While I was writing my last blog about the molting lobsters, I realized I was on my way to authoring a tome nobody would ever trudge through. (Also, if you are a regular consumer of TSM blogs, you will know I am perpetually behind on blog writing so in the spirit of ingenuity – two birds, one stone.)

I was cleaning out and reorganizing my garage (again) the other day and I had to remind my wife when she came to see the progress and instead found a disaster – sometimes it gets worse before it gets better! Improving the function, process, or efficiency of a thing regularly means taking it all apart and putting it back together, but better. The middle part is messy. While I was alone in the garage playing Tetris with all of our stuff, I looked out the window at our yard and saw remnants of last year’s dormant plants interspersed with the new growth of the coming spring. The messy middle. I thought about the hours and hours of work spent removing the invasive plants and replacing them with natives and edibles. The old yard wasn’t ugly - I suspect it even won yard of the month or something at some point; but it wasn’t doing its very best to support and sustain wildlife or our family. So, we took it apart and started rebuilding. I couldn’t help but think about how universally this idea could be applied and how it relates to our work every day.

In the past month or two, The Spark Mill has heard from a few organizations who committed to doing authentic work around DEI in the last couple of years and have recently found themselves grappling with a heightened awareness around DEI concerns that are causing internal conflict. The messy middle. They went through the difficult process of holding a mirror up and shining a spotlight on their weaknesses and failures to identify any harm they were causing internally and to their larger community. They knew going into it they were embarking on a journey and that true equity work isn’t a one and done event where you create a plan and everything is suddenly better.

Even knowing all of this, it can still make you feel like you are failing when the “issues” seem to be getting worse. It’s the growing pains that come with taking it all apart in order to put it back together better. The messy middle. Starting those conversations and working to improve your culture and the way you interact with the world opens you up to being called in, called out, and held accountable.

If you are in the midst of this kind of transformation, personally or organizationally, hang in there and remember that sometimes it gets worse before it gets better. Just keep moving forward knowing that even incremental progress on the journey, if done authentically, is getting you further from where you started and closer to a better functioning more supportive and life sustaining place than where you began.