Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Organizational Kintsugi, 2024 vs. 2025

As 2024 nears to a close, and 2025 is about to commence, we, as business leaders, should look back on our experiences in the last year. We should look at what was broken, what failed, what thrived, what worked, what succeeded.

We should contemplate what, and whom, as leaders, we fixed and restored.

We should be thankful for the learning opportunities we gained, the learning and teachings we passed along to others.

We should realize that often, we want more for people than they want for themselves.

But that's ok.

We must realize that perfection often lies in the imperfect.

"The wound is where the light enters you." -Rumi

Pain brings strength, change brings growth, challenges bring opportunities.

It has been said, "no pain, no gain."

When we experience these dynamics - as leaders - we have the responsibility to share what we've learned with the people we teach and mentor.

In Japanese culture, broken pottery is repaired with the use of golden or silvered metals and resins, illustrating and celebrating the imperfections and showing the "scars" as the now strongest areas of the item.

This is called Kintsugi.

金継ぎ

Organizations also should celebrate their learning moments and the moments where there have been voids filled, imperfections strengthened, and improvements made.

They can, and should, each day, assimilate into their culture of wabi-sabi, an embrace of the fleeting, transient, transitional nature of things, and often where the beauty lies and the gains are made.

The next generation of leaders are not timid; they ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Executives in the turnaround and transformation trade are in the business of seeing cracks and imperfections, and remedying those imperfections.

If done well, the organization, or, vessel is strengthened, and the people in the organization are made better. A formerly leaky, broken bowl, can hold the fluidity of volume, of water, of nourishment. The people who participate in the team effort to transform an organization should also be celebrated, and celebrate their collective effort in making the vessel whole again, so that it may hold volume, water, substance - and no longer leak.

Kintsugi honors change, turmoil, victory, consequence, evolution, growth.

In the same way organizational culture does, in the most successful of learning organizations.

"The world breaks everyone and some become stronger at the broken places." - Ernest Hemingway

If a leader is worth his or her salt, he or or she has not only repaired the vessel, he or she has made the people in the organization better and stronger.

The Japanese word for healing is te-ate, which is literally translated “to apply hands.”

The responsibility of capable leadership means you have a fiduciary responsibility to the organization and its people, its stakeholders, its symbiosis, all of which lie in your hands. You are responsible to make them all better, to leave things better than you found them, to share your scars and to fill the cracks of your organization and the cracks within your people - not with the strength of resin, per se - but the strength of resolve.

Leadership is impassioned, resolute and equal parts knowledge, conviction, integrity - with a fierce warrior spirit - unafraid of cracks in the armor and wounds to the body and heart and mind.

Leaders heal not just a broken organization, they heal imperfect and incomplete managers so that they may lead. The accept the de facto wabi-sabi of incomplete information.

And a vessel which is still broken should never be put in incapable hands.

there is no growth without pain

there is no opportunity without challenge

there is no strength without repair

there is no joy without work

there is no intelligence without stupidity

there is no industriousness without apathy

there is no improvement without failure

there is no preparedness without teaching

there is no greatness without mentoring

there is no beauty without scars

痛みのない成長はない

挑戦なくして機会はない

修理しなければ強度はありません

仕事がなければ喜びはない

愚かさのない知性はない

無関心のない勤勉はない

失敗なくして改善なし

教えなければ備えはない

指導なくして偉大さはない

傷のない美しさはない

Kintsugi, by Paul Fioravanti

Copyright, 2023, 2024, 2025, Paul Fioravanti, MBA, MPA, CTP and/or Qorval Partners, LLC. All rights reserved. www.qorval.com