Growth hurts when systems don't support identity

Growth is often framed as something positive — expansion, progress, scale. But real growth is rarely simple. It often asks people to change how they see themselves, how they behave, or how they engage with the world around them.

That might look like adopting a new way of working, learning a new tool, letting go of a familiar process, or questioning assumptions that have long shaped how they navigate systems and resources. These shifts are complex, often slow, and rarely linear. They usually require sustained effort, small wins along the way, and deliberate care to maintain momentum and energy for the kaupapa.

At a systems level, growth can involve strategy, structure, policy, or technology. But those shifts are always absorbed — and carried — by people. And this is where growth becomes personal.

When we hone in on the individual experience of growth, we often treat it as a personal responsibility: be more resilient, adapt faster, upskill, keep up. But behaviour doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s shaped by culture, power, relationships, history, and the environments people move through every day.

When systems fail to account for identity — cultural, personal, or professional — they can unintentionally disable the very change they’re trying to enable.

This shows up clearly in organisations that are scaling or transforming. New strategies, new structures, new expectations — but the same underlying assumptions about how people should behave, communicate, or belong. When identity isn’t acknowledged, growth can feel misaligned, unsafe, or disorienting.

What looks like resistance is often grief.

What looks like disengagement is often a loss of belonging.

What looks like poor performance is often a nervous system under strain.

Human development theory has long shown that people grow best when their environment supports who they are becoming — not just what they are expected to produce. When identity, culture, and lived experience are ignored, growth becomes something people must endure, rather than something they can sustain.

If you want to go deeper

Much of this thinking is grounded in ecological and relational approaches to human development. A resource I often return to is The Ecology of Human Development, which explores how people develop within — and in response to — the systems around them.

For a more contemporary, accessible lens on identity, trauma, and resilience, What Happened to You? offers up a reframe on behaviour, shifting the question from 'What’s wrong with you?  to 'What happened to you?

Claire Mance, January 2026.