My Dear Niece Snakeash,

Change.

Oh, how we hate this word.

If I were to posit (and I do so enjoy positing all over myself) what the least favorite activity in the workplace is—aside from work—it would easily be Change.

But change is never easy, is it? 

We talk so freely about change, transitions, and re-orgs; but the truth (*gag*) is that everything is the way it is for very specific reasons. 

There are no accidents on the ol’ org chart. 

Kinda like the Grand Pyramids of Giza—I should know, I was there. 

Yes, your dear Aunt Toutlips had a life before traversing the rocky roads of resourcing humans. And that life was traversing the rocky roads of Egypt during the reign of Khufu skillfully resourcing human…slaves.  

At the time, I was a little different: a minor demon-muse tasked with inspiring the slave drivers with new and awful methods of exacting every once of blood, sweat, and tears from the slaves who built the pyramids. 

Which slaves were those? Ha, I am not going to get sucked into a political debate. Now, AT one though…

As much as I enjoy chains and whips of the whole affair, we were able to come up with incredibly motivational methods of torture, which inspired our charges to increase the production ten-fold. 

It was truly wonderful to behold. And beheld by Oris—my designated slavedriver. Oh, his hands were wonderfully calloused. And the stench from his man-skirt? Enough to make a minor demon-muse’s hoofs quiver with anticipation. Cloppity clop clop! 

But endless bliss and pleasure must (paradoxically) end sometime. The pyramid was finally constructed. 

Oris eventually had the ancient Egyptian equivalent of an exorcism—and I finally departed him, but I wanted to leave him something to remember me by, so I carved my initials in his lower intestinal tract. 

But the point is that the pyramid did not erect itself overnight. Oris also struggled with this. 

Organizations are like the pyramid. 

Just as each block was formed in fire, dragged across miles of desert, and carefully placed in a specific pattern, departments in an organization came into being purposefully and not randomly. 

We have all heard expressions like ‘it is what it is’ and ‘it’s just the way it is.’ 

These are not casual sentences; rather they are pronouncements of reality. 

Because organizations grow, regress, and stagnate in all the same ways, BUT, each department is still unique to itself. 

Say I were to have two different HR departments and staff each similarly. 

Would the organizational cultures of each be the same? 

Of course not. 

We know this is because of chaos theory. 

Each department will evolve and grow and change over time, and it will be like no other department before it. 

This is why change is so darn hard—unlike Oris. 

Change, especially of the wholesale variety, permeates through every facet and affects the entire body from top to bottom. 

Change is a violent experience—forcibly tearing out the old and clumsily replacing it with the sloppy new. 

Change is awkward, halting, and uncomfortable, and we often strongly resent those who force it upon us. 

But change is still necessary. 

Without change, there is simply nothing. And if there was nothing, who would HR make endlessly miserable? 

Ultimately, we hate change because it disrupts the one thing all humans crave: comfort. 

Clop clop indeed,

Aunt Toutlips

Author Notes