Nostalgia is good for grounding us in values and shared stories. Research by University of Southampton psychologist Constantine Sedikides, Joost Leunissen, and Tim Wildschut shows that nostalgia bolsters social connectedness, strengthens optimism, and helps us weather disruption with a sense of who we are. Used well, it’s a bridge between identity and change.
Historians have long understood the myriad and complex power of nostalgia, especially for organizations.
When your work focuses on shifting culture, which mine has for the last few decades, nostalgia stops being a bridge and becomes a wall. Or, more accurately, it can be a swirling, vibes-fueled monkey that ignores data, external realities, and stories of progress to deliver on its mission to curtail transformation and paralyze evolution, revolution, and/or prevent the future from arriving because it is strange and new.
As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney tells us, though, nostalgia is not a strategy.
Seth Godin argues that nostalgia can be fatal, especially given that things are changing faster than every before all the time amidst chaos and uncertainty. The history of nostalgia itself is instructive. In his 1688 dissertation, Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer classified nostalgia as a dangerous medical condition: a debilitating longing for home so severe it could prove fatal. Sufferers became indifferent to their surroundings, confused past and present, and even hallucinated. They literally could not move forward because of a pathological inability to inhabit the present.
“That’s not how we used to do it.”
“It worked better before.”
“Remember [INSERT NAME OF PERSON WHO HASN’T WORKED HERE FOR 13 YEARS WHO 11% OF PEOPLE IN THE ROOM KNOW/HEAD-OF]? I wonder what they’d say about this? Right?!“
“Let’s bring back that things that we used to do.”
“Remember when things around her were simpler?”
These are the sentences that quietly stall transformation. And they’re almost never about the process being changed or the insights that inspired the culture shift. They’re about what the old process meant for the folks who were there when it how things got done around here, inspiring some yearning for belonging, competence, and certainty. Change asks people to let go of something real before they can build something better. That’s the emotional work that gets skipped.
While I hold enormous respect for institutional memory, nostalgia – unchecked – is one of the most quietly destructive forces in organizational life.
Culture work lives in this tension every day. When I lead teams through shifts in process, structure, or behaviour change, the stickiness isn’t usually about the new thing. It’s about what the old thing meant for people. It represented belonging, competence, certainty.
Or at least the idea of such things.
Change asks people to grieve something real before they can build something better.
That’s the work. Not dismissing the past, but refusing to live in it forever. Especially during times of awesome change and transformation.
Nostalgia explains. And, often, contextualizes. It doesn’t lead.
The future, as it turns out, doesn’t look good in the rearview mirror.
