Every eighteen months, the org chart changes.
New reporting lines. New team structures. New leadership alignment. The slide deck promises "increased velocity" and "clearer ownership."
Six months later, the dysfunction has returned with different names. The organization begins planning the next reorg.
⸻
The Accountability Reset
A reorganization terminates every active commitment. Projects that were behind schedule are quietly dissolved into the new structure. Metrics that showed decline are replaced with new baselines. The leaders who presided over the failure are reassigned, not removed.
This is the primary function of the reorg. It is not a repair mechanism. It is a reset button.
The system cannot fire the people responsible, because responsibility was distributed across teams that no longer exist. The reorg erases the evidence and starts a fresh clock.
⸻
The Knowledge Destruction
Every time a team is restructured, institutional knowledge is scattered.
The engineer who understood the legacy billing system is moved to a platform team. The product manager who mapped the customer journey for the enterprise tier is now running a different vertical. The tribal knowledge that held the system together is distributed across five new teams, each of which inherits a fragment.
None of these fragments are documented, because the knowledge was never formal. It lived in relationships, in Slack channels that are now archived, in meeting notes that belong to a project that was cancelled.
The new teams spend their first quarter rebuilding context that the old teams had already earned.
⸻
The Cycle
The reorg follows a predictable pattern. Year one: new structure, optimism, fresh metrics. Year two: problems resurface, ownership gaps emerge, cross-team friction increases. Year three: leadership concludes the structure is the problem and plans a new reorg.
The underlying dysfunction is never structural. It is cultural, strategic, or incentive-driven. But those problems are harder to diagnose and impossible to fix with a slide deck. So the system defaults to the tool it knows: redraw the boxes on the org chart.
⸻
Surviving the Shuffle
You cannot prevent the reorg. You can prepare for it.
Document your work in formats that survive team dissolution. Build relationships across organizational boundaries, not just within your reporting line. When the shuffle comes, the engineers who are legible to multiple teams have options. The ones who were only legible to their manager are at the mercy of the new structure.
Do not invest emotional capital in the current org chart. It is temporary. Your skills and your network are not.
End.