Explore the gap between what organisations say and what people experience, what it costs and why noticing matters.
How often do you sit in meetings where the conversation goes in endless circles? Why do we think posters proclaiming values have any impact on behaviour at all? What sense can we make of the endless reports written by consultants that end up in desk drawers, never to be seen again? And what happens when we pretend organisations, and how we lead them, are rational?
We are joined by Charleen Johnson from InSpark Group, who developed the 2026 Workplace Absurdities Report, and Ket Patel, who has worked across change, transformation, projects and programmes for a number of years, often as an external practitioner, and volunteered with the Change Management Institute for many years. Guiding the conversation is Steve Hearsum, author of No Silver Bullet: bursting the bubble of the organisational quick fix. Together they explore the gap between what organisations say and what people actually encounter, what it costs, and why noticing it is part of the work of every Change Manager.
What absurdity means at work
Absurdity, in this context, is the disconnect between what an organisation says, intends to do or believes is happening and what people are actually encountering. Many of us experience it on a day to day basis. It can show up as:
- Contradiction in the workplace
- Interesting dynamics around how tension or friction happens in the organisation
- A lot of irony and humour in the workplace, including more cynical uses of humour
Dictionary definitions point to something silly, unbelievable or highly impractical, and the word sometimes carries connotations of being amusing. Yet the absurd can also be quite dark, and Albert Camus had a take on it too. It is not always a funny thing. It can be darkly comic.
A reflection to start with
Think about an absurd scenario in a meeting or conversation you have had in the last few weeks. If nothing comes to mind at work, think about your family or your relationships, which are often full of absurdity. Then, in three sentences:
- Name the pattern you observed
- Ask what function the absurdity is serving. Is it there to defend against anxiety, to deflect or to deny?
- Consider what it is costing the individual and the organisation, whether that is clarity, money, efficiency, relationship or connection
Functional absurdity: keeping the organisation moving, at a cost
Consulting companies often develop trends reports that look at what has been happening. The 2026 Workplace Absurdities Report takes that idea and looks through an absurdity lens, delving into why work is getting so difficult to navigate. The pace and complexity of change seem to be accelerating, and AI sits on top of that too.
Organisations continue to function and perform, and may even meet their KPIs, while individuals do a lot of compensating for the disconnects. It is a gigantic movement happening in organisations in spite of the experience people are having on the ground and what is working for them. That is why we see:
- Workarounds
- Snarky comments
- Funny jokes in the corner about “here we go again, another restructure”
This is functional absurdity. It does keep the organisation moving forward, but at what cost?
Two people, two interpretations, no conversation
As practitioners, we get a unique perspective on organisations and on the contradictions between what people say and what actually happens, and on how those contradictions show up in the conversations people have with one another.
A lot of the tension in organisations comes from a set of assumptions we make about how people interpret things, a series of actions we take because of those assumptions, and then horror when the actions are not realised the way we expected.
Two people can see something, interpret it entirely differently, walk away without ever having a conversation about what they interpreted, go off and do lots of things, and then be confused about why the other has done something else. It is important to start noticing where those contradictions and tensions arise, and what conversations are not happening as a result. Practitioners have a unique position to bring light to them, to drive some of that tension away, or at least to uncover it.
The absurdity inside our own profession
Rigid boundaries around the work
One question comes up all the time: can a project manager do change management, or can responsibility be shared in some way? There is often a rigidness that says only I can do it and only you can do that, or that an organisation should never hire someone with a bit of something else on the side. There is some blend an organisation could use if the skills required for the job were matched to the size of the change. The rigidity about the boundaries of our work, and how protective we can be of them, feels counterproductive and absurd.
Turning change into an object
Keynotes and the whole market for thought leadership can feel beyond absurd. So can the way we thingify culture, leadership and change and turn them into abstractions: land the change, drive the change. Change is not an object, and culture is not a thing.
On one side there is the laughable stuff. On the other side there is the pain and the dehumanising nature of turning something like culture into an object. Absurdity is not only funny. Sometimes you have to see the human cost of it.
Your own absurdity
A curveball for you as a Change Management practitioner: do you have any sense of your own absurdity?
- When have you said or done something that, in hindsight, makes you ask what on earth that was about?
- How have you colluded with your organisation or your client in a way that, in hindsight, looks daft?
What absurdity costs
Eroding the unwritten social contract
One story involves 13 instances of absurdity, recorded over 12 months, experienced by one person in the organisation they work for. They started out very committed, giving a lot of their personal time and discretionary effort in expectation of some reward. This is the traditional exchange of effort for something in return, the often unwritten social contract we have with our organisations. You start to notice its erosion when things that have been said do not happen, and in fact the opposite happens.
In one example, people were streaming at lunchtime. Instead of a grown up conversation about appropriate use, someone decided to introduce a process where each employee had to request a Wi-Fi password every day. One person would access it and share it around, so everyone still had access. All the process did was leave people angry and disenfranchised by the sheer audacity of being controlled in this way.
This is where a business starts to lose discretionary effort, which is fundamental when you think about change. Everybody you ask to change is already doing a job, and no one has been given extra time to take on the adoption of a change. We ask people to give extra time, and then undervalue the time and resources they require because we will not have a grown up conversation.
Loops, burnout and rework
People spend a lot of time trying to reconcile contradictions and make sense of them. Communication plans, stakeholder management and communication all go into reconciling contradictions, and sometimes those contradictions never get resolved. The costs include:
- Groundhog Day meetings that keep coming back to the same issues because decisions are not being made
- Burnout from absorbing unresolved contradiction and chasing clarity
- Implications for employee engagement
- Change projects and initiatives that are not successful, with restarts, rework or a big pause
- Financial and reputational costs to organisations
There are big implications for not addressing these issues head on.
Why Change Managers ignore absurdity at their peril
There is a big difference between internal and external practitioners. As an external, it can be easier to see what looks absurd. People who are internal may become more accustomed to “this is the way things are”.
Noticing absurdity is part of the job, whether you are internal or external. If you do not notice it, you are ultimately colluding with change not being done in a way that is effective, engaging and drives outcomes. It is an important part of our practice to notice:
- Where tension exists
- Where things get repeated
- Where things do not get decided or resolved and make no progress for anyone
We cannot be the ones who keep allowing the resurfacing to happen. Of all the people in organisations, we understand the dynamics of human behaviour and relations and driving outcomes. It is our responsibility to notice these things and bring light to them, even if that is harder when you are internal.
Where absurdity shows up in your practice
There are a few different ways absurdity can show up for practitioners:
- In how we run the change itself and how we do our change practice, for example saying we need early involvement when decisions have already been made
- In the lived experience once the change is executed, and how it actually lands for people
From implementer to strategic partner
Change Practitioners are in a great position to be the feedback loop, and they already are. Often, though, they are brought in to help execute and implement the change rather than be a strategic partner in it. There is an opportunity to shift that role.
Our role is to help orient the organisation to the change. It is not only about the training plan, the comms plan and the typical things that help with execution. It is about making sure the change is effectively executed, and about the implementation itself and how we do the change. There is an opportunity for the profession to look at how we can become more strategic partners.
Bringing it together
Absurdity is the gap between what organisations say and what people actually encounter. It can be laughable and it can be dark, and it carries a real cost in discretionary effort, clarity, burnout, rework and money. For Change Managers, noticing it is part of the job, starting with your own.
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