Ungrieved Loss
Leadership celebrated the new direction. The team mourned the old one. In silence. Because mourning in a forward-looking organisation feels like disloyalty.
The noble do not treat suffering as cause for despair. Valluvar speaks of personal resilience, of holding steady through pain. But he never said: pretend the pain doesn’t exist. The old way ended three years ago. The team that built it was disbanded. The processes they’d perfected over a decade were replaced. The expertise they’d spent years developing was reclassified as ‘legacy knowledge.’ Leadership celebrated the new direction. The team mourned the old one. In silence. Because mourning in a forward-looking organisation feels like disloyalty.
Adidas invested $3.8 billion to acquire Reebok in 2005, partly to build a digital fitness platform. I traced how the organisation’s wholesale DNA rejected digital. Store owners lobbied against direct-to-consumer. The marketing department optimised for shoe launches, not app engagement. When Adidas finally sold Reebok in 2021 for $2.5 billion, the digital fitness vision had been absorbed by Nike, Apple, and Peloton. The organizational immune system didn’t fight the innovation. It simply starved it of oxygen until it stopped breathing.
Every change involves a death that nobody names. In psychology, Kubler-Ross’s grief model describes the stages of processing loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The progression isn’t linear, but the principle is: loss requires processing. Skipping stages doesn’t eliminate them. It defers them. Organizational change always involves loss: the old team structure, the familiar process, the accumulated expertise, the relationships built around a shared practice. When organisations refuse to acknowledge this loss, grief doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. It manifests as passive resistance, low engagement, quiet sabotage, and the vague but persistent feeling that ‘something is wrong’ that nobody can articulate.
Before your next change, name what’s being lost. Not what’s being gained. What’s being lost. Acknowledge it publicly. Give people permission to feel it. ‘We’re moving forward, and we’re also losing something that mattered.’ That sentence costs nothing. Its absence costs everything.
That silent mourning has a name. Ungrieved Loss. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Untie The Knot
Uproot
Loss was unacknowledged because the organisation equated grief with resistance. Mourning the old way felt like opposing the new way. Leadership pushed forward without pausing to honor what was being left behind.
Navigate
Every significant change includes an explicit acknowledgment of what is being lost. Grief is treated as a natural and necessary response, not as opposition.
Tool
CORE / Legacy: the framework that honors what was built before it was replaced. Legacy ensures that the past is respected, not erased, as the organisation moves forward.
Implement
Before your next change, name what’s being lost. Say it publicly: ‘We’re moving forward, and we’re also losing something that mattered.’ That sentence costs nothing. Its absence costs everything.
Emerge
When loss is acknowledged, transitions become emotionally complete, energy redirects from underground grief to active engagement, and the organisation carries its history forward instead of burying it.