They discover that they can step outside it if they want to, set it aside, or change its flavor. The trance is no longer autonomous, the behavior no longer automatic. Change is similar at different scales. Change is similar at different scales. Here we can take an insight from psychology and apply it to organizations.
Organizations have trances, too.
They have autonomous states of mind, ways of thinking that seem to come from nowhere, that seem impossible to change. Or communal habits. Or organizational trances. The unions wanted to end a two-tier pay system to which they had agreed in the early 1990s during a financial crisis. Yet both sides, as if on robotic command, acted out the frustrations, posturings, and beliefs about the other side left over from the previous settlement, or in some cases left over from the previous strike a generation before in the late 1970s.