You know that moment when you realize something that used to work… doesn’t anymore? Your organization has always been able to attract great people, and suddenly recruiting feels harder. Employees who once seemed engaged have become quieter. Customers are asking for things you never had to think about before. AI has entered the conversation, and everyone has an opinion about what it will mean, while no one really knows exactly how it will change the way we work.
Sometimes there isn’t one dramatic event you can point to. Things simply start to feel different. The conversations change. The energy shifts. Expectations evolve. What used to feel predictable becomes uncertain, and the approaches you once relied on no longer produce the same results.
As leaders, our instinct is often to fix it. We want a plan, we want answers, and we want to know what we need to do to get everyone moving forward again. But sometimes what we are experiencing is bigger than a problem to solve. Sometimes, we are experiencing a shatter—the moment when the old way can no longer carry us into what comes next.
The Shatter
A shatter can happen suddenly through a merger, a new CEO, a major restructuring, the loss of an important customer, an economic downturn, a new competitor, or a technology that changes the way an entire industry operates. These are the disruptions we recognize because there is usually a clear before and after. Something happened, and we know the organization has changed because of it.
But not every shatter arrives with an announcement. Sometimes it happens one small crack at a time. Trust begins to erode, your strongest employees stop contributing ideas, people are exhausted but reluctant to say it, customers quietly begin looking elsewhere, or leaders become increasingly removed from what employees are actually experiencing. On paper, everything may still look fine—until one day it isn’t.
That is one of the challenges of disruption. We tend to notice the crash, but we are much less likely to notice the cracks that came before it. By the time the shatter becomes impossible to ignore, the conditions that created it may have been developing for months or even years.
Every Organization Has a Vase
If you have heard me speak or read Breaking Vases, you know that the vase has been part of my story for a long time. Growing up, it came to represent the expectations and limitations surrounding me: who I was supposed to be, how I was supposed to behave, and what my life was supposed to look like. There was already a shape waiting for me, and my job was to fit inside it. Eventually, I had to find the courage to break that vase and begin creating a life beyond the expectations that had defined me.
Years later, after working with leaders and organizations around the world, I began to see the same pattern in a completely different context. Organizations have vases too. Their vases are built from assumptions, habits, systems, hierarchies, traditions, and unwritten rules that define how things are supposed to work.
You can often hear the organizational vase in everyday conversations: “This is how we’ve always done it.” “That will never work here.” “Leadership will never go for that.” Or my personal favorite, “Let’s wait until things settle down.”Whenever I hear that one, I find myself wondering when exactly we expect that to happen. There will always be another change coming, another challenge to navigate, or another expectation that requires us to think differently.
Many of these structures and ways of working may have served the organization extremely well. In fact, that is often why we hold onto them. They helped create the success we have today. But something can serve us for years and still reach a point when it no longer serves where we are going. That is where leaders can get stuck: we become so loyal to what worked that we stop questioning whether it still works.
The Shatter Has a Way of Exposing Things
Here is what I have learned about disruption: it has a way of bringing things to the surface. A major change may reveal that employees don’t trust leadership nearly as much as leadership thought they did. A restructuring may expose communication problems that have existed for years. Increased turnover may force us to acknowledge that people were disengaged long before they started leaving. A new competitor may reveal that we stopped listening closely enough to our customers because we became comfortable with our own success.
Those problems did not necessarily begin with the disruption. The disruption simply made them harder to ignore. The cracks that were easier to overlook when business was predictable suddenly become visible when the organization is under pressure.
That is why I believe there can be tremendous value in the shatter, even when we would never have chosen it. The shatter gives us information. It helps us see what is working, what is weakening, what is strong enough to carry forward, and what we may have outgrown. It forces us to question assumptions that may have gone unchallenged for years. Disruption may be uncomfortable, but if we are willing to pay attention, it can also be incredibly revealing.
Why We Want to Put the Vase Back Together
When something shatters, our instinct is often to pick up the pieces and try to put them back where they were. We want things to feel normal again. We want the uncertainty to end, the team to settle down, the market to stabilize, the change initiative to finish, and everyone to get back to work. There is comfort in the familiar, especially when everything around us feels uncertain.
But I have learned something from breaking vases: the goal is not always to put the same vase back together. Sometimes the disruption is showing us that we have outgrown the shape we were trying so hard to preserve.
The world that created our old ways of working has changed. Our employees have changed. Our customers have changed. Technology has changed. Expectations have changed. And hopefully, we have changed too. Trying to recreate exactly what existed before may feel safe, but it can also keep us anchored to a reality that no longer exists.
This is why one of the most important questions leaders can ask after disruption is not simply how we get back to where we were, but what this moment is asking us to become. That question requires us to look beyond recovery and begin thinking about possibility. It shifts our attention from restoring the past to considering what deserves to come with us into the future.
Don’t Rush to Pick Up the Pieces
I have broken enough vases—literally and figuratively—to know how tempting it is to immediately start rebuilding. Leaders are rewarded for action. We solve problems, make decisions, create plans, and move things forward. When something goes wrong, people look to us and ask what we are going to do, and we feel pressure to have an answer.
Yet the moments immediately following disruption may be exactly when we need to resist the urge to move too quickly. Before we decide what comes next, we need to understand what just happened. We need to examine what the shatter revealed about our organization, which assumptions we are still carrying, what deserves to come with us, what we have outgrown, and what possibilities we can now see that were hidden when the vase was still intact.
This is where resilience begins. Resilience allows us to stand in uncertainty long enough to learn from it. It gives us the capacity to recover, adapt, and ultimately reinvent rather than automatically recreating what existed before. Every leader and every organization will experience a shatter at some point. We cannot always control when it comes or what causes it, but we have tremendous influence over what happens afterward.
The shards give us information about what held, what cracked, and what we may have been unable—or unwilling—to see before. If we rush to sweep them away or immediately glue everything back together, we risk missing what the disruption was trying to show us.
That is why there is an important space between the shatter and whatever comes next: the pause. It is the space where we make sense of what happened, listen more closely, challenge old assumptions, decide what deserves to move forward with us, and begin to see possibilities that may not have been visible before.
What we do in that pause matters. It can determine whether we simply recover from disruption or use what it revealed to begin the much more meaningful work of reinvention.
Dima Ghawi is the founder of Rise Beyond™, a global leadership development company that helps individuals and organizations build resilient, future-ready leaders. Through transformational keynote speeches, leadership development programs, executive coaching, and her global leadership community, Dima has empowered thousands of professionals around the world to expand their leadership potential, navigate change with confidence, and turn challenges into opportunities for growth.
Learn more at DimaGhawi.com, ToolKit.RiseBeyond.pro, and BreakingVases.com.
