The Case for Somatics in Strategy: Why So Many Change Initiatives Don't Survive Contact With Monday
Most change management fails for a simple reason: it's designed entirely for the part of a person that thinks, and almost never for the part that decides, in a fraction of a second, whether it's safe to act differently. Strategy documents live in the brain. Trust lives somewhere else. Until an organization's change work speaks to both, the strategy will keep losing.
I want to make the case for something that sounds, on paper, like an odd pairing: somatics and strategy. One is associated with breathwork and therapy rooms. The other with org charts and OKRs. In practice, they're solving the same problem from two directions — and neither works especially well alone.
The Missing Variable in Change Management
Walk into almost any change initiative — a new strategic plan, a restructuring, a "culture transformation" — and you'll find the same architecture: a rollout deck, a town hall, maybe a training. All of it aimed at the cognitive layer. Explain the change clearly enough, the logic goes, and people will adopt it.
Except people rarely fail to change because they didn't understand the plan. They fail to change because their nervous system doesn't trust that it's safe to. Someone who watched the last reorg quietly punish the people who spoke up isn't going to raise a hand in this one, no matter how clear the new values statement is. That's not resistance to change. It's an accurate read of the environment — one no slide deck can talk someone out of, because the deck is arguing with the wrong part of the brain.
This is the part strategy work consistently underweights: the body keeps score of what actually happened in a workplace, independent of what leadership says is happening now.
Respect Is a Leadership Behavior, Not a Feeling
It's tempting to file all of this under "soft skills" — nice to have, hard to measure, easy to cut when budgets tighten. The research says otherwise.
In a Harvard Business Review study of nearly 20,000 employees worldwide, Georgetown's Christine Porath found that respect was the single most important leadership behavior for driving commitment and engagement — more important than recognition, an inspiring vision, useful feedback, or even opportunities for growth. Separately, Gallup's most recent data puts U.S. workers' sense of being respected at 37%, tying the lowest mark Gallup has recorded since it started tracking respect in 2018.
Put those together and you get a strange picture: the single most important lever leaders have is one that fewer than four in ten workers feel is being pulled. That's not a motivation gap. That's an execution gap — and it's the same gap most strategic plans quietly assume doesn't exist.
What the Body Registers That the Strategy Memo Doesn't
Dr. Donna Hicks, whose framework on dignity has shaped decades of conflict-resolution work, makes a distinction worth sitting with: dignity is inherent and unconditional, but it's also an embodied skill — something practiced or violated in the small, physical moments of a workday. Whether a mistake gets met with curiosity or blame. Whether someone's idea gets credited in the room or quietly absorbed by whoever repeats it next. Whether a raised hand gets a real answer or a polite deflection.
None of that shows up on an org chart. All of it shows up in the body — in who stays quiet, who over-explains, who's already updated their résumé. Strategy that ignores this isn't wrong, exactly. It's incomplete. It's optimizing for the 10% of behavior change that logic can drive, and leaving the other 90% — the part governed by whether people feel safe enough to actually do the thing — entirely to chance.
This is where somatic practice earns its place in a strategy conversation, not as a wellness add-on, but as the missing mechanism. Guided somatic work lets a room physically register the difference between a threatened state and a safe one — together, in real time — which is a different kind of learning than being told the difference in a slide. It's the difference between knowing a fact and knowing it in your body, and only the second kind reliably changes what people do when no one's watching.
Two Traditions, One Practice
We didn't arrive at this pairing from a textbook. Lars spent years inside corporate People & Culture leadership, including at Nike and Catalyst, watching well-designed strategy stall out in rooms that hadn't been given permission to be honest. I came from organizing work, where the entire discipline is built on the premise that structural change only holds when the people living inside the structure trust each other enough to act collectively. Different vocabularies, same finding: the strategy is never the bottleneck. The room's capacity to trust it is.
Working at the intersection of somatics and strategy means treating that capacity as something you build deliberately — with the same rigor you'd bring to any other part of an organizational plan — rather than something you hope shows up on its own once the new values are printed on a poster.
What This Looks Like When It's Done Right
In practice, this is a facilitated process — Listen, Reflect, Move, Build — that surfaces real, unfiltered sentiment; reflects it back to the room to build verified consensus instead of performative alignment; uses guided somatic practice to let people feel the shift, not just hear about it; and closes with concrete behavioral practice so the change has somewhere to land. We've run it with groups from 30 to 150, in formats from a 45-minute keynote to a multi-day activation. (We go deeper on the method itself, and the data behind why it's necessary, in our companion piece on rebuilding trust beyond engagement scores.)
FAQ
What does "somatic" mean in a workplace context? It refers to the body's role in processing safety, threat, and trust — distinct from purely cognitive processes like reasoning or memory. In practice, somatic work uses guided physical awareness to help people register and shift patterns (like defensiveness or withdrawal) that cognitive-only training tends to miss.
Isn't this just psychological safety with extra steps? Psychological safety is the outcome. Somatic and dignity-based practice is one of the more direct mechanisms for building it, because it works with how people actually register threat and safety, rather than only explaining the concept to them.
Does this replace traditional strategy or OKR work? No — it's designed to sit alongside it. The thesis isn't that strategy doesn't matter; it's that strategy without a way to build the room's trust in it will consistently underperform its own logic.
Who typically brings this into an organization? Most often HR Business Partners, DEI and Talent Development leaders, or executive teams preparing for an offsite, restructuring, or leadership summit where buy-in — not just information — is the actual goal.
If your organization's strategy keeps arriving in rooms that aren't ready to trust it, that's the gap we work in. Get in touch to talk it through →
Aparna Rae is co-founder of Circle Back Club, where she and Lars Gallien work at the intersection of somatics and strategy to help organizations rebuild trust and reduce conflict.
