Philosophie Magazine recently marked its twentieth anniversary, a milestone that, for me, landed closer to home than most publishing anniversaries do. They published their latest episode, going back on the main events of the past 20 years, one of them being the Arab Spring. My master’s thesis at Sciences Po looked at the Arab Spring: how a wave of uprisings that seemed, from a distance, sudden and spontaneous was in fact the visible eruption of pressures that had been building, unseen, for years.
That distinction, between the moment change becomes visible and the much longer period during which it was already underway, has shaped how I think about organisational transformation ever since.
The eruption is never the beginning
When a reorganisation is announced, or a team suddenly disengages, or resistance to a new system boils over in a meeting, it’s tempting to treat that moment as the start of the story. It rarely is. By the time resistance becomes visible (vocal, public, hard to ignore), it has usually been accumulating for months: in conversations that didn’t happen, in feedback that was raised once and never followed up on, in the gap between what leadership announced and what people on the ground actually experienced.
The Arab Spring didn’t start the week protests filled the squares. The conditions had been building for years, largely invisible to anyone not looking closely, until they weren’t. Organisations aren’t nations, and I’d never claim the comparison is exact, but the underlying pattern holds: visible rupture is a symptom, not a starting point. If you only start paying attention once the rupture is visible, you’ve already missed the window where the intervention would have been cheapest and easiest.
What this means for how we listen
It’s part of why immersion, actual time on the ground, real conversations, not a survey sent from a distance, sits at the centre of how we approach change work. The goal isn’t to predict the future. It’s to notice the pressure building before it needs a rupture to become visible: the informal go-to person who’s quietly absorbing more and more of the organisation’s coordination work without any formal recognition, the team that’s stopped raising concerns in meetings not because everything’s fine but because raising them stopped changing anything.
Structure and imagination
There’s a second thread from that period of study that still shapes how I think about transformation: the idea, drawn from Castoriadis, that organisations don’t change because a plan is imposed on them, they remake themselves, from their own collective imagination. The plans that hold are the ones that gave people room to imagine, and build, what came next, not just comply with what was decided for them.
Twenty years of a magazine that made space for that kind of long-view thinking feels, to me, like a fitting occasion to say it plainly: the work of change management isn’t managing the moment of rupture. It’s paying attention long before it, and building enough trust that when the rupture does come, there’s already a shared story to rebuild from.
If you wish to be supported during your transformation projects, we invite you to schedule a meeting with The Change Society Office.
