New research from Cornell University challenges us to rethink purpose — not as a fixed trait, but as a dynamic, living force. For those who work at the intersection of systems psychodynamics and organisational life, the implications are profound.

We live in a moment of extraordinary anxiety. Across the world, individuals, institutions, and entire societies are wrestling with a destabilising question: what are we actually for? Organisations that once offered coherent identities — a sense of collective mission that oriented daily effort and sustained people through difficulty — find themselves adrift. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. Hybrid work has fractured the social containers through which shared purpose was once transmitted. Technological disruption, geopolitical turbulence, and the accelerating pace of AI transformation have left many employees — and many leaders — in a state of chronic purposive flux, oscillating between moments of clear direction and stretches of hollow going-through-the-motions.

In this context, a newly published study from Cornell University lands with quiet but considerable force. Its subject is adolescents. Its implications reach far beyond them.

Purpose Is Not a Fixed Star

Anthony Burrow, the Ferris Family Associate Professor of Life Course Studies in Cornell’s Department of Psychology, and his colleague Kaylin Ratner, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have done something deceptively simple: they measured purpose not once, but every day, for ten weeks, across a national sample of more than 320 high-school students. The result is a study that dismantles one of the field’s most comfortable assumptions.

Most prior research on purpose has treated it as a trait — something you either have or you don’t, measurable in a single snapshot survey. Burrow and Ratner’s study, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, reveals instead that purpose fluctuates day to day, in ways that matter enormously for wellbeing and self-esteem. And the finding that most arrests attention is not about the intensity of purpose — how strongly a young person reports feeling purposeful at any one moment — but about its stability. Teens who experienced purpose more consistently, with fewer wild swings, fared significantly better on measures of wellbeing.

The compass metaphor is telling. A compass does not eliminate difficult terrain; it does not prevent storms, exhaustion, or wrong turns. What it provides is something more fundamental: a reliable orientation, a steady return to direction. The adolescents who thrived were not those who burned most intensely with purpose on their best days. They were those who maintained the most even, consistent purposive signal across all their days — including the hard ones.

Through the Lens of Systems Psychodynamics

For those working within the tradition of systems psychodynamics — the theoretical and applied field that draws on psychoanalytic insight, open systems theory, and the study of group life — this research resonates with something well understood in the consulting room and the boardroom alike: that the organisations and groups we inhabit are powerful modulators of our inner experience.

Wilfred Bion’s concept of containment — the capacity of a group, institution, or leader to receive, metabolise, and return the projected anxieties of their members in a more bearable form — illuminates why purpose stability matters beyond the individual. In a group with strong containment, members can tolerate uncertainty without defaulting to fight-flight or dependency. Purpose, in this reading, is not merely a cognitive orientation. It is also a form of psychological holding. When it is reliable and consistent, it reduces the persecutory anxiety that makes people defensive, regressed, and unable to think. When it swings wildly — inflated by grandiose visions one quarter, hollowed out by restructuring the next — it actively undermines the group’s capacity to work.

D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “holding environment” extends this further. For Winnicott, healthy development depends on an environment that is reliably present, predictably responsive, and able to survive the infant’s — or in organisational terms, the employee’s — moments of rage, despair, and disintegration. An organisation’s stated purpose can function as part of that holding environment, provided it is genuine, consistent, and lived rather than merely laminated. Purpose as performance — the glossy values poster on the wall, the town hall speech that bears no relation to Monday’s decisions — is not holding. It is its opposite: a false-self organisational structure that generates cynicism and disconnection.

The Role of the “Champion”: Leadership as Container

There is a detail in the Cornell study that deserves particular attention for leadership practitioners. The research was conducted in partnership with GripTape, a nonprofit that pairs students with an adult “champion” — a mentor who checks in regularly on the student’s self-directed learning journey. Among participants, students reported feeling most purposeful on the days they met with their champion.

The parallel with leadership is not subtle. The champion is not directing the student’s work; the student themselves has chosen their learning challenge, owns the process, shapes the goals. What the champion provides is something more structural: a reliable relational presence that re-anchors the student’s sense of meaningful agency. In the language of systems psychodynamics, the champion functions as a container — not absorbing the student’s autonomy, but holding the space in which that autonomy can be sustained and made sense of.

The most important thing a leader may do for organisational purpose is not to articulate it more loudly, but to hold it more steadily.

This challenges some dominant assumptions about purpose-driven leadership. The emphasis in much of the contemporary leadership literature is on inspiration — on leaders who articulate purpose with passion, who cast compelling visions, who ignite their followers’ sense of meaning. The Cornell data suggests this may be only half the story, and perhaps the less important half. What matters more than the heat of purpose is its constancy. A leader who inspires brilliantly but inconsistently — whose own purposive signal fluctuates with market conditions, board pressure, or personal anxiety — may inadvertently transmit that variability to the system around them.

In systems psychodynamic terms, this is the leader operating from the basic assumption rather than from the work group. Under stress, leaders may unconsciously seek the group’s dependency, or project their own purposive confusion into the organisation, creating the very instability they fear. The containing leader, by contrast, does the internal work to maintain purposive orientation even when the terrain is difficult — not because they are invulnerable to doubt, but because they have developed what the Cornell researchers call the capacity to sustain purposeful pursuits.

Variability as Signal, Not Noise

Burrow is careful to frame purposive variability not as a pathology but as information. “It’s an opportunity to pay more attention to the fullness of our experiences,” he has said. The fluctuations in purpose are not problems to be suppressed; they are signals pointing toward something worth investigating — particular environments, relationships, tasks, or systemic pressures that either support or deplete the sense of purposeful engagement.

This is a fundamentally diagnostic stance, and it is one that translates directly into organisational consulting. Rather than treating a team’s or an organisation’s apparent loss of purpose as a communications problem — solvable by a better strategy narrative or a more polished employer brand — the systems psychodynamic practitioner would be drawn to the underlying dynamics, which could be revealed in such questions as:

• What is the organisation’s relationship to its own stated purpose?

•Where does that purpose feel alive and generative, and where does it feel performed or fraudulent?

• What are the specific moments, relationships, or structural features that reliably sustain or undermine purposive engagement?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are diagnostic ones, with observable correlates in the daily life of groups.

Burrow’s research team found that providing teens with opportunities to shape their own learning was a particularly powerful support for purpose stability. Agency matters. In organisational terms, this aligns with a substantial body of evidence on psychological ownership and intrinsic motivation — but it also resonates with the psychodynamic understanding that genuine work (in Bion’s sense) requires that group members experience themselves as real actors in a shared task, not as instruments of a purpose imposed from above.

Steadiness as Leadership Discipline

What the Cornell research ultimately offers — translated into the register of organisational and leadership psychology — is a reframing of what it means to be a purpose-led organisation or leader. The aspiration is not peak purposefulness: the peak experience, the galvanising offsite, the CEO’s barnstorming address. These have their place. But they are not sufficient, and they may even be counterproductive if they create a cycle of purposive inflation followed by deflation that leaves the system more dysregulated than before.

The aspiration, rather, is steady purposefulness: the kind that persists through ordinary Tuesdays and difficult Thursdays, through disappointing results and unexpected setbacks, through the daily undulations of organisational terrain. Burrow’s formulation is elegantly simple: “Remaining even keel is probably better. When it comes to feeling purposeful, stability might be far more advantageous than bouncing around.”

For leaders, this is both a clinical and a developmental challenge. It requires the capacity for what might be called purposive self-regulation — the ability to stay anchored in one’s own sense of direction without either inflating it defensively or losing it under pressure. It requires the relational discipline of the champion: showing up consistently, holding the space, remaining present to the system’s experience without being captured by it.

In a world where so much conspires toward purposive volatility — where every news cycle, every earnings call, every restructuring announcement can send the organisational compass spinning — the ability to hold a steady orientation may be among the most important capacities a leader can develop. Not the loudest voice in the room about purpose, but the most consistent one. Not the brightest flare, but the steadiest light.

Source: Burrow, A.L. & Ratner, K. (2026). Within-Person Variability in Daily Purpose Moderates the Association Between Trait Purpose and Adolescent Adjustment. Journal of Research on Adolescence.

When journalist Anand Giridharadas spent four or five days methodically reading through thousands of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails released by the House Oversight Committee, he was not primarily looking for salacious detail or celebrity name-drops.

He was looking for something harder to see: the shape of the system itself.

What he found, and what he described in his interview with the New York Times, is less a scandal about one monstrous man than a clinical portrait of how organizational pathology functions at the highest altitudes of power—and what it costs the rest of the world when it does.

Speaking on WBUR’s On Point on February 26, 2026, Giridharadas argued that the Epstein story is misread every time it is reduced to the crimes of an individual. “There are a lot of powerful people in this country,” he has noted across several interviews, “who would like the story to begin and end with one monstrous man.” It does not.

What the emails reveal, he argues, is a “borderless network of people who are more loyal to each other” than to any institution, nation, law, or ethical principle. And that loyalty—that warped solidarity—is the real subject worth interrogating.

The Network as Pathological System

To understand what Giridharadas calls the “Epstein class,” one must first resist the temptation to map it onto conventional categories. The network was not ideologically coherent: it contained Lawrence Summers and Steve Bannon, Noam Chomsky and Peter Thiel, Barack Obama’s White House counsel and the architects of Trumpism. It spanned Republicans and Democrats, financiers and professors, royalty and scientists, philanthropists and politicians. The breadth, Giridharadas argues, is the point.

What unified this seemingly incoherent cast was not shared politics, but shared status—and a shared, largely unconscious practice of what the Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura called “moral disengagement.” When Epstein, already a convicted sex offender, needed social rehabilitation after his 2008 Florida plea deal, he knew exactly where to turn: to an elite practiced at the art of not noticing inconvenient things.

“He had chosen this particular kind of social network,” Giridharadas observed, “because he could be sure that it would be able to look away.”

From a psychodynamic organizational perspective, this is a recognizable pattern. In systems theory and group psychology, what Wilfred Bion described as “basic assumption” thinking—the unconscious, primitive mental states that can overtake groups—manifests in elite networks as a collective defense mechanism: the denial of ethical reality in service of group cohesion.

The emails’ texture bears this out in granular detail.

Giridharadas describes a ritual that repeats across thousands of messages: the “whereabouts update,” a constant stream of pings—”Just got to New York, love to meet, brainstorm”—that amount to a form of collective echolocation among members of the class, a continuous affirmation that they remain inside the network. The emails are not the correspondence of conspirators. They are the correspondence of a social organism maintaining itself, each member reinforcing the others’ sense of belonging to something larger than ordinary life, something that, by implication, exempts them from ordinary accountability.

The Perversion of Solidarity

In healthy organizations and social systems, solidarity is generative. It is the glue of collective action, the psychological foundation for trust, cooperation, and shared sacrifice.

This distinction matters enormously. What the emails reveal is not a network of people who knowingly enabled rape. It is, more insidiously, a network of people who had trained themselves to simply not register the suffering of those outside their orbit. Giridharadas puts it plainly: “Many in the Epstein class worked up to disregarding Epstein’s victims by looking away at so much other abuse and suffering” long before Epstein ever entered the picture.

This is the structural design of elite impunity.

It does not require active malice in most participants. It requires only a social architecture in which the costs of looking are higher than the costs of not looking—in which raising an uncomfortable truth means losing access, invitations, deal flow, and the intoxicating proximity to power. Over time, the capacity for moral perception atrophies. The network becomes self-reinforcing not through explicit agreement but through the simple mechanics of who gets invited back and who doesn’t.

Psychiatrist and large-group theorist Vamik Volkan has described how groups seeking cohesion and legitimacy construct what he calls a “chosen glory.” In his work on collective identity, chosen glories are narratives of exceptional achievement—stories a group tells about its brilliance, heroism, or civilizational importance—that bind members together while quietly defining who falls outside the circle of moral concern. Traditionally, these narratives are attached to nations or ethnic groups. In the Epstein milieu, however, the chosen glory took a modern, technocratic form: meritocratic self-congratulation. The network understood itself as a gathering of the world’s most exceptional minds—brilliant scientists, visionary financiers, world-historical problem-solvers. This shared narrative did more than flatter its participants; it organized perception itself.

The Infrastructure of Impunity

Fergus Shiel and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’s work on the 2017 Paradise Papers touched upon aspects of Epstein’s finances and off-shore structures, pointing to the second layer of the pathology: the institutional scaffolding that operationalized the network’s impunity. Evidence of this scaffolding goes back decades. The much-discussed 2008 plea deal stands as a glaring example. Negotiated by former US Attorney Alex Acosta—granting Epstein and his co-conspirators federal immunity in exchange for guilty pleas to lesser state charges—it was not merely a prosecutorial failure. It was a demonstration of how the network functions when activated. The deal shielded not just Epstein but a class of people whose exposure might have followed from a full federal prosecution. As the NPR investigation published in late February 2026 found, documents relating to allegations against President Trump were withheld from the publicly released files—a reminder that the structural protection of elite networks does not observe political party lines.

This is what Giridharadas means when he says the “clubby deal-making and moral racketeering of the Epstein class is now the United States’ governing philosophy.” The network did not merely protect one man. It demonstrated, repeatedly and across administrations, that a certain class of people could operate with a different set of consequences than everyone else. The mechanism is not primarily corruption in the transactional sense; it is something more like gravity—a constant, invisible force bending every institution, every process, every decision slightly in favor of those already closest to power.

Conclusion to Part I: The System Reveals Itself

The psychodynamic portrait that emerges from the Epstein emails is not, in the end, a portrait of monsters. In fact, that framing is precisely the misreading that elite networks depend upon. Monsters can be expelled. Systems cannot—they can only be understood and, with sufficient will, redesigned.

What Giridharadas’s analysis illuminates is that the Epstein network functioned as a nearly textbook example of what organizational theorists have long described as a pathological system: one in which the normal feedback mechanisms of accountability have been systematically disabled, in which the group’s survival instinct has been weaponized against moral reality, and in which the architecture of prestige itself becomes the primary instrument of impunity.

Understanding this is not merely an academic exercise. The same mechanics—moral disengagement, inverted solidarity, the invisible gravity of elite proximity—operate wherever concentrated power and institutional insularity combine. Yes, the Epstein network was an extreme case, but it was most certainly not a unique one.

Part II of this series turns from the psychodynamics of the network itself to its material and institutional context: the global business culture that made Epstein’s world possible, the corporate governance failures that rhyme structurally with his story, and the deeper question of what genuine accountability would actually require of us.

References

Bandura, A. Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves. Worth Publishers: 2015.

Bion, W. R. (1961/1969). Experiences in groups and other papers. Routledge.

Giridharadas, A. (2026, February 26). Epstein Class: What the files reveal about the global elite. WBUR On Point [Radio broadcast/podcast]. With Fergus Shiel. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026/02/26/epstein-class-what-the-files-reveal-about-the-global-elite

Cohen, L. H. (2026, February 24). Ill-doing is not the province of monsters. It is the province of you and me. WBUR Cognoscenti.

Fowler, S. (2026, February 24). Justice Department withheld and removed some Epstein files related to Trump. NPR.

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). https://www.icij.org

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Volkan, V. D. (2018). Blind trust: Large groups and their leaders in times of crisis and terror. Pitchstone Publishing.

In 1855 when Daniel McCallen and George Holt Henshaw created the first organisational chart, they drew it as a plant—with leaves, stems, roots, and multiple branches, all interconnected.

They had been tasked to represent the structure and dynamics of New York’s Erie Railroad Company, a large, complex and dispersed enterprise with 500 miles of track and a geographically scattered workforce of thousands.

Only a living object, they concluded, could capture the nature of the organisation in all its complexity. And thus the first organisational chart was born.

Now in 2026, organisational charts looked drastically different.

Over the past 170 plus years, McCullen and Henshaw’s impulse to render the organisation as a living thing has been blunted by the forces of rationalization. Today, an organisation is rendered more like an object or machine, void of the living pulse that permeated McCullen and Henshaw’s vision. Once a vibrant human thing, it now more closely resembles a cadaver ready for dissection and analysis—in short, for layoffs, downsizing, and restructuring.

All of this is amplified in our AI-haunted era. Plagued by anxiety over automation and loss of human agency, the modern workplace has become a pressure cooker. Leaders are asked to deliver results while holding together increasingly anxious, divided, and exhausted “systems”.

And yet, when those leaders try to understand what is happening, they rely largely on diagnostic tools designed for a different era — models that focus on structures, processes, and behaviours, while leaving aside what is hardest to see: emotion, conflict, anxiety, and the unconscious dynamics that shape collective life.

These are the questions at the heart of a new diagnostic approach developed by Prof. Dr. Claas Lahmann known as Operationalised Systems Psychodynamic Organisational Diagnostics (OSPOD) — a framework that borrows rigorously from clinical psychology and applies it to organisations as living entities.

Why Organisational Change Keeps Failing

Lahmann’s research grows out of a sobering fact about organisations: only about one in three planned change initiatives succeeds. The rest either fail outright or produce superficial compliance that evaporates over time. Employees are often labelled as “resistant,” leaders as “out of touch,” and culture as “the problem.”

But as Lahmann explains, resistance, from a psychodynamic perspective, is not irrational. It is a signal.

In clinical work, resistance points to anxiety, unresolved conflict, or threatened identity. Organisations are no different. When change provokes fear — of incompetence, loss of status, or abandonment — systems develop defences. These defences can take many forms: bureaucratic rigidity, excessive harmony, blame-shifting, silence, or passive non-compliance.

Traditional diagnostic models — such as McKinsey’s 7S framework, Weisbord’s six-box model, or the Burke-Litwin model — have been enormously influential. They offer useful ways of mapping strategy, structure, leadership, and culture. But they are largely behaviourist and rationalist at heart. They describe what is happening, not why it feels so hard to change.

In today’s environment, this limitation has become increasingly costly, which sets the stage for the development of Lahmann’s new diagnostic tool.

From the Individual to the Organisation: A Clinical Inspiration

In medicine and psychotherapy, as Lahmann points out, diagnosis is never optional. A symptom is not treated without first understanding its context, severity, and underlying causes. Importantly, many psychological conditions cannot be captured through checklists or lab values alone. They require structured conversation, careful listening, and attention to what is said — and what is avoided.

One of the most widely used diagnostic frameworks in European clinical psychology is the Operationalised Psychodynamic Diagnostics (OPD). Unlike purely classificatory systems, the OPD assesses a person across four complementary dimensions: current challenges, relational patterns, unconscious conflicts, and psychological structure. It provides a multidimensional picture that guides meaningful intervention.

The insight behind Lahmann’s OSPOD is deceptively simple: if this approach works for human beings, why not adapt it for organisations?

Introducing OSPOD: Four Axes of Organisational Life

The OSPOD translates the four axes of clinical psychodynamic diagnosis into an organisational context, integrating established organisational theory with systems-psychodynamic thinking. The result is a diagnostic framework that looks beneath surface performance issues and examines the deeper structure of organisational life.

Axis I: Organisational Framework and Socio-Technical Integration

The first axis addresses the organisation’s current challenges: what hurts, how long it has hurt, and how severe the impairment is. Importantly, it distinguishes between technical problems (systems, processes), cultural issues (values, norms), and human factors (skills, relationships).

It also examines how the organisation understands its own problems. Does it frame everything as a technical issue requiring new tools? As a people problem requiring training? Or does it see itself as a socio-technical system where structure, culture, and emotion interact?

Finally, Axis I assesses readiness for change — not as a slogan, but as a realistic appraisal of resources, barriers, and the organisation’s tolerance for discomfort.

Axis II: Internal Relational Patterns and Dynamics

If Axis I asks what is happening, Axis II asks how people relate while it is happening.

Organisations are webs of relationships. How authority is exercised, how conflict is expressed (or avoided), how care and recognition are distributed — all of this shapes outcomes more powerfully than org charts suggest.

The OSPOD uses a structured relational model to map recurring interpersonal patterns within the organisation. Are relationships characterised by excessive control or excessive avoidance? By warmth that stifles disagreement? By autonomy that slides into isolation?

These patterns are assessed not abstractly, but through concrete episodes and lived experience. Over time, they form a relational “signature” that powerfully influences decision-making and change.

Axis III: Unconscious Organisational Conflicts

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the OSPOD is its focus on unconscious organisational conflicts.

Drawing on psychodynamic theory and organisational research, the framework identifies recurring tensions such as:

• dependency versus autonomy,

• submission versus control,

• care versus self-sufficiency,

• identity coherence versus fragmentation.

These conflicts are rarely spoken about directly. Instead, they surface in repeated struggles: debates about centralisation, clashes between generations, ambivalence toward leadership, or paralysis in moments that demand decision.

Importantly, these conflicts are not pathologies. They are inherent to organisational life. Problems arise when they remain unacknowledged and acted out unconsciously.

Axis IV: Structural Capacities of the Organisation

The final axis examines the organisation’s structural “psychological” capacities: its ability to reflect on itself, regulate emotion, communicate internally and externally, form and dissolve attachments, and deploy defences flexibly rather than rigidly.

In clinical terms, this is akin to assessing psychological structure. Organisations with strong structural integration can tolerate ambiguity, hold conflict without collapse, and adapt under stress. Those with weaker integration tend to regress when pressure rises, relying on denial, blame, or rigid control.

What the Pilot Studies Revealed

Lahmann tested the OSPOD in two small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany, using a semi-structured interview format adapted from clinical practice. Interviews were conducted with senior leaders and employees, and analyses were independently rated to ensure reliability.

What emerged was striking.

In one organisation, long-standing success as a family business had created a powerful culture of care and loyalty — but also an unspoken dependency that made generational transition deeply anxiety-provoking. Employees struggled with the growing distance between leadership and workforce, while leaders underestimated the emotional impact of that distance.

In the other organisation, efforts at digital transformation triggered intense resistance that initially appeared irrational. A psychodynamic reading revealed a deeper conflict around identity and self-worth: experienced employees felt that new technologies threatened not just their skills, but their value to the organisation.

In both cases, the diagnostic process itself was experienced as meaningful. Interviewees described feeling heard, understood, and surprised by insights that traditional assessments had never surfaced.

Why This Matters Now

The timing of Lahmann’s OSPOD is not accidental.

Today’s organisations are being asked to transform continuously — while carrying unresolved emotional legacies from crises, restructurings, and rapid growth. Leaders are expected to act decisively, yet sensitively. Employees are asked to adapt, yet remain resilient.

In this context, superficial diagnostics are no longer enough.

The OSPOD does not promise quick fixes. It offers something more demanding and ultimately more valuable: understanding. By treating organisations as living systems with psychological depth, it creates the conditions for interventions that address root causes rather than symptoms.

Before launching the next transformation, perhaps it is time to ask a different question — not “What should we change?” but “What is this organisation trying, unconsciously, to protect?”

Only then can meaningful change begin.

Professor Dr. Claas Lahmann is the Medical Director of the Clinic for Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at the University Medical Center Freiburg. For more information, visit his website at: https://www.uniklinik-freiburg.de/symoa/prof-lahmann.html

His thesis, “Operationalised systems psychodynamic organisational diagnostics (OSPOD): creating a diagnostic tool for the living organisation,” was submitted in August 2023 as part of the Executive Master in Change program at INSEAD.

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New research from Wharton suggests that as artificial intelligence becomes embedded in everyday decision-making, human judgment may be quietly stepping aside — with profound consequences for business and accountability

When Goldman Sachs analysts began using AI tools to draft client memos, or when a hospital administrator in Singapore started routing triage decisions through an algorithmic system, something subtle but consequential happened: humans stopped being the primary authors of their own conclusions. They became, in a very real sense, editors — and not always critical ones.

A landmark paper from researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is now putting a name and a rigorous empirical framework to this phenomenon. Titled Thinking — Fast, Slow, and Artificial, the study by Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave introduces “Tri-System Theory,” a sweeping update to the foundational cognitive psychology model popularized by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. The research doesn’t just describe how people think alongside AI. It reveals, with striking clarity, how often they simply stop thinking at all.

Beyond Fast and Slow: Introducing System 3

For decades, Kahneman’s dual-process model has been the dominant framework for understanding human judgment. System 1, as it is known, is the fast, intuitive, gut-feel mode of thinking — the one that tells you the answer to 2+2 without effort. System 2 is slower, more deliberate, the kind of reasoning deployed when filling out a tax return or weighing competing job offers.

Enter System 3 — artificial cognition, defined as external, automated, data-driven reasoning performed by AI systems such as large language models.

System 3, in their framework, is not merely a tool like a calculator or a search engine. It is a functional cognitive agent — one that can supplement human reasoning, but also one that can quietly replace it. The researchers call the endpoint of this replacement “cognitive surrender”: the tendency for people to adopt AI-generated outputs without critical scrutiny, effectively outsourcing their judgment to a machine and then accepting its conclusions as their own.

This is distinct, they are careful to note, from using AI strategically to assist one’s thinking — a process they call “cognitive offloading,” which remains an active and deliberate form of engagement. Cognitive surrender is something more passive and more troubling: reasoning that has been vacated rather than delegated.

What the Experiments Showed

To test their theory, Shaw and Nave conducted three preregistered experiments with 1,372 participants, totaling nearly 10,000 individual reasoning trials. Participants were asked to solve problems from the Cognitive Reflection Test — a well-validated set of questions designed to distinguish intuitive, snap-judgment answers from those requiring careful deliberation. (A classic example: a bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total; the bat costs $1 more than the ball; how much does the ball cost? The intuitive but wrong answer is 10 cents; the correct answer is 5 cents.)

Some participants worked alone. Others had optional access to an AI chatbot embedded in their testing interface. Crucially, the researchers secretly manipulated the AI’s accuracy: on some questions, it gave the correct deliberative answer; on others, it confidently delivered the intuitive wrong answer.

The results were stark. Participants consulted the AI on more than half of all available trials. When they did, they followed its advice roughly 93% of the time when it was correct — and 80% of the time even when it was wrong. Accuracy soared 25 percentage points above the no-AI baseline when the AI was right, and plummeted 15 points below baseline when the AI was wrong. The researchers describe this asymmetry — the “behavioral signature of cognitive surrender” — as having a large effect size by the standards of psychology research.

Perhaps most disquieting was the confidence data. Despite the fact that approximately half of all AI outputs in the study were deliberately incorrect, participants who used the AI reported being significantly more confident in their answers than those working without it. Confidence did not meaningfully decline as faulty AI responses accumulated. People felt more certain precisely because a machine had told them they were right — even when they weren’t.

Who Surrenders, and When?

The research also mapped the individual characteristics that predict susceptibility to cognitive surrender. Those with higher trust in AI were more likely to consult it, more likely to follow its recommendations, and significantly less accurate on trials where it gave wrong answers. In contrast, participants who scored higher on “need for cognition” — a measure of how much someone enjoys effortful thinking — and those with higher fluid intelligence were better able to resist faulty AI recommendations and override them.

The studies also tested whether situational factors could dislodge this pattern. Predictably, time pressure — a 30-second countdown per question — did not eliminate cognitive surrender; it amplified it, further suppressing the deliberative checking that might otherwise catch AI errors. Performance incentives combined with real-time feedback did help, improving accuracy and increasing the rate at which participants overrode wrong AI recommendations. But even then, the gap between following correct and incorrect AI advice remained large. The surrender effect proved stubborn.

The Business Stakes

For the global business community, the implications of this research extend well beyond the laboratory.

Across industries, AI has moved from experimental curiosity to operational infrastructure. McKinsey’s 2024 global AI survey estimated that nearly three-quarters of organizations had adopted AI in at least one business function. In financial services, algorithms now participate in credit decisions, fraud detection, and portfolio management. In healthcare, diagnostic AI tools are used in radiology, pathology, and emergency triage. In law, large language models draft contracts and review documents. In each of these domains, a human is nominally “in the loop” — but Shaw and Nave’s research raises a pointed question about what that really means.

Consider the legal profession. In 2023, two New York attorneys were sanctioned after submitting court briefs containing AI-generated case citations that turned out to be entirely fictional — cases that did not exist. The lawyers had used ChatGPT to research precedent and accepted its output without independent verification. This was not a failure of intent; it was, in the language of the new research, a textbook instance of cognitive surrender. The AI was consulted, it delivered confident outputs, and human deliberation was short-circuited.

Or consider the medical context. A 2025 study cited by Shaw and Nave found that physicians who used AI-assisted colonoscopy tools showed signs of “deskilling” over time — their unaided diagnostic performance declined after repeated deference to algorithmic recommendations. This is one of the more alarming downstream implications of the theory: that cognitive surrender today may erode cognitive capacity tomorrow.

In finance, the risks are different in kind but perhaps equal in consequence. Quantitative funds have long grappled with model risk — the danger that a flawed model is trusted too completely, too uncritically, by the humans nominally overseeing it. The 2010 Flash Crash, in which automated trading systems played a factor in the brief erasure of nearly a trillion dollars of market value, is a reminder of what happens when algorithmic confidence outpaces human oversight. Tri-System Theory gives us the cognitive vocabulary to describe how such failures propagate: not through malice or incompetence, but through the natural human tendency to defer to a system that presents itself with fluency and authority.

The Design and Policy Challenge

Shaw and Nave are careful not to frame their findings as an indictment of AI adoption. Cognitive surrender, they note, is not inherently irrational. In many domains, deferring to a statistically superior system is the right move. A radiologist who follows AI guidance on a scan the model has seen a million analogues of may achieve better outcomes than one who relies solely on intuition. The problem is not AI use; it is uncalibrated AI use — the inability to distinguish contexts where System 3 deserves trust from those where it requires scrutiny.

Confidence scores, uncertainty indicators, explicit flags for low-reliability outputs — these are not cosmetic features but cognitive guardrails. An AI that tells a doctor “I am 94% confident this is benign” invites a different kind of engagement than one that simply outputs “benign.” Similarly, the study’s evidence that incentives and feedback can partially restore deliberative engagement suggests that performance management systems and accountability structures in organizations have a role to play — not in restricting AI use, but in shaping how it is used.

For policymakers, the research joins a growing body of evidence calling for AI literacy as a core competency, not a niche skill. The European Union’s AI Act, which entered into force in 2024, mandates human oversight requirements for high-risk AI applications. But legislation alone cannot substitute for the cognitive habits and institutional cultures that determine whether human oversight is genuine or ceremonial.

What We Lose When We Stop Thinking

There is a deeper question lurking beneath the empirical findings — one that the authors gesture toward in their conclusion:

The study found that people exposed to AI outputs were more confident in their answers, regardless of whether those answers were correct. This inflated confidence is not merely a statistical curiosity. In a business context, it means that leaders who defer to AI recommendations may be simultaneously less accurate and less open to challenge. Confidence, after all, is partly what earns people the authority to make and defend decisions. If that confidence is borrowed from a machine rather than earned through genuine deliberation, the accountability structures built around it become hollow.

Shaw and Nave call Tri-System Theory “a theory for an age of human-AI algorithmic cognition.” What they have built, in practice, is a diagnostic tool — a framework for asking, in any given decision, whether what looks like judgment is actually something more passive. We do not merely use AI, they write. We think with it. And increasingly, it thinks for us, while we sit back, more confident than ever, and agree.

The question facing businesses, regulators, and individuals alike is not whether to engage System 3. That ship has sailed. The question is whether, in doing so, we are doing so as active partners or as willing passengers — and whether we will know the difference when it matters most.

The research paper “Thinking — Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender” by Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave is available as a preprint via SSRN.

References

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In 2026, as companies worldwide deploy increasingly sophisticated AI systems to streamline hiring and decision-making, a quieter and more troubling pattern is emerging: algorithms trained on historical data are amplifying, rather than reducing, workplace homogeneity.

Yet algorithms are only part of the story.

Long before AI entered the workplace, humans were already drawn to what felt familiar. Again and again, leaders select colleagues who mirror their own backgrounds, assumptions, and ways of thinking — often without realizing it. Sociologists call this instinct “homophily,” or the love of the same, and its gravitational pull has proven difficult for even the most well-intentioned diversity programs and quota systems to overcome.

But what if the solution lies not in better training programs or stricter quotas, but in understanding a different kind of person altogether—leaders who possess what might be called “heterophily,” a genuine love of difference?

A psychodynamic study by INSEAD Executive Master in Change researcher Vanessa Steenkamp points to an unexpected possibility: the foundations of inclusive leadership may be laid much earlier than we assume. Many leaders who demonstrate an unusual openness to difference share a formative experience — an early encounter with “otherness” that quietly expanded their sense of self.

The Outsider’s Advantage

Vanessa Steenkamp’s research began with a simple question: Why do some leaders naturally gravitate toward diverse teams and perspectives while others, despite good intentions, consistently recreate homogeneous environments?

Working with top executives from different industries and cultures, she used an unusual methodology—asking them to draw childhood memories before conducting in-depth interviews about their leadership journeys.

The results were striking. Every participant, regardless of nationality or background, had moved frequently as a child—across cities, countries, or even continents. Each had experienced the disorienting feeling of being an outsider, of not quite fitting in. And each had developed what psychologists call “openness to experience,” a personality trait characterized by curiosity about different cultures, comfort with ambiguity, and attraction to novelty.

Another participant, raised in Africa and Europe with British nationality, remembered a formative moment at a Girl Guides event: “I saw girl guides from all over the world wearing different uniforms, speaking other languages, looking very different. It was eye-opening—there was this other world, these other girls like me but somewhere else, living very different lives and yet doing so much similar things. I think that really marked me.”

The Architecture of Inclusion

What emerged from Steenkamp’s research was a recognizable pattern. The inclusive leaders she studied didn’t just tolerate difference—they actively sought it out. Their life partners came from different nationalities or ethnicities. Their hobbies transcended cultural boundaries. Their careers zigzagged across industries and geographies in ways that mystified more conventional colleagues.

But perhaps most tellingly, when these leaders drew pictures of their childhood memories, certain elements appeared again and again: outdoor spaces and nature, bicycles and cars (symbols of independence and freedom), musical instruments, books, and—overwhelmingly—other people. Their early lives had been characterized by movement, exploration, and a persistent curiosity about what lay beyond the familiar.

This attraction to the different wasn’t superficial tourism or performative diversity. It was woven into their identities, shaped by childhoods that demanded constant adaptation. Moving frequently had forced them to develop resilience and social flexibility. Being the outsider had taught them empathy. Navigating between cultures had trained them to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously.

From Trauma to Transformation

Not all of these childhood experiences were positive. Several participants described feeling excluded, misunderstood, or judged for being different. One woman recalled the challenge of studying in a field that was 90% male. Another spoke about having to “behave more masculine” in corporate environments to be taken seriously, describing how “the entire ecosystem is built to make us think in certain ways—soap operas, movies, our families.”

A male participant noted an ironic reversal in recent years: “I married a feminist who has changed me in the sense of what’s imprinted in me. She’ll say things like, ‘Why did you draw long hair on the girls?’” He also observed that he now sometimes felt like a minority himself as organizations actively promoted more women and people of diverse ethnicities—a disorienting experience that gave him new insight into what others had long felt.

What Steenkamp’s research suggests is that these experiences of exclusion, rather than hardening these leaders against difference, had made them more committed to inclusion. Having felt what it’s like to be on the outside, they were determined to create environments where everyone could belong.

Another put it more philosophically: “Having moved so often and seen the wonderful diversity of cultures, people, ways of eating, religion—it becomes something you can’t live without. Even when I go on holiday, I’m not the one who sits by the pool and relaxes. I just want to experience what’s out there.”

The Business Case Beyond the Business Case

The executives in Steenkamp’s study weren’t naive idealists. They understood that businesses must be profitable and that inclusion initiatives face real resistance. But they had learned something that traditional diversity training often misses: diverse teams don’t just check boxes—they solve problems better.

Another made an even more direct connection to childhood experience: “Having been part of that minority ecosystem for so many years, I recognize what it will be like for others not to be included. I expect, teach, and coach people to focus outward instead of inward.”

This wasn’t about following HR mandates or avoiding lawsuits. It was about leveraging difference for competitive advantage—and about creating workplaces that reflected the complex, multicultural world these leaders had navigated since childhood.

The Heterophily Hypothesis

Steenkamp’s research introduces a provocative concept: heterophily as a learnable trait, or at least one that can be cultivated through the right experiences. While personality research suggests that openness to experience has both genetic and environmental components, her findings indicate that early exposure to diversity—particularly when it requires adaptation and resilience—can fundamentally shape how leaders approach inclusion later in life.

The model that emerges is surprisingly straightforward: Children who experience frequent moves, exposure to different languages and cultures, and the feeling of being outsiders develop comfort with the unfamiliar. This comfort translates into curiosity rather than fear when encountering difference. As adults, they naturally seek out diverse perspectives, build heterogeneous teams, and create inclusive environments—not because they’ve been trained to, but because homogeneity feels limiting and boring.

The Challenge for Organizations

If Steenkamp’s research is correct, it poses a challenge for organizations trying to develop inclusive leadership through conventional training. You can teach people to recognize bias, to use inclusive language, or to follow diverse hiring practices. But can you teach someone to genuinely love difference if they’ve spent their entire life in homogeneous environments?

The answer may lie in expanding what we consider formative experiences. Several participants noted that their leadership styles continued to evolve through their careers, influenced by partners, colleagues, clients, and the various organizational cultures they encountered. One male executive credited his feminist wife with helping him recognize unconscious biases. Others spoke about learning from joint ventures, international assignments, and cross-cultural teams.

This suggests that while childhood experiences may create a foundation for heterophily, it’s not the only pathway. Adults who deliberately seek out diverse experiences, who put themselves in situations where they’re the minority, who travel not as tourists but as learners—they too can develop the cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence that characterize inclusive leaders.

Beyond Diversity Metrics

Perhaps the most important insight from Steenkamp’s research is that truly inclusive leadership can’t be reduced to diversity metrics or compliance checklists. It emerges from a deeper place—a genuine curiosity about others, a comfort with complexity, and often, a personal history of navigating between different worlds.

“I don’t believe in diversity in the sense of ticking boxes,” one participant insisted. “I actually think about creating an inclusive community. People will say, ‘We employ disabled people’—but if they really understood our business model, they’d realize that we don’t. We actually just open the job to ‘whoever is best for the job’. On top of this, we have to deal with our clients who have their own biases.”

This leader’s comment captures a crucial tension and blind spot: even when individual leaders embrace heterophily, they operate within systems—organizational cultures, industry norms, client expectations—that often pull toward homophily, whether there is an awareness of this or not. Breaking these patterns requires not just individual transformation but systemic change.

The Path Forward

As we navigate a world where AI systems trained on historical bias threaten to amplify homogeneity, and where political polarization makes difference feel threatening rather than enriching, Steenkamp’s research offers a potential path forward. Rather than fighting against the human tendency toward homophily through mandates and metrics alone, we might focus on cultivating genuine heterophily—a love of difference that makes inclusion feel natural rather than forced.

This could mean rethinking leadership development to include more international rotations, cross-cultural assignments, and opportunities to be the outsider. It could mean valuing unconventional career paths and diverse life experiences when promoting leaders. It could mean creating space for people to share the childhood experiences that shaped their perspectives.

Most fundamentally, it means recognizing that the best leaders for our increasingly diverse, interconnected world may be those who learned early on that being different isn’t something to overcome—it’s an advantage to embrace, both in ourselves and others.

References and Further Reading

Primary Source

Steenkamp, V. (2020). A Love of the Different: How Heterophily is Cultivated in Childhood and How It Impacts the Mindset of Inclusive Leaders—A Psychodynamic Examination. INSEAD Executive Masters in Coaching and Consulting for Change thesis.

Secondary Sources

Baer, D. (2014, May 30). “If You Want to Get Hired, Act Like Your Potential Boss.” Business Insider.

Bourke, J., & Dillon, B. (2019). “The Six Signature Traits of Inclusive Leadership.” Deloitte Review, 25.

Christensen, A. P., Cotter, K. N., & Silvia, P. J. (2019). “Reopening Openness to Experience: A Network Analysis of Four Openness to Experience Inventories.” Journal of Personality Assessment, 101(6), 574–588.

Dweck, C. S. (2017). “From Needs to Goals and Representations: Foundations for a Unified Theory of Motivation, Personality, and Development.” Psychological Review, 124(6), 689–719.

Graham, L. (2013). Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being. New World Library.

Granovetter, M. S. (1973). “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.

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Hunt, V., Layton, D., & Prince, S. (2015). “Why Diversity Matters.” McKinsey & Company.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2006). The Leadership Mystique: Leading Behavior in the Human Enterprise (2nd ed.). Pearson Education.

Llopis, G. (2017, January 16). “5 Reasons Diversity and Inclusion Fails.” Forbes.

Long, S. (Ed.). (2013). Socioanalytic Methods: Discovering the Hidden in Organisations and Social Systems. Karnac Books.

Lozares, C., Verd, J. M., Cruz, I., & Barranco, O. (2014). “Homophily and Heterophily in Personal Networks: From Mutual Acquaintance to Relationship Intensity.” Quality & Quantity, 48, 2657–2670.

Mandela, N. (1995). Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Little, Brown and Company.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (2008). “The Five-Factor Theory of Personality.” In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (3rd ed., pp. 159–181). Guilford Press.

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 415–444.

Mor Barak, M. (2017). Managing Diversity: Toward a Globally Inclusive Workplace (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Rivera, L. A. (2012). “Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms.” American Sociological Review, 77(6), 999–1022.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.

Sparkman, D. J., Eidelman, S., & Blanchar, J. C. (2016). “Multicultural Experiences Reduce Prejudice Through Personality Shifts in Openness to Experience.” European Journal of Social Psychology, 46(7), 840–853.

Steele, C. M., Spencer, S. J., & Aronson, J. (2002). “Contending with Group Image: The Psychology of Stereotype and Social Identity Threat.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 34, 379–440.

Van de Loo, E. (2016). “The Art of Listening.” In M. F. R. Kets de Vries, K. Korotov, E. Florent-Treacy, & C. Rook (Eds.), Coach and Couch: The Psychology of Making Better Leaders (pp. 121–137). Palgrave Macmillan.

In the gleaming offices of Singapore’s business district, a senior executive sat across from her coach, stuck. She’d come seeking clarity about finding her voice as a female CEO in the male-dominated automotive industry. The usual coaching questions weren’t breaking through. Then her coach handed her something unexpected: a camera.

“Take 30 minutes,” he said. “Walk around and photograph whatever speaks to your feelings about this challenge. Don’t think too much. Just shoot.”

When she returned and began viewing her images on a large monitor, one photograph stopped her cold. She’d been drawn to light streaming through a circular opening—a metaphor for hope, she thought. But now, reviewing the image with her coach, she noticed something else: an exit sign in the corner of the frame.

The session’s entire direction pivoted in that moment. The real question wasn’t about finding her voice. It was whether she should stay in a toxic relationship with the company’s founder at all.

This breakthrough moment exemplifies the surprising power of what researcher, coach and consultant Darryl Chen calls “photo-coaching”—a methodology he developed and tested that’s challenging conventional approaches to leadership development in an age increasingly dominated by AI-driven solutions and efficiency metrics.

When Words Fail

Chen’s research, conducted as part of the Executive Master in Change program at INSEAD, addresses a fundamental limitation in how we typically approach personal and professional development: our reliance on verbal communication and conscious thought.

“Many coaching methods remain at a surface level without an exploration of unconscious material,” Chen writes. In other words, we’re trying to solve deep-seated challenges with the same thinking that created them.

The timing of this research feels particularly relevant today. As organizations rush to implement AI coaching tools and automated development programs—solutions that promise scale and efficiency—Chen’s work suggests we might be overlooking something essential: the messy, non-linear, deeply human process of self-discovery that can’t be reduced to an algorithm.

The hypothesis was deceptively simple:

Over nine coaching sessions with real executives facing genuine dilemmas, Chen discovered something unexpected. The camera didn’t just help people express themselves. It transformed the entire coaching process in ways that challenged prevailing theories about how personal transformation actually works.

The Camera Takes the Blame

One of Chen’s most intriguing findings centers on how participants related to the camera itself—not as a neutral tool, but as what psychoanalysts call a “transitional object.”

Think of a child’s security blanket or favorite teddy bear. These objects exist in a special psychological space: they’re separate from the child, yet they represent something deeply personal. The camera, Chen discovered, functions similarly for adults engaged in difficult self-examination.

The camera, in essence, took the blame. It absorbed participants’ performance anxiety and fear of judgment in a way that other creative methods—like drawing or sculpting—couldn’t. When asked to contrast photography with drawing, every participant favored the camera, citing phrases like “I’m not artistically inclined” or “My hand can’t do what I see in my head.”

But the camera offered something more profound than just reduced anxiety. Because it belonged to the coach—because it was external, unfamiliar, and specifically designated for this task—it created what one participant described as “a fresh pair of glasses to look at things differently.”

This externality proved crucial. In our smartphone age, where our devices feel like extensions of ourselves, the dedicated camera represented something apart from daily routine. “A camera is very distinct and purposeful for the task,” one participant explained. “You don’t have to deal with any other thing.”

The Transformative Power of Not Thinking

The second major finding challenges our culture’s obsession with conscious analysis and rational problem-solving.

Chen designed the photo-taking exercise with very specific instructions: capture images that express your feelings about your challenge, don’t look at the pictures you’re taking, don’t try to make sense of them, and resist analyzing what they might mean. Just shoot what draws you.

This deliberate suppression of conscious reflection produced remarkable results. Participants described entering states that sound remarkably like mindfulness or flow:

The neuroscience here is fascinating. When we’re consciously trying to solve a problem, we activate the same neural pathways and mental models we always use. But by photographing intuitively—following gut feelings and emotional responses without verbal analysis—participants seemed to access different forms of knowing.

“At the start it was more like a feeling kinda thing,” one participant reflected. “I guess I know that it’s really just being playful, having an open mind to explore how I feel.”

This playfulness, Chen argues, creates what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a “transitional space”—a psychological zone between inner reality and the external world where creativity and discovery become possible.

The results speak for themselves. Of the nine participants, nearly all emerged with insights dramatically different from their initial presenting issues. An executive who came asking how to balance his full-time job with a startup venture left realizing his real challenge was about blurred boundaries between friendship and business. An entrepreneur seeking career direction discovered her dilemma stemmed from childhood fears about financial security.

What the Images Revealed

Perhaps the most powerful moment in photo-coaching comes when participants return from their image-making expedition and begin viewing what they’ve captured.

Chen deliberately designed this process with careful attention to the physical setup. Images were projected on a large monitor, but the coach positioned himself facing primarily toward the client, keeping the monitor in peripheral vision. The client controlled which images to view, navigating through them on a tablet.

This arrangement matters more than it might seem. In PhotoTherapy—a related but distinct practice—therapists are warned to “keep the focus off the client and on the photo” to avoid making assumptions. But Chen’s research suggests that in coaching, the opposite approach yields better results. By maintaining primary focus on the client while using images as a catalyst, coaches can attend to something crucial: their own emotional and somatic responses to both the client and the images.

This is where Chen’s framework becomes particularly sophisticated, drawing on psychoanalytic concepts that might seem esoteric but prove remarkably practical.

In one session, a participant was exploring photos related to balancing work commitments. As they discussed three images of disconnected objects, Chen felt “a tremendous sense of guilt creeping into me.” Rather than dismissing this feeling, he shared it with his client.

The client’s response was immediate: “Yes, guilt.” The entire session pivoted to explore guilt around working with friends, boundaries, and unspoken expectations—material that hadn’t surfaced in the initial framing of the challenge.

In another session, Chen experienced a physical sensation of wanting to run out of the room—strange for him, as this wasn’t typical. Using this somatic reaction as data, he asked the client what they might be “avoiding.” After a long silence, the client admitted he hadn’t brought a real challenge but had made something up to help with the research. This breakthrough allowed them to explore the client’s actual issue: defensiveness about asking for feedback.

These examples illustrate what psychoanalysts call “projective identification”—the unconscious process by which one person’s feelings get transferred to another. Rather than seeing this as contamination of the coaching process, Chen argues it’s essential data that skilled coaches should learn to recognize and use.

Beyond the Transitional Space

Chen’s most significant theoretical contribution challenges even his own initial hypothesis.

He began with the idea that photo-coaching creates what Winnicott called a “transitional space”—a safe zone for exploration and play. This proved true. But something more was happening.

By making himself fully available—attending not just to words but to his own emotional responses, bodily sensations, and intuitive reactions—Chen found he was creating what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls a “transformational object.”

The distinction is subtle but profound. A transitional space is something you create with someone. A transformational object is something you become—a facilitating presence that enables another person’s development and growth.

“You created a safe space for me to open up,” one participant reflected. Another noted: “You have a very nice presence, you are non-judgmental, you ask probing but gentle questions.”

But participants struggled to articulate exactly what the coach did that was helpful. It wasn’t just the questions asked or techniques employed. It was a quality of presence—what Bollas describes as “countertransference readiness,” the willingness to be emotionally available and responsive to whatever emerges.

This challenges the trend toward standardized, scalable coaching interventions. If the coach’s subjective, embodied presence is essential to transformation, then automation and artificial intelligence—no matter how sophisticated—may be fundamentally limited in their ability to facilitate deep personal change.

The Framework for Practice

For coaching professionals, Chen offers a practical framework built on these insights.

The photo-coaching process unfolds in two distinct phases, each creating different psychological conditions:

Phase 1: Image-Making The camera functions as a transitional object, taking on participants’ projections and performance anxiety. The coach provides clear task boundaries (what to photograph, how long, where to go) while explicitly instructing participants not to analyze or make sense of their images. This creates conditions for intuitive, non-verbal knowing to emerge.

Phase 2: The Coaching Conversation Images become vessels for meaning-making through what psychoanalysts call “introjective processes”—the unconscious adoption of meanings and insights. But critically, the coach must attend to multiple sources of data: the client’s verbal reflections, the images themselves, and the coach’s own emotional and somatic responses.

It’s this third source—the coach’s subjective experience—that conventional training often neglects or even discourages. Yet Chen’s research suggests it’s essential. By noticing feelings of guilt, impulses to flee, physical tension, or intuitive hunches, coaches access crucial information about unconscious dynamics in the room.

The framework rests on what philosophers call “intersubjectivity”—the idea that meaning emerges not just within individuals but between them, in the space of relationship. The coach doesn’t maintain objective neutrality but rather becomes a participant in a shared process of discovery, using their own responses as legitimate data.

Implications for an AI Age

As organizations increasingly turn to technology-driven solutions for leadership development—AI coaching chatbots, automated feedback systems, algorithm-driven assessments—Chen’s research offers a counterpoint worth considering.

This doesn’t mean technology has no role. The methodology itself uses basic digital tools—a point-and-shoot camera, a tablet, a display monitor. But these tools serve human processes of meaning-making rather than replacing them.

More broadly, Chen’s work suggests that as work becomes more automated and efficiency-driven, we may need development approaches that go deeper, not shallower.

A Different Kind of Seeing

Chen’s study opens with a telling anecdote. Acquaintances looking through his vacation photos commented: “You must be a people person! Your photos are mostly of people and it captures their emotions.”

This observation sparked the research: What else can photography reveal if we allow ourselves to dig deeper?

The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. Not because cameras are magic or because images contain objective truth, but because the act of making and viewing photographs can create conditions for a different kind of seeing—one that bypasses our verbal, analytical defenses and accesses material we otherwise keep hidden, even from ourselves.

In executive coaching circles, there’s growing recognition that leadership development isn’t just about acquiring skills or changing behaviors. It’s about transformation—shifts in how people see themselves, understand their relationships, and navigate complexity.

Photo-coaching suggests one path toward that transformation, rooted not in newer technology or more sophisticated assessment tools, but in something paradoxically simpler: the willingness to play, the courage to not-know, and the radical act of paying attention to what’s actually there rather than what we think should be.

As one participant reflected at the end of their session: “The pictures are a tool, but to still have you let me engage with them in a very freestyle but non-judgmental way... it’s a tool and it cannot replace your role.”

In our rush toward automated solutions and artificial intelligence, that might be the most important lesson of all: some forms of human development can’t be outsourced to machines. They require the irreducible messiness of two people, a camera, and the willingness to see what emerges when we stop trying so hard to figure everything out.

Darryl Chen’s thesis, “Capturing the Unconscious: A Psychodynamic Lens on Using Photography in Coaching,” was submitted in June 2018 as part of the Executive Master in Change program at INSEAD.

References and Further Reading

Primary Source

Chen, D. (2018). Capturing the Unconscious: A Psychodynamic Lens on using Photography in Coaching. INSEAD Executive Master in Consulting and Coaching for Change, Wave 23, Singapore.

Key Theoretical Works Cited

On Transitional Objects and Psychoanalytic Theory:

• Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books.

• Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press.

• Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99-110.

• Bion, W. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Karnac Books.

On Photography in Research and Therapy:

• Weiser, J. (1999). PhotoTherapy Techniques (2nd ed.). Vancouver, Canada: Phototherapy Centre Press.

• Collier, J., & Collier, M. (1986). Visual Anthropology - Photography as a Research Method (Revised and Expanded ed.). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

• Harper, D. (2002). Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation. Visual Studies, 17, 13-26.

On Arts-Based Methods in Organizations:

• Barry, D., & Meisiek, S. (2010). Seeing More and Seeing Differently: Sensemaking, Mindfulness and the Workarts. Organization Studies, 31(11), 1505-1530.

• Warren, S. (2017). Photography in qualitative organizational research: conceptual, analytical and ethical issues in photo-elicitation inspired methods. In C. Cassell, A.L. Cunliffe, & G. Grandy (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Business and Management Research Methods: Methods and Challenges. SAGE.

On Countertransference and Intersubjectivity:

• Racker, H. (1968). Transference and Counter-transference. London: Karnac Books.

• Finlay, L. (2005). “Reflexive Embodied Empathy”: A Phenomenology of Participant-Researcher Intersubjectivity. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 33(4), 271-292.

Related Reading on Visual Methods

• Wang, C.C., & Burris, M.A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369-387.

• Rose, G. (2007). Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage Publications.

• Meyer, R.E., Höllerer, M.A., Jancsary, D., & van Leeuwen, T. (2013). The Visual Dimension in Organizing, Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas, Current Developments, and Promising Avenues. The Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), 489-555.

• Schaverien, J. (2005). Arts, dreams and active imagination: A post-Jungian approach to transference and the image. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 50(2), 127-153.

On Coaching and Organizational Development

• Schein, E.H. (2013). The Role of Art and the Artist. Organizational Aesthetics, 2(1), 1-4.

• Kets de Vries, M. (1991). On becoming a CEO: Transference and the addictiveness of power. In M. Kets de Vries (Ed.), Organizations on the couch: clinical perspectives on organizational behavior and change (pp. 120-139). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

In January 2026, the United Arab Emirates stands as a remarkable example of transformation in the Middle East. Women comprise 66% of the government workforce and hold positions from cabinet ministers to airline executives. These aren’t just statistics—they represent real women navigating an extraordinary moment in history, one that offers valuable insights for working women everywhere.

Sarah Al Bakeri, an Emirati HR professional, thought leader and alumna of INSEAD’s Executive Masters in Change, wanted to understand what this transformation actually feels like from the inside. As someone who has lived these changes herself, she recognized that behind every success story lies a human experience worth exploring and learning from.

Her research, involving in-depth conversations with Emirati professional women, reveals something profound: these women aren’t just adapting to change—they’re actively creating new models of leadership that integrate professional excellence with cultural authenticity and family devotion.

A Nation Writing Its Own Story

To appreciate what Emirati women are accomplishing, consider the remarkable timeline. The UAE celebrated its 50th anniversary just five years ago. This is a nation younger than many of its citizens, where grandmothers remember a time before oil transformed their world.

The late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the nation’s founding father, understood that true progress requires including everyone. “The woman is half of the society,” he declared. “Any country which pursues development should not leave her in poverty or illiteracy.”

His vision has borne fruit in ways both visible and profound. Where tradition once limited women’s roles, they now pilot commercial aircraft, engineer skyscrapers, and shape national policy.

This diversity has created something unprecedented—a laboratory for cultural integration where Emirati women are pioneering new ways to honor heritage while embracing innovation.

The Art of Integration

Through conversations with four accomplished Emirati professional women—all mothers, all in leadership roles—Al Bakeri discovered women who are masters of integration rather than compromise. These aren’t women torn between competing identities; they’re women actively creating something new.

“Everyone is expecting me to be there for them and perform 100% with no excuses,” one participant shared, describing not a burden but a testament to how much people rely on and believe in these women’s capabilities.

One vice president with six children described colleagues’ amazement at her ability to excel in both domains. Rather than viewing this as skepticism, she’s reframing it as an opportunity to demonstrate what’s possible.

These women are showing that high performance at work and deep family commitment aren’t mutually exclusive—they’re complementary expressions of the same values: dedication, excellence, and love.

Discovering the Power of Self-Care

One of the most significant shifts happening among Emirati professional women involves redefining self-care—not as selfishness, but as sustainable leadership.

When Al Bakeri asked about “me time,” many women initially struggled with the concept. “I didn’t have the awareness and the priority to look after my health,” one woman reflected, describing her past rather than her present. The shift in awareness itself represents progress.

These conversations are opening new possibilities. Women are beginning to see self-care not as a luxury but as essential maintenance that enables them to show up fully for everyone who depends on them.

Evolution of Empowerment

The UAE’s women’s empowerment initiatives have created unprecedented opportunities, and participants in Al Bakeri’s research engaged thoughtfully with how to make these even more effective.

Several women emphasized the importance of merit-based advancement. “What I appreciate is genuine empowerment,” one woman explained. “When women earn their roles through competency, everyone benefits—the women themselves, their organizations, and future generations who see authentic role models.”

The most forward-thinking participants recognized that true empowerment requires more than policy—it requires infrastructure. They’re advocating for flexible work arrangements, extended parental leave, and accessible childcare not as special accommodations but as smart organizational design that benefits all parents.

“With the right support systems,” one participant noted, “women don’t have to choose between career growth and family connection. They can excel at both.”

These women aren’t complaining about policies—they’re actively shaping the next generation of initiatives through their lived experience and advocacy.

Strength in Cultural Navigation

Being part of an expatriate-majority nation has given Emirati women a unique superpower: cultural fluency. They move seamlessly between the traditional values of their heritage, Islamic principles, modern professional standards, and diverse global perspectives.

Another woman described how exposure to diverse perspectives has enhanced her parenting and leadership: “Values started to shine in a diverse workforce system—like prioritizing picking up my kids and taking family vacations. I learned to be more intentional about what matters.”

This cultural dexterity positions Emirati women as natural global leaders who can bridge different worldviews and find common ground.

A Movement Across Generations

Al Bakeri’s personal journey illuminates the transformation underway. Her own awakening came through coaching after having three children. “I came to a personal reflection about the significance of ‘Me Time,’” she writes. Initially met with resistance, her honest conversations about stress and the need for personal space eventually won support from her family.

This breakthrough informed not just her research but her relationships. When she shared her findings with her mother and daughter, their reactions captured the intergenerational momentum building in the UAE. Her mother recognized the progress from her own era, while her daughter expressed confidence in her generation’s heightened awareness and determination.

Each generation builds on the previous one’s courage, gradually expanding what’s possible. Al Bakeri dedicated her thesis to her father, who passed away during her studies—a loss that deepened her understanding of resilience and the importance of pursuing one’s dreams despite obstacles.

Lessons for a Changing World

The UAE’s compressed timeline of change—five decades of transformation—offers the rest of the world valuable insights. These Emirati women are pioneering solutions that professional women everywhere can learn from:

Integration over balance. Rather than trying to perfectly balance competing demands, these women are finding ways to integrate their various roles into a coherent whole that honors all parts of their identity.

Cultural authenticity as strength. Maintaining strong cultural roots while embracing progress isn’t a contradiction—it’s a source of resilience and perspective.

Collective advancement. By supporting each other and advocating for systemic changes, these women are ensuring that future generations face fewer obstacles.

Redefining success. Success isn’t just about titles and salaries—it’s about living with integrity, raising thriving families, and creating positive change.

Voice and advocacy. Speaking honestly about challenges isn’t complaining—it’s the first step toward meaningful solutions.

Writing the Future

Reflecting on the purpose of her research, Al Bakeri writes:

That journey—of honoring tradition while embracing modernity, maintaining cultural identity while pursuing professional excellence, fulfilling family obligations while claiming personal space—represents a universal challenge for women worldwide, particularly in rapidly evolving societies.

The Emirati women in this research aren’t victims of impossible expectations. They’re pioneers creating new pathways, demonstrating daily that it’s possible to be fully Emirati, fully professional, fully devoted to family, and fully themselves.

Their message to women everywhere: You don’t have to choose between the different parts of who you are. The struggle to integrate them is real, but so is the possibility of success. And you don’t have to do it alone.

As we navigate 2026’s conversations about gender equality and work-life integration, these voices remind us that meaningful change happens not just in boardrooms and legislatures but in daily choices to honor our whole selves—our heritage, our ambitions, our families, and our own wellbeing.

The question isn’t whether we can have it all. It’s whether we can create societies, workplaces, and families that make integration possible rather than punishing. The Emirati women in Al Bakeri’s research are showing us it can be done. They’re not waiting for permission—they’re writing the future, one brave choice at a time.

References

Al Bakeri, S. (2023). Minority Amidst Majority: A Psychodynamic Inquiry into the Identity Challenges of Emirati Professional Women Living as a Minority Amidst a Majority of Expatriates in the UAE [Master’s thesis, INSEAD].

Al Marzouqi, A. (2011). An exploratory study of the under-representation of Emirate women in the United Arab Emirates’ information technology sector [Doctoral dissertation, Zayed University].

Alrasbi, A. N. J. B. (2017). Understanding the factors that influence Emirati women career development in higher education: Case study from United Arab Emirates [Doctoral dissertation, The British University in Dubai].

Alteneiji, E. (2023). Value changes in gender roles: Perspectives from three generations of Emirati women. Cogent Social Sciences, 9(1), 2184899.

Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority. (2020). UAE Population. https://uaestat.fcsc.gov.ae/en

Forster, N., Ebrahim, A., & Ibrahim, N. (2014). An exploratory study of work-life balance and work-family conflicts in the United Arab Emirates. Skyline Business Journal.

Hopkyns, S. L. (2017). A conflict of desires: Global English and its effects on cultural identity in the United Arab Emirates [Doctoral dissertation, University of Leicester].

Long, S. (2018). Transforming experience in organisations: A framework for organisational research and consultancy. Routledge.

Ministry of State for Federal National Council Affairs. (2009). Women in the United Arab Emirates: A Portrait of Progress. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Shaya, N., & Abu Khait, R. (2017). Feminizing leadership in the Middle East: Emirati women empowerment and leadership style. Gender in Management: An International Journal, 32(8), 590-608.

World Economic Forum. (2012). The Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013. Geneva.

World Economic Forum. (2013). The Global Competitiveness Report 2013-2014. Geneva.

In an age where anxiety rates have skyrocketed and burnout has become endemic across professions, understanding how humans perform under extreme pressure has never been more urgent. While corporate leaders navigate volatile markets and healthcare workers manage life-or-death decisions daily, one group of enthusiasts has been conducting an unwitting experiment in human psychology at 10,000 feet—paraglider pilots who launch themselves into the sky with nothing but fabric and string between them and catastrophe.

A groundbreaking study by researcher and pilot Tomoko Hoshiai suggests that what happens in the minds of these free-flyers offers profound insights not just for extreme sports, but for anyone navigating high-stakes, rapidly changing environments. And the implications reach far beyond the realm of adventure sports.

The Sport That Makes Dreams—and Nightmares—Real

Paragliding transforms an ancient human fantasy into reality. More than 128,000 licensed pilots worldwide now soar for hours without engines, reading invisible rivers of air, making split-second decisions that determine whether they climb higher into the clouds or descend rapidly toward earth. It’s a sport that delivers transcendent joy and crushing disappointment, often within the same flight.

Yet despite extensive training materials covering everything from meteorology to equipment handling, few address what might be the most critical factor in safe, successful flying: the psychological forces at work in the pilot’s mind.

“Not much is discussed in training materials about the psychological factors that can influence the pilot’s behaviors and experiences,” Hoshiai writes in her recent thesis for INSEAD’s Executive Master in Change program. “And such discussions, if any, are mainly centered around how to manage fear or human factors that can cause accidents.”

This gap in understanding struck Hoshiai as not just incomplete, but potentially dangerous. As both a researcher trained in systems-psychodynamics and a pilot with nine years of experience, she set out to explore the hidden emotional landscape of free flying—and discovered patterns that illuminate how all of us function under pressure.

The Invisible System

Hoshiai’s first revelation came from mapping what she calls the “paragliding system”—a complex web of interacting forces that pilots must navigate. Unlike the relatively stable environment of an office or hospital, this system is radically temporal and unpredictable.

Weather patterns shift by the minute. Thermals—columns of rising air that pilots use to gain altitude—appear and disappear. The physical demands change constantly. Even the pilot’s internal state fluctuates rapidly as adrenaline, fatigue, and emotion cascade through their body. Every component feeds back into every other component in an intricate dance.

Sound familiar? Replace “airspace” with “market” or “operating room” or “battlefield,” and you have a description of high-stakes decision-making in countless contexts. The business executive, the surgeon, the military commander—all operate within similarly complex, rapidly shifting systems where they serve as both participant and catalyst.

The Möbius Strip of Human Emotion

To understand what pilots actually experience in this high-wire act, Hoshiai analyzed 41 personal narratives from experienced flyers around the world, stories that ranged from transcendent adventures to near-death experiences to the aftermath of fatal accidents. She also conducted her own series of structured emotional writing exercises about her recent flights.

What emerged was startling: ten distinct emotional themes that pilots cycle through, often multiple times within a single flight.

• Curiosity and excitement about the unknown

• Fear and anxiety about threats

• Frustration and disappointment when things go wrong

• Joy and satisfaction in achievement

• A profound sense of connectedness to nature

• The raw desire to live when facing mortality

• Pride in community and belonging

• Grief and guilt over losses

• Discovery and inspiration through working through challenges, and

• Pervasive ambivalence—wanting to flee and wanting to stay, feeling confident and doubtful simultaneously.

But what proved most revealing was the relationship between these emotions.

Hoshiai proposes that pilots’ minds operate like a Möbius strip—that mathematical curiosity where one side flows seamlessly into the other in an endless loop. Positive emotions bleed into negative ones and back again, not as opposites but as part of a single, continuous experience.

This circular model challenges the typical view of emotions in our daily life, where anxiety is seen as something to eliminate and positive states become the goal. Instead, Hoshiai suggests, the tension between life-affirming and death-confronting emotions is inherent and unavoidable. The question isn’t how to escape it, but how to navigate it.

The Defenses We Build

When faced with this existential tension, the human mind does what it has always done: it deploys defenses. And this is where things get dangerous.

Through her self-reflective writing exercises, Hoshiai discovered patterns in her own flying that she hadn’t consciously recognized. She found herself gripped by competitive jealousy toward other pilots, driven by a hidden sense of inferiority. She noticed herself dissociating from obvious risks, unable to connect factual awareness with logical assessment of danger. These weren’t character flaws—they were automatic psychological mechanisms designed to protect her ego from uncomfortable truths.

One pattern revolved around what she calls “competitiveness and inferiority.” During one flight when her GPS equipment malfunctioned, instead of appreciating the experience of reaching 2,500 meters without technology, she felt only shame that others were higher. This led to an aggressive second flight where she pushed into areas she knew were risky.

“Until I did these exercises, I was not fully aware that I am this deeply governed by jealousy and competitiveness towards others due to a suppressed sense of inferiority,” she writes. The root, she discovered through deeper reflection, lay partly in experiences of being marginalized as a woman in both her business career and in flying—a smaller pilot with fewer equipment options, unconsciously projecting suppressed anger onto others.

Another pattern centered on what she terms “fate for failure”—an unconscious belief that she was destined to fail at paragliding, rooted in a teenage sports injury that ended her track and field career. This hidden conviction led her to dissociate from risks even when she intellectually recognized the danger, a defense mechanism that ironically made accidents more likely.

Writing as a Window to the Hidden Self

Hoshiai’s tool for uncovering these patterns was deceptively simple: structured expressive writing. Following established psychological research protocols, she wrote about her emotional experiences around specific flights, beginning with body awareness exercises and progressing through meaningfulness, integration, and discovery.

The benefits proved substantial. She developed an awareness of recurring emotional patterns. She surfaced difficult thoughts from her past that were unconsciously driving current behaviors. She gained new perspectives that changed how she approached flying. She learned to recognize when she was deploying maladaptive defenses.

This mirrors findings from sports psychology research showing that expressive writing helps athletes re-evaluate stressors, develop self-awareness, manage emotions, and improve performance. But it also challenges the typical approach in high-stakes environments, where emotions—especially difficult ones like fear, shame, and grief—are often seen as obstacles to be suppressed rather than resources to be understood.

Lessons for Life on the Ground

The parallels to other high-pressure contexts are unmistakable. Business leaders navigating market volatility, healthcare workers managing crises, anyone making consequential decisions in uncertain environments—all operate within complex systems where emotions run high and defensive patterns can emerge unconsciously.

Hoshiai identifies three implications from her research that extend well beyond paragliding:

First, self-awareness over ignorance. Understanding one’s hidden emotional drivers—even when they seem illogical—creates the possibility of challenging misplaced forces and gaining new insights. Awareness doesn’t solve everything, but it offers a fighting chance at more realistic decision-making and better outcomes.

Second, relationship over isolation. The emotional lives of pilots were rich with connections—to other pilots, to nature, to their own inner experience. In an era of increasing isolation and remote work, this reminder of relationship as central to wellbeing and performance feels urgent.

Third, embracing wholeness over splitting. The tendency under stress is to divide the world into all-good and all-bad, to deny the shadow side of our endeavors. But the dark side is integral to any meaningful pursuit. Acknowledging that both positive and negative aspects reside within ourselves and our work is essential before taking on any challenge.

The Moment of Truth

Perhaps most intriguingly, Hoshiai describes moments when pilots transcend the tension of the Möbius strip entirely—when they experience what she calls a “connectedness to nature” so profound that boundaries dissolve.

“Pilots can feel so tiny in front of nature, sometimes losing their sense of any separation between the internal and the external, between the positive and the negative—feeling the wholeness of universe,” she writes.

These moments of sublimation, she hypothesizes, represent what draws pilots back to the sport despite—or perhaps because of—its inherent dangers.

In one of her own writing exercises, reflecting on a calm evening flight, Hoshiai writes of “a sense of reincarnation in the universe that I am part of.” It’s the kind of statement that might seem mystical or overwrought—until you recognize it as describing something many of us seek in our own high-stakes pursuits: not just success or achievement, but a moment of feeling fully alive within systems larger than ourselves.

Coming Back to Earth

As workplace stress reaches crisis levels and the pace of change continues accelerating, Hoshiai’s research offers an unexpected gift. By studying people who voluntarily put themselves into extreme situations, she’s illuminated psychological patterns that operate in all of us under pressure—the defenses we build, the emotions we suppress, the circular tensions we navigate.

Her prescription is both simple and demanding: structured reflection, emotional awareness, and the courage to surface what we’d rather keep hidden. Not because it feels good—it often doesn’t—but because unexamined patterns can lead us into danger, whether that’s crashing a paraglider or making catastrophic decisions in other high-stakes contexts.

Today, the pilots who inspired Hoshiai’s research continue to launch themselves into uncertain skies, not despite the existential tension but because of it—seeking in that space between earth and heaven, between life and death, between fear and joy, something approaching a moment of truth about what it means to be fully human.

The rest of us, even with feet on solid ground, might have something to learn from their flight path.

References

Baikie, K. A., & Wilhelm, K. (2005). Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 11, 338-346.

Craig, A. & Miller, H. (Eds.). (2023). Head in the Clouds: The Best Stories from 50 Years of Free Flying. Lewes: Cross Country International.

Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 823-865.

Hanin, Y. L. (2000). Individual zones of optimal functioning (IZOF) model: Emotion-performance relationships in sport. In Y. L. Hanin (Ed.), Emotions in Sport (pp. 65–89). IL: Human Kinetics.

Hoshiai, T. (2024). Paraglider Pilots’ Emotional Experiences in the Flying System: A Systems-Psychodynamic Inquiry into the Hidden Source for Human Flying. [Master’s thesis, INSEAD Executive Master in Change].

Hudson, J. & Day, M. C. (2012). Athletes’ experiences of expressive writing about sports stressors. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 13, 798-806.

Milton, J., Polmear, C., & Fabricius, J. (2011). A Short Introduction to Psychoanalysis (2nd ed.). London: SAGE Publications.

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Petriglieri, G. & Petriglieri, J. L. (2020). The return of the oppressed: A systems psychodynamic approach to organization studies. The Academy of Management Annals, 14(1), 411-449.

Robazza, C., & Ruiz, M. C. (2022). Why study emotions in sport? Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 61, Article 102213.

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Senerman, R. (2022). The Reflection in the Paper: Reducing Anxiety and Increasing Self-Reflection. In E. Florent-Treacy (Ed.), Hidden Challenges Human Dynamics in Organizational Change and Recovery (pp. 131-158). NY: Business Expert Press, LLC.

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Stein, S. J. & Book, H. E. (2011). The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success (3rd ed.). Ontario: Jossey-Bass.

It starts with a simple phone call. You’ve been overcharged, a product stopped working, or a promised refund never arrived. You dial customer service, expecting help. Instead, you’re transferred three times, asked to repeat your information twice, and eventually told the agent needs to “check with their supervisor.” By the time you hang up—problem unsolved—you’re furious.

Now imagine being on the other side of that call. You’re a customer service agent in Manila or Bangalore, headset on in a room buzzing with dozens of other voices. Your performance is measured by how quickly you close tickets, not whether customers feel heard. When someone screams at you for the third time today, you have no training in handling their emotions—only a script. You’re exhausted, considering calling in sick tomorrow just to recover.

This volatile dynamic—the collision of frustrated customers and overwhelmed agents—has become a defining feature of modern commerce. In 2025, as companies increasingly rely on AI chatbots for first-line support and route only the most complex, emotional cases to human agents, understanding the psychology of these fraught interactions isn’t just important. It’s urgent.

A groundbreaking study by INSEAD Executive Master in Change researcher Sudhir Sharma, who interviewed both customers and support agents about their most difficult interactions, reveals why customer service calls can go wrong—and what companies are fundamentally misunderstanding about quality support. The findings suggest that while businesses obsess over metrics like call resolution time and customer satisfaction scores, they’re missing the deeper psychological dynamics that determine whether an interaction succeeds or explodes.

The $11 Billion Problem

The stakes are staggering. In Singapore alone, businesses lose $11 billion annually due to poor customer service. Globally, the numbers are astronomical. According to research firm Gartner, 89% of companies now compete primarily on customer experience—yet most are failing at the most basic level: the human interaction.

The consequences extend beyond lost revenue. In extreme cases, customer grievances have turned violent. In 2018, a woman who believed YouTube was suppressing her videos opened fire at the company’s headquarters, wounding several people before taking her own life. In 2017, a passenger dragged from an overbooked United Airlines flight sparked international outrage, costing the company millions in settlements and brand damage.

These dramatic incidents represent the far end of a spectrum that includes millions of daily interactions where customers feel dismissed, agents feel attacked, and companies wonder why their satisfaction scores keep dropping despite investments in “customer-centric” policies.

The Listening Gap

When Sharma asked customers to describe their worst support experiences, a consistent theme emerged: they didn’t feel heard.

Another described calling with multiple issues, getting one addressed, then watching the agent prepare to hang up without asking about the others. “I had to interrupt and remind them I called about three things.”

These aren’t edge cases. They represent a fundamental breakdown in what psychologists call “active listening”—the practice of not just hearing words, but understanding meaning and demonstrating that understanding back to the speaker.

The problem isn’t that agents can’t hear. It’s that they’re not trained—or empowered—to truly listen. Most receive extensive technical training but almost no instruction in emotional intelligence or managing their own feelings when confronted with an angry customer.

“I don’t know how to deal with an angry customer, other than just to say ‘please maintain the decorum’ of this discussion,” one agent admitted. “For any aggressive customer interaction, we add details in a document, but don’t know what happens next.”

The Factory Floor

To understand why this gap exists, consider the typical customer service environment. Multiple agents described their workplaces as resembling factory floors—dozens of voices speaking different languages, background noise constant, every word recorded and potentially reviewed in team meetings to “point out mistakes.”

Agents work from scripts, have limited autonomy to make decisions, and must frequently say “Let me check with my supervisor.” Their performance is judged primarily on quantitative metrics: how many cases they handle (called “utilization”), how fast they respond, and their resolution rate.

This creates what psychologists call a “hostile holding environment”—the opposite of the safe, supportive space needed for productive communication. Rather than feeling empowered to solve problems creatively, agents feel surveilled and constrained.

The emotional toll is severe. Agents described feeling “tense” when tickets remained open in their queue, “burned out” after dealing with hostile customers, and sometimes calling in sick just to recover from particularly stressful interactions. Industry research shows a direct correlation between frequency of angry customer encounters and agent burnout.

What Customers Really Want

Sharma’s research identified a hierarchy of customer needs that extends far beyond simply getting their problem fixed. While resolution matters, customers also want:

Empathy: Not just sympathy, but genuine understanding of their situation. When an agent puts themselves in the customer’s shoes and demonstrates that understanding through words and tone, customers feel valued.

Control: Customers want to feel they have some influence over the outcome. Being told “this can’t be done” without explanation or alternatives triggers feelings of powerlessness.

Transparency: Customers want to know what’s happening and why. Being put on hold without explanation or promised a callback that never comes violates trust.

Recognition: Customers want to feel their business matters. Being treated as “just another ticket” breeds resentment.

Honesty: Customers prefer difficult truths over convenient lies. “The agent outright said ‘this can’t be done,’” one customer recalled. “After I spoke with them for five minutes, they agreed that it’s a simple thing, and apologized for being negative earlier.”

The Quality Paradox

Here’s where it gets interesting: companies think they’re measuring quality, but they’re often measuring the wrong things.

Most organizations use Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores—typically a five-point scale from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied.” But Sharma’s research reveals critical flaws in how these scores are collected and interpreted.

First, companies often focus on “top box scores”—the percentage of customers rating service “very satisfied” or “satisfied.” This approach lumps together genuinely delighted customers with those who were merely adequate experiences. More importantly, it loses valuable data from the “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied” group and everyone below.

“These are usually considered as ‘Users being Not Happy Users’ even after we try to help them,” one agent explained. The company writes them off rather than investigating what went wrong.

Second, surveys are supposed to reach random customers, but agents admitted they often ask their “favorite clients” during calls if they would complete the survey, thus skewing results toward positive responses and missing feedback from genuinely unhappy customers.

Third, when companies do audit interactions for quality, they weight factors bizarrely. In one quality framework Sharma examined, attributes like “acknowledging the issue,” “reassurance,” “clear explanations,” and “communication style” received only 20% of the total quality score—categorized as “not critical.”

Meanwhile, 40% of the score came from “customer critical” factors like avoiding making customers repeat information and resolving issues quickly. Another 20% covered “compliance critical” items like authentication and protecting personally identifiable information.

While speed and legal compliance matter, this weighting ignores the emotional dimensions that determine whether customers feel satisfied or enraged. An agent can check all the boxes—resolve quickly, follow authentication protocols, document everything—and still leave a customer furious because they felt dismissed or condescended to.

The Psychology of the Space Between

What Sharma found most fascinating was exploring the psychological “space” that forms between customer and agent during an interaction—what psychodynamic theory calls a “holding environment.”

Imagine two strangers who’ve never met, will likely never meet again, and know nothing about each other’s backgrounds, stresses, or emotional needs. One is dealing with a problem—possibly the latest in a series of frustrations. The other is doing a job—possibly their thirtieth call of the day.

For this interaction to succeed, someone needs to create safety. The customer needs to feel they can express their frustration without being dismissed. The agent needs to feel they can acknowledge limitations without being abused. Both need to trust that the other is acting in good faith.

“Understanding customer wants and needs can help create positive customer experiences,” Sharma writes. But this understanding requires something most organizations don’t provide: training in emotional regulation, empathy, and the ability to understand that other people have different mental states, beliefs, and perspectives than our own.

When this holding environment collapses—when the customer feels unheard or the agent feels attacked—both parties activate defense mechanisms. Customers become aggressive: demanding supervisors, threatening legal action, using profanity, refusing to hang up. Agents become defensive: falling back on scripts, passing the buck, or simply shutting down emotionally.

Reframing Complaints as Gifts

Perhaps Sharma’s most counterintuitive finding is his suggestion that companies completely reframe how they think about complaints.

“When we think about complaints, we think about conflict, things being unsatisfactory, unacceptable,” he writes. But what if complaints are actually opportunities—signals that a customer cares enough to give the company another chance?

This perspective shift requires cultural change. Currently, when customers complain, agents often feel defensive. Organizations treat complaints as problems to be minimized rather than intelligence to be valued. Quality auditors mark down agents for generating complaints rather than praising them for surfacing issues.

But if companies truly believed complaints were gifts—rare opportunities to identify problems before customers simply leave—they would approach these interactions completely differently. They would train agents in how to welcome difficult feedback. They would reward employees who successfully convert angry customers into satisfied ones. They would analyze complaint patterns to fix systemic issues.

A Framework for Better Interactions

Based on his research, Sharma proposes a framework for handling difficult customer interactions that prioritizes psychology over productivity:

Listen without interrupting: Practice active listening. Let customers fully express themselves before responding. Write everything down so they don’t have to repeat it.

Don’t get defensive: Even if you disagree with their position, expressing understanding of why they feel that way helps resolve conflict. Use a calm, low tone of voice.

Use positive framing: Instead of starting with “unfortunately,” try “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I’m sure we can work something out. I’m sorry there’s a problem.”

Express genuine empathy: Create real connection by recognizing that the customer’s experience is as rich and detailed as your own.

Ask questions: Once emotions calm down, summarize your understanding and use open-ended questions. Confirm you understand the exact problem before proposing solutions.

Find out what they want: Don’t assume. Ask customers what resolution looks like to them. Put them back in control.

Explain what you can do: If you can’t solve the problem immediately, discuss alternatives and educate the customer. Be transparent about what will be done, when, by whom, and how.

Take action immediately: Timeliness is critical. Keep customers updated if plans change. Keep your word.

Follow up: Don’t leave resolution to chance. Confirm they’re satisfied. Document what happened for organizational learning.

This framework sounds simple, but it requires something most organizations don’t currently provide: the time, autonomy, and training for agents to operate this way.

The Path Forward

As artificial intelligence increasingly handles routine customer service tasks, the interactions that reach human agents will skew toward the complex and emotional. This makes understanding the psychology of these encounters more critical, not less.

“Support agents take care of customers, and organizations need to take care of their agents by enabling holding environments,” Sharma concludes. Organizations must create conditions where agents feel supported enough to provide genuine emotional support to customers.

This means:

• Training agents not just in technical troubleshooting but in emotional intelligence, active listening, and de-escalation

• Giving agents autonomy to make decisions and go beyond scripts

• Rewarding quality of interaction, not just speed

• Creating quiet, focused work environments rather than “factory floors”

• Providing mental health support for agents dealing with regular verbal abuse

• Viewing complaints as valuable intelligence rather than failures

• Measuring success by whether customers feel heard, not just whether tickets close quickly

The current system treats customer service as a cost center to be minimized through efficiency and automation. But Sharma’s research suggests a different model: customer service as a relationship-building opportunity, where the quality of human connection during difficult moments determines whether customers become loyal advocates or vengeful critics.

In a world where products are increasingly commodified and competition is a click away, that human connection might be the only sustainable competitive advantage left.

“Customers are humans. Humans want to be heard,” Sharma writes. “Not listening to the customer, or not providing customers the right environment to share what they want, and to not acknowledge the requests are the primary reasons for the customer’s dissatisfaction.”

That’s not a customer service strategy. It’s a human one.

References

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In the past few years, workplaces have absorbed shocks that once seemed unimaginable. A global pandemic normalized daily death counts on the evening news. Wars returned to Europe and the Middle East with brutal visibility. Mass layoffs arrived at by algorithm, not conversation. Artificial intelligence accelerated work while hollowing out old certainties about identity and purpose. In many organizations, employees are being asked—implicitly or explicitly—to bring their “whole selves” to work, while simultaneously being expected to remain endlessly productive, resilient, and emotionally contained.

Against this backdrop, a quieter crisis unfolds every day inside offices, factories, hospitals, and Zoom calls. Someone returns to work only a few days after burying a partner, a child, or a parent—unless they call in sick, citing depression or another reason. Once back at work, their calendar fills again. Meetings resume. Messages pile up. Nothing is said. Everyone notices. No one speaks.

This is the world of hidden grief at work—a phenomenon that affects nearly everyone, yet remains largely unacknowledged. A study conducted by INSEAD Executive Master in Change researcher Clemente Pinedo entitled The Impact of Hidden Grief on Organizations offers a rare and unsettling look inside this silence. Drawing on in-depth interviews with bereaved employees and their managers, Pinedo’s research exposes not only the human cost of ignoring grief, but also the unconscious forces that drive organizations to look away.

Grief is everywhere—and nowhere

Death is the only certainty of life, yet modern Western workplaces behave as if grief were an anomaly rather than an inevitability. Research consistently shows that almost every employee will experience the death of a close family member during their working life. Still, grief is treated as a private disruption—something to be managed quickly and discreetly, preferably outside office hours.

Most bereavement policies reflect this mindset. In the United States and much of Europe, employees are typically granted three to five days of paid leave after the death of a close relative. These days are usually sufficient to arrange a funeral—but not to grieve. Psychological research suggests that mourning often unfolds over months or years, not days. Yet the unspoken organizational message is clear: take care of it quickly, then come back as before.

The result is a growing population of employees who are physically present at work but psychologically elsewhere—exhausted, distracted, emotionally raw. Economists call this “presenteeism.” Colleagues sense it. Managers struggle with it. Organizations pay for it. And still, the subject remains taboo.

Listening to the bereaved—and those around them

Against this backdrop in which discussions of death and bereavement taboo, Pinedo’s study took an unusual approach. Rather than surveying HR policies or analyzing productivity metrics alone, it listens carefully to lived experience. Pinedo conducted 18 in-depth interviews: nine with employees who had lost a partner, child, or parent, and nine with their managers or close coworkers.

What emerged were five recurring themes that illuminate how grief actually plays out inside organizations.

1. Work as therapy—and as refuge

For many bereaved employees, returning to work serves as an anchor. Several interviewees used this exact word. Work provided structure when everything else felt chaotic. It offered distraction from the loneliness of home, a reason to get out of bed, and sometimes a sense of competence when life elsewhere felt shattered.

“I needed something predictable,” one participant explained. “Otherwise I would just be floating.”

But this apparent functionality can be misleading. From a psychodynamic perspective, work-as-anchor can also operate as a defense—a way of postponing the full emotional impact of loss. By immersing themselves in tasks, deadlines, or responsibility, employees may delay confronting grief rather than integrating it.

Organizations often welcome this behavior, interpreting it as resilience or commitment. In reality, it can mask deeper distress that resurfaces later—sometimes as burnout, disengagement, or sudden exit.

2. Two realities, one return to work

A striking finding of the study is how differently the same return-to-work experience is perceived by bereaved employees and by their managers.

Many employees believed they were functioning reasonably well within weeks. Managers and coworkers, however, often described a much longer period of reduced capacity—four, six, even nine months before full effectiveness returned.

This mismatch is not simply about memory or performance metrics. Psychologically, grief disrupts self-perception. When people are operating at 30 percent of their usual capacity, but giving everything they have, it feels like 100 percent. Effort replaces outcome as the internal yardstick.

Without open conversation, these parallel realities remain unexamined, breeding frustration, guilt, or silent judgment on both sides.

3. The elephant in the room

Nearly every interview touched on the same phenomenon: silence.

Colleagues avoided mentioning the death for fear of saying the wrong thing. Managers worried about triggering emotion they didn’t know how to contain. Bereaved employees themselves often chose not to speak, afraid of appearing weak, unprofessional, or burdensome. Some of them, when they did speak, did not display any emotion or empathy after a while, as if they felt compelled to show that life must gone on.

The result is what organizational psychologists call the “elephant in the room”: a shared awareness of something important that no one names. This silence is not neutral. It is actively stressful. It forces grieving employees to manage not only their loss, but also the emotional comfort of those around them.

From a systems psychodynamic perspective, this avoidance functions as a social defense. By not talking about death, organizations protect themselves from anxiety, vulnerability, and the fear of emotional contagion—at the cost of genuine support.

4. Grief changes leaders

One of the most unexpected findings of the research is how often deep loss reshaped people into better leaders.

Managers who had experienced bereavement described becoming more patient, empathetic, and emotionally available. Coworkers noticed increased maturity, clarity, and resilience. In some cases, grief accelerated the development of human skills that improved their leadership capability rather than derailing it.

This aligns with broader research on post-traumatic growth. When loss is acknowledged and integrated—rather than suppressed—it can deepen self-awareness and emotional intelligence. Organizations that support employees through grief may ultimately benefit from these transformations.

But this potential is fragile. Without support, grief can just as easily erode confidence, trust, and engagement. It can also decrease talent retention.

5. The missing protocols

Perhaps the most telling finding is what didn’t exist in any of the organizations studied: clear grief protocols.

Managers of the bereavers were left to improvise. Some responded with compassion and flexibility. Others defaulted to silence or rigid expectations. Employees described this as a lottery: support depended entirely on who your manager happened to be and their emotional capability.

Several participants warned that “common sense” is not enough. Untrained responses—however well intentioned—can unintentionally harm. Yet few organizations provide training on how to support grieving employees, despite branding themselves as “people-centered.”

A notable exception is the pioneering work of INSEAD, which has recently launched the first Compassionate Protocols in Europe, a programme that was supported by Clemente Pinedo’s expertise.

Why organizations look away

If grief is universal, and its costs are well documented, why do organizations continue to avoid it?

The answer may lie beneath the surface. Psychodynamically, grief confronts organizations with everything they try to deny: vulnerability, dependency, loss of control, and the limits of productivity. Acknowledging grief risks slowing down, softening boundaries, and admitting that human beings cannot always perform on command.

Silence becomes a form of protection—not just for individuals, but for the system itself.

Yet this protection is illusory. Studies estimate that unaddressed grief costs organizations tens of billions of dollars annually through presenteeism, absenteeism, turnover, and disengagement. More importantly, it corrodes trust. Employees remember how they were treated when they were most vulnerable.

What a grief-literate workplace looks like

The research does not argue for endless leave or lowered standards. Instead, it points toward something more subtle—and more powerful: normalization.

Grief-literate organizations recognize that loss is part of working life. They equip managers with language, not scripts. They allow flexibility without stigma. They check in over time, not just once. They make it permissible to say, “This is hard.”

Such workplaces do not collapse under emotion. They become more resilient precisely because they can hold it.

The human future of work

As work accelerates and technology reshapes how we live and labor, the temptation to treat grief as an inconvenience will only grow. But the evidence is clear: ignoring loss does not make it disappear. It drives it underground, where it quietly drains energy, meaning, and connection.

The question facing organizations today is not whether grief belongs at work. It already does.

The real question is whether leaders are willing to see it—and what kind of workplaces we want to build if they do.

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On a February evening in 2011, as millions of Egyptians watched their president of three decades step down, the streets erupted in celebration. Then they fell quiet. In that stillness, another story was born: one not of politics, but of psychology—of confusion, loss, and the collective anxiety that follows when long-standing authority suddenly vanishes.

For INSEAD Executive Master in Change researcher Ahmed El-Orabi, who participated in the Arab Spring protests, Egypt’s revolution offers more than a historical turning point. It reveals what happens when leadership itself collapses—when the figure that once contained a society’s fears and hopes abruptly disappears. His study of that psychological unravelling exposes dynamics that reach far beyond Egypt, offering powerful insights into how organizations and institutions everywhere respond when the structures that hold them steady begin to fall away.

The Hidden Function of Leadership

In the years that followed Mubarak's fall, El-Orabi started to discern something others had missed: leadership provides more than strategic direction or organizational control. It serves a subtler—and often overlooked—function: acting as a psychological container for collective anxiety.

Think of leadership as a vessel built to hold uncertainty. At its best, it absorbs the tensions, fears, and contradictions that would otherwise overwhelm a group. But when that vessel cracks or disappears, the contents spill out in unpredictable ways. The anxiety once contained by authority becomes free-floating, seeking new targets and defenses.

It is this very dynamic that El-Orabi’s research into post-revolutionary Egypt—conducted through in-depth interviews with ten Egyptians of varying ages and perspectives—reveals with striking clarity.

As his work elucidates, when President Hosni Mubarak resigned in 2011 after 30 years in power, Egypt didn’t simply experience a political transition. It underwent what the research identifies as a “disruption of containing structures” that unleashed cascading psychological responses still reverberating today. This was described vividly in the words of his interview participants:

These weren’t merely political opinions. They were visceral psychological responses to the sudden absence of a structure that, however imperfect or even oppressive, had provided a form of psychological containment for an entire society.

The Anxiety Cascade

When leadership vanishes, anxiety doesn’t simply increase—it transforms. El-Orabi’s research identifies what might be called an “anxiety cascade,” where the absence of containment triggers increasingly primitive psychological responses.

First comes free-floating anxiety: a generalized unease without clear object or solution. “How long will it take for life to return to normal, regardless of how events unfold?” one participant remembered thinking. “I longed for stability to return in the blink of an eye.”

This anxiety manifests across multiple dimensions simultaneously. Economic concerns intensify—not just rational worries about markets or employment, but deeper fears about survival and security. One younger participant described how “my emotions were deeply shaped by my father, who was profoundly distressed by how things had turned out—the economic stagnation and the sudden halt of all our business ventures.”

But the most profound dimension is existential: Who are we now? What do we stand for? As one 44-year-old Egyptian put it:

Crucially, this anxiety doesn’t respect geographical boundaries. Egyptians living abroad—physically removed from day-to-day upheaval—reported intense distress. One participant working in Germany described being “solely focused on my professional future” there, yet unable to return to Egypt “until I have achieved all my dreams.” The leadership vacuum created psychological displacement even across continents.

The Defense Mechanisms Emerge

Organizations—whether corporations, institutions, or entire societies—don’t passively absorb anxiety. They develop defense mechanisms to protect against overwhelming psychological pain. El-Orabi’s research identified five primary defenses that emerged in response to Egypt’s leadership vacuum, each with striking parallels to organizational behavior elsewhere.

1—Avoidance and Psychological Exile

The most visible defense was withdrawal—both physical and emotional. Younger, educated Egyptians emigrated in significant numbers. “I’m 29 years old, and I’ve had to leave Egypt, forced out by the harsh reality we live in,” one participant explained. “Do you really think I would have walked away from my homeland if the revolution had brought us the justice and dignity we longed for?”

But psychological exile extended beyond literal departure. Others described emotional numbing: “I don’t feel anything—perhaps I’m just indifferent,” said a 36-year-old engineer. This indifference served a protective function, reducing anxiety by dampening responsiveness to threatening realities.

In corporate contexts, we see similar patterns after sudden leadership departures: talented employees leave for competitors; those who remain become emotionally detached, going through motions without genuine engagement. The avoidance protects against disappointment but simultaneously prevents the processing necessary for renewal.

2—Splitting: The World Divided

Perhaps the most psychologically primitive defense is splitting—dividing reality into absolute categories of all-good and all-bad. Unable to hold complexity, groups regress to stark either-or thinking.

The Egyptian experience revealed this dramatically. Those who initially celebrated Mubarak’s removal later idealized his era: “The days of Hosni Mubarak were truly irreplaceable!” one participant declared. Another, who had supported the revolution, later reflected: “I now think our judgment of Hosni Mubarak was unfair to a great extent.”

Organizations undergoing leadership transitions often exhibit similar patterns. The departed leader becomes either villain or martyr. The successor is either savior or imposter. Nuanced assessment becomes psychologically impossible because it would require holding painful contradictions without a containing structure to process them.

3—Idealization: The Perfect Past and Perfect Future

Closely related to splitting is idealization—the creation of flawless mental objects that provide psychological refuge from messy reality. In Egypt, this took two forms: idealization of the pharaonic past and fantasies of perfect future leadership.

Participants consistently referenced Egypt’s ancient civilization—”the cradle of civilization and the source of culture, arts, and architecture,” as one put it. Several drew pyramids when asked to visually represent Egyptian identity, rendered as geometrically perfect forms without wear or damage. This defensive idealization transformed historical monuments into psychological resources that maintained self-esteem when contemporary achievements seemed lacking.

Future leadership received similar treatment. Participants described ideal leaders who would be simultaneously strong yet compassionate, decisive yet consultative, authoritative yet collaborative—a combination of contradictory qualities no actual human could embody.

The corporate parallel is striking. In the absence of stable leadership, organizations often idealize either their past (”we need to return to our roots”) or their future (”we need a visionary who will transform everything”), rather than engaging with present realities.

4—Rationalization—Making Sense of Disappointment

When reality becomes too painful, groups develop sophisticated intellectual explanations that provide distance from emotional truth. Egyptian participants offered elaborate rationalizations for their nation’s difficulties: the people weren’t ready for democracy; fourteen years of instability inevitably produces economic problems; external forces conspired against change. One participant sought to explain Egypt’s struggles in this manner:

These rationalizations weren’t necessarily false. They provided logical frameworks that made disappointment comprehensible. But they also served a defensive function: protecting against the more threatening acknowledgment that the leadership vacuum had triggered forces beyond anyone’s control or understanding.

Organizations do this constantly. When leadership transitions fail, we attribute outcomes to “cultural fit” issues, “market conditions,” or “timing”—explanations that provide intellectual comfort while avoiding deeper psychological truths about collective anxiety and defense mechanisms.

5—Projection: Externalizing Internal Conflict

The fifth major defense mechanism involves projecting internal conflicts onto external entities. In Egypt, state-controlled media became a primary recipient of such projections. Participants consistently identified media as manipulative, distorting, deceptive—qualities that might equally describe the psychological processes within themselves.

While media certainly shaped perceptions, the intensity of these attributions suggests projection: the external media became a container for awareness of internal psychological manipulation and self-deception that individuals found too threatening to acknowledge directly.

The Double Bind of Leadership Expectations

Perhaps the most fascinating finding from El-Orabi’s research concerns what he identifies as “the double bind of Egyptian leadership”—a set of mutually contradictory expectations that makes any actual leadership inevitably disappointing.

Egyptians expressed desires for leadership that was simultaneously:

• Strong yet gentle

• Decisive yet consultative

• Like a protective father yet promoting independence

• Embodied in a charismatic individual yet embedded in systematic structures

• Firm in maintaining order yet flexible in allowing freedom

As one participant explained, capturing the essential contradiction:”My vision of leadership is one of decisiveness, strength, and clear vision—but above all, it is about being human.”

The visual representations participants created revealed this bind even more clearly. Some drew triangular hierarchies representing top-down authority alongside circular diagrams representing collaborative leadership—competing models that couldn’t be reconciled verbally but could somehow coexist visually in the same drawing.

This isn’t unique to Egypt. Organizations everywhere demand leaders who are simultaneously visionary and pragmatic, inspiring and realistic, transformational and stable. We want leaders who take bold risks without making mistakes, who are confident without being arrogant, who are strong without being inflexible. These contradictory expectations guarantee disappointment because no actual human can fulfill them.

The leadership vacuum intensifies this bind. In the absence of real leadership serving a containing function, fantasies of perfect leadership proliferate, unchecked by reality. The ideal leader becomes increasingly heroic, increasingly impossible—which paradoxically makes it easier to accept inadequate leadership, since no alternative could meet the inflated expectations.

The Identity Crisis

The research reveals another crucial dynamic: leadership vacuum doesn’t just create anxiety about the future—it fractures identity in the present. When asked about Egyptian identity, participants expressed what El-Orabi terms a “quaternary structure” involving four elements in perpetual tension:

Historical Greatness: Pride in pharaonic civilization and ancient achievements—”a civilization whose mysteries modern science has yet to fully unravel.”

Religious and Moral Values: Ethical foundations rooted in faith—”religion and humanity’s relationship with the Supreme Creator—a relationship that is fundamentally based on morality and self-discipline.”

Modern Aspirations: Desire for contemporary recognition—”The world should respect us, listen to us, and recognize our role in shaping the outcomes of the modern world.”

Resilience and Endurance: Capacity to persist through hardship—”the unbreakable spirit that rises through every hardship—it is a resilience that is etched into our very being.”

Without integrative leadership, these elements remain fragmented, activated defensively rather than synthesized coherently. Historical greatness gets emphasized when present achievement seems lacking. Religious values get invoked when moral decay is perceived. Modern aspirations emerge when comparing unfavorably with developed nations. Resilience gets referenced when acknowledging hardship.

Organizations face similar identity fragmentations during leadership vacuums. Different elements of organizational culture—innovation versus stability, customer focus versus operational excellence, growth versus profitability—pull in competing directions without leadership to create synthesis. Teams defend their particular piece of identity while the coherent organizational self disintegrates.

The Transgenerational Dimension

One of El-Orabi’s most psychologically sophisticated findings concerns how responses to leadership vacuum get transmitted across generations, creating patterns that repeat despite changed circumstances.

Multiple participants described how their attitudes toward the revolution were shaped by parental responses.

But the transgenerational pattern extended further. Participants described how their parents’ relationships with earlier leaders followed consistent patterns: initial support, then disillusionment, then retrospective idealization. Gamal Abdel Nasser was embraced, then rejected after military defeat, then partially rehabilitated. Anwar Sadat was disdained, then admired after military victory, then criticized for peace agreements. Hosni Mubarak was accepted, then overthrown, then nostalgically recalled.

This creates what psychoanalysts call a “repetition compulsion”—unconsciously recreating familiar patterns despite painful consequences. Societies, like individuals, repeat unprocessed traumas across generations. Without psychological working-through, each new leadership transition triggers the same cycle: idealization, disappointment, splitting, and defensive withdrawal.

Organizations exhibit similar patterns. Companies that experienced traumatic leadership failures often unconsciously recreate similar dynamics decades later with different actors. The scripts persist beneath conscious awareness, transmitted through organizational culture and informal mentorship even as formal structures change.

Implications for Organizations

What does Egypt’s experience teach us about leadership vacuum in organizational contexts?

First, recognize the containing function of leadership. We often focus on leadership’s strategic, operational, or inspirational roles while overlooking its psychological function: providing a container that processes collective anxiety. When evaluating leadership or planning succession, this containing capacity deserves explicit consideration.

Second, anticipate defense mechanisms during transitions. Leadership changes will trigger psychological defenses—avoidance, splitting, idealization, rationalization, projection. Rather than being surprised or judgmental, organizations can recognize these as predictable responses to anxiety and create structures to work with rather than against them.

Third, provide transitional containment. The most dangerous period is the interim between leadership departures and arrivals. Organizations need explicit mechanisms—whether interim leaders, advisory councils, or structured processes—that provide containing functions during transitions. Without these, primitive defenses proliferate.

Fourth, address transgenerational patterns. Organizations carry unconscious memories of past leadership traumas. Before major transitions, it’s worth explicitly examining historical patterns: How have previous leadership changes unfolded? What unprocessed disappointments linger? What scripts might unconsciously repeat?

Fifth, resist the double bind. Leadership expectations often become impossible during vacuums. Organizations can consciously identify contradictory demands and choose which to prioritize rather than expecting any leader to fulfill all competing desires simultaneously.

Sixth, support identity integration. Leadership transitions threaten organizational identity. Rather than allowing fragmentation into competing camps or nostalgic versus progressive factions, create processes that help integrate diverse elements into coherent wholes.

Finally, enable collective mourning. Transitions involve loss—of familiar arrangements, expectations, relationships. Without space for genuine mourning, unprocessed grief converts into depression or manic denial. Organizations that create ritual space for acknowledging loss navigate transitions more successfully than those that suppress grief in favor of forced optimism.

The Path Forward

El-Orabi’s research doesn’t merely diagnose problems—it suggests pathways toward healing and integration. The key insight is that transformation requires psychological work, not just structural reform.

For Egypt, this means creating spaces for collective processing of revolutionary trauma, developing leadership models that balance containment with participation, activating resilience as a bridge between historical pride and contemporary challenges, and supporting media literacy that helps citizens recognize defensive patterns in collective narratives.

For organizations, similar principles apply. Leadership development must address emotional intelligence and anxiety containment, not just strategic thinking. Organizational culture work must include processing historical traumas, not just defining aspirational values. Change management must account for psychological defenses, not just rational resistance.

The research identifies resilience as particularly crucial—not merely individual fortitude but collective capacity to maintain coherence amid disruption. In Egypt, participants described resilience as “etched into our very being”—an enduring resource that persists even when other structures fail. Organizations likewise possess resilience that leadership transitions can either activate or undermine, depending on how consciously these dynamics are addressed.

Conclusion: The Universal in the Particular

Egypt’s post-revolutionary experience might seem distant from corporate boardrooms or institutional leadership transitions in stable democracies. Yet the psychological dynamics El-Orabi identified operate universally wherever leadership provides—and then withdraws—its containing function.

Whether it’s a CEO’s sudden departure, a beloved founder’s retirement, a department head’s resignation, or a political leader’s fall, the same cascade unfolds: anxiety emerges, defenses activate, identity fragments, and transgenerational patterns reassert themselves. The scale differs, but the mechanisms remain remarkably consistent.

The crucial insight is that leadership’s psychological function—providing containment for collective anxiety—is not optional or supplementary. It’s fundamental. When that function disappears, groups don’t simply experience logistical challenges or strategic uncertainty. They undergo psychological regression that can persist for years or even generations without conscious intervention.

But recognition opens possibility. Organizations that understand these dynamics can prepare for them, work with them, and ultimately transform anxiety-driven defenses into opportunities for genuine development. The anchor lifting need not mean drifting helplessly. It can mean learning, finally, to navigate by our own capacities.

As one of El-Orabi’s participants poignantly observed about Egypt:

That resilience exists in every organization, every institution, every group that confronts leadership vacuum. The question is whether we’ll activate it consciously or remain trapped in defensive patterns we cannot name.

The answer begins with understanding what really happens—psychologically, collectively, unconsciously—when leadership vanishes. Only then can we build the containing structures, integrative processes, and reflective capacities that transform leadership transitions from traumatic ruptures into opportunities for authentic development.

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Hopper, E. (2003). Traumatic Experience in the Unconscious Life of Groups: The Fourth Basic Assumption: Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or (ba) I:A/M. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Jaques, E. (1955). Social systems as a defence against persecutory and depressive anxiety. In M. Klein, P. Heimann, & R. Money-Kyrle (Eds.), New Directions in Psychoanalysis (pp. 478-498). Tavistock Publications.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (1988). Prisoners of leadership. Human Relations, 41(3), 261-280. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872678804100305

Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99-110.

Kotter, J. P. (2007). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 85(1), 96-103.

Lawson, E., & Price, C. (2003). The psychology of change management. McKinsey Quarterly, (4), 30-41.

Long, S. (2013). Socioanalytic Methods: Discovering the Hidden in Organisations and Social Systems. Routledge.

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Petriglieri, G., & Petriglieri, J. L. (2010). Identity workspaces: The case of business schools. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 9(1), 44-60. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.9.1.zqr44

Petriglieri, G., & Petriglieri, J. L. (2020). The return of the oppressed: A systems psychodynamic approach to organization studies. Academy of Management Annals, 14(1), 411-465. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2017.0007

Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. SAGE Publications.

Szakolczai, A. (2000). Reflexive Historical Sociology. Routledge.

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Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. International Universities Press.

Historical Context

Egyptian revolution of 2011 - January 25, 2011: Important events on January 25th in history. CalendarZ. (2025, April 3). https://www.calendarz.com/on-this-day/january/25/timeline-of-the-egyptian-revolution-of-2011

In an era defined by rapid technological change, political polarization, hybrid work environments, and ongoing debates about diversity and inclusion, creating organizational cultures that are both cohesive and innovative can feel impossible.

Enter Rami Kaminski’s The Gift of Not Belonging. With insights drawn not from corporate case studies but from a deeply personal exploration of identity, displacement, and human connection, the book offers a surprisingly relevant framework for navigating modern complexity.

Kaminski, an Israeli-born psychiatrist and founder of The Otherness Institute, writes from the perspective of someone who has never quite fit neatly into any single category. His book examines the psychological experience of being an outsider and transforms what many perceive as a deficit into a powerful asset. For today’s leaders grappling with fragmented teams, employee disengagement, and the challenge of fostering genuine belonging in increasingly diverse workplaces, Kaminski’s insights provide a roadmap that goes beyond superficial solutions.

The Paradox of Belonging in Modern Organizations

At the heart of Kaminski’s work lies a profound paradox: the very experience of not belonging can become a source of creativity, empathy, and leadership strength. This runs counter to much of the contemporary discourse around organizational culture, which often emphasizes the importance of “fitting in” and creating environments where everyone feels they belong.

Kaminski doesn’t dismiss the importance of connection and community. Instead, he argues that the discomfort of not fully belonging can sharpen our awareness, deepen our empathy for others who feel marginalized, and free us from the groupthink that often afflicts overly cohesive teams. In today’s business environment, where innovation requires challenging established norms and where diverse perspectives are essential for solving complex problems, this insight carries particular weight.

Modern organizations face a delicate balancing act. On one hand, psychological safety and a sense of belonging are crucial for employee wellbeing and retention. On the other hand, too much emphasis on conformity can stifle the very diversity of thought that drives innovation. Kaminski’s framework suggests that leaders should not only tolerate but actively value the perspectives of those who don’t quite fit the organizational mold.

Identity Fluidity in a World of Rapid Change

One of Kaminski’s key insights concerns the nature of identity itself. Drawing from his experience navigating multiple cultures, languages, and professional contexts, he presents identity not as a fixed essence but as something fluid and contextual. This perspective resonates powerfully with today’s organizational challenges.

Consider the reality of modern work life. Employees may work remotely from different countries, collaborate across time zones, and toggle between various professional identities throughout their day. The same person might be a team leader in one meeting, a learner in another, and a consultant to a different department in the afternoon. The rigid organizational structures and fixed role definitions of the past increasingly fail to capture this complexity.

It means understanding that employees navigating multiple cultural contexts—whether as immigrants, members of diaspora communities, or simply people straddling different generational or professional worlds—possess valuable skills in code-switching, perspective-taking, and bridging divides.

In practical terms, this might mean rethinking how we structure teams, allowing for more fluid participation across projects rather than rigid departmental silos. It could involve creating opportunities for employees to contribute outside their formal roles, recognizing that the marketing manager who speaks three languages might have valuable insights for your global expansion strategy, or that the engineer who studied philosophy might help frame ethical questions about your product.

The Creative Power of Marginality

Kaminski explores how those who exist at the margins of social groups often develop unique creative capacities. Because they observe from multiple vantage points and aren’t fully invested in maintaining existing social structures, outsiders can see possibilities that insiders miss. They notice the unspoken rules precisely because they’ve had to consciously learn them rather than absorbing them automatically.

For organizations, this insight has profound implications. In an age where disruption comes from unexpected directions—when a bookseller becomes a cloud computing giant, or when social media platforms reshape political discourse—the ability to see beyond conventional wisdom becomes a core competitive advantage. Yet many organizations still inadvertently select for conformity, favoring candidates and promoting employees who best embody existing cultural norms.

The remote work revolution of recent years has expanded the pool of potential “outsiders” who can contribute to organizations. Geographic constraints have diminished, opening opportunities for people who couldn’t relocate to major urban centers. Yet organizations must be intentional about ensuring these newly included voices are genuinely heard, not just present.

Loneliness and Connection in the Digital Age

Kaminski writes movingly about the experience of loneliness and the deep human need for authentic connection. These themes resonate powerfully with contemporary workplace challenges, particularly in the wake of the pandemic’s acceleration of remote work.

Studies consistently show rising rates of loneliness, even as we’re more “connected” than ever through digital platforms. Employees report feeling isolated from colleagues, even those they interact with daily over video calls. Leaders struggle to maintain team cohesion when spontaneous coffee conversations and hallway encounters have been replaced by scheduled Zoom meetings.

Kaminski’s work suggests that addressing this requires more than superficial solutions like mandatory fun activities or team-building exercises. Instead, it requires creating spaces for authentic vulnerability and genuine encounter.

The book’s emphasis on the quality rather than quantity of connections offers guidance for organizations rethinking their approach to team structure and communication. Perhaps the goal isn’t to maximize interaction or create an always-on culture, but rather to facilitate deeper, more meaningful connections even if they’re less frequent. This might mean protecting time for focused individual work while also being more intentional about designing moments of genuine human connection.

Navigating Multiple Truths in Polarized Times

One of the most challenging aspects of contemporary leadership involves navigating an increasingly polarized social and political landscape. Organizations find themselves pressured to take stands on social issues, while simultaneously trying to maintain cohesion among employees with vastly different worldviews. The question of what responsibility organizations bear for addressing societal problems grows more pressing and more contested.

Kaminski’s exploration of holding multiple perspectives simultaneously—of understanding that different truths can coexist depending on one’s vantage point—offers a nuanced framework for these challenges. His work doesn’t advocate for relativism or the abandonment of principles, but rather for a kind of sophisticated perspective-taking that can hold complexity.

In practice, this requires tremendous emotional intelligence and the courage to disappoint both sides of any debate by refusing to fully align with either.

This approach doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations or failing to take stands on issues of genuine principle. Rather, it means doing so thoughtfully, recognizing complexity, and maintaining respect for those who see things differently. In an age of cancel culture and social media mobs, this nuanced stance requires real courage from leaders.

The Healing Power of Storytelling

Throughout his book, Kaminski demonstrates the transformative power of storytelling—both sharing our own stories and listening deeply to others’. In organizational contexts, this insight points toward the importance of creating cultures where people can bring their full selves to work, where personal narratives aren’t relegated to brief team-building exercises but inform how we understand and value each other.

Organizations might also create more structured opportunities for storytelling and deep listening. This could take the form of mentorship programs that emphasize mutual learning, peer coaching circles, or simply making space in meetings for people to share not just project updates but personal context that informs their work and perspective.

Practical Applications for Modern Leaders

So what might it look like to actually apply Kaminski’s insights in contemporary organizational life? Several practical approaches emerge:

First, leaders can intentionally seek out and amplify the voices of those who don’t fit neatly into existing categories. When forming teams or hiring, look beyond conventional criteria.

• Who brings a perspective that might make others uncomfortable?

• Who has lived experience that challenges organizational assumptions?

• Create explicit mechanisms to ensure these voices influence decisions, not just attend meetings.

Second, embrace and normalize the experience of not fully belonging. Rather than pretending everyone can or should feel completely at home in organizational culture:

• Acknowledge that some degree of friction and difference is healthy.

• Create language and frameworks that help people understand that not fitting in perfectly might be a source of strength rather than a problem to be solved.

Third, invest in developing cultural intelligence and perspective-taking skills across the organization. Go beyond traditional diversity training to help people:

• Genuinely understand how their experiences and worldviews are shaped by their contexts, and

• How others might see the same situations completely differently.

Fourth, design organizational structures that accommodate fluidity rather than rigid categorization. This might mean:

• Matrix structures that allow people to contribute across traditional boundaries,

• Project-based teams that form and reform as needed, or

• Career paths that embrace non-linear progression.

Fifth, prioritize depth of connection over breadth. Rather than trying to create an artificial sense of belonging through surface-level activities, focus on facilitating genuine relationships, even if they’re fewer in number. This might mean:

• Smaller teams,

• More intimate forums, and

• Protected time for meaningful conversation.

Conclusion

Rami Kaminski’s The Gift of Not Belonging wasn’t written as a business book or a leadership manual. Yet its insights speak directly to the challenges facing modern organizations. In a world characterized by disruption, diversity, and displacement—where the pace of change leaves everyone feeling somewhat unmoored, where traditional sources of identity and belonging have weakened, where the nature of work itself is being fundamentally reimagined—Kaminski’s exploration of the outsider experience provides unexpected wisdom.

The book suggests that perhaps the answer to our current challenges isn’t to double down on creating perfect belonging, but rather to embrace the creative potential of not quite fitting in. It asks leaders to value the margins, to seek out discomfort, to hold complexity rather than reducing everything to simple narratives.

For leaders willing to sit with this paradox, Kaminski’s work offers not just insights but hope. It suggests that the very conditions that make contemporary leadership so challenging—the complexity, the diversity, the rapid change—also create unprecedented opportunities for creativity, empathy, and genuine human connection. The gift of not belonging, it turns out, might be exactly what modern organizations need most.

References and Further Reading

Primary Source:

Kaminski, Rami. The Gift of Not Belonging: How Outsiders Thrive in a World of Joiners. Little, Brown Spark, 2025.

Related Works on Identity and Belonging:

Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Avery, 2012.

Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Duke University Press, 1996.

Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, 2000.

Simmel, Georg. “The Stranger.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by Kurt H. Wolff, 402-408. Free Press, 1950.

On Organizational Culture and Diversity:

Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley, 2018.

Grant, Adam. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Viking, 2021.

Page, Scott E. The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Williams, Joan C. and Sky Mihaylo. “How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias on Their Teams.” Harvard Business Review, November-December 2019.

On Leadership in Complex Times:

Heifetz, Ronald A., Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. Harvard Business Press, 2009.

Kegan, Robert and Lisa Laskow Lahey. An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. Harvard Business Review Press, 2016.

Snowden, David J. and Mary E. Boone. “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making.” Harvard Business Review, November 2007.

On Connection and Loneliness in Modern Life:

Murthy, Vivek H. Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. Harper Wave, 2020.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.

As 2025 draws to a close, we find ourselves in a world increasingly defined by divisions that feel insurmountable. Wars rage across multiple continents. Political polarization has reached levels that make dialogue across differences seem naive at best, dangerous at worst. Our social media feeds reinforce the message daily: we are enemies, separated by unbridgeable chasms of ideology, identity, and interest.

In moments like these, when the very possibility of peace seems like wishful thinking, history offers us something more valuable than hope—it offers us evidence.

On December 24, 1914, something happened that defies our modern assumptions about conflict, tribalism, and human nature. It was an event so improbable that many dismissed it as myth, so counter to everything we think we know about war that military historians still struggle to fully explain it.

The undisputed facts are these.

From December 24-26, 1914, five months into World War I—a war that had already claimed over one million lives and would go on to kill 25 million more—an unofficial and entirely unauthorized ceasefire erupted along the Western Front. Without orders from above, without diplomatic negotiation or military sanction, along some two-thirds of the front controlled by the British Expeditionary Force, the guns fell silent.

And then something even more extraordinary happened.

Close to 100,000 men, trained and ordered to kill one another, emerged from their trenches to sing Christmas carols, share food, exchange stories, and play football together in the space between the lines.

What occurred over those three days more than a century ago seems nothing short of miraculous. Otherworldly. The kind of thing that makes us wonder if we’re reading fiction rather than history.

Yet this mass defection from the logic of war cannot be dismissed as accidental or inexplicable. If tens of thousands of men, designated as mortal enemies by their nations, could collectively choose restraint and recognition in the midst of the deadliest war humanity had yet known, then the question is not whether it happened.

The question is how.

To answer this question—as we shall see—is to understand something vital about human agency, about the incremental power of small acts of humanity, and about the conditions under which even the most entrenched conflicts can be interrupted.

Creating the Conditions: How “No Man’s Land” Became Shared Ground

It was the early months of World War I and the killing had proceeded at an industrial scale. By late November 1914, one million soldiers lay dead. To shield troops from relentless gunfire and artillery bombardment, military commanders ordered the construction of trenches along the 475-mile Western Front.

These rival trenches were dug in remarkably close proximity—often separated by only 10 to 100 meters. The space between them became known as “No Man’s Land,” a term that suggested emptiness, a void belonging to neither side.

But something unexpected happened in that supposedly empty space. The very closeness of the enemy lines created the possibility for mutual observation and, more significantly, for a space that was, in practice, collectively shared by both sides.

It was the creation of this shared space that set in motion a series of actions and behaviors that would progressively lead toward the massive Christmas ceasefire.

When Idealism Fades: The Emergence of Accommodation

By December 1914, most of the men fighting were veterans who had witnessed months of mechanized slaughter. Whatever idealism they had carried into battle about the nobility of the cause had largely evaporated in the face of the grinding, dehumanizing reality of trench warfare.

As enthusiasm for combat waned on both sides, something subtle but significant began to happen. The soldiers started creating practices to accommodate their basic human needs and bring small measures of civility to the barbaric conditions they endured together.

Letters and military records document numerous examples of these “accommodating practices.” At various points along the front, soldiers on opposing sides established temporary, unspoken ceasefires when a man needed to relieve himself—a basic human necessity that transcended national allegiance.

Increasingly, rival soldiers would shout across No Man’s Land to communicate about specific events. A correspondent from the Daily Express reported an incident in which German soldiers sent their British opponents an invitation to a birthday concert, noting they would cease firing during the performance. The invitation arrived with a chocolate cake. At another location, soldiers used a dog as a courier between rival trenches, exchanging newspapers, postcards, and even cognac.

These actions represented what we might call “micro-risks”—small experiments with dual identities. The soldiers remained enemies in the official narrative of the war, yet they were simultaneously human beings who recognized in each other a shared need for dignity and normalcy.

In effect, they were creating liminal states—psychological spaces where war and peace coexisted, initiated not by command but by their own choices and behaviors. To varying degrees, they were engaged in a process of transitioning across the boundaries their governments had drawn.

“Something in Common”: When Shared Humanity Surfaces

Both governments recognized that morale among frontline troops was dangerously low. As Christmas approached, each side made efforts to lift spirits. Emperor William II sent miniature Christmas trees adorned with candles to German soldiers. King George V delivered over two million Christmas cards to British troops, and Princess Mary distributed Christmas boxes containing cigarettes, tobacco, chocolate, and plum puddings.

Slowly, amid the bleakness of the trenches, a Christmas atmosphere began to take shape. Small trees appeared on parapets, their candles flickering in the winter darkness, visible across No Man’s Land to soldiers on both sides.

Then, as Christmas drew near, the weather shifted. The constant, soaking rain that had turned the trenches into rivers of mud gave way to a hard freeze. Ice and snow dusted the landscape along the front, and many soldiers on both sides felt that something spiritual was unfolding.

Bruce Bairnsfather, a soldier who was present, wrote in 1916:

“There was a kind of invisible, intangible feeling extending across the frozen swamp between the two lines, which said, ‘This is Christmas Eve for both of us—something in common.’”

This sense of “something in common” emerged from a shared cultural and spiritual heritage that transcended individual national identities. It awakened in the men a recognition that there was, in fact, more that united them than divided them.

A Pattern Emerges: From Carols to Conversation

While the truce manifested differently in different sectors of the front, a common pattern emerged. One group of soldiers would begin singing Christmas carols—most often the Germans. The opposing side would respond with their own carols, which prompted applause and shouts for an encore. Sometimes a sign would be lifted displaying the greeting “Merry Christmas” or the proposition “You no fight, we no fight.”

Ernest Morley, a Rifleman in the 16th Battalion, London Regiment, described this pattern in a letter home:

“We had decided to give the Germans a Christmas present of three carols and five rounds rapid. Accordingly, as soon as night fell, we started, and the strains of ‘While Shepherds Watched’ (beautifully rendered by the choir!) came upon the air. We finished that and paused preparatory to giving the second item on the programme. But lo! We heard answering strains arising from their lines. Also, they started shouting across to us. Therefore, we stopped any hostile operations and commenced to shout back. One of them shouted ‘A Merry Christmas English, we’re not shooting tonight.’ We yelled back a similar message.”

Shared Hardships: Building Connection Through Common Ground

With the space between trenches now frozen solid, movement became easier. Once soldiers ventured into No Man’s Land, they began sharing stories about the common hardships of trench life and discussing possible solutions.

How could they keep their gear dry?

How could they manage the infestations of lice and rats?

These concerns were universal, regardless of which side a man fought for, and discussing them required no betrayal of military secrets. The appalling conditions they all endured became a foundation for emotional connection and solidarity that existed entirely apart from their national allegiances.

Burying the Dead Together: Connection at the Existential Level

Once in No Man’s Land, soldiers on both sides confronted the overwhelming smell of decomposing bodies—a visceral reminder not only of the magnitude of their shared situation but also of the fate that likely awaited them all.

Each side began to bury their own dead. But as rival soldiers intermingled in that space, something remarkable happened: joint burials began to occur.

Arthur Pelham-Burn, a Second Lieutenant in the 6th Battalion Gordon Highlanders, was stationed west of Lille, France, where the trenches were separated by only 60 yards. In a letter home, he described a mass burial in which German and British soldiers together interred more than 100 bodies:

“A service of prayer was arranged and amongst them was a reading of the 23rd Psalm and an interpreter wrote them out in German. They were read first in English by our Padre and then in German by a boy who was studying for the ministry. It was an extraordinary and wonderful sight. The Germans formed up on one side, the English on the other, the officers standing in front, every head bared. Yes, I think it was a sight one will never see again.”

Life-Affirming Exchanges: Beer, Haircuts, and Shared Cigarettes

Yet even amid the solemnity of burying the dead, the soldiers found ways to connect that affirmed life. Germans were often happy to trade their plentiful supply of beer for British plum and apple jam. Mutual hair trimmings were reported, as were scavenger hunts for corned beef and uniform buttons. On more than a few occasions, rival soldiers were seen sharing a smoke.

The actions in No Man’s Land evolved progressively—from individual gestures to interactions between pairs of rival soldiers to, finally, more coordinated collective efforts between larger groups of troops.

The Football Matches: Spontaneous Games in the Space Between

The widely reported football games that emerged can be understood as the culmination of these accumulating efforts. They occurred at various locations in No Man’s Land, ranging from informal kickabouts to something approximating organized matches with chosen teams and recorded scores. When no soccer ball was available, the men improvised with caps, tin cans, and whatever else they could find.

What stands out is that all of these games were spontaneous, instigated entirely by the soldiers themselves. Private Ernie Williams of the Cheshire Regiment reinforced this point:

“A ball appeared from somewhere, I don’t know where, but it came from their side. They made up some goals and one fellow went in the goal and then it was just a general kickabout. I should think there were a couple hundred taking part. I had a go at the ball. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. There was no sort of ill-will between us. There was no referee and no score, no tally at all.”

More Than Magic—An Accumulation of Ordinary Choices

In 2022, historians A.J. Baime and Volker Janssen described the Christmas Truce as “one of the most storied and strangest moments of the Great War—or of any war in history.”

One hundred thousand men, commissioned to kill one another, created instead a space of civility, recognition, and shared celebration. It is tempting to see the episode as pure magic: a fleeting suspension of reality, an historical anomaly that resists explanation.

Yet, what appears, from a distance, as a miracle often looks very different when examined from within the ordinary, cumulative choices that made it possible. Here, in this examination is where the challenge lies for us if we are to lay bear the mystery of this event and make it, even in some small way, repeatable in our times.

The diagram below traces the behaviors, actions, and conditions that appear to have laid the groundwork for the ceasefire that emerged.

The close proximity of the trenches which also created a shared space between the opposing soldiers was a critical component. It created the possibility for mutual recognition—for soldiers to see that the fears, discomforts, and needs of those across the lines mirrored their own. Within this environment, individuals began to test the boundaries of what might be possible through small, tentative acts: calling out, agreeing not to fire at certain moments, exchanging objects, acknowledging shared hardships.

Each gesture carried risk. None altered the official status of the war. Yet each subtly expanded the psychological space in which soldiers could hold dual identities at once: enemy combatant and fellow human being.

Over time, these individual acts accumulated. Interactions that began between pairs of soldiers widened into collective practices—joint burials, shared songs, spontaneous games—until the logic of war itself was temporarily suspended. No orders were given. No agreements were signed. The transformation emerged from below, through action rather than intention.

Fraternization with the enemy has always stood in direct violation of military doctrine. Yet for the men in the trenches, the inhuman conditions of daily life and the constant presence of death carried more weight than rules imposed from a distant command. In that context, restraint became not an abstraction but a lived necessity.

Through this incremental process, tens of thousands of soldiers set aside their assigned roles long enough to co-create a space governed by recognition rather than violence—a space that existed only because they continued to act as if it could.

What We Can Learn: The Power of Concrete Action

Reflecting on the Christmas Truce, Substack CEO Chris Best has written,

The Truce suggests something more precise—and more demanding—than a stirring of sentiment. It shows that peace can take shape through concrete behaviors, specific choices, and calculated micro-risks, even under conditions designed to make such choices unthinkable.

The soldiers of 1914 did not wait for permission. They did not wait for guarantees. They did not wait for the other side to move first. They acted—tentatively, imperfectly, and at significant personal risk—to create conditions in which something other than violence could emerge.

They transformed No Man’s Land from a killing field into shared ground through accumulated acts of recognition and reciprocity. In doing so, they revealed a form of agency that does not depend on authority or agreement, but on the willingness to behave differently in the presence of an enemy.

As we confront our own divisions—political, social, and ideological—that feel increasingly fixed and impermeable, the Christmas Truce offers neither blueprint nor reassurance. It offers something quieter and more unsettling: evidence that even in the most constraining circumstances, human beings retain the capacity to interrupt the logic that governs them.

The soldiers of 1914 did not end the war. The machinery of violence soon reasserted itself. Yet for a brief and fragile interval, they demonstrated that peace does not always arrive through understanding, negotiation, or command. Sometimes it emerges when people choose, against expectation and instruction, to recognize one another as human first.

Sources

Dash, M. (2011, December 3). The Story of the WWI Christmas Truce. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-story-of-the-wwi-christmas-truce-11972213/

The Gazette (n.d.). World War I: The Christmas Truce of December 1914. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/awards-andaccreditation/content/287

The National World War I Museum and Memorial. “Trench Warfare: Life in the Trenches: 1914-1919.” https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/trench-warfare

Weintraub, S. (2001). Silent Night: The Story of World War I Christmas Truce. New York: Free Press.

Woodward, D. R. (2011). Christmas Truce of 1914: Empathy Under Fire. Phi Kappa Phi Forum, 91(1), 18-19.

When Takeshi, my coaching client, walked into his new workplace on the first day, he thought he’d found everything he’d hoped for. Modern building, city center location. Colleagues who greeted him warmly. A well-designed office where everyone had space to focus. By every rational measure, it was a good start.

But his body told a different story.

“Something felt off,” he told me later in one of our sessions. But he couldn’t explain why at the time. It was just a faint stirring deep in his chest. A whisper he tried to ignore.

A month passed. But the feeling didn’t fade. It crystallized.

In meetings, everyone looked busy, he explained to me. But no one seemed to be working together. Conversations stayed within departmental boundaries. People shared the same space yet remained isolated, each one an island.

Then Takeshi—still new, still finding his footing—was asked to speak to a talented colleague who was thinking of resigning and convince him not to do so.

He sat down with the man, someone from another department he barely knew.

“We’re all too busy to look out for each other,” the colleague said.

“I’m just trying to keep up with my workload. I’ve lost sight of what I really want to do.”

“My boss only cares about results. It doesn’t feel like anyone is thinking about our individual futures in this organization.”

Takeshi listened. He tried to reassure him, to explain that the organization wasn’t truly like that. But even as he spoke, he heard the hollowness in his own words.

Because deep down, he felt the same way.

Before leaving, the colleague said quietly, “I wish I had met you sooner.”

When Takeshi finally shared his full story with me in one of our sessions, he concluded:

When the Body Speaks Before the Mind

How often do we brush off those subtle signals of discomfort—telling ourselves, “It’s probably nothing,” or “I’m overthinking it.”

The flutter in the chest, the tightness in the throat, the shallow breath, the knot in the stomach—our bodies speak to us in these ways.

Have you ever noticed your body sensing something before your mind could rationalize it? And in that moment, did you listen—or did you dismiss it as imagination?

As business professionals, we are constantly making decisions in uncertain environments.

While we rely on data and facts, we also draw on intuition refined through our own experiences to make effective choices.

Yet when stress and fatigue accumulate, that intuition begins to fade. In complex and high-pressure workplaces, it becomes harder to listen to what our bodies are telling us. But perhaps that very difficulty is what invites us to start “tuning in” to our bodies once again.

The Brain That Reacts Before Reason

Why do we hesitate to trust our intuition?

As business professionals, we make decisions in fast-moving, uncertain environments. We rely on data and facts—but also on instinct – it could be called a ‘gut feeling’, honed through experience.

Clark and Sugar note that combining intuition with analytical thinking allows people to make faster, better, and more accurate decisions. They also suggest that when individuals lose touch with their intuition, anxiety rises, self-consciousness increases, and decision-making—particularly pattern recognition—suffers. This tends to happen under stress or fatigue.

In Takeshi’s story, the strain of adapting to a new environment may have dulled his ability to listen to his intuitive voice.

Where That Gut Feeling Comes From

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH) offers insight.

SMH asserts that emotions, expressed as bodily feelings (somatic markers), are crucial for rational decision-making, guiding us by tagging potential outcomes as good or bad, even unconsciously. In this way, such somatically-linked emotions can help us choose wisely and avoid risks. This runs contrary to the idea that “pure logic” is best.

According to Damasio, these somatic “markers” are linked to past experiences and help filter complex choices. In this way, our emotions work in concert with reason, not against it.

Thus, when Takeshi sensed something was off—the atmosphere, the relationships, the dysfunction in the teamwork—what was happening was his body was recalling past experiences tied to similar feelings. When we encounter a new situation, the brain quickly searches its database of memories and, upon recognizing familiar patterns, triggers bodily reactions before conscious analysis begins.

A racing heart, a tight chest, a churning stomach—these “somatic markers” are signals from the body’s learned warning system.

Takeshi’s discomfort on his first day wasn’t “just a hunch.”

It was a message from his body: “This organizational pattern is a red flag.”

Even while his rational mind said, “Everything looks fine,” his body had already sensed the deeper structure—the unspoken communication patterns, the flow of energy, the invisible tension among people.

The Cost of Ignoring Discomfort

Let’s revisit the story of Ayako from my previous article, Unfinished Business and the Bandage.

Ayako, just like Takeshi, was unable to recognize her “somatic markers”—her body’s sensations.

She continued to see what she wanted to see. In her mind’s “inner theater,” she replayed her “favorite” stories over and over. She continued running similar narratives on loop, reinforcing what she believed—even when it was nothing more than an “assumption” or “misunderstanding”—layering it again and again until it solidified.

In Ayako’s case, she kept searching for evidence to remain the protagonist in a grand drama of her misunderstanding: “I am not enough” and “I will not be accepted as I am”—beliefs rooted in the false perspectives of others.

The amygdala—our anxiety-detection system that resists change—continued to convince Ayako that maintaining the status quo was good for her. Even as she sensed that “something was wrong,” she lived on without confronting that bodily sensation.

As a result, Ayako becomes trapped in a cycle of self-negation, unable to express her true potential. Moreover, the “discomfort” within her remained an unresolved issue—like “a browser tab left open to check later”—constantly consuming her laptop’s background memory and draining her energy. She desperately wanted to change, to break free, yet she continued to cling to the illusory belief that change is “dangerous,” exhausting herself and further reinforcing that very belief in an ongoing cycle of depletion.

Dialoguing with the Body—Becoming a Better Professional

By tuning into our intuition and bodily sensations, we can complement our rational analysis and avoid blind spots.

Daniel Goleman in The Focused Leader describes three kinds of attention in effective leaders: Self Focus, Other Focus, and Outer Focus.

Here, I’d like to focus on the first of these—attention toward oneself, which relies heavily on self-awareness.

This involves recognizing the signals from our somatic markers—the emotions and intuitions emerging from the amygdala—and integrating them with logic and reason to make balanced decisions.

At the same time, bodily reactions can be distorted by stress, fatigue, or environmental noise. Sometimes they’re false alarms.

So how can we refine our ability to observe and interpret these signals without overreacting?

One approach is journaling, from the following perspectives:

• Structuring experience

According to James Pennebaker, putting experiences into words deepens understanding, helping us make sense of events and organize them into a coherent system. In doing so, intuition and bodily sensations become more accessible and interpretable.

• Emotional balance

Research by Lieberman, Eisenberger and others shows that labeling one’s emotions with words reduces amygdala activation, promoting emotional regulation and decreasing the fight-or-flight response. Repeated journaling can train us to read somatic signals more accurately without overreacting.

• Method

Handwriting may be particularly effective. Studies by Mangen and Vely suggest that writing by hand activates multiple brain regions, including those related to emotion and self-expression.

Takeaway

Our bodies and brains are constantly working to protect and guide our true selves. By listening—neither ignoring nor overreacting—we can live and lead more fully.

Ultimately, attuning to our inner voice allows us to live in alignment with our values and use ourselves as the most powerful instrument of our own work. In so doing, the self can become a force for good, benefiting not only ourselves, but others.

Final Reflection

Let me leave you with a question to reflect on:

The body has its own wiring and its own wisdom. And, as in the case of Takeshi, sometimes it senses the most important things first.

References:

Clark, D, Sugar, A. (2023). What to Do If You Feel Like You’ve Lost Your Intuition. Harvard Business Review.com. https://hbr.org/2023/10/what-to-do-if-you-feel-like-youve-lost-your-intuition

Damasio, A. (2005). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin Books.

Goleman, D. (2013). The Focused Leader. Harvard Business Review.com. https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-focused-leader

Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.I., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H., & Way, B.M. (2007). “Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli.” Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428

Mangen, A., & Velay, J. (2010). Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the haptics of writing. In InTech eBooks. https://doi.org/10.5772/8710

Memarian, N., Torre, J.B., Haltom, K., Stanton, A.L., & Lieberman, M.D. (2017). Neural activity during affect labeling predicts expressive writing effects on well-being: GLM and SVM approaches https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/9/1437/3979177

Pennebaker, J.W. (1997). “Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process. Psychological Science.” 8(3), 162-166.

The numbers paint a stark picture: 82% of employees are now at risk of burnout, with nearly half of American and Canadian workers reporting daily work-related stress. For younger workers, the crisis is even more acute. Peak burnout now occurs at just 25 years old—17 years earlier than the average American, suggesting that traditional career paths are failing an entire generation before they’ve barely begun.

As executives and HR leaders grapple with retention challenges and declining mental health across their organizations, conventional solutions—wellness apps, flexible schedules, mental health days—provide only temporary relief. Without intervention, burnout costs the U.S. healthcare system alone $4.6 billion annually, largely from turnover and reduced productivity. But what if the answer to this modern crisis lies not in the future, but in our past?

Belgian executive coach and Senior Client Partner Advisor at Korn Ferry, Bieke Teerlinck was experiencing her own version of this crisis some years ago. After 14 successful years with the same company, she found herself at 41, disengaged and uncertain. “I had been largely happy during most of my career,” she recalls, “but something fundamental was changing.” During a sabbatical, she made an unexpected decision: she returned to two childhood passions she’d abandoned decades earlier—playing piano and competitive sports.

That decision sparked a radical question:

The Flow Identity Theory

Teerlinck’s research, conducted through INSEAD’s Executive Master in Change programme, challenges conventional career counseling wisdom. Rather than relying on personality tests or skills assessments, she developed a methodology to help mid-career professionals reconnect with what she calls their “flow identity”—the core attributes of activities that naturally absorbed them as children.

The concept builds on psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s groundbreaking work on “flow”—that state of complete absorption where time seems to disappear and the activity itself becomes intrinsically rewarding.

“Children spontaneously devote time to activities they love doing—their passions—without anyone telling them what they should or shouldn’t like or do,” Teerlinck writes.

But as we mature into professionals, something fundamental shifts. We make choices based on practicality, parental expectations, monetary rewards, or status. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described this as developing a “false self”—suppressing our genuine desires to meet others’ expectations, leading to what he termed “self-estrangement.”

The consequences of this estrangement are now everywhere. Sixty-seven percent of workers reported experiencing at least one symptom commonly linked to workplace burnout in the past month, including lack of interest, motivation, or energy. Many mid-career professionals find themselves successful by conventional measures yet profoundly unfulfilled.

Drawing as Discovery

Teerlinck’s methodology is deceptively simple yet remarkably powerful. She worked with twelve professionals aged 30-50, all in career transition, guiding them through a series of drawing exercises focused primarily on childhood. Drawing itself is often a flow activity, creating an ideal medium for accessing deeper memories and emotions.

One participant, a 46-year-old woman recovering from a three-year burnout, arrived with no energy and a heightened sensitivity to noise that limited where she could function. During the first drawing exercise—a self-portrait incorporating past, present, and future—something unexpected happened. Despite initial discomfort with her drawing skills, she became absorbed in the activity. Her drawings exploded with color and playfulness, depicting a childhood filled with sunshine, sweets, and birthday parties.

“Wow, I was so surprised realizing that I had such a satisfying and happy childhood, full of energy!” she told Teerlinck after the first session. “Why can I not get this back now? Today I don’t have any energy. I want to do many things, but I’m immediately tired.”

Through subsequent exercises—drawing her “passion biography” at ages 5, 10, 15, 20, and beyond—patterns emerged. Words like “creating,” “experimenting,” “liberating,” and “shining” surfaced repeatedly. When Teerlinck suggested she saw a “magician” in the drawings, the participant lit up: “Yes! Something crazy, magical and unexpected sits in me! I’m also always looking for a reason to laugh!”

Yet her career told a different story. She’d become a nurse almost by accident, making choices based on convenience and fear of not being “good enough” for her real dream—dancing. She’d spent decades in pharmaceutical companies, never feeling passionate about the work. The disconnect between her flow identity and her career path couldn’t have been starker.

By the intervention’s end, she’d identified five core attributes: 1) expressing herself and being herself, 2) connection with others and herself, 3) recognition, 4) expressing craziness and 5) laughter.

The Consistency of Core Values

Perhaps the most striking finding from Teerlinck’s research is how consistent these childhood attributes remain throughout life. Every participant completed a Career Anchors assessment—identifying aspects they’d most enjoyed in their professional lives. The correlation between childhood flow identity and career satisfaction was unmistakable.

One 43-year-old man, unexpectedly laid off after 18 years with the same company, revealed something profound through his self-portrait. He drew it horizontally rather than vertically and left the left side—representing childhood—completely blank. He hadn’t noticed the omission himself.

Probing deeper revealed a difficult childhood: his parents’ move to Hawaii when he was 10, followed by their divorce. He felt different from everyone else “in a negative way,” forced into lower-level studies as a pâtissier when he’d aspired to more. He carried shame about this educational path even as he’d later completed a Master’s degree while working—an impressive achievement he couldn’t fully own.

The blank space in his drawing represented what he’d been blocking. By the final session, he had reached a breakthrough: “I now realize that I should be proud of what I have achieved, instead of feeling shame and anger about my childhood education.”

Beyond Traditional Career Counseling

The implications challenge how we think about career guidance. Traditional approaches focus on personality assessments like Myers-Briggs or skills inventories, attempting to match people to suitable roles. But these tools miss something fundamental:

Teerlinck’s approach doesn’t deny the value of developing new skills or exploring unfamiliar territories. Rather, it suggests that understanding our flow identity provides a compass for navigating change. The same core attributes can manifest across multiple roles and contexts—what researcher Herminia Ibarra calls our “multiple working identities.” The key is not to lose sight of the core attributes of your unique flow identity and to remain cognizant of the need for them to informed whatever “working identity” you may be embracing at the moment.

Practical Applications

For organizations grappling with the burnout crisis, these findings suggest new approaches to retention and development. Rather than generic wellness programs, what if companies helped employees understand their flow identity? What if career development conversations began not with “What do you want to do next?” but “What activities made you lose track of time as a child, and what was it about them that captivated you?”

The methodology Teerlinck developed could be adapted for team-building or onboarding. Understanding colleagues’ core attributes related to flow identity—one person craves connection and collaboration, another seeks independence and challenge—could improve team dynamics and project assignments.

For individuals in career transition, the implications are even more direct. Before updating your resume or browsing job postings, the first question should be: What is my flow identity and what are its core attributes? Those core attributes then become non-negotiables, the elements without which no amount of salary or prestige will create lasting satisfaction.

A Different Question

As workplace stress continues to escalate and traditional career paths satisfy fewer people, perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions. We obsess over skills gaps and competency frameworks, resume optimization and interview techniques. We tell young people to follow their passion but rarely help them understand what that actually means beyond superficial interests.

Teerlinck’s work suggests a more fundamental inquiry:

The approach isn’t nostalgic or escapist. We can’t and shouldn’t try to recreate childhood. Life grows more complex; responsibilities accumulate; we change. But perhaps those childhood passions weren’t just pleasant pastimes or developmental phases. Perhaps they were our truest selves, expressing something essential before the world told us who we should be.

In an era of unprecedented career anxiety, when 43% of Millennials and 44% of Gen Z workers have recently left jobs directly due to burnout, maybe the way forward requires looking backward. Not to return to childhood, but to reconnect with the child who knew—before anyone told them otherwise—exactly what made them come alive.

References and Further Reading

APA poll finds younger works feel stressed, lonely and undervalued. (2024, June). American Psychological Association. Retrieved November 29, 2025, from https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2024/06/younger-workers-stressed

Burleigh, E. (2024, March 14). Around 82% of employees are at risk of burnout but employers are failing to to make well-being a priority | Fortune. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2024/03/14/employees-at-risk-burnout-disconnect-bosses-well-being/

Carra, M. (2025, March 5). Is workplace burnout the new normal for Americans and Canadians? The Bay State Banner. Retrieved November 29, 2025, from https://baystatebanner.com/2025/03/05/is-workplace-burnout-the-new-normal-for-americans-and-canadians/

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Springer Science+Business Media.

Don’t want to lose your Gen Z and millennial talent? Here’s what you can do. (2025, June 11). Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/deloitte-millennial-survey.html

Gallup. (2024). State of the Global Workplace Report. Retrieved from gallup.com

Guys, I. (2025, October 19). The State of Workplace Burnout in 2025: A Comprehensive Research report - The interview guys. The Interview Guys. https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-research-report/

Ibarra, H. (2023). Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Harvard Business Review Press.

Schein, E. H., & Van Maanen, J. (2013). Career Anchors: The Changing Nature of Work and Careers (4th ed.). Wiley.

Teerlinck, B. (2019). Becoming Again a Child at Play: Reconnecting with Childhood Passions through Flow for a More Meaningful Career and Life. INSEAD Executive Master in Change thesis.

Winnicott, D. W. (2007). Ego distortion in terms of True Self and False Self. In Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (pp. 140–152). Karnac Books.

World Health Organization. (2019). Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases. Retrieved from who.int

Across boardrooms from Silicon Valley to Shanghai, the message seems universal and urgent: AI or die. CEOs face unrelenting pressure from investors demanding credible AI roadmaps. Analysts cite predictions—such as McKinsey’s estimate of potential 40% productivity gains by 2035—to argue that hesitation borders on negligence. Fall behind now, the logic goes, and your competitors will eclipse you before the decade ends.

But what if this fervent embrace of AI isn’t purely about innovation or opportunity?

During his research on how professionals actually experience the rise of artificial intelligence, Diego Bonifacino—an action researcher and graduate of INSEAD’s Executive Master in Change—encountered an unsettling pattern. That buoyant sales director who champions AI in every meeting? The manager who eagerly volunteers for every pilot program? Their enthusiasm, he discovered, may be less about strategic vision and more about fear.

“The determining factor for this research emerged during my very first interview,” Bonifacino recalls. He was speaking with a conversational designer—someone who would readily describe herself as an AI enthusiast and who relied on the technology every day. But when he asked about shifting work expectations, her tone faltered. Her expression tightened.

“Are you worried about your work?” he finally asked.

“Sì,” she admitted quietly in Italian. “It is difficult not to be.”

In that moment, Bonifacino recognized something disquieting: her fear was also his own. Beneath his professional optimism about AI’s transformative potential, he realized he had been running from an uncomfortable truth—much of today’s excitement about artificial intelligence may be fear in disguise.

That realization became the foundation for Bonifacino’s unprecedented study exploring how leaders and professionals really feel about artificial intelligence—not through surveys or interviews, but through something far more revealing: their drawings.

Drawing Out the Truth

Over three research cycles involving 45 participants across Southern Europe, Bonifacino developed a deceptively simple method he calls “Picture AI.” He asked executives, engineers, healthcare workers, and business leaders to draw what AI means to them and their organizations. What emerged wasn’t just a collection of doodles—it was a psychological X-ray of how organizations unconsciously relate to one of the most transformative technologies of our time.

The drawings revealed a striking pattern: AI functions as what psychoanalysts call a “phantastic object”—a blank screen onto which people project their deepest desires, anxieties, and unresolved conflicts. When participants drew AI, they weren’t really drawing technology. They were externalizing their fears about obsolescence, their frustrations with chaotic workflows, their hopes for relief from drudgery, and their organizations’ hidden power dynamics.

One participant, working in environmental services, drew AI as a house processing customer chaos—revealing not just a vision of AI, but an admission that customer input felt overwhelming. A nursing consultant’s drawing exposed the tension between following procedures and showing empathy to patients. These weren’t AI visions; they were confessions about work itself.

The Metaphors We Choose

The symbolic language participants used clustered around three dominant metaphors: brains, magic, and nature.

Brains appeared in eight drawings, depicted in various states of transformation. In one, the human brain shrinks as the AI brain grows—a visual representation of cognitive displacement anxiety. In another, a Pac-Man devours the brain, while elsewhere a rocket-propelled brain suggests enhancement. These competing visions revealed deep ambivalence: Is AI augmenting our intelligence or replacing it?

Magic emerged as a metaphor for the unknown. Participants drew magic boxes that transform raw inputs into finished goods, and magic wands that solve problems without understanding. One participant explicitly contrasted what he knew about AI with what his company saw—highlighting a dangerous ignorance gap. The element of magic tied directly to control: Who wields the wand? Who understands the spell?

Nature and organic metaphors suggested something even more unsettling: the delegation of control to forces beyond human authority. Trees with expanding roots, dawn-like suns that people walk toward “almost like in a religious procession,” and references to Avatar’s “tree of souls” painted AI not as a tool but as a ruling system—something that grows according to its own logic and reorganizes society.

Whether through brains, magic, or nature, the drawings spoke of relinquishing control—or at least profound ambivalence about it.

Fear-Driven Enthusiasm

Using a mental-state coding framework developed by psychoanalysts, he estimated whether individuals operated from what’s called a “depressive position”—characterized by the ability to tolerate ambiguity and integrate contradictions—or from more defensive positions marked by splitting, idealization, or paranoia.

The majority showed signs of defensiveness. Even more revealing, their enthusiasm often served as a sophisticated defense mechanism. Bonifacino identified what psychoanalysts call “identification with the aggressor”: siding with what frightens you to regain a sense of safety. People adopt AI’s language and logic to cope with vulnerability, without consciously acknowledging their fear.

Consider the participant who drew a broken heart—one half black (the bad Terminator-like AI) and one half golden (the helpful AI). The explanation emphasized control: “man is always the one who manages AI.” Yet the image told a different story: a heart divided, unable to integrate its contradictions.

Another drew humanity’s next evolutionary step: an enormous brain connecting all aspects of society, but the human figure had shrunk to just a head, eyes closed, body gone—a Matrix-like vision. Though the participant acknowledged fear, the drawing revealed something deeper: a loss of physicality, agency, and grounded reality.

One drawing showed a stark contrast between today’s “sad” work—colored like coal—and tomorrow’s AI-enabled “WOW” moments of strategic thinking. As researcher Stefan Selke noted, AI has become a “secular promise”—a modern myth offering salvation in place of old religious or ideological systems.

“Was the entire hype behind AI fear-driven?” Bonifacino asked. The answer, uncomfortably, seemed to be yes—at least in significant part.

The Faultlines That Fracture

Two latent divisions—what researchers call “faultlines”—repeatedly disrupted group cohesion: domain expertise and gender.

The expertise divide was palpable. “We’ve been doing AI for the last 20 years,” many technically-oriented participants emphasized, drawing a sharp line between themselves and those excited by recent generative AI. This wasn’t just pride; it was a boundary that excluded non-technical colleagues from meaningful participation.

Bonifacino contrasted two European sales directors: one from a global beverage company, one from a top tech firm. The beverage director kept AI at arm’s length, believing its impact was “still five years away” and that the conversation was “reserved for technical people.” The tech director, by contrast, lived with AI daily—her targets set by algorithms, her coaching supported by generative models.

The gender gap also emerged. All women in the study included humans in their drawings; 44% of men did not. Women tended to focus on tangible outcomes—changes in work composition, autonomous societal elements. Men were more likely to draw processes, networks, interplanetary visions, and boundaries. Only men drew scenarios without any human presence.

These patterns echo research showing gender gaps in generative AI adoption as large as 20%. Faultlines matter because they determine who gets heard, whose concerns are validated, and whose imagination shapes the future.

Three Questions, Five Dimensions

In the final phase, Bonifacino presented participants with a collage of all the drawings and asked them to identify themes, concerns, and questions. Despite having only minutes to observe, participants converged on remarkably similar insights.

From their observations, five core tensions emerged:

1. Evolutionary Path: Excitement about transformation meets fear of the unknown

2. Cognitive Boundaries: AI should enhance, not erase, human creativity and intuition

3. Bandwidth: AI connects everything but risks overwhelming us with information

4. Reliance: Productivity gains come at the potential cost of agency and skill

5. Accessibility: Democratizing AI power raises questions about ethics and misuse

Even more striking, participants’ questions—though phrased differently—collapsed into three essential inquiries:

• How will we use AI, and to what end?

• What will be our role?

• How do we feel about it?

These questions map directly onto Organizational Role Analysis, a framework for understanding the dynamic relationship between individual, role, and organization. Bonifacino synthesized these insights into the AI Reconciliation Canvas (AIR)—a practical tool that crosses the three questions with the five dimensions, creating fifteen conversation spaces where teams can explore their relationship with AI. It’s not a solution template but a “holding environment” where groups can confront tensions, clarify boundaries, and move from reactive adoption to conscious co-creation.

What Organizations Should Do

The implications of this research challenge conventional AI adoption strategies. Technical training and change management programs typically treat resistance as an information problem. Bonifacino’s findings suggest something different: resistance is information.

First, recognize that AI discussions reveal organizational truth. When teams talk about AI, listen for what they’re really saying about work, control, value, and identity. Their AI concerns are symptoms of deeper organizational dynamics that preceded the technology.

Second, create spaces for collective reflection before rushing to implementation. The Picture AI method proved surprisingly powerful. In just minutes, groups surfaced themes, concerns, and questions that might never emerge in traditional town halls or surveys.

Third, attend to who’s in the room. Faultlines around expertise and gender aren’t just diversity issues; they determine whose intelligence shapes adoption. When technical experts monopolize AI conversations, organizations lose the grounded, human-centered perspectives that non-technical colleagues bring.

Fourth, don’t mistake enthusiasm for readiness. The finding that two-thirds of participants exhibited defensive postures—even among motivated MBA students—suggests that visible excitement may mask unacknowledged anxiety. Leaders should cultivate the capacity to hold ambiguity, integrate contradictions, and tolerate not-knowing.

The Mirror, Not the Answer

Perhaps the most profound insight from Bonifacino’s research is simply this: AI is a mirror. It reflects back our organizational anxieties, our unspoken power dynamics, our hopes for relief from drudgery, and our fears of obsolescence.

In 2025, as AI capabilities accelerate and adoption pressures intensify, organizations face a choice:

The drawings Bonifacino collected—brains growing and shrinking, magic boxes processing chaos, trees extending roots, broken hearts, humans walking toward digital dawns—aren’t just about AI. They’re about us: our relationship to work, to control, to knowledge, to each other, and to an uncertain future. “When we talk about AI,” Bonifacino concluded, “we are, in essence, talking about ourselves.”

The question isn’t whether AI will transform organizations. It already has. The question is whether we’ll do the human work—the psychological, relational, emotional work—required to make that transformation conscious, inclusive, and genuinely beneficial. The technology will keep advancing regardless. But the quality of our collective thinking, our ability to hold complexity, and our willingness to examine what the AI mirror shows us—that will determine whether we shape this transformation or are simply swept along by it.

In the end, adopting AI wisely isn’t a technical challenge. It’s a human one. And as Bonifacino’s drawings reveal, we’re still figuring out how we feel about that.

References and Additional Reading

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

Bonifacino, D. (2025). Picture AI: Navigating the Hidden Dynamics of Organizational AI Adoption. Thesis for Executive Master in Change, INSEAD.

de Maat, S., Scherbakova, O., & van de Loo, E. (2024). Metaphors of Success: Finding Potential Manifestations of Unconscious Phantasy? Socio-Analysis, 25, 1–16.

Desmarais, A. (2025, February 11). Here’s What Has Been Announced at the AI Action Summit. Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/02/11/heres-what-has-been-announced-at-the-ai-action-summit

Freud, A. (2018). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. London: Routledge.

French, R. B., & Simpson, P. (2010). The ‘Work Group’: Redressing the Balance in Bion’s Experiences in Groups. Human Relations, 63(12), 1859–1878.

Lau, D. C., & Murnighan, J. K. (1998). Demographic Diversity and Faultlines: The Compositional Dynamics of Organizational Groups. The Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 325–345.

Long, S., Newton, J., & Sievers, B. (2006). Coaching in Depth: The Organizational Role Analysis Approach. London: Routledge.

McKinsey & Company. The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier. (2023, June). Retrieved November 30, 2025, from https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/mckinsey%20digital/our%20insights/the%20economic%20potential%20of%20generative%20ai%20the%20next%20productivity%20frontier/the-economic-potential-of-generative-ai-the-next-productivity-frontier.pdf

Menzies, I. E. P. (1960). A Case-Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety. Human Relations, 13(2), 95–121.

Otis, N. G., Cranney, K., Delecourt, S., & Koning, R. (2024). Global Evidence on Gender Gaps and Generative AI. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/h6a7c

Pasmore, W., Winby, S., Mohrman, S. A., & Vanasse, R. (2019). Reflections: Sociotechnical Systems Design and Organization Change. Journal of Change Management, 19(2), 67–85.

Selke, S. (2024). Future Technology as Comfort: Promising Tales About AI. In Lifelike: Artificial Intelligence, Humanoid Robots, and the Future of Humanity (pp. 255–279). Wiesbaden: Springer.

Thatcher, S. M. B., & Patel, P. C. (2012). Group Faultlines: A Review, Integration, and Guide to Future Research. Journal of Management, 38(4), 969–1009.

Tuckett, D., & Taffler, R. (2008). Phantastic Objects and the Financial Market’s Sense of Reality. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 89(2), 389–412.

Turkle, S. (2023, March 10). Should You Be Nice to AI Chatbots Such as ChatGPT? Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/should-you-be-nice-to-ai-chatbots-such-as-chatgpt/

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books.

Zhan, E. S., Molina, M. D., Rheu, M., & Peng, W. (2024). What Is There to Fear? Understanding Multi-Dimensional Fear of AI. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 40(22), 7127–7144.

From Dubai’s gleaming corporate towers to Cairo’s bustling start-up hubs, from Riyadh’s Vision 2030 initiatives to Beirut’s creative agencies, Middle Eastern organizations are racing to modernize. Governments are launching ambitious reform programs. International consultants are redesigning hierarchies. And leadership development programs proliferate.

Yet beneath the surface of these institutional changes, a more fundamental force continues to shape how power actually operates in these spaces: the family.

As the region grapples with record youth unemployment, brain drain, and the challenge of building knowledge economies that can compete globally, understanding this invisible architecture has never been more urgent.

• Why do so many talented young professionals leave the region?

• Why do innovation initiatives often fail to take root?

• Why does workplace culture so frequently feel stifling, despite stated commitments to empowerment and creativity?

According to Ahmed El-Orabi, consultant, researcher and alumnus of INSEAD’s prestigious Executive Master in Change programme, the answers may lie not in organizational charts or mission statements, but in the dining rooms and living rooms where we first learned what authority means.

The Family as Society’s Foundation

El-Orabi’s research reminds us that, in Middle Eastern societies, the family occupies a position of centrality that distinguishes the region from much of the industrialized West. This is not merely a cultural preference but a structural reality that shapes every aspect of social organization. Extended family networks remain the primary source of economic support, social identity, and emotional belonging. Marriage continues to be understood less as the union of two individuals than as the alliance of two families. Inheritance laws, property ownership, and business partnerships all reflect the assumption that the family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society.

This centrality, as El-Orabi points out, means that the family serves as the original classroom for learning about power, hierarchy, and relationship. Long before a child encounters formal institutions—schools, governments, corporations—they have already internalized complex lessons about authority from their position within the household. Who speaks and who listens? Who commands and who obeys? Whose dreams matter and whose must be deferred? These early experiences create internal templates that persist, often unconsciously, throughout life.

The household becomes a miniature political system, complete with its own hierarchies, alliances, and unspoken rules. The father, traditionally, occupies the apex of this system—provider, protector, and ultimate arbiter of major decisions. His authority is rarely questioned openly, even when it may be resisted privately. The mother, while often wielding considerable influence within domestic spheres, typically operates through indirect channels of power. Children learn to navigate this landscape through a complex calculus of obedience, strategic compliance, and the careful management of parental expectations.

The Choreography of Love and Control

What makes this dynamic particularly psychologically complex, according to El-Orabi, is that authority in Middle Eastern families is rarely experienced as purely coercive. It is wrapped in the language of love, sacrifice, and devotion. Parents genuinely believe they are acting in their children’s best interests when they chart educational paths, influence career choices, or arrange marriages. The narrative of parental sacrifice is powerful and pervasive: parents have given everything—their youth, their resources, their very lives—so that their children might prosper. How can children, then, refuse what is asked of them?

This creates a distinctive emotional register where care and control become intertwined in ways that can be difficult to disentangle. A father who insists his son become a physician may be motivated by genuine concern for the son’s financial security and social standing. Yet this concern, however authentic, can also function as a form of domination—a commandeering of the son’s life narrative to fulfill the father’s own unmet ambitions or to maintain the family’s status.

Consider a common scenario: a young man dreams of becoming an artist or a writer, but his father, a successful businessman, insists he study engineering or medicine. The father’s reasoning seems sound: creative fields offer uncertain futures, while professions provide stability and respect. He frames his insistence as wisdom born of experience, as protection against hardship he himself has known. The son, taught from earliest childhood to honor his father’s judgment, feels the weight of this expectation as something more than preference—it carries the moral force of duty, loyalty, and gratitude.

Yet beneath this ostensibly rational calculus lies something more psychologically fraught. The father’s insistence may also express his own unlived life—his own abandoned dreams of distinction, his need to prove to his own father (now deceased) that his line has produced someone of stature. The son becomes not just himself, but a vessel for multiple generations of hope, disappointment, and aspiration. To pursue his own dream is not merely a personal choice; it becomes an act of betrayal, a rejection of everything the family has sacrificed.

The Translation into Organizational Life

According to El-Orabi, these patterns do not remain confined to the family home. They migrate, often without conscious awareness, into professional contexts. The young man who learned to silence his own desires to fulfill his father’s expectations may, years later, find himself doing the same to his subordinates. Having internalized the equation of authority with superior knowledge and legitimate control, he reproduces it naturally when he himself rises to positions of leadership.

This is not hypocrisy, but rather the working of unconscious loyalty. We tend to recreate what we know, even when what we know has caused us pain. The manager who was once stifled by paternal authority genuinely believes he is being a strong, decisive leader when he dismisses subordinates’ input, makes unilateral decisions, and expects compliance without question. He has simply activated the template for authority that was etched into his psyche decades earlier.

In workplaces structured by these unconscious family patterns, hierarchy becomes rigid and communication flows primarily downward. Questioning decisions is interpreted not as healthy critical thinking but as insubordination or disrespect. Innovation requires risk-taking and experimentation, but both are dangerous in an environment where errors may be met with shame and punishment rather than learning. Employees learn to manage upward—to present what leadership wants to hear rather than what they actually think or observe.

The result is what organizational psychologists call a “culture of compliance.” People become adept at reading signals, at anticipating what authority figures want, at avoiding blame. Energy that might be directed toward creative problem-solving or genuine collaboration is instead channeled into navigating political dynamics and protecting one’s position. Trust atrophies. Autonomy is experienced as threat rather than opportunity. The organization becomes, in essence, a larger version of the authoritarian family—a place where care and control remain confused, where loyalty is demanded but genuine engagement withers.

The Generational Divide: A Collision of Expectations

Perhaps nowhere is the tension between inherited family patterns and changing realities more evident than in the generational divide now opening across Middle Eastern workplaces. The region is experiencing what might be called a “psychological globalization”—younger professionals, shaped by education abroad, exposure to global media, and digital connectivity, are arriving in traditional organizational settings with fundamentally different assumptions about authority, autonomy, and the purpose of work itself.

This generational shift is not simply about age but about the collision of different psychological formations. Those who entered the workforce in the 1980s and 1990s—today’s senior leadership—came of age in a context where traditional family structures were largely unquestioned, where economic opportunities were more abundant (particularly in oil-rich economies), and where the social contract seemed clearer: work hard, show loyalty, and advancement would follow. For this generation, reproducing family-style authority in organizations felt natural, even necessary for maintaining order and achieving results.

Today’s younger professionals, by contrast, often describe a profound sense of dislocation. A 28-year-old engineer in Amman, educated at a European university, returns to find that her ideas are dismissed not on their merits but because of her junior status. A Dubai-based analyst with an MBA realizes that promotions depend less on performance than on personal relationships with senior management. A young entrepreneur in Cairo discovers that challenging a bad decision in a meeting is seen not as constructive feedback but as a character flaw requiring correction.

These younger professionals have often been exposed to different organizational models—flatter hierarchies, cultures of psychological safety where dissent is encouraged, feedback systems that flow in multiple directions. They have absorbed, consciously or not, the language of contemporary management: authenticity, purpose-driven work, work-life integration, collaborative leadership. When they encounter organizations still operating on family-system dynamics, the cognitive dissonance can be profound.

What makes this particularly painful is that many of these young professionals deeply value their cultural heritage and family bonds. They are not wholesale rejecting Middle Eastern culture in favor of Western individualism. Rather, they are experiencing the difficult work of trying to integrate different value systems—honoring family while claiming personal autonomy, respecting tradition while embracing change, maintaining connection while establishing boundaries. The workplace becomes yet another arena where this internal struggle must be negotiated.

Senior leaders, meanwhile, often interpret younger employees’ expectations as entitlement, impatience, or insufficient respect. They see young people who expect rapid advancement without “paying their dues,” who question decisions without understanding the full context, who prioritize personal fulfillment over organizational loyalty. From their perspective, these attitudes reflect a troubling erosion of values that once held society together. The family patterns that shaped their own success now seem under assault.

This mutual incomprehension can create organizational paralysis. Younger employees become cynical and disengaged, viewing senior leadership as out of touch and resistant to necessary change. Senior leaders become defensive and rigid, doubling down on traditional authority structures precisely because they feel threatened. The organization fractures along generational lines, with each cohort reinforcing the other’s worst suspicions.

Yet this generational tension also contains the seeds of transformation. It makes visible patterns that were previously invisible, forces conversations that were previously avoided, and creates pressure for change that cannot easily be dismissed as coming from “outside” the culture. The question is whether organizations can harness this tension constructively rather than allowing it to calcify into permanent conflict.

Toward a Different Kind of Leadership

According to El-Orabi, recognition is the necessary first step toward change. Leaders must become aware of the family patterns they carry and how these patterns shape their behavior in organizational contexts. This requires a kind of psychological literacy that is not typically part of leadership development—an ability to reflect on one’s own emotional history and to recognize how unconscious loyalties and unexamined assumptions continue to operate.

What might leadership look like if it were freed from the compulsion to repeat these inherited patterns?

Under this new rubric, the leader would serve as a vessel to absorb, process and manage the anxieties, fears, and complex emotions within an organization, particularly in times of uncertainty. By embodying and creating safe psychological spaces—these containers—ideas and emotions can be expressed and processed, and ultimately transformed into clear direction and productive action.

Drawing from the work of Kets de Vries and others, El-Orabi describes the key characteristics of this new leadership model as follows:

• Holding Anxiety: The primary role of the leader is to tolerate the system’s anxiety and tension without immediately trying to discharge it with premature reassurance or control. This means staying calm and grounded even in the face of pressure or chaos.

• Metabolizing Emotions: Leaders absorb these “raw” emotions and transform them into something that can be thought about and acted upon. They convert fear and confusion into clarity and a set of choices for the team.

• Creating Psychological Safety: The leader establishes the values, norms, and boundaries that create an environment of trust and safety, allowing team members to express themselves, share ideas, and engage in constructive conflict without fear of judgment.

• Facilitating Sensemaking: By “holding the space,” the leader allows the group to explore different perspectives and make sense of complex situations together. This enables the group to work through challenges rather than fall apart under pressure.

• Empowering Growth: The ultimate goal is to help individuals develop their own capacity for self-responsibility and maturity, eventually enabling them to manage their own “internal container”.

Conclusion: The Work Ahead

As El-Orabi explains, the transformation of Middle Eastern organizations is not primarily a technical or structural challenge but a psychological and cultural one. It requires that we become aware of patterns we have inherited, that we examine the unconscious loyalties that shape our behavior, and that we learn to distinguish between the authority that enables growth and the domination that stifles it.

This is difficult work. It requires us to revisit experiences that may be painful, to acknowledge ways we may have been harmed and ways we may be harming others, and to risk creating new patterns without the security of familiar templates. It means having conversations that Middle Eastern cultures, with their emphasis on harmony and respect for authority, have traditionally avoided.

Yet the urgency of this work has never been greater. As the region confronts unprecedented challenges—economic transitions, generational shifts, geopolitical instability—its organizations will need every ounce of creativity, commitment, and collaborative capacity they can muster. That potential will remain locked as long as workplaces continue to function as extensions of authoritarian family systems rather than as spaces for genuine human development.

The generational divide, uncomfortable as it is, offers an opportunity. It creates a productive tension that can catalyze change if organizations can learn to harness it constructively. Younger professionals bring fresh perspectives and legitimate demands for more humane, effective ways of working. Senior leaders possess hard-won wisdom about navigating complexity and understanding context. The challenge is creating spaces where both forms of knowledge can be honored and integrated.

The question, ultimately, is whether we can learn to lead differently—to transform authority from an instrument of control into what it might truly become: a commitment to creating conditions where others can flourish, think freely, and contribute their full humanity to shared endeavors.

The answer will shape not only the future of Middle Eastern organizations but the life possibilities of millions who work within them. The work is hard, but it is also hopeful: every moment of awareness, every small act of leading differently, every conversation that names what has been unspoken serves as a building block for this transformation.

References and Further Reading

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.

Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups: And other papers. Tavistock.

El-Orabi, Ahmed (2025). Egypt on mind: The role of leadership absence & identity fragmentation in collective social anxiety and defences [Master’s thesis]. Executive Master in Change, INSEAD.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2001). The leadership mystique: A user’s manual for the human enterprise. Financial Times/Prentice Hall.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2006). The leader on the couch: A clinical approach to changing people and organizations. Jossey-Bass.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R., Korotov, K., & Florent-Treacy, E. (Eds.). (2007). The coach and the leader: International perspectives on executive coaching. Palgrave Macmillan.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2014). Mindful leadership coaching: Journeys into the interior. Palgrave Macmillan.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R., & Cheak, A. (2016). Psychodynamic approaches to leadership development. In G. R. Goethals, S. T. Allison, R. M. Kramer, & D. M. Messick (Eds.), Conceptions of leadership: Enduring ideas and emerging insights (pp. 65–82). Palgrave Macmillan.

Scharmer, O. C. (2009). Theory U: Learning from the future as it emerges. Berrett-Koehler.

Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Volkan, V. D. (1997). Bloodlines: From ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Volkan, V. D. (2001). Transgenerational transmissions and chosen traumas: An aspect of large-group identity. Group Analysis, 34(1), 79-97. https://doi.org/10.1177/05333160122077730

Volkan, V. D. (2004). Blind trust: Large groups and their leaders in times of crisis and terror. Pitchstone Publishing.

Volkan, V. D. (2006). Killing in the name of identity: A study of bloody conflicts. Pitchstone Publishing.

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. International Universities Press.

In daily life, we collect scrapes, cuts, and bruises—small reminders of how fragile the body can be. A cut finger in the kitchen. A knee scraped on wet pavement. A tumble after returning to an old sport. The healing is straightforward: wash the wound, cover it, give it care and time.

But sometimes, we forget. We leave the scrape untended. We keep a bandage on too long, ignoring the festering that is going on underneath.

What about the wounds we cannot see?

How often do we bandage our emotional pain—convincing ourselves that if we just wait long enough, it will heal on its own? In protecting ourselves from discomfort, might we also be turning away from the very process that leads to healing?

This reminds me of a moment with my friend, Ayako,* that remains forever engraved in my mind.

Unfinished Business — What Are Unfinished Emotions?

The text message came out of nowhere on a Tuesday afternoon.

“Want to grab a drink after work?“

It was from Ayako, a friend whose career trajectory had always impressed me. Her LinkedIn profile read like a master class in leadership success—steady promotions, impressive results, the kind of upward momentum that made her seem unstoppable. By every external measure, she was winning.

But the moment I saw her face that evening, I knew something had shifted.

“You look exhausted,” I said, settling into the chair across from her. “Everything okay?”

She stared into her drink for a long moment. “I don’t know. There’s something really off in my life, and I can’t seem to shake it.”

What came next caught me completely off guard.

“Each time I get a promotion or move up to a bigger title with better pay, I feel this rush of relief—like I’ve finally proven myself. But then...” She paused, searching for words. “It all starts over again.”

“Like you’re stuck in something,” I offered.

“Exactly. There’s this voice that never stops. This deeper sense that I’ll never be enough. That I’m not enough. So I keep pushing, keep proving I’m worthy of whatever comes next.”

I studied her face, trying to reconcile this vulnerability with the confident leader I thought I knew. “I never would have imagined you felt this way. You always seem so together.”

That’s when the dam broke.

“The thought that ‘I am not enough’ has been with me since childhood,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I have almost no memories of being praised by my parents. My siblings were, but not me—not for grades, not for anything. I never felt accepted. So I internalized this drive: ‘I’m not enough. I have to do more.’ Even when I accomplish something, the self-criticism doesn’t stop—’I should have done better’ or ‘I could have handled that differently.’ And the worst part? I end up imposing this same impossible standard on everyone around me, which destroys my relationships. I’ve been trapped in this cycle for decades—beating myself up and beating others up, hoping that somehow, someday, I’ll finally be enough.“

I sat there, stunned.

In that moment, I witnessed something rare and courageous—someone pulling back the curtain on the gap between their public success and private struggle—between their “fitting-in self” and their “authentic self.” And from the pain in Ayako’s eyes it was clear that acknowledging these unresolved emotions had been no easy task.

Cost of Avoidance—The Price of Not Looking

In psychology, unresolved emotions like Ayako’s are colloquially referred to as “unfinished business”. In every life, there are matters left unresolved—like wounds kept beneath a bandage. No matter how stellar a career we build, nothing truly heals until we face these emotions and the patterns they create within us. When we fail to do this, they return to us, again and again.

After talking with Ayako, I couldn’t stop thinking about what happens when we cannot “properly hold our grief,” and instead slap on a bandage and get by with first aid. Gestalt therapy founder Fritz Perls wrote that unfinished business is any unexpressed emotion from the past that interferes with present awareness. Ayako’s fears—“I am not good enough,” “I won’t be accepted as I am”—are emotions born of her interpretations. Those emotions are certainly “real.” But were the interpretations that produced them actually true?

When we keep a bandage on and choose not to look at an emotional wound, it comes back over time larger, stronger, and deeper. Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik showed experimentally that unfinished tasks are remembered more strongly than completed ones, which is referred to as the Zeigarnik effect (McLeod, 2023). Much like multiple browser tabs saved as “I’ll read this later” that continue to consume memory in the background, unfinished emotions quietly drain our energy.

Psychologist Mark Travers notes that when unresolved elements remain, we tend to replay past events and imagine counterfactual outcomes, falling into repetitive thought patterns that are emotionally exhausting (Travers, 2024). When we’re depleted like this, can we really perform as expected? Rather than nurturing healthy self-regard, might we be damaging our confidence?

There are times when it is necessary to hold emotions gently and leave them be. Even so, facing the truly important unfinished emotions is what ultimately helps us live better—both as professionals and as human beings.

Moving Toward Healing—A Step-by-Step Process for Healing

So how do we remove the bandage from the heart and begin the healing process?

Travers discusses this primarily in the context of romantic relationships, but the steps he offers can also be helpful when working with emotions more broadly (Travers, 2024). They are presented below as starting points for your journey. Ultimately, each step can be be reflected upon in depth. Exploring them through journaling or with the aid of a trained coach or therapist could help you gently open the door to the healing process.

1. Acknowledge that unfinished emotions exist

Acknowledge that there are unresolved emotions or experiences. Recognize what weighs on you and which feelings remain unfinished.

2. Accept ambiguity

Accept that not everything around us is logical. Not everything has a clear answer. Cultivate the capacity to live with unanswered questions—Negative Capability. (Please also read my article, Leading Like Bamboo, where I discuss negative capability.)

3. Feel and put it into words

Express what you wanted to say, what you wanted to do, what you felt, what you are feeling now, and what you learned from the event.

4. Forgive

Mark an end to the negative emotions directed toward yourself or others.

5. Let go

Create closure through your own small ritual of mourning—write a letter and tear it up, place symbolic items in a box, etc.

6. Make time to heal

Allow time for the wound to heal, and treat yourself with care. Recovery is not linear. Be kind to yourself.

Reflection:

What is your “open tab” in your heart right now?

Choose one. If you were to take two of the six steps above today, which would you begin with?

Unfinished business exists for everyone. Looking away does not make it disappear; if anything, the more we avert our eyes, the more strongly it remains and the more it returns in new forms.

A series of kind acts towards ourselves sends us forward into the future with lightness. It all begins with a small act of courage—like peeling off a single bandage.

In my next article, I’d like to continue this exploration of unfinished business by looking at the signals it sends to our body before our “mind” starts to notice that something is really off.

* To ensure confidentiality, I’ve used the pseudonym “Ayako.”

References

McLeod, S. (2023). Zeigarnik Effect Examples in Psychology. SimplyPsychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/zeigarnik-effect.html

Travers, M. (2024). 3 Reasons Behind Love’s ‘Zeigarnik Effect’—By A Psychologist. Forbes.com. https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/12/23/3-reasons-behind-loves-zeigarnik-effect-by-a-psychologist/

A quiet exodus is underway in the corporate world.

High-performing executives are stepping away from their careers—not to retire, but to rediscover themselves. What they find in that space between ambition and rest is changing how we understand work, identity, and human fulfillment.

The statistics tell part of the story. In 2025, burnout among professionals hit a record 66%, with three-quarters of employees reporting moderate to severe stress. Meanwhile, Gen-Z workers began championing a new concept to battle workplace stress and find a way out—the “micro-retirement.”

But statistics only scratch the surface. In boardrooms and C-suites around the world, people once defined by perpetual motion are pausing—sometimes for the first time in their careers. These sabbaticals are not indulgences. They are acts of self-preservation, even self-discovery—an urgent search for the person buried beneath years of performance and productivity.

The conditions that led here have been building for decades. Remote work blurred the borders between professional and personal life. Economic uncertainty eroded the promise of linear careers. A generation raised to optimize every minute has finally reached its limit. And in that collective exhaustion, a new movement is taking shape—one that prizes being over doing, presence over performance.

When Achievement Becomes Identity

Curious about this emerging phenomenon, Silvia Lago, an executive coach and Affiliate with Russell Reynolds Associates, undertook a study of corporate sabbaticals, and a disturbing pattern was exposed. Of the 20 executives who participated—all of whom had taken extended sabbaticals—the majority had allowed their identity to become dangerously fused with their sense of professional achievement. They had become, in Lago’s words, “human doings” rather than “human beings.”

“I was becoming more and more of a dark, tangled mess,” one participant said of her pre-sabbatical state. Another recognized the danger signs: “My life was all about work. If I stayed like this I would definitely burn out.”

The modern workplace creates what psychologists call an “achievement treadmill.” The faster you run, the faster it moves. Social media amplifies this effect, transforming professional networking into performance art where every career move is curated for maximum impact. LinkedIn has become the new keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, except we’re comparing job titles instead of lawns.

This culture breeds executives who measure their worth in metrics: revenue generated, teams managed, deals closed. But what Lago’s research demonstrates is that those metrics make a poor foundation for human identity. When self-worth depends on quarterly results, what happens when those results inevitably falter?

The Triggers

The catalysts that drive successful people to abandon successful careers are remarkably consistent. Lago identified several patterns: chronic stress approaching burnout, significant personal loss, or a deepening sense that work lacks meaning. Sometimes it’s a values clash—discovering that the corporate culture they’ve thrived in no longer aligns with who they want to be.

“The toxic environment was changing me. I didn’t recognizing myself anymore,” one executive explained. Another developed physical symptoms: “I had an anxiety crisis, with insomnia and irritability.”

The corporate world’s traditional response to these breaking points has been to ignore them or treat them as personal failings. Take a vacation. Get therapy. Learn to manage stress better. But Lago’s research suggests something different: these aren’t bugs in the system, they’re features. They’re natural responses to unnatural pressures, healthy reactions to unhealthy environments.

What makes this particularly urgent today is the acceleration of these pressures. The pandemic didn’t create burnout culture, but it stripped away many buffers that made it tolerable. Commutes that provided transition time disappeared. Office friendships that offered emotional support became Zoom squares. The thin line between work and life didn’t just blur—it evaporated.

The Power of Unstructured Time

The most counterintuitive finding in Lago’s research: the participants who planned their sabbaticals least were often transformed by them most.

Those who approached time off like another project to optimize—scheduling every day, setting ambitious goals, treating rest like another form of productivity—missed the point entirely.

“I planned every single minute of it,” one executive admitted about his company-sponsored sabbatical. “I went back to the company, and ended up leaving after one year.” The irony wasn’t lost on him: he’d tried to solve over-optimization by over-optimizing his solution.

They traveled without itineraries, lived without schedules, and—perhaps most importantly—existed without achievements to validate their worth. In that space of uncertainty and unstructured time, something shifted: they began to remember who they were before they became what they did.

“I didn’t plan my days. I tried to do everything differently than when I’m in my working mode,” one participant explained. “I enjoyed the small things; the spontaneous moments.” Another described learning to “float” instead of constantly swimming: “Before I would swim from side to side of the pool, fearing that I would sink. The best part of my sabbatical was learning how to float.”

This surrender isn’t just philosophical—it’s practical. Modern neuroscience confirms what ancient wisdom traditions have long taught: our brains do their most creative work when we’re not actively trying to solve problems. The default mode network, active when we’re daydreaming or at rest, generates insights and makes unexpected connections. But this network only functions when we stop forcing it to perform.

Three Stages of Transformation

Through her analysis, Lago identified a consistent pattern in how people experience sabbaticals—and by extension, how they navigate major life transitions. She calls these stages “Fitting In,” “Being,” and “Belonging,” drawing from psychological theories of adult development and identity formation.

In the “Fitting In” stage, people conform to external expectations and social rules. They become what their organizations need them to be, often at the expense of their authentic selves. Most corporate high-achievers spend years or even decades in this stage, climbing ladders that may be leaning against the wrong walls.

The “Being” stage is the sabbatical itself—a liminal space where old identities are suspended and new ones haven’t yet formed. This is often the most uncomfortable phase, filled with uncertainty and anxiety. “In the beginning, I cried every day,” one participant recalled. “It took me months to start enjoying my sabbatical.” But it’s also where transformation becomes possible.

The “Belonging” stage represents integration—returning to work and relationships with a clearer sense of self and boundaries. People in this stage aren’t rejecting society or their careers entirely; they’re engaging with them more authentically. They’ve learned the difference between fitting in and belonging.

“When I came back from sabbatical, I was a different version of myself,” one executive reflected. “Trivial things stopped mattering. What mattered was the larger scheme of things and I began to look at things from a more holistic perspective”

The Corporate Dilemma

Companies that offer sabbaticals face a fundamental paradox: they’re essentially paying employees to potentially realize they don’t want to work there anymore. Lago’s research confirms this risk—several participants never returned to their original companies, and those who did often came back with very different priorities and boundaries.

Yet companies that have embraced sabbatical programs report unexpected benefits. Employees return with fresh perspectives, renewed energy, and often, surprisingly, deeper loyalty—not to the company as an institution, but to colleagues and work that truly matters to them. They become more discerning about how they spend their time and energy, but also more effective when they do engage.

The key difference, Lago found, was in how companies framed these programs.

This creates obvious challenges for HR departments trained to measure ROI on every investment. How do you quantify the value of an employee learning to “float” instead of constantly swimming? How do you budget for transformation that can’t be captured in performance metrics? These questions reflect broader tensions between humanistic approaches to employee wellbeing and business imperatives for measurable outcomes.

When Opportunity Meets Awareness

One of the most intriguing aspects of Lago’s research involves what Carl Jung called “synchronicity”—meaningful coincidences that seem to guide people toward important insights or opportunities. Participants who learned to release control during their sabbaticals reported a striking number of these experiences.

One executive discovered an old notebook with a list of things she wanted to become and found “scuba diving instructor” written there. When she decided to pursue it, she unexpectedly received money from a tax return that made the dream possible. Another, frustrated by poor food quality while traveling, started blogging about the experience and accidentally discovered the business opportunity that would become her new career.

These stories might sound like wishful thinking, but they point to something more practical: when we stop forcing outcomes and start paying attention to possibilities, we notice opportunities that were always there. The executive who became a scuba instructor didn’t manifest money from the universe—she became aware of resources she’d been ignoring. The food blogger didn’t stumble into success by accident—she recognized a market need because she’d stopped being so focused on her predetermined path.

“Leadership is more about being than doing,” one participant observed, quoting leadership expert Joseph Jaworski. In a culture obsessed with action and achievement, this insight feels almost radical. But the executives who internalized it reported becoming more effective leaders, not less. They delegated more, listened better, and inspired others through authenticity rather than authority.

Visualizing Change

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Lago’s research came from an unusual source: she asked participants to draw representations of themselves before, during, and after their sabbaticals. The results were striking.

Before their breaks, people drew themselves as constrained figures—trapped in fishbowls, running on treadmills, or literally boxed in by corporate structures. Their self-representations were often dark, stressed, or fragmented. One executive drew herself with her mouth covered, representing how she felt unable to express her true self in her corporate role.

During their sabbaticals, the drawings opened up. People depicted themselves in nature, underwater (several chose water metaphors), or simply as more relaxed versions of themselves. The rigid structures disappeared, replaced by fluid, organic forms.

The “after” drawings were perhaps most interesting. Rather than showing people who had completely rejected their former lives, they showed integration. Figures standing confidently but peacefully, connected to both their inner selves and their outer environments. Not floating free from responsibility, but engaged with it more authentically.

These visual representations capture something difficult to express in words: the difference between being shaped by external forces and choosing how to engage with them. It’s the difference between fitting in and belonging.

Making It Last

The end of a sabbatical presents its own challenges. How do you maintain insights gained during months of reflection when you’re back to back-to-back meetings? How do you preserve spaciousness when your inbox is overflowing?

Some participants in Lago’s study struggled with this transition more than others. Those who tried to return to their exact same roles and routines often found themselves slipping back into old patterns. But those who used their sabbatical insights to make concrete changes—setting new boundaries, changing jobs or industries, or restructuring their work-life integration—were more successful at maintaining their transformations.

“When I returned, I had courage to say no to a role in the HQ and persist on another which was back in my country,” one executive shared. “Reconnecting with my roots gained importance for me.” Another described learning to create regular spaces for reflection even within a busy schedule: “Even when I went back to my urban life, I created space to feel connected with nature somehow.”

The key insight:

A Skill for Uncertain Times

Lago’s research, conducted in 2018, feels remarkably prescient in 2025. The themes she identified—burnout, identity confusion, the search for meaning beyond achievement—have only intensified. The “Great Resignation” of 2021-2022 can be understood as a mass version of what her participants experienced individually: people stepping back to reassess their relationships with work.

But there’s a crucial difference between quitting in frustration and taking a sabbatical with intention. The former is reactive; the latter is proactive. Sabbaticals, when done thoughtfully, create space for transformation rather than just escape.

This distinction matters as we navigate an economy where traditional career paths are increasingly obsolete. The executives in Lago’s study weren’t just taking breaks from their jobs—they were learning skills for navigating uncertainty, for finding meaning beyond external validation, and for maintaining their humanity in increasingly dehumanizing systems.

These are skills we all need as artificial intelligence automates routine tasks, as economic volatility makes long-term planning difficult, and as climate change forces us to reconsider fundamental assumptions about progress and growth. The ability to pause, reflect, and adapt may be the most valuable professional skill of the coming decades.

The Fundamental Question

In the end, Lago’s research circles back to something bigger than sabbaticals—or even work. It asks a question most of us try to avoid: What does it mean to live a human life inside a system built for productivity?

Kierkegaard once wrote:

The trick, as these leaders discovered, is to do both at once: to look back long enough to learn, but not so long as to stop moving.

In an age addicted to acceleration, the sabbatical whispers a counter-cultural truth: that real growth often requires stillness, and that our deepest human work happens not in the striving, but in the pausing to reflect on the fullness of who we are.

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In an era when corporate scandals dominate headlines and CEO integrity faces unprecedented scrutiny, investors are grappling with a fundamental question that has plagued the financial world for nearly a century: How do you accurately assess the character of the people running the companies you’re betting on?

The collapse of FTX, the ongoing questions surrounding tech leadership accountability, and the rise of ESG investing have thrust management assessment into the spotlight. Yet despite these high-stakes consequences, most investors still rely on gut feelings and informal hunches when evaluating whether a CEO can be trusted with their capital.

This glaring gap in investment methodology has caught the attention of researchers who believe the answer might lie in an unexpected place: psychology. A groundbreaking study by Rafael Kisslinger da Silva suggests that the tools psychoanalysts use to understand human behavior could revolutionize how investors evaluate corporate leadership—and that legendary investors like Warren Buffett may already be using these techniques intuitively.

The 90-Year-Old Problem

The challenge isn’t new. Back in 1934, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd—the fathers of value investing—identified three critical factors for analyzing any investment: company valuation, business model strength, and management quality. They developed sophisticated frameworks for the first two but essentially threw up their hands on the third.

“Qualitative factors such as the character of the management are exceedingly important, but they are also exceedingly difficult to deal with intelligently,” Graham and Dodd wrote. Their solution was radical for its pragmatism: focus on quantitative factors and largely ignore management character, since financial results would “epitomize” the qualitative elements anyway.

This approach worked reasonably well in an economy dominated by tangible assets—factories, inventory, equipment—that appeared clearly on balance sheets. But today’s knowledge-based economy tells a different story. When human capital drives most of a company’s value, ignoring the people in charge is no longer viable.

“Unfortunately for value investors today, human capital is ever more important for a company’s valuation than the tangible, physical assets that can be objectively quantified,” da Silva notes in his research. “Ignoring qualitative factors such as the character of management is no longer a viable option.”

What Warren Buffett Actually Does

The world’s most successful investor has long emphasized the importance of management integrity, famously stating:

But when pressed to explain exactly how he evaluates integrity, even Buffett struggles. In a 1998 Berkshire Hathaway meeting, he admitted: “I can’t tell you exactly what filter we put them through mentally, but I can tell you that if you’ve been around a while, you can have a pretty high batting average in coming to those conclusions.”

Nine years later, still grappling with the same question, Buffett said:

This inability to codify his process frustrated da Silva, who suspected Buffett was unconsciously employing sophisticated psychological techniques. To test this theory, he interviewed ten successful European investors managing portfolios from tens of millions to 2.4 billion euros, all of whom had consistently outperformed market averages.

The Hidden Psychology of Investment Decisions

The research revealed that successful investors are indeed using psychological methods, though they don’t realize it. They’re employing what psychologists call “associative thinking”—the mind’s ability to make connections between ideas and experiences based on patterns, even when those connections aren’t immediately logical.

This process, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as “thin-slicing,” allows experts to make accurate judgments based on minimal information. Art experts can spot forgeries in seconds; marriage researchers can predict divorce with 95% accuracy after watching couples for just one hour. The key is pattern recognition developed through experience.

“All investors confirmed that gut-feelings play an important role in their investment process,” da Silva found. “When I dug deeper into what is meant by gut-feelings, all investors agreed that gut-feelings are somehow related to unconscious pattern-recognition.”

One investor told da Silva he takes potential business partners to lunch and observes how they treat the waitstaff—a classic example of using minimal behavioral cues to infer broader character traits. Another looks for family-controlled companies that shared IPO proceeds with employees, reasoning that such generosity signals fairness and stakeholder consideration.

The Science Behind the Intuition

What makes this research compelling is how it aligns with established psychological findings. The investors’ instincts about management character mirror discoveries in personality psychology:

The Honesty-Humility Factor: Psychologists Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee discovered that honesty and humility form a unified personality dimension. Remarkably, da Silva’s investors had independently noticed this connection, using observations of humility as indicators of integrity.

The Dark Triad: Research into Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy has shown these traits cluster together and predict manipulative behavior. Several investors described watching for narcissistic tendencies in management, even without knowing the formal psychological framework.

Thin-Slicing Accuracy: Studies show that snap judgments based on minimal information can be surprisingly accurate—sometimes more so than extensive analysis. This validates investors’ reliance on brief management interactions to form lasting impressions.

Beyond Gut Feelings: The Logic of Inference

The investors weren’t just using pattern recognition; they were employing a specific form of reasoning called “abductive logic.” This approach, developed by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, involves observing surprising facts and inferring the most likely explanation.

For example: A CEO openly discusses personal mistakes and company shortcomings in annual reports. If the CEO were trustworthy, such candor would be expected. Therefore, the CEO is likely trustworthy.

This same logic underlies both detective work and psychoanalysis—and apparently, successful investing. “In all four investment examples shared by Rob Vinall in his annual letter, he used abductive logic,” da Silva noted. “This was evident every single time investors described looking at factors ‘below the surface and beyond the obvious.’”

The Reflection Factor

Perhaps most importantly, successful investors share a commitment to reflection. They spend significant time thinking about their observations, discussing them with others, and examining their own potential biases. This mirrors psychoanalytic practices designed to bring unconscious insights into conscious awareness.

“All socioanalytic methods have one thing in common: they are aimed at creating the conditions for reflection,” explains James Krantz, a systems psychodynamics expert. “Shared reflective practice is the pathway to understanding the unconscious background of organizations.”

The parallel to investment success is striking. As da Silva discovered, “All investors confirmed that an important part of their work involves spending a lot of time thinking and reflecting.”

The Cognitive Bias Trap

But associative thinking comes with risks. Because much pattern recognition happens unconsciously, it’s vulnerable to cognitive biases. The “halo effect” might lead investors to overlook red flags in managers they find personally likable. “Transference” could cause them to trust someone who reminds them of a respected mentor.

One investor admitted to da Silva that despite having developed a systematic “red flag” checklist, he still invested with a manager who exhibited multiple warning signs simply because he was fond of the person—a costly mistake that illustrated how emotional bias can override analytical frameworks.

Practical Applications

So how might investors practically apply these psychological insights? Da Silva suggests several approaches:

Systematic Pattern Documentation: Rather than relying solely on intuitive pattern recognition, investors could maintain explicit lists of behavioral indicators they’ve observed over time, both positive and negative.

Bias Awareness Training: Understanding specific cognitive biases—halo effects, confirmation bias, transference—can help investors recognize when their judgment might be compromised.

Structured Reflection Practices: Regular reflection sessions, either alone or with trusted advisors, can help bring unconscious observations into conscious analysis where they can be properly evaluated.

Behavioral Cue Checklists: Specific things to observe during management meetings—communication style, response to challenges, treatment of others, discussion of failures—could provide more systematic character assessment.

Beyond Financial Returns

The implications of da Silva’s work extend beyond portfolio performance. If more investors allocated capital based on management integrity rather than just financial metrics, it could incentivize better corporate behavior. As da Silva notes: “If more investors would allocate their capital to managers with high integrity, it could help to make the world a little better.”

This aligns with growing demands for stakeholder capitalism and ESG investing. Investors increasingly want to support companies that create value for society, not just shareholders. But without systematic ways to assess management character, these goals remain difficult to achieve.

A Framework for the Future

Da Silva’s research suggests a potential synthesis: combining the quantitative rigor that investors already use with psychological insights that can systematize character assessment. This wouldn’t replace traditional financial analysis but would complement it with tools specifically designed for evaluating the human elements of business.

The approach recognizes that assessing people is fundamentally different from analyzing balance sheets. It requires what philosophers call “interpretive” rather than “positivist” methods—approaches that acknowledge subjectivity while still providing systematic frameworks for evaluation.

Warren Buffett has spent decades perfecting his ability to read people, developing what he calls his “inner scorecard” for character assessment. But if psychological research can help systematize even a portion of this process, it could democratize access to better management evaluation—giving more investors the tools to avoid the next FTX while supporting truly trustworthy business leaders.

As corporate leadership faces increasing scrutiny and investor responsibility grows, the stakes for getting character assessment right have never been higher. The answer may not lie in traditional financial metrics but in understanding the psychology of the people who drive business success or failure.

The question isn’t whether investors should evaluate management character—it’s whether they’ll develop systematic ways to do it well. Psychology might finally provide the missing framework that Graham and Dodd couldn’t offer 90 years ago.

The research discussed is based on Rafael Kisslinger da Silva’s thesis “The Socioanalytic Edge: Are Systems Psychodynamics Methods & Concepts the Missing Framework in Value Investing?” completed in 2021.

References

Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2013). The H factor of personality: Why some people are manipulative, self-entitled, materialistic, and exploitive—and why it matters for everyone. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Berkshire Hathaway. (1998). Morning session - 1998 meeting. CNBC. Retrieved from https://buffett.cnbc.com/video/1998/05/04/morning-session---1998-berkshire-hathaway-annual-meeting.html

Berkshire Hathaway. (2007). Afternoon session - 2007 meeting. CNBC. Retrieved from https://buffett.cnbc.com/video/2007/05/05/afternoon-session---2007-berkshire-hathaway-annual-meeting.html

da Silva, R. K. (2021). The socioanalytic edge: Are systems psychodynamics methods & concepts the missing framework in value investing? [Master’s thesis]. Executive Master in Change, INSEAD.

Gladwell, M. (2006). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. Little, Brown and Company.

Graham, B., & Dodd, D. (1934). Security analysis: Principles and technique. McGraw-Hill.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Krantz, J. (2013). Work culture analysis and reflective space. In S. Long (Ed.), Socioanalytic methods: Discovering the hidden in organisations and social systems (pp. 15-32). Karnac Books.

Long, S. (2013) Socioanalytic Methods: Discovering the hidden in organisations and social systems. https://www.amazon.com/Socioanalytic-Methods-Discovering-Organisations-Systems/dp/0367101556.

Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). The dark triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556-563.

Peirce, C. S. (1931-1935). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vols. 1-6). Harvard University Press.