My name is Antony Chane-Hive. I joined Mercari in 2018 as an Engineer and I’m currently an Engineering Manager in the Product Engineering division.
In this article, I will explore certain themes such as Psychological Safety, Self-Determination Theory and Dynamic Reteaming.
This post is for Day 8 of the Mercari Advent Calendar 2025.
(~15 min read)
The Paradox
When my manager announced a new reorganization, I caught myself having two opposite reactions at the same time.
Part of me felt curious.
A new team meant new challenges, new problems to solve, new people to learn from. I’ve always liked change. Chaos brings opportunities. It forces growth.
Part of me felt exhausted.
The fatigue of constantly starting over. Of being a novice. Of rebuilding relationships, relearning processes. Again.
How do you love chaos and be tired of it at the same time?
That’s when I realized something I’d been avoiding: I was waiting. Waiting for the next change to be the last one. Waiting for things to finally stabilize. Waiting for the ground to stop shifting so I could finally build something that would last…
I was waiting to rebuild my comfort zone. To feel competent. To know who to ask for help, how things worked, where I fit.
But that moment wasn’t coming. Maybe it never would.
The pace keeps accelerating. AI is reshaping how we work. Strategies expired before we could even implement them. And it is not just us—the world itself is spinning faster. A pandemic. Political changes. The ground is changing around us, not just at work.
Instability is not a phase to endure. It’s the new operating system we need to learn.
So, I started thinking about what worked and what didn’t. I observed people who seemed to adapt faster—how they asked questions, how they built relationships, how they approached the unfamiliar. I paid attention to the forces behind the changes themselves. I experimented with tools and frameworks.
This is not a prescription for how you should navigate change, but an invitation to reflect on how you’re navigating it right now.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: We’re all learning this in real-time. Some of us are just asking different questions.
Part 1: The Safety to Not Know
Earlier in my career at Mercari, a task looked straightforward on paper. A coding implementation that needed deep domain knowledge. As a mid-career engineer with a couple of years of backend and frontend experience, I should have been able to handle it perfectly.
But I wasn’t sure I could.
In the team discussion, colleagues referenced concepts and patterns I’d only skimmed in documentation. My instinct was to nod along, to protect my image of being a mid-career engineer.
So I did. I nodded, took notes, and spent time piecing together what I’d pretended to understand. I eventually succeeded (and learned a lot), but it took longer than it should have.
Feeling confident is our accelerant for steady progress, reducing stress and maintaining our motivation.
I thought I was protecting my status. I was actually delaying my effectiveness.
The Turning Point
When the company changed my role to engineering manager, I faced a different kind of gap.
"Congratulations on your new role" they said. "You’re now the manager of this team."
My knowledge was lacking. I didn’t know where to begin, what I should do or how. And unlike a coding task, I couldn’t fake management by searching on the web.
In one of my first meetings with my manager, I asked the questions I’d been avoiding: "How do I conduct 1-on-1s? How can I grow my members? What should I look for?"
I didn’t understand all the ramifications of the answers. I had to figure it out myself.
But something started to shift.
The learning wasn’t faster because I got better answers. It was faster because I’d stopped spending energy on pretending.
Different paths, Same need
As I observed how others navigated similar transitions, I noticed people approached uncertainty differently.
Some colleagues asked direct questions in meetings. Others researched before responding. Some observed quietly, piecing together understanding through pattern recognition.
None of these approaches were better than the others. They were just different ways of managing the same vulnerability. What mattered wasn’t how someone expressed uncertainty—it was whether they felt safe doing it.
The need for belonging transcends culture, even if how we say "I don’t know" varies. The vulnerability feels the same, whether you’re asking directly, observing first, or probing the situation. We’re all managing the same question: Can I be incomplete here and still belong?
Change often feels threatening not just because it’s new, but because it can mean a loss of safety, status, or belonging. Recognizing these feelings—our own and others’—is the first step to building trust in any environment.
How I nailed it
I discovered there was research behind what I’d experienced.
Psychological safety—a term coined by Amy Edmondson—describes a shared belief that interpersonal risk-taking is safe. That you won’t be humiliated, punished, or marginalized for speaking up, asking questions, or admitting mistakes.
It’s not about comfort. It’s about learning effectiveness.
Edmondson’s research showed that teams with high psychological safety learn faster. Not because they’re smarter or more talented, but because they can be beginners without penalty. They ask questions early, when confusion is small and correctable. They experiment without fear of judgment.
Having a name for it—psychological safety—helped. Though, sometimes, I still go back to my flaws, pretending I understood. It’s still happening. Knowing the concept doesn’t make the fear go away. It just makes you feel more foolish when you do it anyway.
When change throws you into a new domain—whether it’s coding or management or any unfamiliar territory—everyone becomes a beginner at something. The difference between those who adapt quickly and those who struggle isn’t intelligence. It’s whether they can admit what they don’t know.
What changed
The shift from pretending to admitting didn’t make learning easier. It made it possible.
I stopped rehearsing confidence I didn’t have. I started asking questions when I was confused, not after I’d tried to figure it out alone for too long.
I watched colleagues who seemed to be adapting well and copied their approaches. Sometimes, I was a bit envious. I learned from my peers, junior and senior alike.
Each new role—engineer, manager, manager of managers—brought its own beginner moments. Vulnerability and learning are not just for newcomers; they’re part of every stage.
More importantly, I noticed something unexpected: people responded differently.
They offered information more freely. They were patient and showed empathy. Some realized they weren’t alone and began asking more questions.
Admitting ignorance didn’t cost me status. It earned me credibility.
The Foundation for everything after
Those transitions taught me: You cannot navigate change quickly without psychological safety—either the kind your environment provides, or the kind you build for yourself.
If your team creates it, use it. That trust is there for a reason. Ask those questions that feel too basic. Admit confusion while it’s still small. Observe who’s adapting well and ask how they’re doing it.
If your team doesn’t provide it, find your own safety nets. Create small circles of safety where you can be incomplete. Demonstrate by example, create this safety net for yourselves and others.
Change forces everyone into a beginner state. The only question is how long you’ll spend thinking you have passed this stage.
Some of the difficulty during those early changes came from maintaining appearances. Once I stopped pretending, I started seeing what I actually needed to rebuild.
I realized that navigating change isn’t about waiting for the ground to settle—it’s about learning to move while it’s shifting.
Part 2: What Change Actually Depletes
When the ground shifts, it’s not just about adhering to the new norm or the new context. It’s about losing the invisible infrastructure that makes work feel doable. How can I be effective? How can I keep things under control? Who can I rely on?
The bandage gets stripped away. That "beginner state" I’d learned to admit was becoming my understanding of what was depleting.
I didn’t know what success looked like anymore. I didn’t know what mistakes to avoid. I didn’t even know what people expected me to do. Each new team brought different dynamics to decode, different trust to rebuild. Existing teams had established patterns I needed to read. Newly formed teams had no patterns yet to build upon, but from what foundation?
The Three Gauges
Later, while reflecting on this article, I found a framework that gave language to what I’d been feeling. Self-Determination Theory—developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan—identifies three fundamental psychological needs that fuel motivation and well-being:
Autonomy: The feeling that you have choice and agency in your actions.
Competence: The feeling that you’re effective at what you do.
Relatedness: The feeling that you’re connected to others and belong.
These needs are universal, but how we experience and restore them varies. For some, autonomy means voice in decisions. For others, it’s space to execute without interruption. Same gauge, different signals.
It was a lightbulb moment… suddenly I had language for what change depletes. Like knowing the light switch exists but finally seeing where it is and how it works. This was the invisible infrastructure: autonomy, competence, relatedness—and psychological safety is the soil in which they can grow.
Change doesn’t just add uncertainty. It drains these three fuels simultaneously but they don’t operate in isolation.
The Cascade
What made it harder to diagnose was how these needs interact. And this pattern isn’t unique to me.
When we change teams, relatedness shifts. We still know people in the company—there are familiar faces, colleagues we can ask for help. But the immediate network changes. The people who understood our context, who we’d built trust with over time, aren’t in the room anymore. New members don’t know us yet. We don’t know their struggles, what makes them open up, how to earn their trust. That takes time to rebuild.
Competence can rebuild faster because we’re not starting from zero—we have the broader company context, we know how to navigate systems, nowadays even AI/LLM could provide initial guidance. But understanding the new domain deeply enough to be effective? That’s slower. We need feedback from people who are still learning to trust us. We need to understand problems we haven’t seen yet. The acceleration comes from knowing who else to ask beyond our immediate team, but the depth comes from relationships that don’t exist yet.
And when competence feels shaky, autonomy shrinks. Decisions feel riskier. We defer more, check more, second-guess more. Even in areas where we technically have authority, we don’t feel the agency to use it.
The reverse is also true: rebuilding one fuel can accelerate the others.
What Restoration looks like
The shifts weren’t dramatic. They were subtle.
Competence didn’t fully restore when I mastered the domain. It was restored in fragments: when I could answer a basic question without searching. When I understood a team member’s goals well enough to see how they fit in the team, in the company. When I could recognize their struggles and offer something useful. When I could foresee more clearly the direction we should take.
Autonomy didn’t come from being given more authority. It came from finding the small spaces I could still shape. How I approached learning. How I structured conversations. How I framed problems to help the team see different perspectives—not as a manager, but as someone who could explain why we’re in the current state and where we might be headed.
Relatedness rebuilt differently each time. Sometimes through one person who became a clarity anchor. Sometimes by observing who else was navigating similar transitions. Sometimes by positioning myself as a connection point—knowing enough about the domain to be useful glue.
We don’t need to restore everything at once. We need to recognize which gauge is limiting us the most right now, and find the smallest step that moves it up.
Returning to my experience, I’d stopped waiting for stability to return. Instead, I was learning to rebuild while the ground kept shifting.
The Shift
Understanding what was depleted converts enduring the changes into specific signals I could track and pursue.
When I feel paralyzed, I can ask: Is this a competence gap (I don’t know how) or a relatedness gap (I don’t have trust)? When I feel constrained, am I actually lacking autonomy, or have I stopped noticing the choices I still have?
The analytical lens doesn’t make adaptation easier. It makes it more navigable.
Once I could name what was missing, the question shifted. Not "How do I survive this change?" but "What’s the smallest move that restores one gauge?"
That shift—from enduring to instrumenting—didn’t eliminate what we lost. But it created space for a question I hadn’t been able to ask: what if uncertainty wasn’t just a threat, but territory to explore?
Part 3: The Space between Exhaustion and Curiosity
As soon as I could identify what was depleted and take steps to restore it, something changed: the exhaustion remained, but I could see where the future was leading me, I could see possibilities.
I noticed how people around me approached their challenges. Some colleagues had impressive output. Others had sharp minds that cut through ambiguity. Some had interesting mindsets that reframed problems in a new perspective.
I became curious. Not in an abstract way—in a specific way. How did they do that? What tools did they use? What did they think about the problem?
Some dove straight into challenges, ready to solve issues immediately. Others took a more cautious approach, observing first, then acting. Everyone had different expectations shaped by their personal context—their background, their previous experiences, what they’d learned to value.
All these approaches were just different ways of navigating the same uncertain territory.
The Paradox explained
The anxiety of change and the lure of curiosity.
Psychologists call this the Uncertainty Paradox: humans exhibit both neophobia (fear of the new) and neophilia (attraction to the new) simultaneously.
Both are evolutionary. One protects us from overload, the other drives us toward growth. Both serve us. Both are valid.
My paradox makes sense now: I like change (neophilia) and am exhausted by it (neophobia).
Self-discovery helps us understand how changes affect us differently over time and that understanding matters.
The question is not which feeling we have. It’s which one we should feed at any given moment. And whether we have the capacity to make that choice.
Why Curiosity isn’t free
Curiosity sounds light. Exploration sounds adventurous.
The reality is heavier.
For example, being curious about how my team members approached their work means energy to listen—really listen, not just hear them talk. It means taking time to understand their context, their struggles, their processes, what they are saying and what they are not saying. It means emotional support through conversations, some tough, some light.
As a manager, curiosity is not just about domain knowledge. It is also about caring for people, helping them to navigate their own uncertainties and through happy or difficult moments. Guiding them toward finding their own solutions, not just giving answers.
I’m not a trained psychologist. My emotional support is limited. But I need to care. I need to help.
The cost is not just my uncertainty anymore. It’s my uncertainty plus their uncertainty plus supporting them through theirs.
Curiosity about people is different from curiosity about systems. It costs more.
The Boundaries that make it possible
I learned something else: we cannot do everything.
We don’t have time for everything. We all have our limitations and our learning edges. We need to acknowledge those limits and work with them, not pretend they don’t exist.
Sometimes another manager or team member is better suited to help someone than we are. Therefore, we need our support network. It’s important to know who to ask and how to handle the situation.
We need to set these boundaries to sustain our work and be effective. Remember, we have three gauges to act on.
Exhaustion doesn’t disappear when we get curious. It stays. And sometimes, that’s useful—it keeps us honest about our limits.
The shift is not about being tireless. It’s more about being curious within constraints, not despite them. Choosing which uncertainties to explore and which to defer. Which conversations to have and which to delegate.
What stays
I’m still afraid when change comes. The fear, the resulting exhaustion is still there, just as present as before. Over time, I’m learning how to tame it because curiosity has traction now.
The question changed. Not "What will I lose?" but "What could I learn from them?" Not "How will I endure this?" but "How could I navigate around it?"
I started observing patterns. Patterns in how people adapted—their different approaches, their personal contexts, the choices they made when facing uncertainties.
And those patterns announced something bigger: patterns in the organization’s design.
Part 4: The Organization as a Fluid System
A new reorganization happened.
A question started forming: Why does this keep happening? Why do we keep changing the organization?
The Pattern beneath the Disruption
I’d been treating each organization change as isolated chaos. But what if this wasn’t random chaos, but a recognizable pattern?
In Dynamic Reteaming, Heidi Helfand’s research describes it as intentional, routine changes to team composition—not reactive scrambling, but deliberate organizational design. Teams form, merge, split, and switch to meet evolving product and system needs.
I was viewing teams as static groups that were being broken and recomposed. In reality, I was experiencing a lifecycle.
Teams can get stuck and might fall into the Poverty Trap, where a lack of resources and support prevents them from growing or might be in the Rigidity Trap, doing the same routines even as the ground shifts around them.
I could see the logic behind the chaos in glimpses. Leadership was navigating its own uncertainties—market shifts, competitive pressure, technological disruption. They were making the best decisions at the time, balancing competing needs: customer value, organizational learning, individual sustainability.
What is depleted
When I formed a new team—mixing familiar faces with people from another domain—relatedness and competence hit hardest.
I had to rebuild trust. New members didn’t know my context. I didn’t know theirs. The shortcuts we’d developed in previous teams—the unspoken understanding, the "I know what you mean" moments—were gone. We were starting from scratch in how we communicated, how we made decisions, who we could rely on.
Competence took longer. The new domain had its own vocabulary, its own problems, its own standards. I couldn’t lean completely on previous expertise. I was learning again, but this time with the added weight of supporting team members who were also learning, also rebuilding.
Then, small wins started appearing. The newly formed team was growing alongside me. Our gauges were refilling, slowly.
The research on Dynamic Reteaming suggests that we can only make the best of organizational redesigns when the environment provides psychological safety and recovery time. Without those, even well-intentioned change can become depleting rather than developing.
The recovery time wouldn’t always be perfect.
Understanding that we needed to change to adapt to business direction gave me a lens. I could see the "why" behind the disruption. I stopped personalizing it.
But understanding didn’t reduce my exhaustion. It just made it legible.
A Question that remains
Dynamic Reteaming is a strategy, not a universal good. It assumes baseline conditions: psychological safety so people can admit what they don’t know, and recovery cycles, so exhaustion doesn’t compound into harm.
When those conditions exist, the system works. Individuals build change fluency—the portable skill of adapting quickly. Organizations gain resilience. Knowledge flows.
When those conditions don’t exist, there’s a gap between organizational intent and individual experience. What leadership sees as building adaptability, individuals may experience as meaningless change.
The system’s intent matters, but so does its execution. Understanding the pattern gives me language to assess: Is this a navigation challenge or a sustainability problem?
I haven’t fully answered that yet. But I’m trying now, asking different questions.
Conclusion: Learning to Reinvent
I still feel both. The exhaustion and the curiosity. But something has shifted.
I’m curious about what the next change will bring.
I no longer wait for the ground to settle. I’ve learned to ask the questions that make me feel like a beginner. I may identify what needs restoring first by observing who’s navigating well and learning from their patterns. I can move while everything is still shifting.
Change fluency strengthens; the transition time is faster. Not because it got easier—because I learned what questions to ask.
Looking back: If nothing is permanent, then the most valuable thing I can build isn’t expertise in any single domain. It’s the ability to adapt. To recognize patterns. To restore what matters. To explore what’s new.
In an unstable world where the ground keeps shifting, permanent adaptability is more valuable than permanent expertise.
The paradox remains. I still like change. I’m still exhausted by it. But I’ve learned they’re not contradictory—they’re two sides of the same journey.
The exhaustion is my tuition; the curiosity is my compass.
What will you discover in your next transition?
Tomorrow’s article will be by otter.
