Guide
Persistent reorgs require persistent adaptation: What we can learn from the bees
- Frequent reorgs are reshaping work. Discover how persistent clarity, communication, and trust help organizations adapt using lessons from bees and science.
“Here we go again.”
If it feels like your organization has been ratcheting up the frequency of reorganizing, you’re not alone. What used to happen every so often is now becoming a recurring event as we adapt to the increasing shifts happening around us that necessitate changes to our strategies and the work to get there. It’s a messy, but necessary, cost of business and most of us are still terrible at it.
Maybe you’re the decision-maker. Maybe you’re on the receiving end. Maybe changes are isolated to one part of the organization or far-reaching. Maybe the org charts are drawn neatly with clear footnotes that describe all the changes. Most likely not.
The toll of reorgs is often underestimated. Most organizations struggle as morale and productivity take a hit, and people try to find their groove before another round of changes hit.
While the rate of change creates more questions than answers, one thing has become clear: We need to stop treating reorgs like a one-time survival event.
Persistent reorgs are the new normal, and we need to persistently adapt.
Learning from bees
Beehives offer us a masterclass in adaptability and collaboration, pivoting seamlessly in the face of disruptions and even relocations. Their secret lies in the clarity of the work and their roles within it, effective communication, and a shared goal of maintaining the hive’s strength.
Reorgs are at the top of the list of organizational disruptions. In many ways, they can feel like a hive that’s been shaken, buzzing with uncertainty, leaving a sense of “What now?”
While humans are certainly more complex and multifaceted than bees, we should take away some lessons for our own organizational adaptability: persistent clarity, communication, and a shared culture that fosters trust and fairness will help mitigate chaos.
Mitigate chaos with 3 principles backed by organizational science (and bees!)
Three areas are long-established best practices for thriving organizations. That said, it’s easy to get swept up in deciding on the new set of boxes and sticks, sending out communications, and moving on to the next urgent priority.
I urge all leaders to nurture the very core cultural elements that will enable your teams to adapt. Think of these habits as the lubricant to your organizational machine. It’s necessary to operate smoothly, and if left undone, the machine will grind to a halt and demand immediate (often more costly) attention in a crisis.
Clarity
There are good reasons that reorganizations don’t involve every employee in the decision-making process. However, you still need persistent habits to create clarity in the work + roles + accountabilities across all levels of the organization, all the time. Think of it this way. If this clarity doesn’t exist, how can you expect informed decisions to be made and ask employees to adapt effectively?
Common symptoms that a culture of clarity is missing: critical work is unaccounted for in the new structure, resources are confused by who is now doing what, gaps and overlaps surface as employees incorrectly assume who owns what.
Establishing and nurturing persistent habits of clarity about your vision, goals, the work, and where people fit within it are critical to frequently changing and adapting.
Communication
The most effective organizations cascade communication top-down, bottom-up, and laterally. In your average organization, however, it’s far more common for communication to flow one-way (usually top-down), cascade unchanged from level to level, and then wonder why some parts of the organization are still confused.
The typical result: Top leaders feel they’ve communicated (often repeatedly), but somewhere along the way, the message failed to be meaningful to its audience and parts of the organization remain confused, creating their own narratives that fuel chaos.
As leaders, we need to ensure we are clear about the bigger picture, what is changing, and why, so we can translate this effectively to our teams and enable them to cascade the relevant messaging to their teams while creating the environment for dialogue that will fuel clarity and feedback loops throughout the organization.
This practice informs decision-making, builds autonomy, trust, and deep collaboration that is essential to building organizational resilience.
Fostering trust & fairness
Employees need trust in leadership to adapt to change effectively, which is essential to maintaining the hive’s strength. Even small changes are enough to violate an aspect of the Psychological Contract between employer and employee, and reorganizations can create a significant sense of violation to employees’ sense of security, value, and culture.
Building the habits of clarity and communication described above is necessary to create a culture that values trust and fairness in the organization. When leaders provide employees with the clarity they need, provide context, and, in turn, ask for feedback and context back upward, they are more likely to make better decisions that show value in the people and the organization, which fosters a sense of trust and fairness with their teams that intrinsically motivates persistent adaptability.
In the end, we are not bees.
We need leadership and guidance to mourn the old ways and get on board. But if we pause to notice what nature has perfected, we can take its lessons and incorporate the best ideas that will help us build the strength and the will to adapt again and again.
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