The resurrection that costs nothing

Posted on: 5 April 2026

Britain has produced more political rebirths per decade than any comparable democracy. Leaders who have lost everything emerge weeks later with a podcast. Parties that have been buried by the electorate announce a new chapter, a listening exercise, a reformed vision. The machinery of resurrection runs continuously, and it runs cheap.

This would be unremarkable if it were only politics. It is not only politics.

The same mechanism operates in boardrooms, in personal brands, in organisations that have spent years building something that no longer works. The language changes slightly: pivot instead of renewal, transformation instead of rebirth, strategic realignment instead of we got it wrong. The structure underneath is identical. Something that should be dead is being kept presentable, and the people doing it have convinced themselves this is the same as being alive.

The original story, the one this weekend technically commemorates, is precise about the cost. There is a real death, a sealed tomb, three days of complete absence. The resurrection is verifiable because the absence was verifiable. Remove the cost and you remove the meaning. What remains is theatre.

The sunk cost mechanism is the most common version of this theatre. An organisation has committed years and capital to a direction that the market has stopped rewarding. Acknowledging this means acknowledging that the investment is gone, that the decisions were wrong, that the foundation was not what it appeared. The human mind resists this with considerable ingenuity: it moves the target slightly, reframes the metric, produces increasingly elaborate justifications for continuing. I watched this in the creative industries through the nineties, businesses that had built their identity around analogue craft continuing to invest in that identity long after the economics had shifted. Not from stupidity. From the same psychology that makes a losing trader double down: the loss is not real until you name it.

The second version is cultural. In organisations where failure carries personal shame rather than institutional information, nobody signs the death certificate. The structure continues to function in a formal sense: meetings happen, reports circulate, headcount is maintained. The substance evaporated some time ago but declaring this publicly would cost someone their position or their reputation, so the zombie persists. Westminster has produced several of these in recent memory, entire policy frameworks kept on life support because the alternative was admission.

Then there is the version that should concern anyone who has to make decisions based on what they read. Some actors have understood that the market rewards the narrative of rebirth regardless of what is actually happening underneath. So the image is resurrected without touching the structure. New name, adjusted logo, someone brought in to talk about vision with the appropriate quantity of inspirational vagueness. The market responds because it wants resurrection stories; it buys them readily, particularly at this time of year. In the short term this is rational. Systemically it corrupts the signal: when everything can be a rebirth, the word stops meaning anything.

The distinction that matters is not about what emerges. It is about what stays behind. A genuine resurrection leaves something in the tomb: a business model that did not work, a type of client that was never right, a conviction about how the market functions that turned out to be wrong. If an organisation comes through a crisis with everything it had before plus a new visual identity, it has not been reborn. It has been redecorated.

Easter is a reasonable moment to run this inventory, for entirely practical reasons. The question is not what you want to become. That one is easy and produces strategy decks. The question is what you are prepared to leave behind. That one is harder to answer honestly than it looks, which is probably why most organisations never quite get around to asking it.