In the corridors of modern organizational life, we have become remarkably skilled at the art of linguistic transformation. The word "failure" has been systematically excised from our professional vocabulary and subtly replaced by a constellation of more palatable words and phrases, such as growth, learning, and opportunity. This phenomenon extends beyond the dreaded one-to-one staffing and performance evaluation discussions—where career coaches, direct supervisors, and other performance evaluators have embraced the belief that setbacks are stepping stones to success—into how departmental, programmatic, or organizational failure is conceptualized. However, the analytical lens through which we view the collapse of human service organizations, particularly those serving individuals with developmental differences, presents us with a glaring tension between our impulse to reframe these failures as learning opportunities and the harsh reality that highlights human incompetence.

The question explored by NOIRE is not one of semantics and wordplay, but fundamentally ethical: Is the collapse of an organization that serves an entire community of vulnerable people in need a failure that demands accountability, or an opportunity that invites learning? This weighty distinction permeates and transcends academic discourse, affecting the lives of individuals who rely on these services for their daily survival, dignity, and connection to their community.

The Architecture of Organizational Euphemism

Take a moment and think through linguistic and rhetorical gymnastics that soften the edges of organizational decline. We have heard them all in meetings, emails, training webinars, and boardrooms across the nation: "strategic restructuring" instead of bankruptcy, "rightsizing" or “creating a more ‘lean’ agency” as opposed to mass layoffs and other staffing cuts, and "organizational pivoting" perpetrating as fundamental business model collapse. This exercise in semantics illustrates what cognitive psychologists have long understood about human nature—our profound discomfort with acknowledging failure, particularly when we bear responsibility for the outcomes.

From the perspective of organizational behavior theory, reframing serves multiple psychological functions that social psychologist Leon Festinger (1957) would recognize as classic responses to cognitive dissonance. At the moment, when an organization's leadership faces the reality that their strategies, decisions, and capabilities have proven to be fundamentally inadequate, they must make a difficult choice between acknowledging and accepting the failure or reconstructing the narrative in more favorable terms. Choosing the latter, while psychologically protective, has the propensity to create what Chris Argyris (1987) calls "defensive routines” systematic organizational behaviors designed to protect individuals and institutions from threat or embarrassment, often at the expense of growth.

I spoke with a former executive whose organization had recently closed after decades of providing services to adults with intellectual disabilities. The language was cautious, measured, and centered on opportunities for future innovation. Beneath this optimist facade was a more complex story of management initiatives that were incompatible with the organization's mission, cookie-cutter approaches to service delivery, decisions on cutting staff who provided valuable skills that were incomprehensible, strategic shortsightedness, mission abandonment, and ultimately, the displacement of forty-three individuals who had called the organization's group homes their permanent residence. The executive's linguistic choices, while understandable from a psychological perspective, obscured the very real human costs of what could more accurately be described as organizational failure.

The Distinctive Ecosystem of Human Service Organizations

HSOs, particularly those serving individuals with developmental disabilities, operate in a distinct organizational ecosystem compared to traditional product-based businesses. The task environment in which HSOs must operate includes economic and human resource scarcity, regulatory density, and moral imperatives and service models that transcend and, in many cases, contradict traditional performance metrics and organizational structures. What is arguably the most essential feature about HSOs is that they serve human beings who face numerous challenges in putting in place what economists Albert Hirschman called "exit" options—the ability to take their business elsewhere when dissatisfied with the quality of the services being provided.

This creates what might be understood as a reverse captive market situation, where organizations become bound to their constituencies by moral obligation rather than market opportunity. A technology startup facing market disruption can pivot to new customers or entirely different product lines. However, a provider of residential services or a day program for adults with developmental distinctions and/or autism does not have the same ability to pivot shift services or clients. Their residents or program participants cannot simply be transferred; their specialized staff cannot be quickly retrained for other sectors, and their regulatory infrastructure cannot be rapidly adapted to serve different populations.

The regulatory environment compounds these constraints in ways that fundamentally alter the calculus of change management. When a commercial enterprise confronts market pressures, it enjoys considerable latitude in how it responds, such as reducing staff, changing product lines, entering new markets, or restructuring operations. Human service organizations operate under layers of state and federal oversight that severely limit their adaptive capacity. Licensing requirements, certification standards, and compliance obligations create what organizational theorists might recognize as "institutional isomorphism"—pressure to maintain standardized approaches even when innovation might be beneficial.

When Learning Narratives Collide with Human Consequences

The optimistic reframing that serves organizations well in contexts where failure carries primarily financial consequences becomes profoundly problematic when applied to human service organizational collapse. The stakes of organizational "learning experiences" in this sector extend beyond the economic bottom line to health and safety, human dignity, and survival.

One example is found in a scenario I observed several years ago. A large, deeply entrenched organization that provided services to individuals who experienced IDD and autism closed. In the months leading up to the closure, the CEO stated that the organization had experienced "challenges that required strategic adaptation." The organization was huge (a too-big-to-fail scenario). However, behind the optimistic messaging lay a series of critical decisions that had gradually eroded the organization's financial sustainability and the health and safety of the people it supported. The executive leadership of the organization changed hands several times, and when an inevitable crisis arose, the organization ultimately closed, negatively impacting over 500 individuals and their families. The narrative around the organizational failure was reframed as an unfortunate but valuable learning experience.

The problem, however, was that the individuals and their families involved in this "learning experience" were pushed into an immediate crisis. People lost educational and residential placements that had been part of their lives for years. People lost access to the day program services that provided structure, positive engagement, and meaningful moments, and families faced months of uncertainty while seeking alternative services. Several individuals experienced behavioral regression that took months to address. The institutional knowledge accumulated over decades of working with specific individuals—understanding their communication patterns, behavioral triggers, and effective interventions—vanished. Not to mention the staff who lost jobs, much-needed income, and stability for their families as well.

The domino effect of this failure extended throughout the broader service system in ways that illustrate what systems theorists call "dynamic complexity” situations, where cause and effect are separated by time and space, making it difficult to anticipate or measure the full consequences of organizational failure. The pressure was felt by multiple segments of the service system, from support coordinators who had to scramble to replace services for the people they supported, to state and county oversight personnel with added pressure to create streamlined service approval processes as changes were taking place. Day treatment program and residential service providers faced sudden increases in demand that they were unprepared to meet, leading to longer waiting lists and stretched resources. Multiple service gaps emerged as a result of the organization's closure that took years to fill, leaving some families without local options. Most significantly, the closure undermined community confidence in the stability of developmental disability services, leading some families to delay seeking support and others to avoid engagement altogether.

The Paradox of Change in Mission-Critical Organizations

Traditional change management frameworks, from Kurt Lewin's foundational three-stage model through contemporary approaches like John Kotter's eight-step process, assume organizations possess the luxury of experimentation, iteration, and gradual improvement. These models emphasize creating urgency, building coalitions, and sustaining momentum through extended transformation processes that allow for course correction and refinement.

However, organizations serving individuals with developmental disabilities operate under what Karl Weick termed "high reliability" imperative conditions, where failure carries catastrophic consequences that must be prevented rather than learned from. For example, the "fail fast, learn faster" mentality doesn’t work for a nuclear facility. Similarly, an organization that provides residential services to individuals with IDD cannot experiment with radical service delivery innovations that might compromise client health and safety.

As a result, tension exists between the speed and depth to which an HSO can adapt to change and mission fidelity that distinguishes human service organizations from their product-oriented counterparts. These are the very characteristics that make these organizations socially essential. An HSO’s commitment to meeting the needs of vulnerable populations, adherence to rigorous safety standards, and the cultivation of risk-averse organizational cultures and typically bureaucratic structures can simultaneously hinder or reduce their capacity for rapid organizational change, which might prevent systemic collapse.

The Internal Mission Conflict Dynamic

This change management paradox becomes particularly acute in situations where developmental disability services exist as specialized programs within larger, multi-purpose organizations. Healthcare systems, Public Health Institutes, faith-based institutions, and diversified nonprofits often integrate developmental disability services within their primary organizational structure and service offerings. This attempt at integrated holistic care systems, while not inherently flawed in its ideological conceptualization, can create complex organizational dynamics that may lead to what might be understood as "mission drift collapse."

The impact of mission drift collapse on other programs embedded within the larger organizations or integrated systems can be swift and devastating. Changes in management approach and strategic objectives that are important or beneficial to the organization as a whole can have disastrous downstream effects, including unrealistic expectations and conflicts between the larger organization's mission and strategic directions, and the specialized requirements of developmental disability services and the organization's broader strategic objectives.

Inappropriate KPI

Multi-purpose organizations often strive to achieve operational efficiency through centralized or performance management systems that utilize standardized key performance indicators across various service lines. Standardization, which is usually beneficial for bureaucracies, has the potential to create "KPI blindness" at the executive level; leaders lose sight of the unique value propositions and success indicators that distinguish effective developmental disability services from other organizational activities.

The Moral Hazard of Institutional Optimism

When applied uncritically to organizational collapse in human services, the prevailing cultural tendency to reframe failure as opportunity creates significant moral hazard that extends beyond individual organizations to affect entire service systems. This optimistic reframing can encourage delayed decision-making, obscure accountability, and ultimately magnify the human consequences of organizational failure by preventing the kind of honest analysis necessary for systematic improvement.

The psychological comfort provided by optimistic reframing can lead organizational leaders to delay difficult but necessary decisions about sustainability and closure. I have observed numerous situations where executives continued to operate failing programs for months or years beyond the point where a responsible closure would have minimized harm to clients and their families. The ability to characterize ongoing problems as "temporary challenges" or "learning opportunities" provides psychological permission to avoid confronting the reality that continued operation may be causing more harm than good.

This delayed decision-making often compounds the ultimate impact of closure by preventing the kind of planned gradual transition that can minimize disruption to vulnerable populations. By the time organizations come to accept the inevitability of that closure, the time and resources to ensure seamless client transitions, staff placement, and effective knowledge transfer to successor organizations are in short supply, and many cases, executive leadership has already transitioned out, and few if any are left behind to assist in the transition process.

A Framework for Understanding Organizational Endings

Rather than embracing either wholesale optimism or cynical fatalism, the human services sector requires more analytically precise frameworks for understanding organizational endings that distinguish between different types of closures and their underlying causes. This analytical precision is essential not only for appropriate accountability but also for systematic learning that can improve the sustainability and effectiveness of the broader service system.

Preventable Failures represent organizational collapses that result from leadership inadequacy, financial mismanagement, regulatory violations, or institutional negligence. These closures reflect breakdowns in fundamental organizational competencies that could have been addressed through better governance, management, or oversight. The closure of residential facilities due to abuse scandals, the collapse of day programs due to embezzlement, or the failure of organizations due to persistent violation of licensing requirements all represent clear examples of preventable failure that should be acknowledged as such rather than reframed as learning opportunities.

Systemic Failures occur when organizational collapse results from broader dysfunction in policy, funding, or regulatory systems that make effective operation impossible, regardless of managerial competence. When reimbursement rates fall below the actual cost of providing mandated services, when regulatory requirements become contradictory or impossible to fulfill, or when policy changes eliminate the theoretical foundation for particular service models, individual organizational closures may reflect system-level problems that require policy intervention rather than organizational improvement.

Strategic Transitions represent situations where organizational closure reflects genuine strategic choice designed to improve overall service quality or system effectiveness. Mergers that achieve beneficial economies of scale, program consolidations that eliminate duplication and improve coordination, or planned phase-outs of obsolete service models all represent examples where organizational endings can legitimately be characterized as opportunities for system improvement.

Environmental Adaptations occur when organizational closure represents an appropriate response to changing demographic patterns, technological disruption, or shifting community needs. A rural day program that closes due to population decline, or a vocational training program that becomes obsolete due to technological advancements, may represent an appropriate system adaptation rather than organizational failure, provided that alternative services are available to meet the continuing needs.

The Leadership Imperative: Beyond Therapeutic Language

The individuals with developmental disabilities who depend on these organizational structures deserve more than therapeutic language about learning opportunities when their essential services disappear. They deserve honest analysis of what contributed to organizational failure, genuine accountability from responsible parties, and systematic efforts to prevent similar collapses in the future. This requires leadership that can distinguish between the psychological comfort of optimistic reframing and the analytical rigor necessary for organizational improvement.

Effective leadership in this context requires what might be understood as "compassionate realism"—the ability to acknowledge failure honestly while maintaining commitment to the individuals and families affected by organizational collapse. This entails establishing governance structures that can identify and address organizational decline before it becomes catastrophic, developing transition planning capabilities that minimize harm when closure becomes necessary, and implementing accountability mechanisms that distinguish between acceptable organizational adaptation and unacceptable abandonment of vulnerable populations.

The sector requires specialized preparation for leaders who will navigate these complex ethical and operational challenges. Executive development programs must address the unique tensions between mission fidelity and organizational sustainability, providing frameworks for making difficult decisions about program viability while maintaining commitment to vulnerable populations. Board governance training must help volunteer leaders understand their responsibilities for organizational oversight in contexts where failure carries human rather than merely financial consequences.

Conclusion: The Importance of Honest Analysis

Reframing, a common practice in organizational culture, promotes resilience, encourages innovation, and fosters hope during times of crisis. However, the uncritical application of positive messaging to organizational collapse in human services can blur the lines between crucial, yet preventable, failures that require accountability and genuine adaptations that represent opportunities for system improvement.

The analytical frameworks that can help understand the distinctions between the two are complex, but they can identify multiple factors that contribute to the collapse of organizations while simultaneously being clear and transparent about moral responsibility and accountability. Some closures are failures of leadership, governance, or stewardship that should be acknowledged and used to improve organizational accountability systems. Others reflect successful adaptation to changing conditions. The majority of closures involving HSO’s can be attributed to complex interactions between individual competence, organizational capacity, environmental pressures, and systemic constraints that cannot be neatly placed into one bucket or the other. Complexity, however, cannot be an excuse for avoiding the difficult work of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable organizational outcomes, particularly when vulnerable populations bear the consequences of these distinctions.

The individuals with developmental disabilities who depend on these organizations for daily support, achieving an everyday life, meaningful moments, community engagement, and life opportunities represent a constituency whose voices are absent from discussions about organizational sustainability and closure. While many barriers to exercising their fundamental rights, personal choice, self-determination, and self-advocacy have been overcome, people who experience IDD/A still face barriers when switching agencies due to poor outcomes and service quality. As such, they depend on the rest of us—leaders, support coordinators, board members, funders, community members, friends, family members, and policymakers—to create and maintain organizational structures that reliably and sustainably serve their needs.