What You Suppress in Change Always Returns

Six weeks into a major change effort at a fast-growing biotech company, no one at the leadership table saw it coming: engagement scores had dropped 40 percent, and turnover had doubled. Executive coach and researcher Jenny Fernandez describes this case in Harvard Business Review (March 2026). The leadership team had the roadmap, the budget, and the communication calendar in order. What was happening beneath the surface only became visible once the numbers were already telling the story.

Fernandez points to McKinsey research that has shown the same pattern for years: roughly 70 percent of change efforts fail to deliver their intended result. The root cause is rarely a flawed business case. It lies in the human element: leaders who read silence in a meeting as agreement, who dismiss hesitation as a difficult attitude, who treat resistance as an opponent to defeat when it is a message asking to be recognized. The energy an organization puts into structure is usually far greater than the attention it gives to what people actually feel and fear.

Joseph Campbell, in his reflection on psyche and symbol, describes a pattern Carl Jung called the shadow: the part of ourselves we would rather not face withdraws inward and resurfaces later. Campbell extends the idea to society itself: what a community suppresses returns as tension, as conflict, in extreme cases as civil war. The same pattern plays out in organizational change. The grief over a role that no longer exists, the uncertainty about one's place, the fear of becoming redundant: when these find no room in the conversation, they do not disappear. They resurface later, in turnover figures, in absence rates, in the quiet distance of people who show up formally while having already withdrawn inwardly. The nineteenth-century anthropologist Adolf Bastian found that this pattern repeats itself across every culture and era he studied. That makes it no isolated incident calling for an exception. It makes it a standing feature of every change process, one that asks to be recognized.

In many myths, the hero reaches a cave deep underground at the end of the journey, where a monster waits. Campbell shows that this creature turns out to be the hero's own heart: the feeling left behind along the way, suppressed, avoided. The traveler who defeats the monster loses the strength held within it. The traveler who recognizes it carries it back up and returns stronger. For anyone leading organizational change, resistance is that monster. Fighting resistance as an obstacle forfeits the information it carries. Addressing resistance as a signal reveals exactly where the effort still needs attention.

What this asks of us tomorrow:

• By spending as much time in the first weeks of a change effort asking what people stand to lose as communicating the new direction.
• By treating silence in a meeting as an invitation to ask further: "what do you actually think about this?"
• By training leaders to recognize their own blind spot for resistance, using real cases from their own teams.
• By discussing turnover and absence figures during change weekly as signals from beneath the surface.
• By making room for the conversation about identity, "who will I be in this new organization", alongside the conversation about process and planning.
• By involving people who hesitate in shaping the change from the start.
• By having leaders themselves show what it costs to let something go, before asking it of others.

Leaders who find the courage to look beneath the surface of their change effort see a different result: people who stay engaged, less unexpected turnover, and a process that lands faster because it has less resistance to overcome. That courage calls for a way to make what lies beneath speakable, well before the numbers tell the story. NarraTyx offers that structure: a narrative conversation that follows the phases of the hero's journey, turning the lived stories of people and teams into information leaders can act on.

What would become visible in your organization if you asked today what people stand to lose in this change? And which part of the story is still waiting to be heard, before it shows up as resistance?

Source: Jenny Fernandez, "When Senior Leaders Lack People Skills, Transformations Fail," Harvard Business Review, March 2026.