Grief doesn’t move well through spreadsheets. It struggles inside tidy frameworks. It resists the cold logic of cause and effect, preferring to surface in ways that are more bodily: a tightening in the throat, a reluctance to revisit a document, a sharp edge in the way we speak to each other after something important has ended.
That’s why organisational grief work needs to be embodied. It has the be felt, handled, built with our hands. When we try to process collective grief only through conversation, it tends to stay in the head, we stay stuck in analysis, rationalisation, or premature sense-making.
However, when we invite the body and hands into the process, a different kind of knowing emerges, one that can hold complexity without rushing to resolution.
This is where the Collective Composting practice comes in. I’ve used it with teams after projects, after restructuring, and after moments of deep collective change. It’s simple, playful and also profoundly effective at surfacing the grief we don’t know how to name.
The invitation is straightforward:
Each person builds something with LEGO: a shape, a structure, an abstract form that represents their personal experience of what’s ending. Then, piece by piece, they walk the group through it. The hands speak first, before the mind catches up.
The medium matters less than the invitation: LEGO, clay, found objects, whatever lets the hands speak without needing artistic skill.
It’s astonishing what surfaces when we let the hands take the lead. People build fragments, bridges, collapsing towers, fragile boats, mazes with no exits. They build things they didn’t know they were holding.
The creations are metaphors made visible, so what emerges is not a post-mortem, but a shared ritual of mourning, witnessing, and honouring.
Grief in organisations isn’t just about what we built together. It’s also about what we believed in together, the values we thought we were living. The stories we told ourselves about what we were making and why it mattered. When those stories unravel, the grief is not just personal it is relational, and stretches across teams, projects, and years.
The LEGO practice is a small way of making space for that grief without apology, and without needing to immediately reframe it as learning. Sometimes, what needs to happen first is simply letting the hands speak, being witnessed, and knowing the grief belongs not just to you, but to the collective.
This is composting work: the slow, relational unravelling that makes room for something new. Not in the urgency of innovation, but in the gentle recognition that grief is the soil for what comes next.
This practice works best when held by someone comfortable with grief-informed group work, someone who can trust that the hands know things the mind doesn’t yet, and who can witness without needing to fix or resolve what emerges.
Ready to bring this practice into your work?
Find this in book form
The Season of Unravelling has its own home beyond Substack now. It’s the first in a four-part Almanac, the expanded long-form telling of this whole year-long inquiry, with Unravelling, Drifting, Seeding, and Resonance each becoming their own book.
This first one, The Season of Unravelling, is 59 pages: longer than a single Substack post, shorter than a commitment. It weaves the original posts into one fuller arc, with the threads, the practices, and the reflections that the weekly format never had room for. It’s available to purchase on Amazon.
The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.