The Ancient Mariner and Organisational Change

On the cost, time, and memory of transformation in organisational life

In March 2015, I had a lengthy discussion with Brendan Sargeant about the nature of change and reform. At one point, during an email exchange, Brendan asked, “Have you read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner?” He went on, “If not, have a read and let’s talk about the narrator’s attitude towards his experience and what it says about change.”

I read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and our chat kept going. Brendan was unusually cryptic when we discussed it. He seemed confident I would find my own way. Many times, I've tried to put into words my thoughts on the narrator’s attitude towards change. Brendan left us in February 2022. I’m still finding my way. 

Brendan’s view (in his words) was: “I think that we live in a closed psychic economy. “Nothing is got for nothing”, to quote Emerson. So change is about managing that economy. Mastery of change is understanding the economy. The Mariner changes, but he doesn’t understand his change. He can tell the story, but not interpret it. Leadership is about doing both.”

What follows is my latest effort to meet Brendan’s challenge. I still feel unsatisfied, so there will be more to come.

Nothing is got for nothing

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a meditation on ‘Power’ in The Conduct of Life (1860), wrote, “Nothing is got for nothing.” The phrase is blunt. It suggests a pragmatic bargain that, like the First Law of Thermodynamics, is inescapable. Every act of creation exacts a price.

Change, whether personal or institutional, operates within what we call a closed psychological economy: we exchange attention for entertainment, trust for convenience, meaning for efficacy, privacy for participation, empathy for metrics, and in a world of automated algorithms, originality for optimisation. 

Sometimes, the exchange happens unintentionally when we forget that nothing comes without a price. Every step forward we take has a cost that isn't clear until it's too late. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner captures the cost of unthinking actions in poetic form.

The Mariner, in a moment of impulse, shoots an albatross. In maritime superstition, sailors considered the following albatross an omen of good luck; they believed the birds protected ships and carried the souls of lost sailors. Shooting an albatross was an act as thoughtless as it was unfathomable.

From that act, a chain of moral and natural retribution unfolds. The ship is becalmed upon the endless sea, “Water, water, everywhere,” the Mariner is condemned to witness the slow unwinding of his deed.

Unlike his crewmates, the Mariner does not die. He remains alive, isolated, cursed, and the dead albatross is fixed around his neck. Death and Life-in-Death gamble for the lives of the crew, and the Mariner is claimed by Life-in-Death, who condemns him to a living spiritual exile.

In solitude, the Mariner is haunted by guilt but eventually undergoes a spiritual awakening. He recognises the beauty of the natural world and blesses the sea creatures he once scorned. This humility and love break the curse, and the albatross falls from his neck. However, his penance remains unfinished: he is compelled to wander the earth, sharing his tale as a warning.

The poem reflects on transformation: its cost, its pace, and its forgetting. The Mariner changes but cannot express what has changed inside him. That paradox holds a lesson for today’s organisational leaders.

We often go through transformation without fully understanding it, or we confuse simply telling the story with truly grasping it. We explain what happened, including the sequence, milestones, and results, but miss the underlying moral economy. 

We often see change as a single event, but it is an ongoing process that needs time, attention, and reflection.

I. The Witness and the Interpreter

The Mariner’s attitude towards his experience is that of a survivor haunted by confusion. When the Mariner tells his story, Coleridge writes, “He holds him with his glittering eye”. The Mariner’s focus is on compelling the listener to listen, not enlightening them through his story. He has been a witness to events that he cannot comprehend; he feels the truth, but he cannot grasp it.

This distinction between being a witness and an interpreter is what Brendan saw as crucial for understanding leadership. Many organisations, after a crisis or reform, are full of Mariners who can tell the timeline of change but cannot explain what changed, why it was important, or what they understood. They know what happened but not why it mattered. They have a story but lack the essential sensemaking.

Leadership involves interpretation: the ability to see the pattern of cause and effect, and to turn lived experience into insight. It essentially asks for what the Mariner cannot do — to live through transformation and understand it as it unfolds.

II. The Closed Psychic Economy

In Coleridge’s universe, balance is essential—"nothing is got for nothing”.

Killing the albatross breaks an ecological and spiritual balance. Change begins when the Mariner realises that his survival depends not on domination, but on restoration.

The same applies in organisations. Change always happens within an exchange economy. Hope, trust, attention, and legitimacy are limited resources. They flow, diminish, and renew based on how well they are managed.

A leader who ignores this moral economy by assuming motivation and goodwill are always abundant will face slow change and, ultimately, stagnation and regression.

The myth of ‘costless transformation’ is one of modern management’s most notable hubris. Every reform, restructuring, and modernisation relies on hidden reserves of energy and conviction. 

When those reserves run out, cynicism rises like the silent sea around the Mariner’s ship. The system doesn’t collapse in rebellion; it just stops moving.

Mastering change depends on understanding this dynamic economy. It involves acknowledging that renewal demands a cost, each act of transformation depletes finite psychic capital, and restoring these resources requires time.

III. The Time of Change

Organisational change occurs gradually over time. However, leaders, under pressure to deliver results, often see it as a one-off event rather than an ongoing process to embrace.

The Mariner’s transformation happens not during the crisis itself but in its lengthy aftermath. Time measures change. Learning happens through a slow, steady process where experience turns into understanding. 

In organisations, performance frameworks and political cycles tend to prioritise immediacy; leadership focus is pulled toward what appears visible and urgent. However, the most meaningful changes, such as cultural renewal, ethical repair, and rediscovery of purpose, can only be fully understood if management sees time as evolutionary rather than episodic.

The paradox of change is that its benefits often become evident only after its causes are forgotten. A reform that initially appears to fail might, over time, lay the groundwork for meaningful renewal. The restoration of public trust, the rebalancing of authority, and the subtle normalisation of new values. These outcomes emerge quietly, long after the crisis has faded.

But because the benefits are delayed and spread out, they rarely appear within the leader’s time in office. This timing mismatch discourages patience. Leaders who look for clear results during their term tend to sacrifice the future for the present, confusing quick results with progress and activity with real achievement.

The deeper work of leadership is to maintain faith in the gradual process of change and to invest in outcomes that are more aligned with stewardship.

IV. The Amnesia of Transformation

When change happens successfully, it fades away. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were considered a threat to social order; now, Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Mick Jagger are part of the establishment.

Once it becomes the new normal, transformation no longer feels like change at all. The effort, compromise, and uncertainty that brought it about are quietly forgotten.

This cultural amnesia is both natural and risky. It protects the organisation from the stagnation of tradition and nostalgia, while skewing our memories of how real change truly happens. We reshape the experiments, missteps, failures, and dissenting voices that sparked the change into a straightforward, rational story of planned change.

Change rarely originates from the mainstream. It starts in the shadows with unconventional ideas, dissenting perspectives, and fringe experiments that question the dominant narrative. When these ideas prove successful, they are often reinterpreted, and the mainstream later claims ownership, smoothing over the discomfort of its earlier resistance.

This forgetting is not deliberate; it is built into the system. Institutions usually focus on their successes and overlook transformation, which can be unsettling. Reflecting on transformation honestly means recognising that authority is always temporary and that renewal often starts where legitimacy appears most fragile.

The Mariner’s constant retelling acts as a remedy for this forgetting. He is destined to remember, even when others want to forget. He keeps alive the memory of transgression and its consequences.

Organisations need their Mariners: those who remember the cost of progress and resist the easy forgetfulness that turns hard-won insight into back-slapping hubris. But they also require interpreters to translate that memory into lessons learned.

V. The Failure of Immediate Judgment

Because change occurs over long timescales, its significance is never immediately clear. The immediate verdict—success or failure— is almost always tentative.

Many of history’s most significant organisational changes were, at the time, regarded as failures. The reforms of the Coombs Royal Commission, the early digital shifts in the public service, and even the major administrative reforms after the war all faced opposition, were partial, and appeared compromised. However, decades later, they are acknowledged as pivotal moments in the development of public administration.

The Mariner’s journey follows a similar arc. His punishment and redemption are intertwined. The suffering that once seemed pointless becomes, in hindsight, a source of wisdom. “He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small.” Yet, this realisation is not instant; it unfolds gradually over time.

Leaders who demand quick validation misunderstand the moral timing of change. Transformation often appears chaotic, conflicting, or even regressive before it finds coherence. Expecting instant results interrupts the process of understanding through doing.

The true measure of change is not instant progress but eventual integration. To what degree do new practices, perspectives, and values turn into lived habits rather than just imposed procedures?

VI. Leadership and the Management of Moral Time

Leadership, then, is not just about managing resources but also involves overseeing time and memory. It includes three disciplines:

1.     Patience: the ability to withstand uncertainty without rushing for an answer.

2.     Memory: the humility to acknowledge the costs of past change and the margins from which renewal started.

3.     Interpretation: the wisdom to turn experience into insight across generations.

To understand the economy of change, a leader must recognise that transformation is cumulative. It evolves through overlapping cycles of loss and renewal. Each generation of leaders inherits an incomplete story and must act in a way that leaves the organisation better than they found it.

VII. Redemption and Renewal

Ultimately, the Mariner’s redemption isn’t in escaping but in enduring. He isn’t absolved; he’s reintegrated into the cycle of life, but forever marked by the cost he’s paid. His story influences others, even if he remains bound to it.

Institutions that endure transformation do not come out of the process pure or perfected. Instead, they come out altered. Reform isn’t about restoring balance but about learning from experience. 

To lead change, then, involves guiding others in transforming uncertainty into understanding, mistakes into insight, and perseverance into purpose. It ensures that the cost of change results in not just movement but also meaningful progress.

VIII. The Quiet After the Storm

At the poem’s end, the wedding guest who has listened to the Mariner’s story awakens “a sadder and a wiser man.” The Mariner himself disappears into the crowd. The experience has been transferred.

Similarly, in organisational life, the true test of effective leadership isn't the noise that comes with reform but the calmness that follows. It's when the system steadies, new behaviours become second nature, and the story of how change happened becomes a shared memory.

However, within that silence lies the new dominant narrative. The struggle, the voices of dissent, and the belief that things can be improved set the stage for the next upheaval.

The cycle starts over again.

IX. The Ledger and the Light

Each organisation operates within its own distinct cultural economy. When change occurs, it disrupts that balance, and leadership's goal is to re-establish it. However, this doesn't mean merely returning to equilibrium. Instead, it involves continuously transforming experience into understanding.

Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner offers a deeper insight into this process than any management textbook. It emphasises that transformation comes at a cost, change requires patience, and learning is rare.

Emerson reminds us that “Nothing is got for nothing. " Mastering organisational change demands change itself, and every leadership act is a Heideggerian act of becoming. It involves recognising the potential in the circumstances, understanding that change will be partial, and that leadership is about taking action rather than abstract reflection.