Opinion | Letting go, composting or pushing through? On the survival instinct, focus and choices when an ending is lurking around the corner.

This week, civil society received the answer to the question that had been hanging in the air for months: how much, and from whom. By 2027, the Flemish government will cut almost 2 billion euros, rising to more than 3 billion in 2029, 1.2 billion of that from subsidies and government operations. Minister Gennez is cutting 47 million euros in culture alone, including 6.1 million from socio-cultural adult work. Many organizations that have stood firm for generations now have to make do with less.

The reactions were strong, and rightly so. “Incomprehensible, short-sighted, a disgrace.” That resistance must be there, and it must be carried out. Resistance against a framing that presents cuts to a vital sector as trimming its own fat, while in reality it costs jobs in organizations that never had any fat.

But alongside that struggle, and that resistance, another question arises within every affected organization. One that no one in parliament will answer for you and that we do not dare ask ourselves: what do we do, here and now, with the budget that remains? It is best to ask yourself that question now, while you can still make a choice. Otherwise the money will run out and you will be forced to choose.

Are we going to fight and stand on the barricades to keep everything afloat? For which things is the context still fertile? Can we reconsider the form? Is this organization still the right party to realize the mission? And is it better to spread the knowledge and expertise into the world, and thus allow the mission to live on? Has the mission perhaps been achieved? An ending has many different faces, and it is worth examining them. 

In short, let go, compost, or push through? 

Very often I see leaders pushing through out of a survival instinct. Pulling out all the stops to restructure, again and again, and then still barely surviving. But sometimes we are allowed to let go sooner. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an argument for simply following government decisions slavishly. Resistance to unjust decisions is a matter in its own right. But what I do want to warn against is that we hold on for too long and in doing so lose control over what is still possible. 

We do this for a good reason, and that is not only the mission. A sense of responsibility, care for colleagues, established relationships, the extent to which we have already invested in the past, … also play a role. And so we hold on, even when, rationally speaking, a new direction could yield more.  

Our brain is wired to do this. It strives for homeostasis. That means that every deviation, even one that may be good in the long term, is registered as a threat. Moreover, under pressure the brain cannot think well about new paths and will then mainly cling to what is familiar. That explains why a leader who knows that something no longer works still holds on. Because their own nervous system registers stopping as a threat.

So this is not weak leadership; it is the default setting of every human brain. That is why it is not a matter of trying harder to rise above it, but of designing the decision-making process in such a way that it counters those tendencies.

Letting go sooner is not failure

We live in a culture that equates "continuing to exist" with success, and stopping with failure. But nature knows no eternal growth. In an old forest, a tree dies here, a branch there: enough to let light penetrate to the forest floor, never so much at the same time that the forest itself collapses. Ecologists call that gap dynamics: targeted, small-scale decline that actually keeps the whole resilient. That is also what letting go in an organization should be. Not shutting down the entire operation because one function has had its day. Letting one tree fall, so that the rest of the forest gets light. A timely ending is sometimes one of the most valuable decisions you can make. That is how you create space for new life.

The energy that is now spent keeping an operation upright that may well have had its day is freed up for something that can still work. Reserves that you are now using up to keep a structure standing for another year can go to something that still has a future. People who leave an organization that had the conversation honestly and in time take that experience and those skills with them into the rest of the sector, instead of leaving worn down and distrustful. And a board, a team, a network of partners that saw an ending coming and went through it together, trusts the next leader more quickly than a team that saw how long people stayed silent. 

Letting go sooner therefore does more than create space. It creates energy, money that does more elsewhere, people who can move forward with their knowledge, and trust that makes the next step easier.

Five ways to do it differently

• Move at the speed of trust: change that moves faster than the trust of the people who have to carry it breaks things down instead of building them up. Therefore, communicate about the process itself, not only about the decision. Say out loud that you are exploring the question before you have the answer. Predictability about how a decision is made restores trust in a damaged system.
   
• Start small: patterns at the micro level repeat themselves at the macro level. You do not have to immediately dismantle the entire operation to know whether letting go is the right move. Stop a program line, close a location, drop a meeting and see what happens to the energy in the team. What you learn at that scale about resistance, relief or a sense of loss tells you more than a grand strategy lasting months.
   
• Let go of roles: "does this person still fit?" becomes "does this role still exist in the new reality?" That shifts a conversation from assessment to organizational necessity. It is more bearable for those who leave, fairer for those who stay, and it prevents a selection from feeling like a verdict on someone's worth. Draw it out literally as well: who is carrying what now, where is there a gap, where is there overload? Those who see that laid out together on the table find new agreements more quickly.
   
• Give the loss a place: those who dismantle an operation remove something people have felt connected to, even if it is the right choice. That grieving will come, whether you make room for it or not. And what is not spoken goes underground and returns as flatness or cynicism. Teams usually move back and forth between acknowledging what is gone and looking for new footing. Allow both. One small ritual is enough. Organize a walk, a word of thanks, a conversation in which the team says: this is gone, this remains, this is what we will continue with.
   
• Separate the roles: what systems theory calls triangulation happens as soon as one person has to guide the team, structure the process and also help decide who leaves, all at the same time. That person is no longer fully trusted by anyone, however carefully they act. When one person in a tense system has to carry several incompatible roles at once, that person automatically becomes the target of the tension that actually belongs to the whole system. Those who want to guide endings well consciously separate who conducts the conversation from who makes the final decision. And those who carry it also need a place of their own for doubt and fatigue.

Those who keep postponing the conversation about stopping do not only lose time. They lose control over how the ending unfolds and leave it to a crisis to do what they did not dare to do themselves.