Can a team stay human through a reorg?

Every reorg starts with a slide.

Boxes move. Names move. Someone gets a dotted line. And in the room where the slide gets made, it looks like a clean solution.

Then it lands on the floor, and something goes quiet.

What's the pattern?

For most of the million years we've been human, we lived in groups of about 150. That number has a name now, Dunbar's number, after the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found that our brains seem to top out at roughly 150 stable relationships. Inside that circle, you know who to trust because you've watched them. Bad apples are hard to hide. Debts get settled face to face.

I wrote about this in Radical Next, because it's the original operating system for trust. Localized. Direct. Earned.

Companies are much bigger than 150. But look closely and you'll see they still run on circles of about that size, and inside those on circles of five or ten. The people who cover for you. The ones you'd call at midnight. That's the real org chart, and it never appears on the slide.

A reorg redraws the boxes. Trust lives in the lines. Break enough lines at once and you don't have a new structure. You have strangers with new titles.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

Map the lines before you move the boxes. Ask each team who they actually depend on. Then try not to sever more than one of those ties per person. That single constraint saves more reorgs than any change-management deck.

Move circles, not individuals. If a group works, move it together. Splitting a working five to seed five new teams sounds efficient. It usually just kills the one team that worked.

And give people a reason they can repeat. "Why are we doing this?" will be asked in every hallway. If the answer takes a slide, it will be replaced by a rumor by lunch.

People have survived far bigger changes than a restructure. They did it in small circles that held. Keep the circles.

Which line on your team would you never want to cut?

Related: What year is it inside your company?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote