Organisational TraumaWhat Organisations Remember, and Who Carries It

On 26 February 1972, a dam built from coal waste gave way above Buffalo Creek in West Virginia. The water it had been holding back went down the hollow and through the mining towns below, and by the end of the day 125 people were dead and thousands were homeless. The dams belonged to the Pittston Company.

The survivors sued, and their lawyers asked the sociologist Kai Erikson to help them explain to a court what had been done to them. Erikson spent time in the hollow and found an injury the law had no ready word for. People had lost relatives and houses, and many were suffering in the ways individual survivors of disaster suffer. They had also lost something they had held in common: the web of neighbours and obligations and habits that had made a string of towns into a community. The main thrust of his testimony, he wrote, was that the disaster had damaged the tissues of communal life as well as the bodies and minds of the people who lived through it. He called this collective trauma, and later defined it as a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together.

The idea of organisational trauma descends from that work, and its origin is worth holding on to. Collective trauma entered the vocabulary as a claim made by an injured community against the organisation that had injured it. Inside organisations today, the same vocabulary often runs in the opposite direction.

What Organisational Trauma Means, and What the Term Can Hide

In 2002 Pat Vivian and Shana Hormann published an article in the OD Practitioner, Trauma and Healing in Organizations, arguing that organisations themselves could be traumatised and that the traumatisation came to shape their culture. Some organisations suffered it directly, in a single event: their example was a women’s health clinic that was bombed. Others developed it over time, through a painful founding history or years of exposure to the suffering of the people they served. Once it had taken hold, the organisation’s own internal dynamics tended to keep it in place.

Their work came out of human services, where the injury usually arrived from outside. The term has since travelled a long way. Organisational trauma is now used for redundancy rounds and mergers, for the abrupt departure of a leader, for years of restructuring and for sustained bad management. It appears in consulting proposals and wellbeing strategies. In many organisations it has become a way of describing what change feels like from the receiving end.

That migration belongs to a wider pattern. In 2016 the psychologist Nick Haslam described what he called concept creep, the expansion of psychology’s concepts of harm, trauma among them, outwards to new kinds of experience and downwards to milder ones. When post-traumatic stress disorder entered the diagnostic manual in 1980, a qualifying event had to lie outside the range of usual human experience, something that would distress almost anyone. Later definitions loosened that, until some described trauma as any event a person experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening.

The usual argument about concept creep is whether the wider use honours suffering or trivialises it, and in organisations both happen. Calling a restructure traumatic can force an organisation to take seriously what it would otherwise file under adjustment. It can also put a reorganisation in the same category as a bombing. The more revealing question is who gains from each use of the word, and the answer is less obvious than it looks.

Staff gain a language that insists the harm was real. Leaders can gain something too, because trauma is the vocabulary of disaster, and disasters happen to people. A flood has no author. When a redundancy programme is described as a traumatic period the organisation went through, the decision behind it starts to resemble weather. The grammar of most internal communication already leans this way. Roles were affected. The business went through a difficult year. Changes were made. The passive voice and the language of trauma do the same job from different directions: each leaves the event standing and takes away the person who chose it.

Then the vocabulary turns. Trauma is an injury, and injuries call for healing, which is something the injured must do. At Buffalo Creek, naming the trauma was a way of establishing what a company owed. Inside an organisation, naming it can become a way of establishing what the employees now need to work on.

How Organisational Trauma Becomes Culture

David Noer’s 1993 book Healing the Wounds described what he called layoff survivor sickness. The people who lost their jobs felt betrayal, resentment, insecurity and depression. What Noer noticed was that the people who kept their jobs felt the same, and so did the managers who had carried out the cuts. The organisation had not removed its pain along with the people it let go. It had distributed it among those who remained.

The pain does not stay as feeling. It settles into behaviour. People who have watched colleagues leave in a single afternoon stop volunteering for visible work and start keeping private records of what they have contributed. They learn not to be the name attached to a project that might fail, and they read every all-staff email for what it leaves out. Each habit is a reasonable response to what happened. Taken together, they amount to a new way of working.

Edgar Schein defined culture as the assumptions a group develops in coping with its problems, which work well enough to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel. A traumatic event is a problem, and the habits people form in response are solutions. As Schein’s Levels of Culture explores, solutions that work harden into assumptions, and assumptions get passed on. Keep your head down. Never believe a restructure described as the last one.

The newcomer learns these assumptions without learning where they came from. They arrive after the event and pick up the flinch without the memory. They notice that nobody challenges a certain director, that proposals pass through more sign-offs than the work seems to need, that one year is only ever referred to obliquely. The reasons are out of reach, because the people who could explain them have left or have stopped talking about it. An organisation can remember through its behaviour long after everyone who remembers has gone, and this is one of the stranger forms of unknowing in working life: a group faithfully carrying out its response to an injury that none of its current members saw.

Isabel Menzies, working with the Tavistock Institute, studied the nursing service of a general hospital and published her findings in Human Relations in 1960. The nurses faced daily anxiety about illness, pain and death, and the hospital had developed ways of organising the work that kept that anxiety at a distance: constant rotation of duties and patients, for instance, which stopped close attachments from forming. Menzies called these social defences against anxiety. They were built into the structure of the work, and they protected the nurses at the cost of the care many of them had come to give. A good number of the students who had come to nurse left.

Organisations that have been through a traumatic event build defences of the same kind. The approval chain that grew up after a scandal, and the policy written in response to one incident that now governs thousands of ordinary cases, both belong to this family. Someone who knows the history can read a policy manual as a record of injuries. Everyone else reads it as bureaucracy, and complains about it, and is told it exists for good reasons nobody can quite reconstruct.

This is where the contradiction Menzies identified becomes an organisational one. The defences that protect people from a past injury also prevent the things the organisation later asks of them. The same leadership team that inherits the sign-offs and the caution will launch an innovation strategy, ask people to take risks and speak up and fail fast, and wonder why nothing moves. The request goes to staff whose procedures and habits were shaped by what happened the last time someone stuck their neck out. As Why Change Doesn’t Fail Because People Resist It argues, what looks like resistance is often an accurate reading of history.

The cycle can close on itself. A new leader arrives after the injury and meets its aftermath without its story. What they see is low engagement, excessive caution, a slow and defensive culture, and they diagnose it the way leaders are trained to, as a performance problem in need of a change programme. The remedy they reach for is often another restructure, designed to shake things up. For the staff who remember the last one, it lands as a repetition. Their caution was the residue of a past decision, and the response to that caution is a fresh decision of the same kind, which deepens the caution it was meant to cure. Nobody involved needs to intend any of this. The leader simply does not know what happened, and the organisation has arranged things so that nobody tells them in a form they can hear.

Vivian and Hormann’s second kind of trauma, the kind that accumulates, may matter most for ordinary organisations. A single catastrophe has a before and an after. Continuous restructuring has neither. When one reorganisation follows another, each announced as the change that will settle things, there is never a point at which the injury is over and recovery can begin. William Bridges argued that every transition starts with an ending that has to be acknowledged before anything new can begin, and as William Bridges’ Transition Model notes, organisations tend to announce the new beginning while people are still living through the ending. Under permanent change, the ending never finishes. What accumulates is less a wound than a climate, and people adapt to it the way people adapt to any climate, by changing what they expect.

Who Carries Organisational Trauma, and Who Names It

Peter Frost, a management professor at the University of British Columbia, came to the subject of workplace pain after being diagnosed with an aggressive melanoma. In Toxic Emotions at Work, published in 2003, he described what he called toxin handlers: the managers and staff who step into painful situations and help heal the people who are hurting. Their work is mostly invisible to the organisation, and it carries considerable risk. Handlers can become so absorbed in helping others that they miss the toll on their own health.

Toxin handlers are seldom the people who made the decisions. They tend to be the team leader who delivers the redundancy news and then stays to talk afterwards, or the HR adviser who hears the same grief from person after person through a long week, or the colleague everyone seeks out. Organisational trauma is carried, and it is carried unevenly. The executive who designed the restructure moves on to the next strategy. The people several levels down absorb its aftermath for years.

The middle manager sits in the most awkward place of all. Noer found that the managers who carried out the cuts shared the survivors’ sickness, and that finding deserves more attention than it gets. The manager who delivered the news was both the instrument of the injury and one of its casualties, and the organisation has no category for that. Their own distress has nowhere official to go. To the people they let go they represent the organisation, to those above them they are expected to be a channel for its decisions, and to the people who stayed they are a reminder of the afternoon it happened.

This is a question of power. The authority to cause an organisational injury and the obligation to tend it are lodged in different places, and the people with the first usually have the power to name the event as well. What staff remember as the worst year of their working lives can appear in board papers as a necessary transformation and in the annual report as a milestone. Both accounts persist. The official one is in the documents. The unofficial one is in the calendar people actually use, which divides time into before the merger and after the restructure, and it is through that calendar that much of the organisation’s meaning is made.

The survivors face a problem of belonging. Staying can feel like a betrayal of the colleagues who were made to leave. Grieving openly can feel like disloyalty to the organisation that kept you. The organisation, for its part, is usually asking everyone to move on, and as Toxic Positivity at Work traces, the redundancy round is often followed within days by a message about an exciting new chapter. To belong after an injury is to accept the official account in public while keeping the unofficial one among the people who were there.

The trauma-informed workplace has emerged as one response. At its most serious it asks organisations to understand how past harm shapes present behaviour, and to stop inflicting more of it. More often it arrives as a training module and the number for an employee assistance programme. That second version fits the reversed vocabulary exactly: the injured are offered support to recover, while the decisions and structures that injured them continue unchanged. As The Authenticity Trap argues, organisations can open new wounds through the very programmes designed to care for people.

Reading Organisational Trauma Through The Fractured Lens

The survivors at Buffalo Creek had a company to sue. Their injury had a clear source, and the source was outside the community. Inside an organisation the arrangement is tangled. The people who caused the injury and the people offering the healing are frequently the same, and the injured are being asked to recover in the care of the institution that hurt them, while depending on it for their income and much of their sense of who they are. It is hard to heal there, and hard to leave.

That tangle is why organisational trauma resists the neat treatment that the language of healing promises. Whether an event counts as trauma depends on who is describing it, and the description assigns responsibility. Whether recovery has happened depends on who is asked. The executive who sees a settled organisation and the long-serving employee who sees a frightened one may be looking at the same people on the same day.

There is also a question that is almost never asked. When does an organisation stop being traumatised? Perhaps when the last people who remember have left, and the habits they formed have become simply how things are done here. From outside, healing and forgetting look identical. The culture is calm, the event has dropped out of conversation, and the staff survey shows nothing unusual. Somewhere in the procedures and the sign-offs and the things people have learned not to say, the organisation is still flinching from a blow that nobody now in the building could name.