentle in a meeting and we exhale in a way that tells us we’d been holding our breath far longer than we knew.

This is not a soft problem. Roughly a third of correctional officers meet the criteria for diagnosable PTSD, a rate some research places alongside combat veterans. The suicide rate runs significantly higher than for the general working population. These are not the numbers of weak people. They are the numbers of people doing something extraordinarily hard, in conditions never designed for their survival across a career, inside a culture that has rarely given them permission to admit it costs anything at all.

Both Sides of the Wall

I came to this work as an advocate, holding the people most harmed by systems like this one. And then I crossed over, and now I am the system; the institution I once held to account, the one I was trained to scrutinize. I make decisions that shape lives on both sides of the walls we keep, and I carry, as best I can, what I learned from each side. That doubleness does not resolve. It simply becomes part of what I hold.

What Lipsky asks of people in this position is not that we feel less. She is not offering us the false mercy of caring less, which is not mercy and does not work. She asks for something harder: awareness. The ongoing, unglamorous practice of noticing what the work is doing to us while it does it, not as confession, not as weakness, but as navigation. She calls this stewardship, and the word is deliberate. A steward holds something precious that is not theirs to keep, holds it carefully, accountable for its condition. To steward this work is to honor the weight of what we witness without letting it become the whole interior landscape of who we are. To stay fully in the room, and also to know where the door is.

James Baldwin wrote that nothing can be changed until it is faced. He meant something far larger than any single profession, but the line holds here with its own gravity. We cannot tend what we will not name. And we cannot care honestly for the people who do this work while we keep treating what it costs them as a private weakness to be managed in the dark.

What Is Still Ours

I have been in and around this a long time, long enough that the changes which once felt like changes now just feel like the shape of things, the way a landscape that has eroded for years simply looks like the land.

Much of what it changed in me I am glad of. I am more patient. I am more honest about what is possible. I understand things about human beings, about how harm and change can live in the same person, about the slow work of becoming different, about the way suffering travels through families and institutions across generations, that I could not have learned any other way. There is a knowledge that comes only from staying in the room, and I do not hold it lightly.

But the phone call happened. And the exhale happened. And what I want and what I think we owe one another, across our whole system, at every level of it, is a culture where my colleague’s quiet observation is possible. Where a warden can say a year was heavy without it being read as proof she isn’t equal to the job. Where an officer can tell a coworker “that one is still with me” without weighing what the telling might cost. Where we make room, plainly and without ceremony, for the fact that this work marks the people who do it, and that they deserve to know they are not alone in being marked.

The phone call wasn’t important. The story I wrote before answering it was. I used to think staying whole meant feeling everything. Now I think it means noticing what I’ve stopped feeling and refusing to call that absence strength.

We carry what we carry. The only question that stays open is whether we carry it knowingly, and whether we let each other set it down, even for a moment, in the ordinary rooms where we spend our days.

Even that body nearly came apart: three days before the deadline, former Territorial Governor Willis Gorman, a Democrat, attacked Republican delegate Thomas Wilson with his cane. Wilson rose to return the blow. The men were separated and removed and the committee kept working. On August 28, 1857, both conventions adopted the conference committee report without amendment, despite protests from some delegates.

The final insult came at the very end: even after agreeing on the text, the delegates could not put their animosity aside to sign the same physical document. Democrats refused to sign a constitution bearing Republican signatures, and Republicans opposed signing one bearing Democratic signatures. So, they produced two enrolled constitutions: one written on white paper and signed only by Republicans, the other written on blue‑tinted paper and signed only by Democrats.

To become a state, Minnesota needed both voter approval of the constitution and approval from Congress. A certified copy of the Democratic constitution was officially transmitted to the U.S. Senate by the territorial secretary, who was himself a Democrat, and that version was attached to the Minnesota statehood bill. Oddly, when the bill reportedly came back from the Senate committee, historians say the Republican version of the constitution was attached instead. No one seems entirely sure how the switch happened, and there is substantial historical authority that Congress ultimately had both constitutions before it when Minnesota was admitted to the Union on May 11, 1858.

Minnesota essentially entered statehood with a shared constitution and a visible symbol of division: two identical copies, separated by ink, paper, and pride.

Meanwhile, before Congress had even approved statehood, Minnesota’s newly elected legislature decided waiting for federal action was unnecessary and convened in December 1857 under the theory that voter approval alone had already made Minnesota a state. Legally, that theory was incorrect. Politically, however, it reflected one rare point of bipartisan agreement: despite deep divisions between Minnesota Democrats and Republicans, both sides appeared more than willing to set those differences aside when it came to asserting state authority against federal government. The legislature proceeded to pass laws anyway, and the courts ultimately allowed those actions to stand.

The remarkable thing is not that the process was dysfunctional. It is that it functioned anyway.

What Minnesota invented in 1857 was architecture: procedural structures sturdy enough to produce agreement among people who deeply distrusted one another.

The conference committee became a governance technology, an early Minnesota innovation for bridging a conflict too hot to be handled in a plenary room. The two-paper solution became a form of face-saving that allowed agreement to stand without requiring either side to publicly capitulate. Minnesota’s statehood required cooperation, but it did not require sentimentality. It required a process strong enough to hold even when relationships were brittle.

What Minnesota has proven is possible when cooperation becomes the strategy

If that story ended in 1858, it would be an interesting historical artifact. But Minnesota’s legislative history suggests something larger: across eras, Minnesota has repeatedly produced major public solutions when leaders treated cooperation not as a mood, but as an operating discipline.

The “Minnesota Miracle” of 1971 emerged from intense pressure over property taxes and disparities in school funding. MinnesotaCare was created in 1992 by Republican Governor Arne Carlson and a bipartisan coalition of legislators seeking a practical solution for working families without affordable health coverage. In 2008, lawmakers from both parties supported the Statewide Health Improvement Partnership based on a shared understanding that prevention was cheaper and more effective than treatment alone.

Even moments of crisis reveal the same instinct. After the I-35W bridge collapse in 2007, state and federal leaders moved with unusual speed to authorize funding, establish investigative structures, and rebuild critical infrastructure.

These examples are evidence that Minnesota has repeatedly built systems capable of functioning despite disagreement. Again and again, the state has relied on structures, negotiations, and shared urgency to produce outcomes larger than any one faction could credibly own alone.

What I have learned about working across differences

I have spent years working inside a state corrections agency, trying to move policy in a field that sits at the intersection of almost every dividing line in modern politics. Corrections is not a natural place to find bipartisan cooperation. And yet some of the most consequential work I have been part of happened precisely because we found legislators on opposite sides of the aisle who could agree on a problem even when they agreed on little else.

When we were building the Healthy Start Act - a bill to keep incarcerated mothers with their newborns in community-based settings rather than returning them to prison within days of giving birth - I needed authors who could carry it in both chambers. Senator Mary Kiffmeyer, a Republican from Big Lake who had served as Minnesota’s Secretary of State and was among the most senior members of the Senate Republican caucus, became our Senate author. Representative Jamie Becker-Finn, a DFL member who grew up on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, had attended listening sessions at women’s prisons, and was one of the most tenacious advocates for justice-involved women in the legislature became our House author. The two of them do not share a political worldview and they did not need to.

What they shared was an answer to the same question: can you defend separating a newborn from its mother two days after birth? The evidence on early attachment, on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, on what happens to women and children when that bond is severed at the most critical window, none of it required a particular theory of punishment to land. The human reality was simply undeniable, and it was undeniable to people across the political spectrum.

We built an all-women, cross-party team of co-authors around that shared moral intuition. Representative Marion Rarick, a Republican from Maple Lake who had served in the House since 2013, came on as second House author and did something that proved decisive: she mobilized the House GOP women’s caucus. That changed the shape of the coalition entirely. This was no longer a DFL bill with a Republican name on it, it was a bill that the largest class of women in the Minnesota House of Representatives had claimed as their own. In May 2021, Governor Walz signed the Healthy Start Act into law. Minnesota became the first state in the country to pass such legislation.

What we can learn from these examples is that there is an architecture of agreement. You do not build a bipartisan coalition by persuading people to abandon their values. You build it by finding the place where their values and yours produce the same answer. With the Healthy Start Act, that place was a newborn, not the mother who had committed a crime.

The Reentry Supports Act of 2021 taught me something different, and in some ways more instructive, about how bipartisan work actually functions at the human level. The bill did many things: it required the Department to provide released incarcerated people with a copy of their criminal history, information on expungement, documentation of programs completed, an accounting of court-ordered fees, assistance obtaining a Social Security card and birth certificate, thirty days of non-narcotic medications, and, the provision that became the quiet centerpiece, recognition of a DOC-issued photo ID as a secondary document for purposes of obtaining a state driver’s license or ID. That last piece sounds bureaucratic. It is not. Without a valid ID, you cannot get a job, open a bank account, rent an apartment, or access almost any of the support systems that stand between a person and reincarceration. The DOC ID provision was, in practical terms, a reentry lifeline.

Our House author was Representative Erin Koegel, a DFL member from Spring Lake Park. Koegel was serving as Vice Chair of the House Transportation Finance and Policy Committee at the time and had already developed a reputation at the Capitol as a thoughtful, pragmatic legislator who could move complicated policy work without a lot of drama. Her background in community advocacy and housing issues gave her a grounded understanding of how easily people can fall through bureaucratic cracks and how devastating something as simple as lacking an ID can become for someone trying to rebuild their life after incarceration.

Our Senate author was Senator Dave Osmek, a Republican from Mound. Osmek and Koegel were polar opposites in their working styles, and Koegel was clear-eyed about that. Rather than insisting on a more traditional cross-chamber dynamic that the situation wouldn’t support, she recognized that the most effective way to work through differences was to let me run the communications between them. I was, functionally, the conference committee.

Osmek went on record saying it was “the most un-Osmek Osmek bill” he had ever carried, which is a remarkable thing for a legislator to say publicly about his own legislation, and which tells you something important about what made it work. He was not pretending the bill fit his brand. He was saying, plainly, that it didn’t, and that he was carrying it anyway, because the problem was real and the ask was reasonable. Removing barriers to reentry is not a liberal idea or a conservative idea. It is a public safety idea, a fiscal idea, a human idea. When Osmek stood up for that bill, he did not need to be someone he wasn’t. He needed an argument he could make in his own voice to his own constituents, and the bill gave him one: making sure people returning from prison could get jobs and become taxpayers.

The Healthy Start Act required finding shared moral ground. The Reentry Supports Act required something more structural: building a process in which two people with fundamentally different political instincts could still move toward the same destination.

I was not a neutral party. I was the Department, and this had started as an agency bill. But I was also the person making sure each side understood what the other needed, where the lines were, and what the bill had to look like to survive in both chambers.

In a session dominated by omnibus negotiations, both the Healthy Start Act and the Reentry Supports Act passed as standalone bills. As far as I know, the two lead authors of the Reentry Supports Act never needed to sit in the same room to make it happen.

What I have also learned, the hard way, is that cooperation is almost never produced by better arguments. It is produced by better conditions. People are more likely to move when they feel respected, when their identity is not under threat, and when the engagement is genuine rather than transactional. Senator Kiffmeyer did not carry the Healthy Start Act because changed her mind about her values. She carried it because of her values, because the problem was real, because the ask was specific, and because the structure of the collaboration gave her ownership rather than asking her to sign onto someone else’s agenda. Representative Becker-Finn did not need convincing; she had been in those prison listening sessions long before the bill existed. What she needed was a Department willing to bring the legislation and a coalition sturdy enough to move it.

The honest caveat is that none of this holds permanently on its own. Coalitions built around specific problems can fracture when the problem is solved or when it isn’t. The Healthy Start Act’s implementation was slower and narrower than many advocates hoped. The work of building the coalition is never the end of the work. But it is the beginning. And it requires the same deliberate design, repeated, that the Compromise Committee required in 1857.

Minnesota’s hidden lesson is that process is part of the product

When Minnesota’s constitutional delegates used a conference committee, they were doing more than finishing a document. They were designing a container strong enough to hold disagreement. That is the deeper lesson modern leaders can apply: collaboration is rarely a spontaneous virtue; it is usually the outcome of intentional design.

Conference committees, working groups, joint committees, and cross-sector commissions are not procedural trivia. They are infrastructure for cooperation and Minnesota has used them repeatedly. In 1857, a conference committee became the only viable bridge between two conventions that refused to meet jointly. In later eras, policy coalitions and bipartisan working relationships became the scaffolding for reforms large enough that no party could credibly own them alone, whether in education finance, public health prevention, or environmental governance.

Even the “two constitutions” detail becomes instructive when viewed through a leadership lens. The two-paper solution reads like absurdity until you recognize it as an early example of what negotiation experts call face-saving: enabling agreement without forcing public humiliation. You can’t ask people to concede if the concession requires them to betray their identity in front of their own side. You can, however, design an exit ramp - language, sequencing, shared credit, parallel statements - that allows movement without surrender.

In other words, the Minnesota story is not “we should all be nicer.” It is: if you want bipartisan outcomes, you need bipartisan architecture.

Three pillars of working together without erasing differences

Minnesota’s history and modern research point toward a few consistent lessons about cooperation.

First, durable coalitions are usually built around concrete problems, not abstract ideology. Property tax crises, bridge collapses, public health costs, barriers to reentry. Shared pressure does not eliminate disagreement, but it creates a reason to stay at the table.

Second, cooperation depends on structure. Conference committees, cross-party working groups, joint authorship arrangements, and negotiated processes matter because they create conditions where disagreement can be managed without becoming destructive.

Third, people move more easily when participation does not require humiliation. You cannot ask someone to support a policy if doing so requires them to betray their identity in front of their own side. Durable negotiations create room for dignity, shared ownership, and language different groups can defend in their own terms.

None of this permanently resolves polarization. Cooperation is not a personality trait or a single moment of goodwill. It is a maintenance practice that has to be rebuilt repeatedly, often under pressure.

It is worth naming when people do this well and worth naming before they are gone. Representatives Kelly Moller, a DFL member from Shoreview, and Paul Novotny, a Republican from Elk River, are both retiring at the end of this term. They will leave behind something that should not be taken for granted: a public safety committee that works.

In the 2025 and 2026 legislative sessions, as co-chairs of the House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee, Moller and Novotny did something that had become almost unthinkable in that space. The public safety omnibus bill, historically one of the last bills to pass, perpetually stuck, reliably the place where session went to die, became one of the first. I know this from the inside. I have spent eight legislative sessions in those negotiating rooms, watching the public safety omnibus stall and the clock run out. For years, it rarely happened. Then Moller and Novotny took over the committee, and suddenly, more often than not, it did.

They did not accomplish this by flattening disagreements into meaningless consensus or asking either side to abandon core priorities. They did it by creating a process where staff, stakeholders, and legislators could work through specifics, sequencing, and language until they arrived at outcomes everyone could live with without feeling they had surrendered something essential.

Public safety is not an easy place to do any of this. The issues are charged, the stakeholders are intense, and the politics are unforgiving. The fact that these two found a way to move consequential legislation in that environment, together, without theatrics, without grandstanding, and without compromising the policy, is a model worth studying long after they have both left the building.

What Minnesota can remember right now

Minnesota’s constitution did not arrive on a wave of unity. It arrived through stubbornness, mistrust, procedural invention, and eventually a conference committee that built a text both sides could live with.

The story is almost comical: blue paper, white paper, switched constitutions, and a cane fight in the middle of negotiations. But the lesson underneath it is serious. A functioning democracy does not require perfect goodwill. It requires structures strong enough to hold disagreement without collapsing under it.

Minnesota’s founders could not bring themselves to sign the same piece of paper, and still they built a state durable enough to last. That may be the most useful political lesson Minnesota has to offer right now.

Before this role, I worked in victim advocacy and policy - the kind of work where you spend your days pushing on systems from the outside, identifying what’s broken, building coalitions, drafting legislation, and showing up at hearings to say this must change. I believed in reform and I still do. I wanted to be on the inside, where I thought the real levers were. Where I could actually change things.

And then I learned.

Not that reform is wrong, or that the systems I came to change don’t need changing; they really do. But I learned something that no amount of advocacy work had prepared me for: that the work of declaring change and the work of making it real are not the same, and we are far better at the first than the second.

Picture this from a couple of weeks ago: It is third deadline week at the Minnesota legislature, and my inbox contains six requests for fiscal notes.

For those outside state government, a fiscal note is a formal analysis of what a proposed bill would cost to implement: the staff, the systems, the infrastructure, the time. Legislators need them to move bills forward. We are required to produce them, often quickly, often in the middle of everything else. This session, the requests have come in waves, and several of the bills are significant: changes to how we classify certain offenses, adjustments to requirements that would ripple through our case management systems, and changes that will drastically impact our staffing models.

Most of these bills will not pass. That is the nature of a legislative session, especially a divided one. The proposals will stall in committee, die in conference, or be traded away in the final hours of negotiation. By June, the majority of what we have analyzed will exist only on paper.

But here is what I didn’t understand when I was the one helping write the mandates and what the public rarely considers: the fiscal note is not a neutral act. It is not a researcher pulling numbers from a spreadsheet. It is a team of people - senior analysts, program directors, deputy commissioners, operational leaders - stopping what they are doing, which is implementing the last round of changes, to model the cost of the next round. And for those people, each fiscal note request is not an administrative task. It is a reminder that the ground is still moving; that the thing they have been working tirelessly to build might be redesigned before they finish building it.

Two Clocks, One Organization

Public sector reform operates on two fundamentally different clocks, and almost no one talks about what happens when they fall out of sync.

The first is the political clock. It runs on election cycles, legislative calendars, budget years, and the attention span of public discourse. It is, by design, impatient.

Democracy requires responsiveness. Legislators are accountable to constituents who want problems solved, not managed. Administrations have limited time and political capital and an obligation to use both. I know this clock well - I have spent years working by it and still do. On the political clock, the passage of a bill is an accomplishment. The signing of an executive order is a milestone. The announcement of a new initiative is evidence of progress. Reform, on this clock, is measured by what has been declared.

The second is the organizational clock. It runs on staff capacity, institutional memory, training cycles, fiscal year and procurement timelines, labor agreements, and the psychological bandwidth of the humans doing the work. It is, by design, slower. Organizations are not machines that can be reprogrammed overnight. They are ecosystems: layered, interdependent, and shaped by everything that has come before.

On the organizational clock, the passage of a bill is the beginning of a very long process. The signing of a piece of legislation is a question: who is going to do this, with what resources, in addition to what they’re already doing? Reform, on this clock, is measured not by what has been declared but by what has actually changed in practice, which is a different thing, and a slower one.

When these clocks fall out of sync, reform becomes performative on one side and destabilizing on the other.

The gap between these two clocks is not a failure of government but rather a structural feature of how democratic institutions work. What is a failure - a systemic, repeating, largely unexamined failure - is that we have built an entire culture of reform that pretends the gap doesn’t exist. I was part of that culture, and I did not see what I was missing until I was on the inside looking out.

The Geological Record

Cut a cross-section of any public agency that has been operating for more than a decade and you will find strata.

There is the layer from eight years ago: a legislative mandate that reshaped how a core function was staffed and tracked. It required new data systems, new training, new supervisory structures. That layer was largely implemented, though not fully. The systems came in over budget and behind schedule. The training was compressed because there wasn’t time to do it right. Some of the supervisory structures were put in place; others were quietly deprioritized when the next urgent thing arrived.

There is the layer from five years ago, when a new administration came in with a reform agenda and reorganized reporting lines and introduced new performance metrics and launched several initiatives simultaneously, each one sponsored by a different deputy and each one competing for the same finite pool of middle management attention. Some of those initiatives took root. Others exist today as policy documents that no one has looked at recently but that technically govern how work is supposed to be done.

There is the layer from two years ago, the one everyone is still, in some sense, living inside. The pandemic reshaped how the organization operated at a fundamental level. It changed where people worked, how they supervised, how they connected, what they expected from their employers and what they believed their employers expected from them. That layer has not been fully processed, and it may not be for years.

Each layer compressed the one below it. The agency you’re trying to change today is made of all of them.

When I was an advocate, I looked at a public agency and saw something static: a thing to be moved. I did not see the geological record. I did not see that what looked like resistance was often an organization so layered with previous mandates, previous transitions, previous changes that never quite finished forming, that it had simply run out of room to absorb another one cleanly.

The Waterline

There is a concept in organizational psychology sometimes called change saturation: the point at which an organization’s capacity to absorb new change has been exceeded, and additional mandates begin to produce diminishing returns regardless of their quality or necessity.

I think about it differently. I think about the waterline.

Every significant change, every legislative mandate, every new initiative, every reorganization, every budget cut that requires doing the same work with fewer people, raises the waterline inside the organization. Staff are treading water. Leaders are treading water. The analysts producing fiscal notes at the third deadline of a legislative session are treading water. They are doing real, important, skilled work. They are also doing it while managing the ongoing implementation of the last set of changes and the emotional weight of the people they lead who are worried about what comes next.

At some point, the next wave, even a small one, doesn’t add to the load. It submerges people who were already at their limit. From the outside, that looks like bureaucratic inertia, institutional conservatism, and the failure of government to move. From the inside, it’s drowning.

In corrections, the stakes of that stall are not abstract. We are talking about an agency whose work is, at its core, about human beings: people who are incarcerated, people who supervise them, people who provide programming and case management and re-entry support, people whose daily decisions shape whether someone leaves custody more capable of living a stable life or less so. Reform in this environment is not a policy exercise, but rather a question of whether the people doing the work have the bandwidth, the training, the institutional support, and the emotional resources to do it differently. Mandate the change without attending to those conditions and you have not reformed anything. You have just contributed to the strata.

I know this because I used to believe if you put mandates in place and fired those who fail to carry them out, you would solve the problem. I believed, as many reformers do, that the urgency of the problem was sufficient justification for the demand. I still believe in the urgency. What I understand now, from the inside, is that urgency and capacity are different things and that confusing them is how well-intentioned reform becomes another layer of sediment in the geological record.

What Gets Missed

The standard critique of public agencies is that they resist change - that bureaucracies are inherently conservative, self-protective, slow to move. I held a version of that view myself, once. I thought the problem was institutional inertia, and that the solution was more pressure, more accountability, more urgency.

I no longer think that’s right. Or rather: I think it’s pointed at the wrong target. The agencies I know are not resistant to change because the people in them don’t believe in reform. Most of the people I work with came to public service precisely because they believe in it. They are in corrections because they believe something meaningful can happen between an institution and a person in its custody. They are in government because they believe that policy, done well, improves lives. They are not opposed to doing things differently. They are exhausted from being asked to do things differently before the previous differently has had time to become normal.

Every new legislative session brings new proposals. Every new administration brings new priorities. Every budget cycle brings new constraints. And each of these arrives on top of the previous ones, in an organization where the people doing the implementation are the same people who implemented the last round, and the one before that. Reformers rotate, administrations change, legislators cycle through committees, but the agency absorbs all of it. The staff remain.

I want to be clear that legislators and advocates working on these proposals are doing exactly what they are supposed to do: identifying problems, proposing solutions, seeking to make government more just and more effective. A proposal to expand re-entry programming, if it passes, would do real good.

The people in my agency who are modeling its cost are not opposed to it. Many would support it personally. But they are also the people who are currently implementing the last expansion - the one from two sessions ago that came in underfunded and required them to renegotiate contracts, retrain staff, and absorb a set of operational changes that are still, frankly, not fully settled. The new bill lands on that reality. It does not land on a clean page.

What’s genuinely hard to see from outside the agency is that an excellent idea can be the fourth excellent idea this year. Or the ninth. And that each excellent idea has a carrying cost that doesn’t appear on any fiscal note.

The Invisible Ledger

There is a ledger that public agencies keep that no one ever audits.

On one side: the formal change log. The bills passed, the initiatives launched, the reorganizations completed, the policies updated. This ledger is visible. It is what gets reported to oversight committees and cited in annual reports and pointed to when someone asks what the agency has accomplished.

On the other side: the cost of carrying all of it. The staff attrition in units where change has been continuous and relentless. The institutional knowledge that walks out the door when a twenty-year veteran decides the churning has finally become more than the mission is worth. The quiet erosion of trust that happens when the message absorbed over time, regardless of intent, is that completion is not actually the goal, that the goal is perpetual motion, that the organization exists to absorb mandates rather than to fulfill a purpose.

This side of the ledger is invisible because we have no good language for it and no standard way to measure it. We can count the fiscal cost of a new program. We cannot easily count the cost of what continuous, stacked, under-resourced change does to the humans implementing it. We cannot audit the distance between what a reform was designed to accomplish and what it actually accomplished, years later, in an organization that was already at its waterline when it arrived.

But the cost is real. And ultimately, it is not paid by the agency. It is paid by the people the agency exists to serve - the ones who needed the reform to actually work, not just to be declared. When we mandate change without attending to the conditions required to make it real, we are not being responsible. We are wasting public dollars on transformation that stalls, and the people absorbing that failure are the ones with the least power to demand something better.

From the outside, I never saw that ledger. I saw the output: the policies that hadn’t changed, the programs that hadn’t scaled, the gaps that persisted year after year, and I interpreted it as evidence of insufficient will and incompetent leadership. Sometimes that’s true. But often, I now understand, it is evidence of a ledger that no one is reading.

What a Different Approach Would Require

I came to this work because I believe in the possibility of systems that actually work - for the people they’re designed to serve and for the people inside them doing the serving. That belief has not changed. What has changed is my understanding of what reforming systems requires.

It requires, first, an honest accounting of implementation capacity. The fiscal note models the cost of a program. It does not model the cost of asking an organization that is already at 95% capacity to absorb a new initiative. It does not capture the human infrastructure required for real change - not just the systems and the training, but the time and attention of people who are already fully committed. Budgeting for the dollar cost of reform without budgeting for the human cost is not fiscal responsibility. It is a form of denial that I participated in, from the outside, for years.

It requires, second, attention to sequencing. A good reform implemented on top of an unfinished one is not twice as good. It is frequently worse than either would have been alone. Those of us who care about outcomes, and not just about the visibility of having acted, need to be willing to ask: what is this organization ready to absorb right now? What needs to finish landing before the next thing takes off? That question requires a kind of institutional humility that is genuinely difficult to practice when the political clock is running and the pressure to show progress is real. I know how hard that is. I’ve felt it from both sides.

And it requires, finally, that the people inside public agencies be seen as more than the implementation machinery of other people’s visions. The staff doing this work are not bureaucratic obstacles to reform. They are, in many cases, the people who care most about whether the reform actually works. Their exhaustion is not indifference. It is the accumulated cost of caring about outcomes in an environment that too often measures only inputs.

The Session Will End

By the time the 2026 Minnesota legislature adjourns, most of what we have been asked to analyze this year will not become law. The session will end, the capitol will empty, and my team will return to the implementation work that the fiscal notes temporarily displaced. The bills that do pass will begin the long process of becoming real inside organizations that will absorb them as best they can, alongside everything else they are already carrying.

This is not a complaint. It is how the work goes, and I have chosen this work deliberately and believe in it. But I think about the staff member who spent her week modeling the cost of a bill that died in committee, when she was also needed for the transition work that has been waiting. I think about what it means, over time, to work inside a system where the two clocks are so radically out of sync that the gap has become invisible; so normal as to be unremarkable.

I came to state government as a reformer, and I believe I am still one. But I am a different kind now - one who has watched the waterline rise, who has stood inside the geological record and understood, for the first time, what all those layers actually do to the people who lived through their deposit and how that impacts their perceptions and understanding of what they are being tasked to do.

The question worth asking - the one I found myself sitting with at the third deadline of this legislative session - is not whether government can change. It can, and it does, and it must. The question is more fundamental than that: do we want to announce that things have changed, or do we want things to actually change? Because those are not the same goals, and we have been treating them as if they are for a long time.

If we want the latter, we cannot keep ignoring the widening gap between the clock that declares reform and the clock that has to make it real. That gap is not abstract. It is where good ideas lose their shape, where public trust erodes, and where the people we meant to serve are asked, once again, to wait.

That is a question I wish someone had asked me to sit with, years ago, before I started adding to the waterline myself.

The book was Managing Transitions by William Bridges, a widely-read guide to the human side of organizational change. I’d been working through it with the focused urgency of someone who needs it to work. I am an executive leader at a large state agency. We are in the middle of significant change. I came to this book the way you come to a map when you’re already driving: a little late, hoping the route is clearer than the navigation app tells you.

My daughter, four months shy of her sixth birthday, picked it up with the curiosity of a child. She touched its cover, looked at it, and asked what it was about. I told her it was a book about change - about how when things change at work, it can be hard for people, and this book helps leaders understand that and know how to help. She considered this. “What kind of change?” she asked. I said: sometimes people get new bosses, or their jobs look different, or things they were used to go away. She nodded, with the gravity of someone filing this information somewhere useful.

Then she looked at the cover again. There is a butterfly on it, wings fully open, orange and black, center frame. She said, with the offhand certainty children reserve for things they find obvious:

“Oh. That’s why there is a butterfly on it. Because butterflies go through a lot of change.”

Then she described metamorphosis. The caterpillar, the cocoon, the emergence, each stage named matter-of-factly, the way she has been taught to see the living world. Her father and grandfather are both wildlife biologists, and she is their most devout student. Then she set the book down and moved on.

She was in the room for perhaps ninety seconds. I had carried that book around for a week, looked at that butterfly every day, and registered it as cover art. I had walked right past the argument it was making before a single word of prose: that change looks like a butterfly because transformation requires full dissolution. The caterpillar does not pause inside the cocoon and wait. It comes apart entirely. There is no other side that doesn’t run straight through the middle. My kid saw it immediately because she wasn’t in a hurry, and because she is five - she has lived almost entirely inside transitions and has not yet learned to skim past the hard middle.

That is exactly what I had been doing with this book: skimming past the hard middle. Pushing toward the destination. Moving efficiently through a text about transition without slowing down enough to actually sit with the experience of one.

This is, I think, one of the most common and least examined failure modes in organizational leadership. We are deeply, professionally uncomfortable with the dissolving part. We have constituents and budgets and legislative oversight and staff who need to believe the ground is stable. And so we manage the change: we announce it, structure it, communicate it, measure it, in ways that can inadvertently signal to the people around us that their internal disorientation is beside the point. Get through it. We have places to be.

Nowhere is this more visible than in how state agencies absorb legislation. In Minnesota, session typically ends in late May. New laws take effect July 1st or August 1st - sometimes later, if the effective date was negotiated, but often not. That means an agency can have as little as four to eight weeks between a bill being signed and the legal obligation to implement it.

And that is rarely one bill. In a typical session, our agency absorbs dozens of pieces of legislation - some sweeping, some surgical, but nearly all of them landing simultaneously on teams that are already running at capacity. One bill changes how we classify a population. Another rewrites a supervision standard. A third creates a new reporting requirement that touches five different units and counties, too. A fourth mandates a stakeholder process that would meaningfully take two years, but we have six months to complete. Each one arrives with its own effective date, its own ambiguity, its own set of staff who now have to become experts in something they didn’t know existed ten weeks ago. From the outside, it looks like implementation. From the inside, it feels like trying to change the engine while the plane is in the air, on multiple planes, at once.

What we rarely budget for, in any of that, is the transition. The change gets planned. The training gets scheduled. The communications go out. But the grief - the real, legitimate grief of people who were good at something and are now being asked to become beginners again - that gets nowhere near a project plan. And so it surfaces elsewhere: in meetings where people go quiet, in staff who ask the same questions repeatedly not because they didn’t hear the answer but because they’re not yet ready to accept it, in the slow institutional resistance that leaders often misread as obstruction when it is actually just disorientation.

I have watched all of this in my own agency. I have announced big changes in rooms, watched people nod in the right places, and only later realized they were not yet inside the change, they were still standing outside it, just looking at it. I have seen staff cling to old processes long after the new ones were in place. I figured it was out of defiance, but now I realize it was because the old process was the last thing that still felt like solid ground. I have watched people wait through the ambient uncertainty of a gubernatorial election year with the particular stillness of someone who has learned that visibility during turbulence carries risk.

But the disorientation is the point. Bridges calls the messy middle the neutral zone, and he is clear that it cannot be shortened, only navigated. The people in your organization who seem stuck, resistant, not yet on board are not obstacles to the change. They are inside it, doing the slow, invisible work of releasing what was and not yet knowing what will be. You might think it is a performance problem; however, that is metamorphosis.

You cannot rush it. You can only make it less lonely.

What making it less lonely actually requires is more than most change management frameworks admit. Bridges suggests it requires leaders to do three things that do not come naturally under pressure. First: name the ending. Not just announce the new thing, but explicitly acknowledge what is being left behind and why it mattered. The prison that is being closed soon? People lived and worked in it for decades, that is all some have known in their adult life. The team that is being reorganized built something together. Pretending otherwise, in the name of momentum or optimism, does not help people move forward. It just makes them feel that their history is being erased.

Second: protect what can be protected. When the large things are uncertain, the small constants become load-bearing. Keeping a team’s meeting rhythm intact, if possible. Maintaining familiar reporting lines where possible. Being explicit, in every communication, about what is not changing, not just what is. This is not small. For people inside a transition, knowing what holds is as important as knowing what moves.

Third: tell the truth about the middle. Not every question has an answer yet. Not every decision has been made. People will not be happy and will question your leadership but do it anyway. Leaders who pretend otherwise, who project a confidence in the destination that outpaces what they actually know, don’t reassure people. They teach people that leadership cannot be trusted to be honest when things are hard. And that lesson outlasts any single transition.

This is where I find myself thinking about parenthood and leadership together. Not because staff should be treated like children - they absolutely should not, and the analogy fails badly if you press it that far - but because the practices that help a child navigate transition are the same ones that help adults, just less disguised.

Children and adults alike require the real why. They need predictability within unpredictability. They need their grief about endings acknowledged before anyone pivots to optimism. And they need someone who has genuinely sat with the difficulty rather than performed their way around it.

I have watched myself skip that last one. I have walked into rooms carrying steadiness that was somewhat manufactured, projecting a confidence in the destination that was intended to be reassuring and sometimes, I suspect, landed as dismissive. Because people can feel the difference between a leader who has sat with a hard thing and a leader who has decided the hard thing is a communication problem. The former earns trust. The latter earns temporary compliance, at best.

The end of an administration is a particular kind of transition, and I am inside one. There is real urgency in the remaining months: projects to finish, problems to solve, changes to be intentional about. But it is also an ending. Of programs that were hard-won through legislative sessions that went to the wire, that survived conference committees and budget negotiations that went late into the nights and early into the mornings. Of relationships with colleagues that have required full presence for years. Of a version of this work that has asked everything of me, and given a great deal back. I have a habit of narrating the transition for others while quietly exempting myself from it; holding space for everyone else’s feelings about what is changing while treating my own as something to manage privately and set aside.

My five-year-old does not do this. She is not yet practiced in the art of moving on before she has actually moved through. When something ends for her, you know it. When something is uncertain, she asks about it, again and again, until she has the shape of it. She is fully inside her own experience in a way that most adults, and most leaders, quietly train themselves out of.

I am not arguing we should lead like children. I am arguing we should lead like people who remember what it actually feels like to be inside a transition, who haven’t become so fluent at managing change that we’ve forgotten how to be honest about it.

My daughter set the book down and walked away. She didn’t linger, didn’t ask what I was trying to figure out, didn’t wait for me to confirm she’d gotten it right. She had seen what she’d seen, said what she’d said, and moved on. The insight was obvious to her. It required no fanfare.

She is five. She knows that butterflies go through a lot of change. She knows, without having words for it yet, that the cocoon is not a detour.

I am still learning.

We need more boring leaders.

Not uninspired leaders. Not disengaged leaders.  Not people who lack conviction. But leaders who understand that real governing is rarely dramatic. It is deliberate and procedural. It is often slow and sometimes frustrating. And when done well, it is, frankly, a little boring.

As social media has taken over our lives, we have increasingly come to expect leadership to look like spectacle. Press conferences are designed to go viral. Sound bites in legislative committees and on the floor are engineered for social media. Public officials have started to behave less like stewards of institutions and more like protagonists in a daily drama.

But the work that actually improves people’s lives rarely happens in those moments.

It happens in meetings about procurement rules. In negotiations over line items in budgets. In careful policy drafting and the tedious work of implementation, devoid of glamour. It happens when leaders read briefing memos, ask hard questions about unintended consequences, and insist on fixing problems that no one outside the system will ever notice.

That kind of leadership does not trend online nor does it generate headlines. It certainly does not produce viral clips.

But it is the leadership that makes government work.

Boring leadership values competence over charisma and rewards preparation over improvisation. It measures success not by social media impressions but by outcomes: safer communities, functioning systems, and institutions that do what they promise to do.

It also reflects an understanding that leadership in public life is not about the leader at all. It is about service. The job is not to generate personal headlines or cultivate a public persona. The job is to do the work on behalf of the people who rely on public institutions to function. When leaders focus less on themselves and more on the quiet responsibility of stewardship, the results are often less visible but far more durable.

This kind of leadership is especially important in public institutions that operate every hour of every day: hospitals, emergency services, transportation systems, and correctional facilities. These are environments where the stakes are high and the margin for error is small. In such places, the best leadership is not flashy. It is steady and disciplined. It is grounded in the understanding that systems succeed when leaders focus relentlessly on the fundamentals.

Consider something as unglamorous as government technology systems. Few issues inspire less excitement. Upgrading databases, modernizing software, or investing in the infrastructure that allows agencies to share information rarely captures public attention. These efforts are expensive, complex, and deeply boring to most people.

Yet without strong technology systems, policy reforms often fail. Programs cannot be implemented properly. Policies are not followed as intended. Agencies cannot coordinate. And we cannot correctly track information to know whether our policies are actually working, or more importantly, why they are not. If lasting reforms are the goal, then investing in technology is not optional but rather foundational. The challenge is that because this work lacks drama and political payoff, it is frequently ignored until systems begin to fail.

There is a quiet professionalism in this approach. It requires leaders to resist the temptation to make every decision a public performance. It asks them to prioritize long-term stability over short-term political wins. And it demands the humility to recognize that institutions are strengthened not by individual heroics, but by consistent stewardship.

The truth is that effective leadership often looks uneventful precisely because it prevents crises before they happen. When systems are functioning well, when policies are implemented thoughtfully, and when problems are addressed early, there is little drama to report.

That is not a failure of leadership but rather, its greatest success.

In many ways, boring leadership is simply another way of describing mature leadership. It reflects an understanding that governing is less about commanding attention and more about earning trust. It is the leadership that shows up prepared, listens carefully, makes decisions deliberately, and then does the work, again and again, long after the cameras have left.

The public may not always notice that kind of leadership but it will certainly feel its results.

Their commute runs smoothly.  Their schools function. Their communities are safe. The institutions they rely on do what they are supposed to do.

None of that is flashy nor does it go viral.

But it is exactly what leadership is supposed to accomplish.

And at this moment in our political culture, a little more boredom might be exactly what saves us.

There is emptiness in the chamber that no procedural motion or tribute can fill, because the violence of last June did not simply take two beloved Minnesotans from us; it altered the emotional architecture of our state. The murders of Melissa and Mark Hortman, and the shooting of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, shattered the assumption that public service in Minnesota was fundamentally safe. They forced us to confront a truth many of us had long kept at a distance: democracy is not self-protecting.

Governor Walz spoke about the loss of our innocence. He was right. The line between disagreement and danger feels less distant than it once did. For many Minnesotans, that loss is about safety. For me, it is also about a dream.

I grew up in Pakistan watching politicians shout, posture and destabilize institutions that were already fragile. I watched public trust erode and power consolidate around families and factions. I watched public service turn into performance and patronage. I also watched elected leaders assassinated and others jailed when political winds shifted, and rival parties rose to power. I learned early that holding office could mean holding a target.

Politics taught ordinary families to lower their voices and stay out of the way. It was something you endured, not something to belong to. None of us grew up aspiring to tour our parliament or holding elected office.

When I became a U.S. citizen, I studied for the civics exam with reverence. I read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence slowly, absorbing their ambition. I read the Minnesota Constitution too. I felt the full weight and privilege of belonging.

This month, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend a congressional hearing. Before I left, I planned to tour the U.S. Capitol afterward. I wanted to send my mother photographs of the dome and the rotunda, tangible proof of the democracy I had once imagined from far away.

I never went.

What I witnessed in that hearing left me unsettled. The rhetoric was theatrical, less a search for truth than a display of power. Oversight, which should be grounded in facts, felt at moments like a stage crafted for viral clips. What should have been a principled clash of ideas instead felt engineered to corner and humiliate. It cheapened the seriousness of the institution we depend on to function.

When the hearing adjourned, I could not bring myself to visit the Capitol. I did not want photographs of a building that felt disconnected from the ideals that once filled me with pride.

In Urdu, there is a word: naz. It means pride derived from an unbreakable belief that what you hold dear is worthy of your love.

When I became a citizen, I felt naz in this country.

Two weeks ago, in Washington, I struggled to find it.

But today, in Minnesota, I still do.

Our state leaders have returned carrying unthinkable grief. Some of them were themselves targets of violence. Many lost a colleague and friend. All are navigating trauma while being asked to negotiate budgets and debate policy.

It is hard to imagine a more difficult task than grieving and governing at the same time. Yet, moments like this shape culture in quiet ways, not only through the laws passed but through the tone used, the language chosen, and the restraint practiced when emotions run high. They reveal whether we can recognize each other’s humanity, even across differences.

I left one country because it felt drained of hope. I built a life here because I believed our civic foundations would be sturdier, that no single leader could bend institutions beyond recognition, that constitutional guardrails would protect us, and that country would come before party so that public service could remain honourable.

I still believe that.

I will return to Washington someday and take that tour. I will send my mother the photographs. I will stand under that dome and feel what I once felt about my adopted country.

But for now, my naz is here in Minnesota. And I know I am not alone in believing it is worth preserving.

About the author: Safia Khan is a Minnesota public servant and former victim advocate who works in criminal justice and public policy.