The cursor blinks, a rhythmic pulse of digital indifference, as the 9:04 AM notification slides into the corner of the screen. It is an all-hands invite, titled with that peculiar brand of corporate optimism that usually precedes a massacre of the org chart. I find myself staring at it with the same misplaced, hysterical detachment I felt last autumn when I accidentally laughed at a funeral. It wasn’t that the death was funny-it was the sheer, suffocating absurdity of the eulogizer trying to claim my uncle was a ‘patient man’ when he once threw a toaster at a squirrel. We lie to make the transition easier. In the boardroom, we lie to make the stagnation look like kinetic energy.

The email lands like a heavy stone in a shallow pond. ‘A Bold New Vision for Synergistic Growth,’ the subject line screams. I know what this is. You know what this is. It is the fourth time in 24 months that we have been told the previous structure-the one we finally memorized 114 days ago-is now the very thing holding us back. We are shifting from ‘Vertical Integration’ to ‘Matrixed Agility,’ which is fancy talk for ‘we have no idea why the product is failing, so we are going to move the chairs around and hope the ghost of productivity finally appears.’

I think about Sarah J.-M. often in these moments. She isn’t a Vice President of Change Management or a Lead Synergy Architect. Sarah J.-M. is a dollhouse architect, a woman who spends 154 hours perfecting the crown molding on a library that will only ever be seen by a family of wooden figurines. She once told me that if you move the foundation of a miniature Victorian more than 4 millimeters after the glue has set, the entire structure develops a permanent tilt that no amount of wallpaper can hide. Business leaders, however, seem to think they can pick the house up, shake it, turn it upside down, and expect the residents to keep cooking dinner like nothing happened.

This constant shuffling is rarely about agility. If it were, the changes would be surgical, quiet, and data-driven. Instead, they are performative. When a leadership team cannot solve a fundamental flaw in the business model-perhaps the pricing is 44% too high or the tech stack is 14 years out of date-they do the one thing that gives them a sense of control: they draw new boxes. They rename the ‘Customer Success’ team ‘Client Experience Evangelists’ and feel as though they have conquered a mountain. But the mountain is still there, and it’s still covered in the same ice that froze the last team.

The Cost of Amnesia: Institutional Memory Lost

Institutional memory is the first casualty of the carousel. When you restructure every 304 days, you lose the people who know where the bodies are buried. You lose the engineer who remembers that the 2014 server patch only works because of a specific line of code written in a fever dream. You lose the trust of the middle managers who have learned to stop investing in their teams because those teams will be dissolved before the next fiscal quarter ends. We become a workforce of ghosts, haunting our own desks, waiting for the next ‘Bold Vision’ to blow us into a different department.

The disorientation is the point, I suspect. If we are constantly trying to figure out who we report to, we have less time to ask why the ship is taking on water.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from having to re-learn your own identity every six months. It creates a cynical layer of scar tissue over the collective psyche of the office. We stop caring about the mission statement because the mission statement changes more often than the flowers in the lobby. We stop building long-term bridges with colleagues because we know they might be ‘re-aligned’ to the Singapore office by Tuesday. In the absence of stability, the only thing that grows is self-preservation. We stop being a team and start being a collection of individuals holding onto our desks so we don’t get sucked into the next vacuum of ‘operational excellence.’

It reminds me of the 404 errors of the soul. You go to a link that used to lead to a solution, and now there’s just a blank page with a clever illustration of a broken robot. Companies are becoming 404 pages. They look modern, they have nice fonts, but the substance has been moved to a directory that no one can find. We are told to be ‘agile,’ but agility requires a stable platform to jump from. You cannot be agile on a trampoline that is currently being disassembled by a team of $5,004-an-hour consultants.

The irony is that in this landscape of shifting sands, we crave the exact opposite of what the C-suite is selling. We don’t want ‘revolutionary synergies.’ We want a place where the rules don’t change while we’re in the middle of a sentence. We want a sanctuary that doesn’t require a new login and a 64-page manual every time the CEO reads a new book on ‘Lean Six Sigma.’ This is why we retreat into the spaces that offer genuine, unironic consistency. When the corporate world becomes a hall of mirrors, we find solace in platforms that understand the value of a steady pulse, like the curated environments found at

EMS89, where the chaos of the org chart doesn’t dictate the quality of the experience. It is a necessary counterweight to the frantic shuffling of the professional world.

I remember the last meeting I had with Sarah J.-M. She was working on a set of 14 miniature chairs for a dining room. One of them was slightly off, a leg 4 millimeters shorter than the others. She didn’t throw out the set or rename the room ‘The Asymmetric Seating Lounge.’ She sat down, breathed, and fixed the leg. She understood that excellence is found in the repair, not in the relocation. If only our leaders had the courage to stay still long enough to actually fix what is broken, rather than just moving it to a different floor.

But staying still is terrifying to a leader who equates ‘action’ with ‘value.’ To stay still is to admit that the problem might be hard. To stay still is to face the fact that the 84% drop in user engagement isn’t because the ‘Marketing’ and ‘Sales’ teams aren’t talking-it’s because the product no longer serves a purpose. It is much easier to launch a 34-week transformation project than it is to look in the mirror and realize you’ve lost the plot.

We are currently in the ‘Mourning Phase’ of the current re-org, though the HR documents call it the ‘Integration Phase.’ I see my coworkers at the coffee machine, and we exchange that look-the funeral laugh look. We know the 204 new job titles are just placeholders for the next wave of names we’ll have to learn in 2024. We have become experts at the temporary. We build our careers on post-it notes, ready to peel them off and move them to a new board at a moment’s notice.

The Tax on the Human Spirit

There is a cost to this, a tax on the human spirit that doesn’t show up on a P&L statement. It is the cost of never feeling settled. It is the cost of knowing that your expertise is less valuable than your ability to survive a spreadsheet merger. We are tired of the carousel. We are tired of the music that never changes even as the horses are swapped out for plastic unicorns. We just want to do the work we were hired to do, 14 months ago, before the world became a series of ‘dynamic pivots.’

As I sit here, staring at the new chart, I notice that my name is now in a light blue box instead of a dark green one. I have been moved from ‘Strategic Content’ to ‘Global Narrative Systems.’ My salary is the same. My desk is the same. My 74 unread emails are the same. But somewhere, a Senior Vice President is claiming a ‘strategic victory’ for this alignment. I want to tell him about the funeral laughter. I want to tell him about the dollhouse architect who knows that the foundation matters more than the paint. But instead, I will just update my email signature. I will wait for the next carousel to start spinning, and in the meantime, I will look for the quiet places that don’t require me to redefine myself every time the wind blows.