Small change: lean into your history

There’s a simple reason why the word ‘change’ brings out many people in hives. It’s that their historic experience of it might well have been terrible.

What was presented as a Panglossian path to some corporate Shangri-la might have instead created huge collateral damage in your people’s careers or lives, or the careers or lives of treasured colleagues.

Organisations store trauma in the way that human beings do: as in the individual, so in the collective. Businesses do not vote for experiences where the associations are unpleasant, however much Pied Piper cosplay leaders engage in.

Pretending that the past doesn’t exist will not stop its echoes haunting your present. The answer lies in an old phrase: “you can’t heal what you can’t feel”.

Something to consider: in defining how we want to move forward, how do we address the mistakes of the past?

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