This is the book I’ve recommended most to my colleagues, clients and friends over the last few weeks. Dear readers of this blog, please do read it, it’s a life-changing book.

It’s a bit like what happened when I read “Subtract” by Leydie Klotz (and this summer I’m planning to read “In a Good Place”, her latest release), it’s one of those books that marked a ‘before and after’ for me, that made me think, and that resonated so deeply with my professional practice that I’ve read and reread passages until I’ve almost learnt them by heart. Death, as I imagine is the case for everyone, terrifies me. And I realise, in my work as a consultant and more generally, that it terrifies my clients too. We become attached to projects and people; we aren’t really conditioned to let things die peacefully.

Abdel Aouacheria, a CNRS researcher in evolutionary biology, discusses apoptosis in his book, a fascinating word that brought back vague memories of biology lessons.

It refers to the mechanism by which some of our cells die, not by accident or through wear and tear, but because they are programmed to do so, at the right time and in the right place. It is apoptosis that shapes our hands by separating the fingers in the embryo, that closes the neural tube to form the spinal cord, and that renews our tissues every day without us even realising it. Without this very precise and organised form of cell death, we would be born deformed and our bodies would be overrun with cells that refuse to die. Could life as we know it exist without apoptosis?

Throughout the book (and I devoured it!), I couldn’t help but draw parallels with my work (and my life too). In fact, when apoptosis goes haywire, cells stop dying when they should, but and here’s the surprise, this doesn’t lead to eternal life! Instead, what you get is cancer. Cells that cling on, that proliferate without producing anything useful, and that ultimately suffocate the entire organism in the very name of their own survival.

I thought of many teams, management committees, and organisations I’ve known, which spend a great deal of time talking about ‘transformation’ ’ and ‘change’ whilst at the same time clinging to what no longer works: obsolete processes (or even those recently adopted but which, clearly, are not going to work (and that is the saddest part), models of ‘enacted’ leadership (rather than merely ‘declared’ leadership, for in declarations it is easy to promote ‘kind’ leadership, ‘authentic’, ‘service-oriented’) which, in reality, breed toxicity and unnecessary exhaustion amongst teams, rituals stripped of meaning… In a natural system, in biology, we would call this a dysfunction.

What this book reminded me of is that regeneration is not at all the opposite of death, but rather its product. We do not regenerate our bodies, teams, organisations or the world by accumulating, expanding or artificially and indefinitely propping up what already exists. Regeneration requires death, at the right time and in the right way; it requires that what has already fulfilled its purpose be allowed to go, to die as Otto Scharmer would say in TheoryU.

This is precisely one of the principles on which we based our workshop and our ReSet game: the intention is to give teams the means to identify what must be allowed to die, so that something else can genuinely be born, so that what once was and no longer fullfils its purpose can decompose, just as happens in biology with apoptosis. The idea is that, rather than letting this death happen haphazardly, in the form of a crisis, burnout or an abrupt departure, we should be able to accompany the process and celebrate what has contributed to life but is no longer vital.

Aouacheria writes that death, in biology, is not the negation of life but one of its conditions of possibility.

My professional practice proves to me, day in, day out, that this is also true for our organisations, and that the real question to ask when thinking, for example, about innovation, is perhaps not “what do we need to build” ‘what do we need to add, create or invent to perform better’, but first and foremost ‘what do we finally need to let die, properly, so that the rest can fully feel life springing forth and so that new life is not stifled by what no longer serves a purpose’.