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"Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble," wrote poet and world leader, Vaclav Havel before his death.

What happens when our systems really break, show their cracks and our foundations begin to crumble? How do we find the resilience, ingenuity, open-heartedness in our souls and in our collective heart to respond in new or generative ways?

How do we know it is time to bring our work or our organization to completion? And how do we actually go about doing it? What does it mean to steward our organizations through their lifecycles, including the phase of dying, completion, release? 

A sustainable system has an inherent ability to shed what is not needed and transform from one form to another in order to continue to evolve.   Forests, animals, and even our own families do this seasonally and with every generation.  But it seems this natural process is very difficult for organizations.  Yet the skillfulness in discerning when it is time to let go - and the collective practice of doing it -  is one of the most crucial learning opportunities for our own, and the social sector’s, vibrancy and evolution.