What Leadership Misses When It Reorganizes Leaving Behind Its Most Important Asset

Field Notes № 02 · June 2026 · A response to Morgan Appel's "The Specialist Paradox." Originally published on LinkedIn.

I am writing this from inside the work.

Not as an outside observer, not as a consultant brought in to assess, but as someone who has spent years in classrooms, in organizations, in rooms full of people doing deeply human work inside systems that were not designed to sustain them. I have sat with educators, program managers, academic directors, and community workers who are brilliant, committed, and quietly running on empty. I have spent years building spaces to nourish and pour life back into the people doing this work, because I know what it costs to stay. And I stay, we stay, because of the people we serve.

I name my position because it matters.

The Structure Argument, and the Layer Underneath It

My colleague Morgan Appel recently published a precise and necessary structural critique of modality-based reorganization in continuing and professional education. He names what is lost organizationally when institutions restructure teams away from the disciplines and communities they serve: the tacit knowledge, the contextual expertise, the coordination costs that no playbook can absorb. It is worth reading carefully.

What I want to add is the layer underneath the structure: the human one. And a broader truth that I believe is playing out not just in one institution, but across the education field right now.

When Organizational Change Does Not Include the Actual Organization

Let me say clearly what this piece is not arguing: institutional change is not the problem. Change is necessary. Organizations must evolve, restructure, reimagine how they work. The field demands it. The communities we serve deserve it.

The problem is not the change itself — it is how the change is brought about. And specifically, what it skips. And it is evident when:

It skips diagnosis. It skips listening. It skips the step where leadership gets close enough to the work to understand what is actually not working and why. Instead, decisions arrive from the top, disconnected from the people doing the work and the communities receiving it. Structures are redesigned around administrative convenience, funding categories, or delivery modalities — not around mission, not around the learner, and not around the staff who have spent years building the relational and contextual knowledge that makes programs actually work.

And underneath many of these decisions, if you look closely, is fear. Fear of missing a federal grant cycle. Fear of falling behind a trend. Fear of being seen as inefficient in a sector that is under enormous pressure to justify its existence. Fear dressed up in the language of expertise, specialization, and operational precision.

Decisions made from fear — quickly, without consultation, without an implementation plan — do not produce efficiency. They produce uncertainty. And uncertainty, sustained and unaddressed, is one of the most potent threats a workplace can generate.

Treating an Adaptive Challenge Like a Technical Problem

Ronald Heifetz distinguishes between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems have known solutions: they can be fixed with the right structure, the right process, the right specialist. Adaptive challenges are different. They require the organization to examine itself: its culture, its assumptions, its relationship to the people doing the work and the communities it serves. They require diagnosis before prescription.

What I observe in the field and in the research is that the reorganizations spreading through education right now are adaptive challenges being treated as technical ones. The diagnosis has been skipped. And without diagnosis, restructuring does not solve the problem. It relocates it.

Heifetz also gives us the image of the balcony and the floor. Adaptive leadership requires both: the ability to step back and see the pattern, and the willingness to step back down and feel what that pattern costs. Most top-down reorganizations happen entirely on the balcony. The people on the floor — the ones who feel the cost in their bodies, in their teams, in their relationships with students and instructors and community partners — are rarely invited into the design of what comes next.

That is not a minor oversight. That is where the intelligence lives.

The Room Gets Quieter. That Is the Data.

When people are reorganized away from the communities and fields they have built their expertise around, when their contextual knowledge is reclassified as a liability, their relationships reframed as bias, their authority quietly redistributed upward — something happens that does not show up on an org chart.

The room gets quieter. People close off. Not because they stopped caring, but because they have learned, quickly and clearly, that speaking carries a cost. When the people who name what isn't working are the ones who lose their positions, the rest of the team receives the message. Silence is not agreement. It is self-protection. And an organization that cannot hear honest feedback from the people closest to the work has lost access to the most important data it has.

This is what Amy Edmondson's decades of research on psychological safety tells us: teams that cannot speak cannot learn. And teams that cannot learn cannot adapt. The irony is acute. Organizations pursuing adaptive restructuring are, through the way they pursue it, dismantling the very conditions that make adaptation possible.

The nervous system does not distinguish between existential threat and professional uncertainty. Chronic ambiguity without communication, without voice, without a clear implementation plan activates the same survival responses as acute danger. People stop taking risks. They stop sharing what they know. The relational connective tissue of a team — the thing that makes tacit knowledge, institutional memory, and genuine collaboration possible — begins to dissolve.

And the students, the instructors, the community members those programs exist to serve? They absorb the depletion, even when they cannot name it. Quality of care is always a downstream expression of the conditions in which care is delivered.

The people with the least institutional power and the most proximity to the work absorb the cost of decisions made by the people with the most institutional power and the least proximity to it. This is not new. But it is worth naming every time it happens, because it is being allowed to happen over and over again.

It Is Not Too Late

Here is what I also know, and what I hold onto: it is not too late.

Adaptive leadership is not a precondition for beginning. It is a posture that can be adopted at any point, including after a painful start. The balcony is always available. The floor is always available. The questions that should have been asked first can still be asked now: What are we actually trying to solve? What does this reorganization cost the people doing the work? What would it mean to co-create rather than mandate?

There is still time to pause. To acknowledge what has been lost and what the process has cost. To apologize, genuinely, not as a performance, for decisions that diminished the expertise and the dignity of the people doing the work. And to invite them into the design of what comes next, not as a gesture of inclusion, but as a recognition that the answers have been there all along. They are the experts in their field.

The people closest to the work are not the obstacle to change. They are the path through it. They carry the knowledge of what is not working. They carry the relationships that make new structures possible. They carry the reason the work exists at all.

That is not sentiment. That is strategy. And the research on psychological safety, on adaptive leadership, on organizational learning has been saying so for decades.

The Most Important Variable in the Room

To my colleagues across the field who are living this right now: I see you. The confusion, the fear, the quiet grief of watching something you built get reorganized without your voice — it is real, and it deserves to be named. You are not the problem. You are, in fact, the most important variable in the room.

And to the leaders who still have time to choose differently: the people on your floor are waiting. Not to resist you, but to help you get this right.

This piece first appeared on LinkedIn, June 2026, in response to Morgan Appel's "The Specialist Paradox." Field Notes is where Working With Delia documents what real engagements and the field are showing, connected to the research. If your organization is navigating change and wants to include the people doing the work in designing it, start the conversation.