The Inner Work of Outer Change

"When organizations want to change, they naturally gravitate towards external solutions. They bring in consulting firms to launch digital transformations initiatives, run change management programs, and redraw org charts, convinced that if they can just find the right configuration, everything will click into place and performance will unlock. It rarely works. According to McKinsey, approximately 70% of transformation efforts fail."

"This ancient wisdom contains a modern management truth: The organizations we build reflect the inner states of those who build them. Buddhist philosophy calls this interdependence, the understanding that outer conditions arise from inner states. If a leader operates from anxiety, the organization feels it. If a team leads from defensiveness, collaboration suffers. The system reflects the people in it. So, if we want to transform our organizations-their cultures, their capabilities, their capacity for innovation -we must first transform the leaders within them."

Rapid AI-driven disruption and organizational uncertainty push leaders to prioritize execution over introspection, treating self-reflection as a post-goal luxury. Timely execution matters, but the quality of action depends on the quality of consciousness from which leaders act. Ancient teaching asserts that mind precedes mental states, and inner states determine outcomes. Organizations mirror the inner conditions of their builders; anxiety and defensiveness among leaders and teams produce poor collaboration and suffering, while clarity fosters positive results. External fixes like consultants, change programs, and org-chart redesigns often fail; roughly 70% of transformation efforts do not succeed. Sustainable change requires transforming leaders' inner states first.

Read at Psychology Today