The scaffold doesn't loosen when the building is being altered

Somewhere in your organisation right now, something is mid-change. A restructure that hasn't finished landing, a system being replaced, a team absorbing its third new priority this year.

And somewhere in that mess, a well-meaning leader has said a version of: "We'll keep things loose until it settles."

The one-on-ones slide, because who knows what roles will exist next month. The Monday meeting gets patchy, because half the team is in workshops about the new thing. The plan is described as evolving, which everyone correctly hears as "there isn't one."

If that's you at the moment, it isn't a criticism. Loosening the structure is what care looks like when you can't offer certainty, and most leaders I work with have done it at some point. It just doesn't do what it feels like it should.

People absorb change from a stable base. So when a lot is moving, a leader's job is to make sure a few things visibly are not, and to keep saying which ones.

Think about scaffolding. When a building is being altered, nobody loosens the scaffold. The scaffold is the still thing that makes work on a moving structure possible. People can climb, carry and rebuild precisely because what they're standing on holds. Take that away and you haven't freed anyone up. You've asked them to renovate while the scaffold sways.

Without a stable base, people spend their capacity on orientation. Working out what today's version of the plan is, whose call something is now, whether the meeting is happening. That energy has to come from somewhere, and it comes out of the work you were hoping they'd get on with.

Take a community health provider with sixty staff across four sites. In March it announces two things at once: a new client management system going live in August, and a restructure merging two team leader roles into one.

The general manager does what most of us would do. She pauses the fortnightly one-on-ones, because half of them would be awkward conversations about roles that might not exist. She lets the Tuesday all-staff huddle go to monthly, because people are in system training anyway. She tells everyone the plan is evolving and she'll share more when she has it.

By June, eleven weeks later, here's where they are. Three versions of the new roster are circulating, and two of them came out of a car park conversation. Nobody is sure whether site coordinators can still approve casual shifts, so some are and some aren't, and one of them has been quietly escalating everything to her for six weeks. Two clinicians have resigned, and both exit conversations mention not knowing where they stood rather than the restructure itself.

None of that came from the change. It came from the eleven weeks with nothing steady in them.

Here's what the general manager said in March: "We'll keep things loose while this beds in, and I'll share more when I have it." The subject of that sentence is the future, and it names nothing that holds right now. It also makes her the only source of information, which is why the car park filled the gap.

Here's what she could have said instead: "Three things are not changing. The Tuesday huddle happens every week, and your one-on-one happens every fortnight, including the weeks I've got nothing new to tell you. Site coordinators keep approving casual shifts throughout. If you hear anything that contradicts those three, it's wrong and I want to know you heard it."

That version names specific things, gives a date-proof rule people can hold, and hands them a test for rumours. It takes about twenty seconds to say and it would have cost her nothing.

Teams that stay on their feet through a messy period tend to look surprisingly boring up close. Four patterns show up consistently.

Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe spent years studying organisations that can't afford a bad day: aircraft carrier flight decks, emergency departments, power grid control rooms, wildfire crews. You might expect the ones that cope best with the unexpected to be the most improvisational. What they describe in Managing the Unexpected is closer to the opposite. The organisations that cope best when something unexpected lands are deeply structured about a small number of things. They run their routines seriously, they pay disciplined attention to small failures, and they are clear about who decides what when conditions shift.

The structure is what frees their attention up. A crew that never has to wonder how the handover works has attention spare for the thing that's different today.

Worth being straight about what that evidence is and isn't. It's qualitative case research in extreme settings, gathered and synthesised over years, and it describes what those organisations do rather than proving that routines cause resilience. A community health provider in Hamilton is not an aircraft carrier, and nobody has run the controlled study that would settle it. What it does give you is a well-observed pattern from the places where getting this wrong is fatal, which is a reasonable thing to borrow from.

It's the opposite problem to the one most leaders have in a change. Nobody is at risk of running too many one-on-ones during a restructure. And the list is deliberately short: three or four things held steady, not a freeze on everything. The point of a scaffold is that most of the building is being altered.

Holding the routines steady doesn't make a badly designed change good. If the restructure is wrong, a protected one-on-one mostly means people tell you it's wrong sooner, which is useful and is not the same as fixing it.

It also won't work if the steady things you name aren't within your gift to hold. Promising a meeting you'll cancel the first time your own diary gets squeezed is worse than never promising it, because you've now demonstrated that the steady list is negotiable.