Making Peace with Messy Work: How to Recover from Challenging Organizational Change
How do you move forward when a work experience leaves you frustrated, disillusioned, or even harmed?
Summer Rest Break // The SDL team spent the last two weeks on the road supporting partners and communities who are working to uplift BIPOC educators and social sector leaders. It’s been emotionally heavy in our current fear-based context, but (as one participant reminded us) being in community is *the work.*
Today marks SDL’s final day of work before our summer break. We are working hard to practice ease and rest; the complexity of today’s world will be waiting for us in August. For now, we are going to sit in nature, laugh with our friends and family, take long naps, and recharge. We’re going to just BE. In the month of July you’ll see posts, but they are pre-scheduled posts by us.
TL;DR // Organizational harm (burnout, disillusionment, and frustration) is real and takes a significant toll. We’ve experienced how tough it is when meaningful work feels wasted on immovable systems. Recovering requires three essential (yet challenging) steps: acknowledging the emotional toll, intentional reflection and sense-making, and transforming difficult experiences into actionable wisdom. By thoughtfully processing past harms, setting clear boundaries, and learning to hold multiple truths, we can design healthier, more sustainable futures for ourselves and our work.
Have you ever left a project or organization feeling drained, disillusioned, or like all your efforts amounted to nothing? Maybe you put your heart into a system that wouldn’t budge, or perhaps a toxic workplace took more from you than it ever gave.
At Systems Design Lab, we've found ourselves navigating these waters. We’ve worked on projects that left our team disheartened, not because of who our clients are, but because of how complicated and immovable their systems are. Despite investing deeply in facilitating meaningful change, systemic inertia and internal politics sometimes mean our efforts don’t translate into the lasting impact we envisioned. This is disillusioning. It leaves us feeling unseen, frustrated, and wondering if the investment was worthwhile. And this isn’t the first time that any of us has experienced this in the social sector.
This experience brought us to a crucial question: How do we recover from these moments and transform them into something useful? Reflecting on our own experiences, we identified three key steps: acknowledging the toll, moving beyond frustration through reflection and sense-making, and transforming harm into future possibilities. Today’s post isn’t one of those “Three Simple Steps to Get Over Your Sh*t” - we know it doesn’t work like that. We share these steps because they seem simple but, in practice, are deceptively hard. It’s kind of like what meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein says about mindfulness meditation: “It’s very simple, but not easy.”
Acknowledging the Toll
Organizational harm is real. It manifests as burnout, cynicism, and disillusionment. It shows up in each of those moments when your contributions go unnoticed or undervalued. And when these moments accrue — when you continually push for change against immovable structures — emotional exhaustion sets in.
This often leads to a spiral of frustration where you replay events repeatedly, wondering if there was something more you could have done. Many organizations focus on outcomes and deliverables, but fail to create space for reflection, leaving individuals isolated in their pain and organizations stuck.
Recognizing when an experience has been more harmful than helpful is crucial. Becoming aware is also really hard. If you pay attention, you may notice tension in your body as a sign of lingering resentment or diminished enthusiasm, or you may notice physical fatigue, or even a persistent cynicism about new initiatives. These signals tell you clearly: it's time to pause, step back, and start processing.
Mini Reflection 💡 What's a work experience that left you feeling frustrated or disillusioned? What made it challenging? What was the impact on you — spiritually, physically, intellectually, intuitively, and emotionally?
Moving Beyond Frustration through Reflection and Sense-Making
Staying stuck in frustration can cause real harm to ourselves and our work. Without intentional reflection, we risk bringing unresolved resentment into new spaces, limiting our capacity to trust, engage, and innovate. Organizational trauma shapes our perceptions and can lead to defensive behaviors that stifle growth and collaboration.
To genuinely move forward, reflection and sense-making are essential. Here are a few ideas we like to rely on:
📝 Journaling: Some folks like an unstructured approach like morning pages, while others prefer specific prompts like "What did I learn? What patterns emerged? What boundaries do I need moving forward?" Either way, it’s useful to get the frustration out of your mind and onto paper. (This is actually backed by research. If you want to nerd out, check out James Pennebaker’s work on expressive writing.)
🗣️ Talking it out: Sometimes it can feel taboo to talk about the water we all swim in, and other times it can feel like trauma dumping or gossip. Yet, when done with trusted peers, mentors, or professional therapists, you can unpack these experiences objectively, which is extremely helpful and unlocks our ability to make sense of our experiences and integrate the learning.
📴 Intentional breaks: Sometimes the best medicine is a pause, allowing ourselves space to recharge, especially before diving into new commitments. Did you know that there are actually seven kinds of rest, and only one of them looks like napping and manicures? (They’re physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, and spiritual). As you read this, our team is on an intentional break, not only to catch up on much-needed rest, but also to give us space to reflect on our recent work and metaphorically sage our space.
There’s one more concept about moving forward that we’ve found helpful, and that’s learning to embrace paradox and hold multiple truths simultaneously. For example, you might acknowledge that despite systemic resistance, your work was meaningful and planting seeds that could sprout later, without you.
Mini Reflection💡 Reflecting on a difficult work experience, what did you learn about yourself, your values, or how you lead? How will you rest so that you can integrate these learnings moving forward? (✨ hot tip: check out the Nap Ministry’s Rest Deck for inspo!)
Transforming Harm into Possibility
Eventually, each of us reaches a moment where we have adequately acknowledged and reflected on our experience, and we are ready to reframe harm as a learning opportunity. The insights we gained can profoundly inform future decisions:
Reframing harm: Rather than just carrying forward bitterness, consider how past disappointments can guide your next moves. The harm can be transmuted into actionable wisdom.
Shaping healthier environments: Take deliberate steps toward building or choosing healthier organizational cultures. Decide what you’re willing to tolerate, for how long, and toward what end. With this in mind, you can set clear boundaries early based on past lessons and then set up regular routines to reflect on those boundaries.
Avoiding past pitfalls: Our team now explicitly references past difficult experiences, reminding ourselves not to recreate that situation and to use that experience as data for a better design.
Codifying these lessons—through writing, mentoring, or community reflection—can deepen the impact and provide clarity. Participating in collective learning spaces, sharing openly, and reflecting as a group can be a transformative experience. This is exactly why we do deep-dive reflections on a personal and professional level twice a year at SDL.
Mini Reflection 💡 How have your past difficult experiences shaped your choices and behaviors in new roles? What do you do differently now?
Designing a More Sustainable Future
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
Many of our current social systems are designed to privilege some and harm others. Redesigning harmful, entrenched, capitalist systems is the work of generations, not decades. Powering through our trauma will not allow us to persist. Even though recovering from harmful organizational experiences isn't a linear process, it can be profoundly generative.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” -audre lorde
We can’t let the systems we seek to change take us out of the game. Remember the emergent strategy principle: small is all. We believe that, by healing ourselves, we can make space for larger and larger circles of healing. 🌿
» I was chatting with a friend this week about the ways that we create our own stress. For example, no one asked me to create a fancy meal or a full itinerary for an upcoming visit with my friends. I’m just being extra, AND I can actually choose ease. I’m practicing that this month when I convene with a group of girlfriends and our families for a summer camp-style week of play. What does ease look like for you these days?
» A post I’ve been revisiting lately comes from Courtney Martin, called A prayer for these cruel times. It’s helping me stay grounded when things feel really out of control.
» My family gets a farm share from a local woman-owned farm, which means we end up with a lot of things that are new to us or make us go hmmm, OK. 🤔 It’s great! I’m using it as a creative opportunity and a reason to dig into real, physical cookbooks like this one I’m really loving lately.
» I know that AI is a divisive, complicated topic. I’ve been experimenting with it a bit so that I can understand what it is and can do (…and I have this on my reading list). I’m here to say that it’s really helping me accelerate my learning about gardening! I have been reluctant to start because of the expense and risk of failure. With a little support from the information wizard that is AI (yes, I mean that in good and bad ways!), I’ve been able to find really useful resources that have helped me succeed.
So that’s where you’ll find me in July: buzzing around with these folks in my new garden. 🍅
Find us elsewhere: