Why the ending is important

A friend I turn to for wisdom about human foibles is a family psychologist in San Francisco. We got into a conversation about organizational change many years ago, and I still remember one of the essential insights about change and transition: We are good at starting things but bad at ending them. “We don’t know how to say goodbye”, he put it.

One client TJALeadership worked with complained that each new project that got started was added onto all the others that never truly ended. “It’s like we’re on a relay team and each of us hands off a baton but then keeps running alongside until we’re just a big pack running ourselves ragged”.

This is a truth that seems to undermine a lot of transitions, in business or personal relationships. Because without a good ending, and a good hand off, you can’t have a good beginning.

So if you want to get good at leading change, get good at ending things well.

Here’s a couple of reasons why it’s hard to end things, from a social science perspective:

1 | Loss aversion

We have a strong “loss aversion” bias, meaning we value what we currently have much more than what we might have in the future. Think “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” as the paradigm. It’s understandable, since the future is unpredictable. But it makes it challenging to end something meaningful, whether it’s disbanding a working group, or ending a relationship, even when it’s evident that things are not working.

One of the great writers on transitions, William Bridges, points out that even when the current status quo is awful — a toxic relationship, a bad boss — it’s awful in a familiar way. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” might be the paradigm. But that’s a way of thinking that holds us captive.

2 | Novelty bias

The second reason it’s hard to end things is that it’s more enticing to start something new. As anyone starting up a project or a job in an organization will know, the upfront part is exciting, filled with promise. But wrapping up an old project or a long career… Well, that’s a bit tedious or sad by comparison.

The problem of unfinished business

The problem with ignoring endings is that we limit our beginnings.

Anything left unfinished rattles around as an incomplete loop. The same phenomenon that animates David Allen’s great work in Getting Things Done — the notion of incomplete cycles that take up your mind space — is the same psychological phenomenon that animates organizational transitions and relationship transitions. If there is something unresolved about the past, you will bring it with you like so much baggage into the present and it clutters your mind.

You will also miss the opportunity to learn from change, which is critical to leading through it. To paraphrase John Dewey, we don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.

Honoring the past

There’s another frequently overlooked problem with ignored endings, which a client and I were talking about over coffee last week. Her boss had joined her organization like a whirling dervish of change, asserting how things were going to be different and better. In the process, intentionally or not, she categorized what people had done before as out of date and essentially wrong. The result? Growing resistance to her vision. The more she celebrated the new and criticized the past, the more she essentially attacked people’s self-worth. She was making a classic mistake in change, which is to fail to honor the good about the past and people’s attachment to it. As a leader, you have to focus on ending that attachment not by insulting the past, but by dignifying it.

Okay, all well and good, but this is always a column where leaders should get practical advice, so how the hell do you practice good endings? I’ve noticed a real paucity of good advice about this out there. So, in honor of wrapping up this year, and encouraging everyone to end things well, here are three principles for managing endings that I have found super helpful. These are oriented towards leaders of teams in moments of change. But let’s face it, they apply to personal lives, too — everything is connected.

1 | Live and learn

You can tackle the loss aversion bias by activating the best hack we have for being positive in the face of fear: get curious. Each ending has a story behind it, a journey that you and a team can learn from. Identify that learning and you can resolve the story even if it felt incomplete.

Try this:

At the close of every big meeting (or event, or project) hold a debrief with your team and ask: What went well? What didn’t go well? How can we do better next time?

2 | Celebrate what is gone

One of my favorite rituals from Marie Kondo is the practice of saying goodbye to an item by thanking it for its use over the years, even if it’s just a pair of socks! This notion of celebrating the past is in a lot of rituals at work, but I think it’s pretty unevenly practiced because we’re often in too much of a rush. In the context of change, it’s really important to be grateful for what was, and say goodbye to old practices.

Try this:

In principle, focus on naming and labeling what’s going away and then stating what you’re grateful for. Simple, effective.

3 | Create a wrap-up ritual

Okay this is more of a container for the other two principles. But it’s worth mentioning in its own right because what a ritual does is it creates a sense of stability and familiarity. You can give yourself over to a ritual. Think of those moments in life when it is a ritual that brings us through — whether a funeral, a marriage, a passage into adulthood. The rhythm of the ritual, the sense of socially approved steps, creates a sense of closure that is vital.

Try this:

Agree on a closing ritual for whatever you’re ending. In a reorganization, that could be how to wind down a group. In a team, that could be how to end a work-stream. And so on. The ritual itself is less important than having those affected actually create and execute it.

And, without further ado, that’s a wrap. ;)

Lead bravely,