Workplace Jiujitsu #6: The Flexibility Of The Machine

Organizations don’t break as easily as we think they will.

They creak. They lurch. They run hot. They struggle. But they don’t shatter.

They absorb chaos like it’s part of the design.

Suppose that

A critical team leaves. A system goes sideways. A senior quits quietly. The hallway talk turns into hallway silence.

And yet

The calendar invites go out. The product demo happens. The metrics slide into the deck. The Slack channels keep moving.

It’s easy to think everything’s falling apart when you're in it. But from the outside? It just looks like Tuesday.

Organizations are like bone.

• They bruise.
• They swell.
• They ache.

But they also regrow.

Sometimes unevenly. Sometimes badly. But they do regrow.

When I left my last team, I briefly thought the machine would stall.

I had been holding key processes together, mentoring junior engineers, documenting the blind spots.

But when I stepped back, the work continued. The stories changed. The shape adapted. And I realized something:

My absence wasn’t a failure. It was a handoff. It was space being made for something new.

That’s the strange beauty of the workplace:

You can pour yourself into a role (fully, deeply, even painfully) and still be replaced by Monday. And somehow, that’s not tragic. It’s proof of resilience.

Here’s the Workplace Jiujitsu move:

Stop confusing your value with your irreplaceability. The goal was never to be unreplaceable. The goal was to build well enough that replacement is possible.

That’s how you win quietly.

So if you’re leaving, or on the edge of burnout, or watching a project stumble forward without you…

Take a breath.

You're not watching a collapse You're watching a reconfiguration.

The work lives on. The people grow. The machine bends, but it doesn’t snap. And sometimes, that’s the most hopeful thing of all.

If you’ve ever left something you cared about and watched it survive, how did it feel?

I’m curious. You don’t have to comment. Just sit with it, like I did.