“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. ”
It’s winter here in Australia. The slowing down, the thick woollen socks, the mug of cocoa, an open fire or a cluster of candles — the Danish art of hygge.
In the old pagan calendar, winter wasn’t a problem to be solved. It was a season for fallow ground — fields deliberately left unsown so the soil could rest and recover.
Now hold that next to how change work feels. Our whole vocabulary is borrowed from spring and summer: the potentiality of the sprint, the heat of go-live. We worship the growing season.
So here’s the question that’s been keeping me warm this week: what does wintering mean in the life of a change practitioner?
The concept – the fallow season
For centuries, farmers practised fallowing: leaving a field unplanted for a season. Nothing was sown. To the untrained eye, nothing was happening. But underground, everything was. The soil replenished, fertility restored. The rest was the work. The empty field in winter was what made the full field in summer possible.
The writer Katherine May gave this a human shape in her book Wintering. She reframed the fallow periods of a life — illness, loss, burnout, the in-between — not as failures to rush through but as necessary seasons of retreat.
Both point the same way. Dormancy isn’t death. Fallow isn’t empty. Rest isn’t idleness. It’s how living systems store what they’ll need to grow.
Which makes change work strange. Because we treat the pause as the enemy.
Connecting the dots
Picture a large transformation. Eighteen months in, it hits winter. The funding gets re-baselined, a steering decision slips, a dependency stalls upstream. Suddenly the program is on hold for a quarter.
And the change team? They sit around with nothing to do.
People polish already-polished decks. The whispered question travels the team: if there’s nothing to deliver, are we about to be cut?
But is it really true that there’s nothing to do?
In one program, the change lead refused the panic. She named the season out loud: “We’re wintering. This is fallow time, not dead time.” Then the team used it. They built the reusable assets they’d never had time for. They took the hoarded leave. They had coffee with stakeholders they’d only ever emailed. They ran a real retrospective on the phase they’d just survived.
When the program thawed, they didn’t restart cold. They launched from readiness — rested, resourced, with deeper roots. The winter was why.
The application: How to winter well
1) Stock the barn while it’s quiet
How it works: A fallow season isn’t for yield — it’s for replenishing stores. Use the lull to build what delivery never allows.
Practical example: The reusable toolkit. The stakeholder map you’ve been running on memory. The next phase’s comms, drafted while the lessons are fresh.
Why it works: When the thaw comes, you launch from a full barn, not an empty one.
Watch for: Busywork dressed up as productivity. Inventing tasks to look occupied isn’t wintering — it’s denial in a hi-vis vest.
2) Rest deliberately to bank energy
How it works: Dormancy is how living systems survive the lean season and surge in the next. Recovery isn’t the opposite of performance — it’s the precondition for it.
Practical example: Take the leave now, in the trough, not “later when things calm down” (they won’t). Protect real downtime — no “eye on Slack” availability that quietly cancels the rest.
Why it works: A rested team drives the next surge. A depleted one stalls it, however good the plan.
Watch for: Leaders who stockpile leave “for when it’s busy.” Winter is the time. There is no perfect later.
3) Tend the soil — relationships and sense-making
How it works: Fallow ground only looks empty from above. Underground it’s teeming — the most important winter work is invisible.
Practical example: Coffees with the stakeholders you usually only transact with. An honest retrospective on the phase just gone. Capability-building the team actually chooses.
Why it works: Trust and insight compound silently. You reach the next phase with deeper roots and a clearer read on the system.
Watch for: Mistaking “no visible activity” for “no progress.” In winter, the growth you can’t see is usually the growth that matters most.
The caveat: fallow is rested, not abandoned
There’s a shadow side. Wintering done badly isn’t rest — it’s a vanishing act. A change function that goes too quiet for too long gets forgotten, then cut. The pause has to be intentional and named, not a slide into invisibility.
And not everyone gets to choose their winter on equal terms. The contractor on a month-to-month rate can’t fallow the way a permanent lead can. Permission to rest isn’t evenly distributed.
So winter with intent. Tend the field. And know when it’s time for spring.
Over to you
Where is your change project wintering right now — and are you treating it as dead time, or as fallow ground? What could you stock, restore, or tend before the thaw?