Anyone who has worked in organizations for a while knows the pattern. The reorganization recreates the silos it was meant to break up. The new process, three years later, is defended as fiercely as the one it replaced. The same conflict between the same two departments returns with new faces. We go around in circles.
Buddhism has a name for this kind of circling: saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirth in which the same patterns return again and again until they are seen through. You don’t need to believe in literal rebirth to recognize the pattern in organizational life. What keeps being reborn in organizations are our problems. You can try to ignore them, you can try to kick the can down the road. Eventually, you will have to face them again, they may differ in appearance, but you’ll recognize them once you take a closer look.
This idea came to me while discussing a huge process. It already put so many constraints on people that it was almost impossible to follow, causing constant delays and frustration. Yet whichever end we tried to pull on, we found someone clinging to exactly that part and unwilling to see it change. Later that day I talked to a colleague who mentioned their Buddhist practice. It struck me that what we had run into all day was clinging, and the suffering that comes with it.
My starting point is simple: life is one indivisible whole. If Buddhism can guide how we live, it should also be able to guide the work we do together. This article is an attempt to translate two of its central teachings — the four noble truths and the eightfold path — into something organizational practitioners can use, both in daily work and when an organization needs to change.
A word about where this comes from. I am not a Buddhist scholar or teacher. Buddhism is a practice tradition with some 2,500 years of practice, study and debate behind it, and everything here rides on the shoulders of that tradition. I have adapted freely, and the mistakes are mine.
Nothing here requires belief. The early Buddhist texts describe the teaching as ehipassiko: “come and see.” You take it up because it seems worth trying, and it earns its place through what it does in practice. I’d ask you to treat what follows the same way.
Four Insights
In Buddhism, these are the four noble truths. What present here I call insights. I don’t claim they are noble, and I haven’t seen enough yet to call them true. They are what I see when I look at organizations through this lens.
1. Suffering is part of working together
The first noble truth is usually translated as “suffering.” Dukkha covers more than pain: it is the grinding unsatisfactoriness of things that never quite fit. In organizations, it shows up as frustration, exhaustion and cynicism: the meeting everyone dreads, the work that gets undone, the sense that the same problems keep coming back no matter what we try. It wears people down.
Some of this comes with organizing itself. Every structure serves some needs and frustrates others, every process ages, and the environment keeps moving. The first insight is to see this suffering clearly, without explaining it away as normal or blaming it on individuals. Naming it plainly is where change starts.
2. Suffering comes from clinging
In Buddhism, the source of suffering is craving and clinging. Applied to organizations, suffering does not come from our processes, roles, strategies or ideas themselves. It comes from our relationship to them: holding on because they are ours, because they worked, because we fought for them.
This is true regardless of whether what we cling to is good. A sound process becomes a source of suffering once we cling to it. We stop looking at it and start defending it, and when the context changes, we are the last to notice.
That is different from the usual change narrative of “letting go of what’s outdated.” The question is not whether something has outlived its value. The question is how we are holding it.
Clinging works in both directions. We can crave change as fiercely as others cling to the status quo, and lose sight of what the current way still does well.
Clinging is not the same as aspiration. None of this means “don’t care.” Buddhism distinguishes craving (taṇhā) from wholesome aspiration (chanda). Aspiration is wholehearted commitment to something worth doing, held open to what happens. Clinging is needing it to stay the way it is, identifying with it, defending it. You can commit fully to a strategy, a product or a way of working and still hold it lightly. That is the stance this whole approach depends on.
3. Letting go is possible
The third noble truth speaks of the cessation of suffering. I can’t promise that for organizations. What I can say is that I have seen teams release a pattern they were holding onto, and the friction around it eased. Where clinging loosens, suffering loosens with it.
4. There is a path
The fourth noble truth describes the eightfold path. It is not a method with guaranteed outcomes. It is a practice: eight aspects of how we see, intend, speak, act, sustain ourselves, direct our energy, pay attention and focus.
An Eightfold Path
What follows is an eightfold path, one adaptation among many possible ones, not the path.
Practices, not principles. Principles invite compliance and judgment. The eight elements here are practices, and people and teams practise them. They are not meant for judging others. They guide our own conduct, and in a team, they help us reflect together on how we act as a team.
Our artifacts shape our practice. Workflows, meeting formats, tools, policies, products and business models are the conditions we work in. They shape how we see, speak and act. So each practice comes with a lens for the artifacts we take part in: does this support or undermine the practice, for us and for the people it touches?
The question stays in the first person. It is not “who got this wrong?” but “what does our participation in this condition, and what do we do about it?” For things we don’t own, that may mean bringing what we notice to whoever does. Looking at our artifacts this way is itself part of the practice.
What “sound” means. The Pāli word sammā is usually translated as “right,” but it means something closer to complete or attuned. I use “sound.” Something is sound when it reduces rather than produces suffering for everyone affected, inside and beyond the organization. It is sound when it arises from generosity, care and clarity rather than from greed, aversion and confusion.
The eight practices are:
- Sound View
- Sound Intention
- Sound Speech
- Sound Action
- Sound Livelihood
- Sound Effort
- Sound Mindfulness
- Sound Concentration
You can use them in daily work, as a quiet check on how you are working. You can also use them in transitions, to see what is being held onto and what wants to change.
The Eight Practices
1. Sound View
Practice: Seeing the situation as it is rather than as our story about it, including that our structures, roles and beliefs are provisional and interdependent.
Lens: Does this help us see what’s actually happening, or does it lock in one story?
Examples: A team keeps saying “our customers want X,” based on interviews from three years ago. Sound view means checking. The cost of explaining our strategy to everyone is easy to calculate; the cost of people not understanding it is not. So we count the first and ignore the second. The lens asks what our numbers leave out
2. Sound Intention
Practice: Acting from readiness to let go, goodwill and the wish to do no harm, rather than from wanting advantage for ourselves, ill will or indifference to harm, and noticing which one is actually driving us.
Lens: What does this reward, and which motives does taking part in it strengthen in us?
Examples: In a meeting, I push hard for my solution. Am I serving the outcome, or my need to be right? A bonus system rewards individual targets. The lens asks what that does to our motives, and how we choose to work within it.
3. Sound Speech
Practice: Speaking truthfully, kindly, usefully and at the right time, and not in ways that deceive, divide, wound or merely fill the air.
Lens: Does this format, channel or tool make honest, timely speech easier or harder for us?
Examples: A status report says “on track” because that spares both sides awkward questions. The team doesn’t have to answer them, and the manager doesn’t have to ask. An escalation path where bad news reliably triggers blame teaches everyone to speak late or not at all.
4. Sound Action
Practice: Acting in ways that don’t cause harm, don’t take what isn’t freely offered, and don’t damage trust or what we share.
Lens: What harm does our participation in this make easier, and what care does it make possible?
Examples: We ship a manipulative sign-up flow because the conversion target demands it. A deployment process makes rollbacks so painful that people quietly work around incidents instead of reporting them. A standard shipping box, chosen because it simplifies logistics, sends mostly air and cardboard to every customer.
5. Sound Livelihood
Practice: Contributing to a larger whole and being sustained by it without causing suffering: in my role within the team, as a team within the organization, as an organization in the world.
Lens: Does this work fit and serve the whole it belongs to, and can we do it in good conscience?
Examples: I hold on to a role because it’s comfortable, although the team needs something else from me. A team defends its territory even though its function duplicates another team’s.
At the level of the whole organization, this practice has an edge the others don’t. Traditionally, sound livelihood isn’t a verdict on other people’s trades. It is the question of which work I take part in. Some business models cannot pass this test, and the practice will say so. The question is not “should they exist?” but “can we do this in good conscience?”
6. Sound Effort
Practice: Putting energy into releasing what’s unsound and cultivating what’s sound, from aspiration rather than clinging, at a pace we can sustain.
Lens: Where does this direct our energy, and does it leave room to let go, or does it require us to hold on?
Examples: We keep investing in a pet project because of everything already sunk into it. A culture that treats visible strain as proof of commitment burns people out. A portfolio process treats stopping a project as failure, so nothing ever stops.
7. Sound Mindfulness
Practice: Noticing what’s happening as it happens, including our own reactions and where we’re holding on.
Lens: Does this give us moments to notice and pause, or does it keep us running on autopilot?
Examples: I notice the tightening in my chest when someone criticizes “my” process. That’s clinging, showing itself. A calendar of back-to-back meetings leaves no gap in which anyone could notice anything.
8. Sound Concentration
Practice: Bringing a calm, collected mind to what matters, rather than one scattered across everything at once.
Lens: Does this let us focus, or does it fragment our attention across everything at once?
Examples: A team of seven runs fourteen initiatives in parallel. A chat tool, with its default settings, interrupts everyone all day.
Leaving the Raft
In a well-known parable, the Buddha compares his teaching to a raft. You build it to cross a river. Once you are across, you don’t carry it on your head for the rest of the journey.
The same applies here. This framework is a raft. Clinging to it — enforcing it, measuring others against it, defending it — is its most likely failure mode. The second insight applies to the framework itself.
There is a real tension in this, and I don’t want to smooth it over. While you are still crossing, you need the raft, and you need to paddle with full effort. Letting go too early is its own failure. The tradition does not resolve this tension logically. It resolves it in practice: wholehearted effort, held without grasping.
Try this week: pick one problem that keeps coming back in your team or organization, and ask: what are we holding on to here? Then pick one of the eight practices and use it as a lens on one artifact you take part in: a meeting, a workflow, a report. Notice what happens.
Come and see.
© 2026 Bernhard Bockelbrink. This article is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Photo by Patrick McManaman on Unsplash