Embracing Organisational Mortality
The Regenerative Cycles of Death and Renewal
In a few weeks’ time, the solstice will be occurring. For our northern hemisphere cousins, this will be a turning of darkness towards light, and for us in the southern hemisphere we will stand upon the inflection point of our longest days beginning their contraction. While this may seem disconnected to our scheduled world of business, it’s a reminder of the cycles we live in. And all cycles have a point of commencement (birth) and of completion (death).
In the mythology of organisations, we speak of perpetual growth, transformation, and evolution—yet whisper behind our hands of endings. Our corporate language celebrates "disruption" while euphemising death, preferring sanitised terms like "restructuring," "pivoting," or "strategic realignment". The reality is that all living systems, including our organisations, must eventually die.
It’s likely that reading that sentence stimulated some discomfort. Our modern world is desperate to avoid reminders of mortality and we collectively participate in this denial. Yet endings occur every second, of every day, and are ultimately required for the emergence of something new. Just as forest ecology depends on the decay of fallen trees to nourish future growth, organisational vitality requires the intentional inclusion of endings (at all scales of the system) to enable renewal.
The Unacknowledged Lifecycle
Organisations, like all living systems, move through predictable developmental arcs. They emerge from the fertile soil of human imagination, grow through youthful experimentation, mature into established patterns, and eventually enter periods of declining vitality. This natural progression contains no inherent tragedy—it simply reflects the rhythmic nature of all living processes.
Yet our organisational narratives resist this fundamental reality. We architect elaborate fantasies of perpetual growth, constructing five-year plans on the unspoken assumption of indefinite expansion. We speak of legacy and permanence while ignoring the transformative necessity of dissolution.
What if, instead, we consciously designed our organisations with full acknowledgment of their inherent mortality? What if we recognised that the average corporate lifespan has shrunk from 67 years (in the 1920s) to less than 15 years today? It’s not failure but an evolutionary response to changes in our operating context.
Death as Creative Space
In natural systems, death creates essential space for emergence. The fallen tree becomes a nursery for seedlings; the scrub fire stimulates new growth; and our body’s cells are in a constant state of decline and rebirth. These endings do not diminish the system but renew it, creating the necessary conditions for continual regeneration.
Organisational death serves a similar function. When obsolete structures dissolve, they release previously captured resources—not merely financial capital, but human creativity, attention, and commitment. They create opportunities to refresh our thinking and reconsider how we apply our team members’ time and skills to more effective applications.
The concept of death occurs at multiple layers and scales of systems as well - the individual, the cohort, and the system. For example, the death of projects within organisations - some through natural conclusions of work and others through forced closure, are examples of small, expected deaths that are occurring all the time and that are necessary for learning and maturity progression. Without these endings, we accumulate anchors that we have to sustain over time and that introduce bias to our decision making for outcomes.
Grieving as Organisational Competency
Our resistance to organisational mortality stems partly from our unwillingness to experience the necessary grief that accompanies significant endings. We fear the disorientation, the loss of identity, the uncomfortable emotion that arises when something meaningful concludes. Yet this process serves essential functions—honouring what has been, metabolising experience into wisdom, and becoming open to new possibilities.
Organisations rarely create space for this work. Leaders announce major transitions, expecting employees to be fully aligned with new directions once they’ve been briefed. Mergers eliminate beloved products without honouring their significance to customers and creators. Reorganisations dismantle long-standing teams without acknowledging the relational bonds (and associated intellectual capital) being severed.
What if we recognised grief as an essential organisational competency—not a sign of weakness but a necessary passage between what was and what might be? Imagine transition rituals that consciously honour past achievements while creating collective space to process loss, with compassion and patience. Consider how differently organisations might evolve if they integrated this emotional intelligence into their cadence and cycles, recognising grief lands differently in context.
Composting: Transformative Dissolution
Death in living systems never represents absolute ending, but rather transformation. Matter and energy change form but persist in the continuing ecosystem. Similarly, organisational death need not mean the disappearance of all that has been created, but rather its transformation into new configurations.
The most regenerative organisations design death into their purpose - this is a brave and challenging space to hold, with difficult trade-offs to navigate. However, developing practices for "composting" your organisation’s past—deliberately breaking down former structures to extract their nutrients for future growth, can be relatively easy to start and can create surprising outcomes:
Harvesting stories that capture essential learning.
Maintaining connection with alumni who carry organisational DNA into new contexts.
Dissolution, properly tended, becomes metamorphosis and we begin to approach it with curiosity and intention rather than as a failure to be hidden. The question becomes not "How do we avoid this death?" but rather "How do we ensure that what has been most valuable lives on in new forms?"
Perhaps most profoundly, acknowledging organisational mortality liberates us from the pretense of immortality. We can shift our fundamental question from "How do we persist indefinitely?" to "What contribution do we wish to make during our finite existence?"
This reframing invites consideration of legacy as generative impact that continues beyond our boundaries and allows us to think about what barriers to this need addressing, including looking at ourselves, our functions, projects, processes, etc. It creates the freedom to take bold risks rather than prioritising self-preservation.
Organisations that embrace their mortality paradoxically gain greater freedom to pursue their deepest purpose. Freed from the impossible burden of eternal existence, they can direct their finite energy toward genuine contribution rather than mere survival.
Practices for Death-Aware Organisations
How might organisations operate differently if they fully integrated awareness of mortality? Consider these possibilities:
Planned Obsolescence: Designing specific organisational elements with acknowledged expiration dates, creating regular space for evaluation and renewal rather than perpetuating structures through institutional inertia.
Legacy Planning: Deliberately considering what wisdom, relationships, and resources should outlive the organisation itself, and designing for their transmission.
Graceful Exits: Developing practices for conscious conclusions—whether for products, programs, or the organisation itself—that honour contributions, process emotions, and release resources for new possibilities.
Transition Rituals: Creating meaningful ceremonies that mark significant endings, providing closure and collective meaning-making during periods of major change.
Mortality Metrics: Tracking not just growth indicators but also signals of declining vitality and relevance, creating early awareness of necessary endings before crisis forces a reaction.
Perhaps the most essential question is not how our organisations might live forever, but how they might die well.