Last week I showed you the research — a thousand leaders, eighty countries, the same story in six thousand different voices. This week I want to talk about one thread that ran through those voices more than almost any other. It was rarely about the change people were being asked to make next. It was about the one that came before — the last change they had lived through, and how it had gone.
Every organisation has a history of change. Most of that history is failure. And the people in the room remember it, even after the organisation has forgotten the angst it created.
There is a name for the people who live through a change that failed and are still in their jobs afterward. We call them survivors, and the residue they carry has a clinical name of its own: survivor syndrome. The reorganisation announced and then quietly abandoned, the system rolled out and rolled back, the restructure that took half their colleagues and left the rest to do the work of the people who had gone — whoever is left standing is a survivor. And survival, it turns out, is not a neutral state.
Every failed change leaves scar tissue, and scar tissue is not the same as what it replaced. It is stiffer and less elastic. It does not stretch the way healthy tissue does, so it limits movement right at the point where you need it most.
It has a poorer blood supply, which makes it biologically weaker than what was there before. And it forms exactly where the wound was — which is why the body tends to re-injure in the same place, again and again. Scar tissue does not just mark the old injury. It makes the next one more likely, in precisely the spot you can least afford it.
That is what you are working with when you announce your change to a team that has survived the last three failures. You believe you are addressing healthy tissue. You are not. You are asking a body that has been cut in the same place, over and over, to move as if it never has.
The survivors carry a specific set of things. Relief that they kept their jobs, tangled up with guilt that others did not. A workload that quietly absorbed the work of everyone who left. And underneath it, the fear that the next round has their name in it.
The fear of losing your job does damage comparable to losing it. People do not need to be cut again to start behaving as though the cut is coming.
You can see it in how survivors work. They do what is asked and not one thing more. They stop volunteering the idea, the warning, the better way — because the last time they offered something it went nowhere, or it got someone noticed in the wrong way. The organisation reads this as disengagement and runs a survey about it. It is not disengagement. It is a rational response to having learned what initiative costs here.
The cynicism you meet when you announce something new — the flat eyes, the “we have seen this before” — you read it as resistance. It is not character. It is not resistance. It is memory.
You are looking at the residue of every change that was done to these people badly, and you are giving it the wrong name.
Some of that residue you created. A great deal of it you did not. The scars in the room may be your predecessor’s legacy — failures you had no hand in, decisions made before you ever held the post. That is the unfair part, and it is real. But it does not let you off, because the people carrying those scars cannot tell the difference between the leader who cut them and the one who simply arrived afterward and asked them to move. To them, you are the latest in a line. What you inherit is not your fault. What you do with it is entirely yours.
Each failed change makes the next one harder. Not because people are stubborn, but because trust does not grow back on its own. A team that was told the last change would be different, and then watched it go exactly the way the one before it went, does not arrive at your announcement with an open mind. Why would they? You taught them what your announcements are worth.
You cannot remove scar tissue. But you can stop adding to it. And that starts with the most unglamorous thing a leader can do: name the history in the room before you ask people to move past it. Not spin it. Name it. The change that failed, why it failed, and what it cost the people who lived through it. People will forgive a great deal if you are willing to say out loud the thing they already know and have been waiting for someone in charge to admit.
That is what the survivors are actually asking for. Not another vision. An honest account of the last one. So the next time you walk into a room that has seen this before, look at what you are standing on. It is not resistance under your feet. It is scar tissue. Some of it you made. The rest you inherited the day you took the job. Either way, it is yours now.