The Space Between Structures

I've been watching the insurance industry with growing fascination and concern. The pace of mergers and acquisitions feels relentless right now, from small independent agencies being absorbed by regional players to the behemoths combining forces. There's something cyclical about it all, this rhythm of expansion and consolidation that feels larger than any individual deal. The high-level analyses talk about market efficiencies and competitive positioning, but they don't capture what I keep thinking about: the individual sitting in a conference room learning their role has been "redundant," or the person who suddenly finds themselves with permission to voice ideas that were previously outside their lane. For every story of elimination, there seems to be another of unexpected opportunity of spaces opening up where none existed before. Maybe that's what drew me to examine what actually happens in the messy middle of these transitions, beyond the press releases and integration timelines. Because somewhere between the old structure ending and the new one taking hold, something more complex than efficiency or redundancy is occurring.

The Opening Moves

Names come down before policies change. Titles shift before processes do. There is always a sequence, and it begins in what disappears. For some, this period, while marked by displacement, also grants access to long-muted ambition, unexpected autonomy, or the chance to reconfigure professional identity outside inherited frames. It follows what gets erased quickly and what refuses to vanish: rituals repeated reflexively, leadership shadows that linger in decision-making, and employees who quietly preserve former norms. These remnants do not block forward motion; they steady it. Within the grief of removal, some discover a rare pause for reorientation, where memory sharpens rather than dulls. There is also the unlooked-for opening that follows the loss of hierarchy: the unexpected space to voice, stretch, or reframe one's role outside of legacy constraints.

Subtracted Symbols

Across industries, the first sign of a merger is often not addition but subtraction. The subtraction of signage. The subtraction of long-held team names. The quiet replacement of fonts and taglines, not yet announced but already enacted. These aesthetic details carry more weight than they appear to. Research has found that visible symbols such as logos and design schemes function as external memory devices, anchoring group identity and providing a sense of continuity through transition periods. Their removal initiates a subtle psychological severing, especially for those who have used these symbols to orient their careers.

What strikes me about these early symbolic losses is how visceral the responses can be. I've heard employees describe feeling physically disoriented walking into newly branded spaces, like entering a familiar room where all the furniture has been rearranged in the dark. Others report an eerie neutrality, as if their company had been emptied of its past overnight. These aren't dramatic reactions, but they stick. They color how people interpret every announcement that follows. The visual language matters more than most executives realize.

Key indicators of symbolic subtraction:

• Logos and team names disappear before formal announcements

• Employees experience disorientation in newly branded spaces

• Individual expression begins to fill the vacuum left by corporate messaging

Symbolic subtraction also opens the possibility for individual imprint. In one mid-sized firm, a long-retired brand phrase was informally repurposed by a team lead to frame a new approach to client experience. It caught on. Within weeks, it had become vernacular across three departments. This was not nostalgia; it was an act of internal authorship. Individuals, once muted by branding, sometimes find that subtraction creates space for expression. Within those open surfaces, some begin to write.

These moments rarely scale, but they teach us something important. What emerges during symbolic absence isn't usually some grand collective truth. It's messier than that: a scattering of individual recognitions. Someone realizes they'd been following rules that were never actually enforced. Someone else discovers their own voice when the corporate script goes quiet. This is where cultural reconstitution really begins. Not in the boardroom, not in the messaging deck, but in how someone changes their tone in a meeting because they finally can.

Strategic Silences

I've seen this pattern play out repeatedly. Organizations believe forward momentum will somehow offset the grief of what's been lost. But unprocessed grief doesn't disappear. It settles like sediment. Isabel Menzies identified how institutions develop defenses against anxiety, often manifesting as strategic silence. The silence itself becomes corrosive. Employees might not actively resist the merger, but they absolutely notice what goes unspoken.

In one firm, the former name remained only in the filing system, a residual artifact no one updated. In another, a leader who had guided the company through three decades was quietly unlisted on the new leadership page. There was no announcement. There was no explanation. He was simply removed. These absences generate what organizational theorist Karl Weick termed "equivocality," a proliferation of interpretations when clarity is withheld. Ambiguity is not neutral; it fills the space with speculation, often tinged with quiet resentment.

More corrosively, the lack of acknowledgment undermines narrative coherence. Employees do not need certainty, but they do need orientation. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues, identity is narrative in form. Without a story that explains what has ended and what has begun, individuals are left in a suspended grammar, unable to conjugate their own place in the present.

Emergent Structures

Yet within this ambiguity, something else can form. Some employees find that the absence of a prescribed identity loosens previously rigid roles. An operations lead begins asking strategic questions once reserved for the C-suite. A client associate starts hosting internal forums, redistributing knowledge laterally.

These shifts are not sanctioned, but they hold. As the known structures recede, informal structures emerge. Complexity theorists call this process "self-organization," where order arises not from design but from interaction.

Here's what I find fascinating: this isn't rebellion. It's reconstruction. When the official structures lag behind reality, people start building what they need from whatever's available. The authority these new forms carry doesn't come from someone's title. It comes from actually working. They're often temporary, sometimes fragile, but they signal something important: agency returning to where it's needed most.

Characteristics of emergent structures:

• Operations staff ask strategic questions previously reserved for executives

• Cross-functional teams form organically around shared problems

• Collaboration replaces hierarchy through necessity, not mandate

• Authority derives from usefulness rather than title

Within such emergent structures, relational dynamics shift as well. Collaboration may replace hierarchy, mentorship becomes horizontal, and recognition circulates informally. Some employees who felt voiceless in legacy systems find resonance here, not because their role has changed, but because the space around it has expanded. These are not revolutions. They are quiet rewirings of who listens to whom. Contemporary research on organizational mergers emphasizes how supportive leadership during these transitions can significantly impact employee outcomes, particularly when leaders actively facilitate the emergence of these new relational patterns.

Stewardship of the Unspoken

The ghosts in the new org chart are not just people but functions, meanings, and timelines. A vacant title on a slide deck echoes longer than a filled one. Those who were mentored by the removed leader often become informal stewards of his ethos, not out of protest but continuity. It is in these acts that the memory of what worked is preserved, not nostalgically but pragmatically. As anthropologist Mary Douglas noted, institutions conserve through pattern recognition, not slogans. People remember what functioned. They carry it forward in tone, in tempo, in how they enter meetings or review a draft.

I've watched this kind of stewardship countless times, and it's almost always invisible work. Nobody rewards it. It rarely gets documented. But it's what actually stabilizes culture when everything else is shifting. Research backs this up: mid-level employees consistently act as culture custodians more than executives do, maintaining behavioral norms through quiet modeling and informal course-correction.

Recent studies have identified this preservation dynamic as a critical factor in post-merger identification, where employees' sense of continuity with organizational legacy becomes a key antecedent of successful integration. It is not a formal role, but it has real influence.

How culture stewardship manifests:

• Mid-level employees preserve effective behavioral patterns through modeling

• Institutional memory survives through tone, tempo, and informal correction

• Continuity emerges organically while official structures lag behind

• Recognition matters for these largely invisible contributions

Subtraction as Space

Even loss can become an aperture. In one acquisition, a former middle manager, once constrained by bureaucratic protocol, began piloting a new model for remote team cohesion. With the previous approval chains blurred, the pilot went unchallenged. It worked. It became policy. Here, the disruption created the conditions for localized invention. Behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan has written about "slack" in systems as the space where cognitive and operational innovation becomes possible. The merger did not create the idea, but it made room for it to move.

These moments of unguarded initiative can seed new forms of collaborative thinking. As formal constraints loosen, spontaneous cross-functional teams begin to coalesce around shared need rather than imposed structure. Colleagues who had never exchanged more than email begin co-developing internal resources, policy mockups, or experimental service flows. Innovation here is not an assigned project, but a distributed instinct. The temporary ambiguity of ownership invites overlapping efforts, which in turn surface unplanned efficiencies. Even when the structure reasserts itself, the precedent remains.

This kind of space doesn't show up on any balance sheet. It lives in the weird moments between approval delays and procedural confusion. But if you know how to listen, it sounds like an opportunity. And here's the thing: the people best positioned to act usually aren't the ones with formal authority. They're the ones willing to risk a little chaos for the chance to experiment.

Recalibration Without Departure

Still, not all shifts are chosen. Many occur under duress. A legacy team may find its charter dissolved, and their roles collapsed into broader functions. In such moments, the temptation is to over-perform or to invisibilize entirely. Both are defensive postures. But a third response, observed in longitudinal studies of professional identity transformation, is rearticulation. Employees begin redefining their own value in terms not given by the institution. They recalibrate. They detach without departure.

This is not resignation. It is interior realignment. The work does not change, but the language around it does. Professionals begin to measure themselves not by output alone, but by rhythm, by integrity of method, by alignment with their own cadence. Some discover that in the absence of traditional scaffolding, a deeper, more durable ethic of work begins to form.

The Edge of Invention

In these internal recalibrations lies the quiet hope of transformation. Not everyone needs to become someone new, but some do begin to recognize who they were beneath the job title, who they might yet become through this unstructured pause. Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that the capacity to begin something new, "natality," is the essence of human freedom. It is not something systems often encourage.

But systems disrupted may no longer block it.

A merger is an event, but absorption is a state. That state has its own weather, its own shadows, its own potential. It begins with removal, but not all removal is reduction. Sometimes it is subtraction that clears the signal.

For those that need some light reading...

• Dutton, Jane E., and Janet M. Dukerich. "Keeping an eye on the mirror: Image and identity in organizational adaptation." Academy of Management Journal 34, no. 3 (1991): 517-554.

• Pratt, Michael G., and Blake E. Ashforth. "Fostering meaningfulness in working and at work." In Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline, edited by Kim S. Cameron, Jane E. Dutton, and Robert E. Quinn, 309-327. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003.

• Menzies, Isabel E. P. "A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety: A report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital." Human Relations 13, no. 2 (1960): 95-121.

• Weick, Karl E. Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995.

• MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

• Holland, John H. Emergence: From Chaos to Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

• Douglas, Mary. How Institutions Think. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

• Van Maanen, John. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

• Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. New York: Times Books, 2013.

• Ibarra, Herminia. Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2003.

• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

• Yadav, Mohini, and Mahima Thakur. "Unraveling the Drivers of Post-Merger Identification in Facilitating Organizational Changes during M&As." Journal of Change Management (2024): 1-24.

• Giessner, Steffen R., Jeremy Dawson, Kate E. Horton, and Michael West. "The impact of supportive leadership on employee outcomes during organizational mergers: An organizational-level field study." Journal of Applied Psychology 108, no. 4 (2023): 686-697.