On screen, the new CEO-the one they brought in to ‘drive aggressive growth’-is speaking in that smooth, pre-recorded cadence that makes you feel like you’re watching an ad for a prescription drug. His hands gesture toward a slide covered in boxes and lines. Our future, charted. It looks like a circuit board designed by a committee that never spoke to each other. My box has moved. It’s under a new department called ‘Synergistic Asset Mobilization,’ a name so profoundly meaningless it must have cost at least $272,000 in consulting fees.

You look at the names in the new boxes around yours. People you’ve only ever exchanged polite nods with in the kitchen. The team you’ve spent the last year building trust with, the people who know you’re not at your best before your second coffee, the ones you have a shorthand with that makes actual work possible-they are scattered across the chart like seeds in a gale. Some are gone entirely.

Leadership calls this agility. They say it’s a decisive, strategic move to unlock new potential. They use words like ‘right-sizing’ and ‘optimization.’ But from down here, on the floor where the work is actually done, it feels like a landlord rearranging your furniture while you’re trying to sleep, and then billing you for the service. For the next six months, at least half of everyone’s brainpower won’t go to their jobs. It will go to figuring out their jobs. It will be spent in introductory meetings, decoding new acronyms, and trying to locate the person who now holds the institutional knowledge you once took for granted.

The Hidden Tax: Destroying Institutional Memory

I remember Taylor N. She was, of all things, an elevator inspector for a massive commercial real estate firm that acquired our smaller company 2 years ago. Not an employee, a contractor. But she’d been servicing our building for 12 years. She knew the machinery. She knew the groans and shudders of the service elevator in the east wing weren’t a sign of failure, but a normal pressure release in the hydraulic system. She knew the freight elevator’s door sensor was finicky on cold days and needed a manual override, a sequence known only to her and the now-retired building manager.

When the acquisition happened, they ‘streamlined’ vendor contracts. Taylor’s small firm was replaced by a national conglomerate with a glossy app and a 2-hour response guarantee. The new guys were perfectly competent, but they only knew the manual. They saw the east wing elevator’s shudder and immediately shut it down for 2 days, costing a fortune in delayed deliveries. They couldn’t figure out the freight elevator, so they recommended a $42,232 replacement. The company lost more in those first two months than they would have paid Taylor in 2 years. They had rearranged the furniture and thrown out the blueprints.

This is the hidden tax of the perpetual re-org. It’s the systematic destruction of institutional memory. It’s the severing of informal networks, which are the actual circulatory system of any company.

We pretend the boxes and lines are the company. They’re not. The company is the quick Slack message to the one person in finance who knows how to format the expense report correctly. It’s knowing who in engineering to ask about a legacy bug because they were there when the code was written. It’s the trust that allows you to have a brutally honest 2-minute conversation instead of a polite and useless 42-minute meeting.

A Message Sent to the Wrong Audience

It’s a leadership team that lacks the courage or the skill to solve deep-seated cultural, product, or market problems, so they do the only thing they know how to do: they redraw the map. It creates the illusion of decisive action, a big, visible gesture that looks good on a slide deck for the board.

It reminds me of last week when I sent a text-a deeply personal, complaining-about-a-friend text-to that very friend by accident. The immediate, cold-water shock. The desperate fumbling to un-send it, to take it back. But you can’t. The message is delivered. The context is destroyed. The trust is damaged. That’s what a re-org announcement feels like. A message sent to the wrong audience. The CEO is speaking to the shareholders, telling them a story of action and change. But we, the employees, are the ones who receive it, and the message we hear is:

The message is received, and it can’t be unsent. That whole tangent about the text seems out of place, I know. I’m supposed to stick to the corporate analysis. But it’s the same feeling of crossed wires, of a fundamental miscommunication that has real consequences. Leaders broadcast a message of ‘synergy’ and ‘future-focus,’ but the organization receives a message of ‘instability’ and ‘chaos.’ We spend the next months trying to repair the damage of a message we were never meant to be the true audience for.

The Cycle of Complicity

So you adapt. You learn the new names, the new reporting lines. You sit through the endless meetings where everyone tries to carve out their new territory. You watch as good people, tired of the whiplash, quietly update their resumes and disappear. The ones who stay become more cynical, more guarded. They invest less. They build shallower roots, because they know a gust of wind is coming. It’s always coming.

I’m a hypocrite, of course. I’ve complained about these top-down mandates for years, yet here I am, already trying to figure out how to leverage the chaos. I’m scheduling 1-on-1s, trying to ‘build bridges’ and ‘align on strategic priorities.’ I’m using the very language I despise because it’s the only way to survive.