“Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past.”
Most organisational changes fade. The posters come down. The slogans die out. The new process becomes yesterday's news.
But some changes stick. Deeply. Like tattoos.
What if the reason so much change washes off isn't that we designed the process badly — but that we never gave people anything to wear?
The concept – symbolism as permanence
Tattoos are more than decoration. They're visible, embodied symbols of identity and belonging. They mark commitment — often painfully, always permanently.
The word itself carries the story. "Tattoo" comes from the Samoan tatau, carried into English by the sailors on Captain Cook's Pacific voyages in the 1700s. In the cultures they encountered, ink wasn't fashion. It was a rite of passage — a public, irreversible marker that you had crossed from one status into another.
Anthropology gave that instinct a name. Arnold van Gennep, in The Rites of Passage (1909), showed that human beings move through change in three stages — separation, the unsettled middle, and incorporation — and that we mark the crossing with ritual and symbol. Victor Turner built on this: it's the shared symbol and the shared ordeal that turn a crowd of individuals into a we.
Here's the bridge. Change leaders roll out initiatives with logic, timelines and comms plans — and almost nothing for the body or the memory to hold onto. We ask people to cross a threshold, then forget to mark it. So the change stays a message. It never becomes an identity.
But be clear about what this is — and what it isn't. This is not change branding. It's not the logo, the campaign name, or the launch hype bolted onto a transformation from the outside. I write about that in my book as one of the quiet ways change goes wrong: branding manufactures the look of commitment without the substance, and it's applied to people rather than chosen by them. A tattoo is the opposite of a logo you're handed. It's a mark you elect to carry. Decoration versus commitment — that distinction is the whole game.
Connecting the dots
You don't have to look far to find the instinct at work.
When Aurecon set out to shift its identity — from a traditional engineering firm into something more curious, more human — it didn't just publish a values statement. It named eight attributes: co-creative, resourceful, commercial, unconventional thinker, inquisitive, fearless, sense maker, engaging. Then it made them personal. People took a quiz to find their strongest attribute and walked away with a branded coffee cup carrying their one — a small, daily, embodied marker of the identity they were stepping into. Not a poster on a wall. A thing in your hand, every single morning.
Sometimes the sharpest symbol is one that never even launched. For a values refresh, Stanley Johnson once proposed a brilliant idea: print the new values on the inside of the employee shirt — so they sat, literally, close to the heart. Unseen by anyone else. Worn against the skin by the person who'd chosen them. It was never approved. But it captures the whole principle: the symbols that change us most aren't the ones we broadcast to the world. They're the ones we carry next to us.
Different artefacts, same mechanism. A cup you drink from. A value stitched where only you can feel it. Each one takes an abstract intention — "be more inquisitive," "live these values" — and gives it a body and a place in the day. That's precisely the move most rollouts skip: they hand people a message, when what makes change stick is something to wear.
The application: How to tattoo your change
1) Create embodied symbols
How it works: Give people a physical or digital artefact they carry, display, or return to — something that makes an invisible value visible.
Practical example: A band, a badge, a team crest on the retro board, a digital emblem earned when a team hits a new-behaviour milestone. Something tied to the change, not to the brand.
Why it works: Visible cues anchor invisible values. The artefact does the remembering so willpower doesn't have to.
Watch for: Gimmicks with no weight. A branded stress ball is not a commitment. If the symbol isn't earned or chosen, it's merchandise — and people can feel the difference instantly.
2) Mark the pain as part of the story
How it works: Tattoos hurt. That's part of why they matter. The cost is what makes the commitment legible — to yourself and to everyone watching.
Practical example: In your rituals, name the sacrifice out loud — the extra hours, the reworked roles, the expertise that no longer counts the way it used to. Don't paper over it. Honour it.
Why it works: Acknowledging the cost signals respect, not weakness. People trust a change that admits what it's asking of them far more than one that promises it'll be easy.
Watch for: Pretending change is painless. People won't believe you — and worse, they'll conclude you either don't understand their reality or you're managing them. Both erode the very commitment you're trying to build.
3) Ritualise continuity
How it works: Ink fades without care. Symbols have to be renewed, retold, and re-earned — not just unveiled once at launch.
Practical example: Build a rhythm: an annual recommitment moment, a story-sharing session where teams retell how far they've come, a refreshed artefact when a new cohort joins. Keep the mark fresh in collective memory.
Why it works: Repetition is what moves a symbol from event to identity. A launch is a moment; a ritual is a belonging.
Watch for: The one-off stunt. A dramatic kickoff with no follow-through doesn't just fade — it teaches people that leadership enthusiasm is seasonal, and that this too shall pass.
The caveat: Permanence cuts both ways
The goal isn't permanence for its own sake — it's commitment that outlives the launch. And the same power that makes a symbol stick can make it a shackle. Rituals that anchored the right behaviour ten years ago can quietly defend an outdated one today. The organisations still carving names into last decade's wall aren't committed; they're stuck.
There's a second shadow, and it's sharper. The very forces that give symbols their power — identity, belonging, a shared mark — are the same forces that feed tribalism. Push embodied commitment too hard and belonging curdles into groupthink: "this is who we are" hardens into "this is who's not one of us." At the far end sits genuine cult behaviour — symbols that punish dissent, loyalty tests dressed up as culture, an us that needs a them. Strong cultures and closed cults share a surprising amount of iconography. The difference is whether people stay free to question the ink — or whether the ink now owns them.
So tattoo with intent. Keep the mark open to challenge, update the design when the story genuinely evolves, and remember that loyalty to a symbol should never outrank loyalty to what it was meant to stand for.
Over to you
If your next change had to be tattooed onto your organisation's skin — visible, permanent, worn every day — what would the design be? And here's the harder question: would people wear it proudly, or would they be quietly looking for the laser removal clinic?