Pain / Management

The organizational flinch!

Geoff Wilson

This one comes from reflections over the past year I spent recovering from a total knee replacement.  The procedure and the recovery has been a revelation in not only the true miracles of modern orthopedic technology, but also the slow loss of function that we don’t even notice as we age.

Just two weeks ago, my wife and I hiked 65 miles along the Coast Path in Cornwall, England.  That would simply not have been possible for me a year ago.

For more than 20 years, I’ve dealt with the progressive degradation of a knee that I injured badly in 1996.  I’ve written about that injury and the learning that came with it in a prior blog post here.  The long degradation proceeded to a point last May where a simple 10-step stroll was a puzzle of pain and motion…and to a point where I experienced a prison of pain where sitting or lying still hurt as badly as moving. So, I have experience to share in my recovery from that: once the pain was gone, I had to re-learn how to move in ways my body had “blocked” over the past three decades.

I think there’s leadership learning in that process…

To wit: walk behind an older person in a grocery store and you might notice the pattern: the careful steps, the limited turns, the subtle guarding of motion. It’s not just age at play. It’s memory — the memory of pain. A stiff back, a knee that needs replacement like mine, a hip that talks back after a long day. Over time, the body learns to move around the pain. To manage it. And in managing it, it also limits itself.

What begins as protection becomes pattern. Eventually, the body isn’t moving to avoid pain — it’s simply not moving.

Organizations behave the same way.

Pain, in a business context, rarely arrives as a torn ligament. It comes as a failed initiative. A reorganization that went sideways. A strategy that fell flat. A leader who pushed too hard. An innovation that drained resources without results.

And like the aging body, the organization remembers.

People stop suggesting bold moves. Teams become careful. Risk assessments grow longer. Reviews grow heavier. The organization doesn’t say, “We can’t do this.” It says, “Let’s revisit that in Q4,” or “This feels like a distraction,” or the classic: “We tried something like this a few years ago…”

The organizational flinch is rarely loud. It’s quiet. Respectable. Even rational. But over time, it becomes rigid.

In physical therapy, clinicians often help patients relearn movements they’ve been avoiding — not because the body can’t do them, but because it’s been trained not to. The process is slow, deliberate, and occasionally uncomfortable. It requires the patient to trust the process — and the therapist to know when a movement is worth reintroducing.

Organizations need a similar kind of therapy.

Avoidance can’t be the long-term answer. Avoiding difficult conversations, complex initiatives, or once-burned strategic paths may feel prudent. But prudence can harden into paralysis. And agility — the ability to move, pivot, try, and adapt — fades.

This isn’t to say that pain should be ignored. Quite the opposite. Pain is a signal. It points to stress, imbalance, or real risk. But pain also presents a choice: recover and reengage, or protect and retreat. The latter feels safer in the short term. The former builds resilience over time.

Leaders must become attuned to their organization’s flinches. Not just the big ones — the failed product line or the ghost of a bad acquisition — but the smaller ones, too: ideas that never make it to the meeting, suggestions dismissed with a glance, initiatives that quietly die on the vine.

Ask: Where are we guarding movement? What pain are we protecting ourselves from? And is that protection still necessary?

Because over time, what we avoid becomes what we can no longer do.

And if we want to stay agile — as leaders, as teams, as organizations — we have to be willing to move through the pain. Thoughtfully. Carefully. But decisively.

What do you think?