“[T]here is no such thing as an intrinsically existing individual. Individuals are always embedded in webs of relationships, systems, places, landscapes, communities and so on.”

Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma, Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human

I’ve spent three decades studying relationality, cultures of care, and ubuntu philosophy. This post is where I share that journey, and why I believe this is the worldview shift organizations need now.

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We’ve forgotten that we are a crew

When the Artemis II crew splashed down in April 2026 after ten days circling the Moon, astronaut Christina Koch said something that moved me deeply.

In that profound experience of watching Earth shrink to a small, fragile sphere in the window of the Orion spacecraft what she understood unequivocally: we belong to one another. Most of us will never experience looking back at Earth from space. But. we can, right from the ground we stand on, cultivate the recognition of our interconnectedness.

When we understand ourselves as connected rather than separate, we begin to prioritize care, reciprocity, and generosity. This is the ethical dimension of interdependence, and it is grounding, because human beings are wired for connection. It is our operating system.

Meanwhile a disordered global system is pressing down on all of us: blazing temperatures and fire seasons, wars that almost none of us want and few of us can stop, a job market that seems broken for many. In the middle of all of it, most people still want the same few things. Peace. Safety. The ability to care for themselves and the people they love.

These crises are neither separate nor simple. Theorists call them wicked problems, because the causes are multiple, nested, and nonlinear.1 Apply a linear solution to a wicked problem and it almost always gets worse.

Our challenges have many roots, but the deepest may be the myth of separateness: the Cartesian idea that we are isolated minds inside individual bodies, cut off from each other and from the world around us. In the West that idea grew into a fiercely individualistic culture, and along with it a scarcity mindset and extractive practices that reward accumulation and competition.

The way of thinking and being that the American Dream was built on is disintegrating. The lone individual is unequipped for high disruption conditions at scale. Whether we solve our wicked problems or not, the way forward is relational.

That means seeing the world relationally, treating care as critical infrastructure rather than a personality trait, and practicing abundance through regeneration instead of extraction.2

In organizations, collapsing employee engagement is the smoking gun announcing the death of business as usual. Gallup found that global engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest point in more than a decade, at a cost of roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity, or about 9% of global GDP. In the United States alone, disengagement costs close to $2 trillion a year.3

Most striking: for the first time in Gallup’s tracking history, managers are now as disengaged as the people they lead.4 Engagement collapse is predictable when viewed through a relational lens. Our organizational systems have been designed around independence, competition, and control, whereas what motivates human beings is care, connection, and contribution.

A colleague told me about a leader at a tech company who said that where she works, “care has gone underground.” Care still happens. It just has to happen on the down low, outside of anything the culture will overtly value or openly reward.

A talented manager I worked with for years described her current job to me this way: “I have my shit storm umbrella over my team at all times.” Doesn’t seem like the greatest use of her time or talents.

What these stories reveal: leaders are swimming against the tide, trying to care for their people in cultures predicated on transactions, not human flourishing.

Ubuntu is the worldview shift we need

I see the word ubuntu everywhere, and of course I do, since my consulting practice is called Ubuntu Culture Company. But something larger is stirring. There is a worldwide awakening to the interconnectedness of all life. In frightening and complicated times, people want to know they are held in a web of belonging.

Ubuntu worldview sits in stark contrast to Western, and especially, American, individualism. It is often translated to “humanness” but the meaning is much deeper. In the ubuntu way of knowing (epistemology) and understanding what is real (ontology), a person becomes a person through other people. We come into our own humanness only by recognizing the humanity in front of us. I am because you are.

This worldview places interdependence and communal wellbeing at the center. It is often carried in the Zulu proverb:

Sit with that for a moment.

From an ubuntu perspective, you cannot be fully human alone. That puts it in direct opposition to Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am.” You cannot think and act as an isolated individual and develop your full humanity. Relationship is not an accessory to personhood. It is the means of it. This is an enormous shift in mindset.

Relationality is a different foundational story of life and reality…At its heart, relationality points to the radical interdependence of all things.5

Cultures all over the world hold concepts of interconnectedness and interrelatedness. As universal as that insight may be, ubuntu is specifically African, and that matters to me.6

In the 1990s, I was a doctoral student of organizational psychology and a diversity consultant. I had earned a master’s degree in African American Studies at UCLA during the Rodney King upheaval. I was deeply committed (still am) to being a part of healing what I consider the original wound of the United States: slavery and ongoing racism.

At the time there seemed to be only two approaches to diversity work in organizations. One was legalistic, built around Affirmative Action policy. The other was a vague ethical appeal to “celebrate” diversity. I was looking for something that hit at the heart of the matter, which is that racism dehumanizes everyone. The social and economic damage falls hardest and most tangibly on people of color, but it also degrades and stifles the potential of racialized white people. Ubuntu illuminates that truth precisely: if you fail to recognize the humanity of other people, you forfeit some of your own.

I humbly recognize that I will always only be a student of ubuntu. I was born, raised, and socialized inside one of the most individualistic cultures on earth, so this way of knowing is not encoded in me the way it is for people of African descent, and it will never be ontologically native to me.7 I highlight ubuntu philosophy for two reasons. Interconnected knowing and mutual responsibility are often missing and sorely needed here in the West.

And ubuntu, precisely because it contrasts so sharply with the individualism I was raised inside, gives me a different lens on life, relationships, and work. I believe it is a lens that helps us live more connected and more meaningful lives.

My ubuntu journey

I first encountered ubuntu through the late Lente-Louise Louw, a South African Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist, psychologist, and diversity consultant in her 1995 book Valuing Diversity. Her description landed in me with the thud of a thousand truths.

Ubuntu is a subtle and not easily translated concept…A Nguni word, ubuntu simply means “the quality of being human” which calls on us to mirror our humanity for each other. [T]he philosophy embodied in ubuntu is one that honors a trusting, interdependent, reciprocal relationship delicately balanced with individual needs for autonomy and self expression.8

I had been grappling, personally and academically, with the dehumanization wrought by racism and the inability or unwillingness for the United States to deal with its root wound: slavery. Ubuntu offered a medicine for that dehumanization, one that heals the person harmed and the perpetrator of harm.

Then I learned that Lente lived in San Francisco, as I did. Over many conversations we discussed how ubuntu’s relational ontology stands opposed to individualism, how it had shaped a white South African woman who chose the anti-apartheid struggle, and what it might offer Western organizations. Ubuntu, she helped me see, is a gateway to human potential: relationality joined to the recognition of every person’s inherent dignity and unique gifts.

My exposure to ubuntu led me to travel to South Africa as a graduate student to conduct qualitative research with people for whom this way of seeing, thinking, and knowing was indigenous. Lente-Louise generously opened her contacts in Cape Town and Johannesburg which led to many amazing conversations and experiences, including witnessing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission proceeding. I returned to the U.S. to the U.S. with my field notes and a stack of books on ubuntu that, in the 1990s, I could not have purchased anywhere else. I finished my doctorate in organizational psychology on the criticality of high-care cultures for organizational learning, with ubuntu’s imprint on my worldview and on the lifelong work I have been doing ever since to make business more human.

Years later, I wrote to Lente to share that I gave birth to a son as a single mother by choice. I described the “village” of friends and family helping me to raise Dexter. I also shared that I had found and connected with mothers of children who shared the same sperm donor, my son’s half siblings (or, “diblings” as we like to say).

Unlike almost everyone else I told, Lente was not the least bit shocked by my decision to have a child on my own. She wrote back:

The reframe —from ‘without a father’ to ‘within a village’— was as revelatory as it was comforting. The idea that I might be giving my son greater stability, more love, and increased security within a non-nuclear family construct had never occurred to me.

It also crystallized something I had been researching for years. Ubuntu is not only a philosophy. It is a different operating system for how human beings actually thrive, and it is the opposite of what most organizations are built on. I decided to build my practice around activating it.

Ubuntu is a practice

Ubuntu is not a process, a transaction, or a fad. It is a deep way of being that shifts where you stand, from individual to relational. Applied across the levels of an organization, that shift is what makes business more human. It takes genuine relationships seriously. It cultivates the conditions for belonging. It produces strategies and business models that affirm life rather than exploit it.

This is my working definition of how ubuntu applies to business.

Every word in it is deliberate.9 The intention behind my work is to help caring leaders awaken and cultivate life-affirming conditions where people can contribute fully. I do this work, first, because I want to deepen and expand my own capacity as a human being, and, second, because I want to support others in fulfilling their own potential.

In the posts that follow, I will show what this looks like in practice at every level of organization, from the individual to the group to the structural and systemic.

For now, an experiment. Over the next week, practice ubuntu in your ordinary life. This is all it takes:

As often as possible, with every person you encounter–family, friends, people who annoy you, and those you don’t usually notice–silently remind yourself:

I am because you are.

Then notice what happens in your mind, your heart, your body. That noticing is the practice. You are already tapping into ubuntu.10

I know that I exist because of you - yes, you reading this! Thank you for subscribing to The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff and please share with others who might resonate with cultivating relationally rooted organizations.

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If you want to explore how to develop an ubuntu worldview in your organization, book a complimentary conversation with me: Calendly - Robin Beers

Teachers and sources of inspiration

These are indigenous African ubuntu expert practitioners whose work I learn from.

Shayla S, Dube: Multi Award-Winning Critical Social Worker| Africentric Social Work Instructor | Ubuntu-Centred Keynote Speaker| Culturally Responsive Clinical Supervisor | Workplace Cultural & Psychological Health & Safety Consultant. Regularly centers her ubuntu worldview in her LinkedIn posts.

Nobantu Mpotulo: Supports coaches to coach with Exquisite Presence, connect deeply with their clients and enhance trust and safety with their clients through Ubuntu Brillance. Offers ICC-accredited Ubuntu Coaching Training

Dr, Dume Magadlela: Founder and CEO: Afrika Coaching; Vice-Principal: The Coaching Centre (TCC) | Executive Coach, Ubuntu Team Coach. Author of Ubuntu Coaching and Connection Practices for Leader-Managers

Avhurengwi Nengovhela: Author of Ubuntu Leadership: Transforming Business Through the Power of African Principles

People losing their jobs makes me sad no matter what, but what hurts my heart even more is the mourning that shows up in these posts — for the great collegial relationships and the flourishing teams. Almost without exception, posts hit the same notes: they’ve been impacted by a layoff, how much they enjoyed the relationships they built, what they learned from their colleagues, and how proud they are of what they achieved together as a team. Beyond being a ridiculous waste of talent, of hard-won explicit and tacit knowledge, and one more smashing of the employee-employer social contract, layoffs choke off what individuals can contribute and dismantle the relationships and team bonds they formed.

CEOs are pinning recent layoffs on AI, while other writers about work chalk them up to a monkey-see-monkey-do contagion, or to right-sizing after too much pandemic-era growth. The reasons are surely multivariate, with a big dose of the short-termism that characterizes most public companies.

These days I partner mostly with public sector and middle-market organizations, because I want to work with leaders who still care about investing in people. But we’re all affected by these macroeconomic signals, even when we aren’t personally living through the loss of a job.

Take this San Francisco MUNI bus sign and notice what it evokes in you, viscerally. Personally, it’s giving me and a whole lot of others the big, creepy dystopian ick. The 24-year-old CEO said it was just an attention-getting joke that went viral, but the ads are still out there all over San Francisco and, as far as I can tell, nobody is laughing. This idea that AI can simply replace humans feels like a threat to our survival, and not the world I want to be living in or helping to create.

Anyway, all of this is to say: it’s been hard to write about cultivating healthy, productive workplaces in the midst of all of this job loss and the dystopian future AI seems to be promising us.

So at the end of last week I just felt DOWN and DONE. I needed to relax, have fun, and blow off some steam. My teenager was at his job and I had no social plans, so I decided to have my own party and rewatch Beyoncé’s film Homecoming in my living room at top volume.1

Homecoming takes you through her vision, the making of the show, and the epic Coachella performance where she was the first Black woman to headline — and one thing is clear as you watch it: you are watching a Legend, and history, in the making. This is not hyperbole.

And to think she did this just after giving us Lemonade and before Renaissance and Cowboy Carter. What is this woman driven by to continue to create the art that we never knew we needed that heals, connects, and inspires us?

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Ubuntu Leadership in Action

Beyoncé had the foresight to make Homecoming a film that shows the invisible labor beneath the polished performance. By taking us through months of unglamorous, difficult, repetitive work, she reveals the craft, the meaning, and the relationships that make the performance possible — the kind of effort and value that never shows up on a spreadsheet.

“It was important to me that anyone that had never seen themselves represented felt like they were on their stage as us… I wanted everyone to be grateful for their curves, their sass, their honesty. Thankful for their freedom…We were able to create a free safe space where none of us were marginalized…I wanted every person who has ever been dismissed because of the way they look feeling like they were on that stage killing it.”

Beyoncé as quoted in Homecoming

This is Ubuntu in its truest sense — I am because we are – in all of our unique humanity, together. Beyoncé’s brilliance doesn’t stand apart from the ensemble; it lives because of them, and theirs because of her. Homecoming is a beautiful example of excellent organizational design and high-care leadership: she assembled a massive ensemble, built it around HBCU culture, created opportunities for Black musicians and dancers, and held everyone to a high standard while clearly caring for her people. She created the conditions for the excellence of the whole to shine — a living case study in the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Watching it, it’s clear that no one is disposable headcount.

Not Another Tech Company Case Study

This is not the first time I’ve turned to Beyoncé for inspiration. A couple of years ago, a consulting partner and I worked with Google to design an offsite for the UX Design team behind their flagship Search product.

The goal of the offsite was to help the team get their creative spark back. But the approach the client proposed — building out case studies of other tech companies that had engineered growth comebacks after a slump, then having the team study them — felt really flat to me. Actually, it felt torturous: sitting there building these case studies, putting myself in the shoes of employees who’d be expected to engage with them and pretend to care about “growing 10X,” whatever that means.

In environments where people are worn down by the relentless pursuit of growth, grieving the loss of laid-off colleagues and expected to “do more with less”...or else…inspiration was never going to come from a tech company case study.

Inspiration struck me while I was driving to the airport and listening to Beyoncé’s recently released Cowboy Carter. I was waxing on to my passenger about what an incredible feat of artistry it was, a reclamation of her southern, country roots, and the smashing of barriers others tried to impose on her. You see, Beyoncé is from Houston, Texas and as she proclaimed proudly in Formation, “you’ll never take the country out me.” She and Destiny’s Child came up performing at rodeos.

And yet she got a famously chilly – racist – reception when she performed “Daddy Lessons,” her country song from Lemonade, with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Awards. Around the same time, the Recording Academy’s country committee declined to consider the song in the country categories, making it ineligible for a country Grammy nomination at all.

In 2024 she gave us Cowboy Carter, her genre-bending, country-inspired album that drew blessings from icons like Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton and gathered up overlooked Black country artists like Linda Martell — the first commercially successful Black woman in country music and the first to play the Grand Ole Opry, pushed out of the industry decades ago and very nearly forgotten.

As I became more and more animated about the revelation that is Cowboy Carter, it became clear: THIS is what inspiration sounds and feels like. The next day I asked my partner what she thought of throwing out the tech company case studies and building the offsite around “lessons from Beyoncé.” She loved it, the client loved it, and the Beyoncé Playbook was born.

The three principles – Go above & Beyond, Break Barriers, and Draw from Past & Future – offered the spark for offsite attendees to think about their own work differently as well as awaken their own sense of play, creativity, and joy. We knew we had succeeded when we overheard:

Beyoncify Yourself

Then came a worldwide Cowboy Carter tour, which I was lucky enough to see twice. All you could see as people streamed into the stadium were cowboy hats, western wear, and fringe. My friend and former colleague Mark McCormick and I stood there taking in this bedazzled spectacle.

Mark and I have designed many workshops together where we push people to imagine the future in new ways, so naturally my mind went there. In awe, I asked him: can you imagine if, ten years ago, we’d shown a group these photos of Cowboy Carter concertgoers and asked them the kind of question we always ask — “Tell me the story of what’s going on here. What future are we living in?”

The IG reel Mark made of our first show at SoFi in LA

I highly doubt anyone would have pictured a contrified Beyoncé album that would go on to win both Best Country Album and Album of the Year at the 2025 Grammys — making her the first Black woman to win the country category, and the first to take the top prize in the 21st century.

Beyoncé gives us music we never saw coming, nourishes us in ways we didn’t know we were deficient, and connects us to the possibility and joy of being alive.

I create at my own pace, on things that I hope will touch other people. I hope my work encourages people to look within themselves and come to terms with their own creativity, strength, and resilience. I focus on storytelling, growth, and quality. I’m not focused on perfectionism. I focus on evolution, innovation, and shifting perception.

2024 GQ Interview

With Beyoncé, it’s just nonstop evolution and growth – fueled by mega talent, beauty, fame, and power – and deep humanity. Do you think AI can do what Beyoncé does? If it tried, would you feel the same way about it?

Play Your Own Game

A while back, I asked the question, What Game Are We Playing? using James Carse’s finite and infinite game framework. Beyoncé is, without a doubt, playing an infinite game, and it's so clear she's motivated by something much greater than a paycheck. She is unwavering in her desire to center and celebrate Black excellence — as both a proud legacy and a powerful future. With Cowboy Carter, she gives us a stunning example of transmuting rejection into growth, for herself as an artist and for the whole country music genre.

I’ve given keynote talks about the human qualities that AI can never take from us — our drive to care, to connect, and to create. And I’ll be honest with you, when things aren’t going my way professionally, I lose sight of those qualities in myself all the time, and I let my sense of worth get tangled up with my output and my labor.

Watching Beyoncé is part of what pulls me back. Her worth was never something the Country Music Awards or the Recording Academy could grant her or take away — it lives in the drive itself, in the caring and the connecting and the creating, and that is the part no finite game has ever been able to touch.

That’s the thing I most want you to take from all of this. The layoff economy and the old country music establishment are playing the same finite game — the one where people are line items to be cut, talent to be used up, names to be crossed off the list. It’s the game that discarded Linda Martell after she broke the ground the rest of the genre now stands on, and it’s the same game playing out across all those LinkedIn posts right now. But being deemed expendable by a finite game has never once been a true measure of anyone’s worth.

So yes, there is only one Beyoncé. But there is only one you, too, and nothing — not a layoff, not a rejection, not an algorithm — can take away your creativity or the particular space you occupy here on this earth. We are all making our way down a long, dark hallway of uncertainty between the old world and the new one, but we can choose to birth a new future. We can keep using our gifts to care, to connect, and to create, and when we do, we reject corporate dehumanization and align ourselves with Life.

I think about the environmental activist Pattie Gonia, who uses joy itself as a tactic to get people to protect the earth, and who, like Beyoncé, is carving a path nobody handed her.2 You could say she’s Beyoncifying her activism. We can all Beyoncify something, in our own way.

As Beyoncé says in the final line of Homecoming:

"If my country ass can do it, they can do it."

Let's do it.

____

Want to talk about Beyoncifying your organization? Book time with me.

Organizations and teams struggle not because problems are unsolvable, but because the most important dynamics often remain invisible — assumptions, mental models, power structures, user needs, cultural patterns. The professional domains of both organizational change and design practice share common methods for making the invisible visible through collaborative insights, artifacts, prototypes, and structured visualization.

Robin Beers, an Organizational Psychologist, and Uday Gajendar, Product Design Strategist, team up in this joint post to explore this topic. You can find Robin’s Substack at The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff and Uday’s at Ghost in the Pixel - please subscribe and tell your friends!

Organizational Blindness

In March 2026, Robin wrote about the Johari Window and made the point that it’s not just individuals who benefit, learn and protect themselves by becoming aware of our blind spots and being more transparent and open with others. Organizations, too, benefit from what theorists Chris Argyris and Donald Schon called double-loop learning, their name for the reflexive practice of taking action, reflecting on that action, updating our assumptions, and, thus, learning.1

Just as there are strategies for reducing your individual blind spots, organizations can engage in learning practices that enhance awareness of how employees, customers, partners, and competitors perceive and experience them.

Take my former employer as an example. Wells Fargo held tightly to its sales culture and practices, even as customers and employees surfaced concerns for years prior to regulators blowing open the sales scandal in 2016. The blind spot — that a high-pressure sales culture with unrealistic goals was fundamentally corrupting the customer relationship — cost the firm $3B+ and counting. Among other factors, Wells Fargo’s blind spot was reinforced by unwillingness to hear and see opposing viewpoints - that is, keeping the invisible hidden from those who could have made better choices and decisions.

Gillian Tett, author of Anthro-Vision cheekily refers to looking at the world from an anthropological lens as “the other AI intelligence.” Looking anthropologically means not just what is happening but why. A cherished mentor, Barbara Perry, PhD, the cultural anthropologist and co-author of Hope at Work, describes this as creating circumstances where we don’t just look through our lens but at our lens.

One way to defamiliarize our environment is to get out of our own frame and into the lived experience of others. Anthropologists have always done this when conducting fieldwork in faraway lands, but those of us who work in organizations can do this too - by immersing ourselves in functional areas different from our own or spending time with our customers in their environment, seeing through their experience, and gaining empathy for them in the process.

Seeing Ethnographically

I’ve been part of product groups that have completely pivoted their product strategy after seeing, first hand, how their customers actually behave, feel, and live. But even more than changing product design, this work often reconnects people and teams to the meaning of their work and the purpose their organization serves in the lives of their employees and customers.

Team-based Ethnography catalyzes two-for-one, double loop learning through immersing into the worldview and experience of other stakeholders in the system. Often this “other” worldview involves internal organization employees spending time with and deeply considering the experience and perspectives of their customers. The value and the outcome are often a radical mindset shift that opens up blind spots, unmet needs, and new possibilities.

Dwelling in the perspective of “the other” is relational, connection-building work which brings a deeper, truer empathy and desire to work toward a better, shared future.

I led a team-based ethnography engagement with top-tier MBA program concerned with their overall ranking standings and student experience scores. Through understanding the current MBA student perspective, many of their presenting assumptions were overturned or reworked and they could see how siloed departments were detracting from a smoother student experience that would support a balance between academic classes, pressure to find employment, and the desire to establish a lifelong network of colleagues within their cohort.

Additionally, they were heartened to know that their school’s visionary leadership principles were embraced by the students and truly set the school apart from other programs. Hearing those stories directly – a student from Nigeria in his tiny efficiency apartment, an Army Captain reentering civilian life – created real transformations in the staff’s understanding of the student experience. Marketing was able to more fully embrace the business program’s uniqueness and speak from that authentic place rather than focusing on being all things to all people and ending up sounding generic. The result was renewed passion for the university’s values and a commitment to matching them to hopes, dreams, and experiences of the students.

Another example about the power of making the invisible visible comes from Gillian Tett’s book, Anthro-Vision, which I mentioned earlier. Tett’s example describes two NY professors who visually mapped the contextual ecosystem around Amazon’s Alexa device. This was 2018 and Alexa was rising in popularity, but like most technologies or utilities we use, most people didn’t know and didn’t think about how it came to be or how it worked.

The map that professors Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler drew was so beautiful and intricate that it was acquired by the NY Museum of Modern Art. But what that map made visible was not the mechanical workings of the Alexa. It depicted the context - everything around the Alexa device - to bring it into existence.

These two professors were making visible what we typically do not see: mineral extraction, supply chain, all the low wage workers who make AI possible and who are never in an echo dot’s mind when they casually command, “Alexa, what is the weather outside?” And making the invisible visible can drive change. For instance, when Amazon executives saw this map, they announced they would no longer construct or confine human workers in quasi-cages at their fulfillment sites - something that was once hidden, and thus accepted, became untenable and changed once it was exposed.

Experience Models

Visual artifacts or, as they are sometimes called experience models, make the invisible visible in unique and useful ways. A journey map is a well-known type of experience model.

But experience models can also be succinct visualizations of complex phenomena. Back in the early days of the internet, I actually held the job title “Experience Modeler” and during this time I learned the power of going beyond narrative description and depicting it visually — a forcing function for simplicity and getting to the essence of that experience.

For instance, in my years leading Research teams at Wells Fargo, we used experience models to both communicate our ideas as well as pressure test our analysis.

The beauty of experience models is that they clarify and crystalize the key elements of the experience. In this case, the undulating sea of cash flow most small business operators must navigate in order to keep their companies afloat. A conceptual model like this doesn’t tell the team what to build but rather acts as headlights on the problem to solve. As an mnemonic and alignment device, they force the research team to synthesize insights into something both simple and memorable that everyone on the team can understand and rally around.

Product Design Blindness

As a Product Design Strategist, Uday, has seen the consequences of designing for imagined users, not real ones, up close. Due to quick timelines and the velocity of business imperatives, using AI-constructed personas or those brought in from prior projects and situations (including from other companies), create blindness to real people’s experiences while creating false certainty and imagined clarity as designers and engineers build for imagined users, they become more and more locked into their mental models as real.

With no external input or feedback to interrupt this manufactured clarity, assumptions become invisible precisely because they’ve never been challenged explicitly. Just as on the organizational level, unexamined certainty shrinks the arena of inquiry; we don’t think to ask new questions because we already believe we know the answers. In this sense, unchallenged certainty can be blinding.

This is where visual artifacts enter — not as final deliverables, but as instruments of illumination. A prototype isn’t a mini-version of the product; it’s a forcing function for clarifying choices about sequencing value. A journey map is not meant to be a pretty diagram on a conference room wall; it’s a mirror reflecting back those moments of friction, the functional gaps, and assumptions baked invisibly into every product decision. When teams gather around these objects, something important shifts: the conversation moves from abstract debate about what users “probably” want to a clear reckoning with what the artifact actually shows. The map or diagram depersonalizes any disagreement, because it’s easier to argue with a journey map than with a colleague, and that’s precisely the point!

I like to refer to such artifacts as “anchor objects.”2 Something tangible enough to react to, specific enough to argue with, drafty enough to refine. Robin’s work with experience models illuminates why this matters at a team level — humans need an external referent to organize collective sensemaking around.

Without it, conversations drift into abstraction, and abstraction is where assumptions grow and survive unchallenged – and participants become lost or confused in this “wilderness of abstractions”, thus disconnected from the day-to-day impact. Visual artifacts break that cycle, however—making the invisible visible—by surfacing unmet needs, hidden friction points, and organizational beliefs that no one had ever thought to name out loud. Visualizing and naming is a kind of power in itself, to call it into being. In this sense, the most powerful design artifacts aren’t the finished solution, but the ones that spark candid, sometimes uncomfortable, dialogue.

Why Visualization Works

As we’ve discussed, visual artifacts give teams a shared representation to collaborate around and uniquely both individual cognitive tools – they help us to understand something better on our own – and relational mechanisms that allow us to engage in more specific, respectful, and meaningful collaborative discussions.

When people who are not designers are asked to pick up the pen and draw the reaction is typically, “I can’t draw!” But this resistance can quickly be overcome with a quick lesson on using simple shapes to convey ideas. But the real “oh no!” might not even be about drawing, really, but more about thinking because when we ask people to draw their thoughts and ideas we are asking them to think differently and more deeply. Putting pen to paper (or a whiteboard) forces us to specificity that words alone allow us to evade.

Sketching or mark-making, either through pen & paper or hasty sticky note/whiteboard scribbles, is most definitely not about artistic skill. Instead, it’s about a willingness to start somewhere, offer specificity, and commit to something that you’re willing to dispose of quickly, without judgment or reservation. It’s not precious art, but instead a temporary rendering of an idea or assumption or expectation that’s meant to be challenged or validated. As they say in critiques, “it’s not you being reviewed, it’s the concept to be improved or discarded”. It’s admittedly a moment of vulnerability for the unaccustomed individual, but can be a great moment of clarity for the collective group.

Artifacts as Alignment Tools

In Robin’s recent culture improvement work with a client, she used storyboards that later became feedback objects when workshop participants took their ideas “into the field” to solicit feedback from colleagues.

Uday’s prototypes serve the same function: Stakeholders can finally see what they’ve been debating abstractly. There’s a pivotal moment in the stakeholder presentation where the prototype is revealed – not the gasp of wonderment or awe, but the realization that certain assumptions and beliefs are being reframed and even shattered. They’re seeing it for the first time. Really seeing it. The prototype lands on the table, and BOOM – the abstraction they’d been arguing about becomes concrete, tangible, arguable in a completely different manner. What was a position becomes a question for the group/team.

Both practices share a rhythm: diverge → visualize → critique/iterate → converge

The artifact simultaneously opens and focuses the conversation, making room for discussion, collaboration, and refinement. This is the deeper function of models and prototypes — not to present the complete answer, but to tether the conversation to something tangible. With a common reference point, conversations can become clearer, deeper, and more productive.

Visibility as Ethical Practice

Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. That’s the whole point — and also the risk.

Making the invisible visible is not ethically or politically neutral work. When artifacts expose gaps, broken assumptions, or political fault lines, they create something that didn’t previously exist in the room: a shared reality. And shared reality creates accountability. That’s why this work often meets resistance. A problem an individual thinks only they notice can coalesce into a pattern and, from there, a movement for change when brought to light visually for all to see. In the light is where accountability lives.

We recently heard the phrase “courage is the new charisma.” We agree. But courage can cost, especially for people with less power in the organization. Often it’s outside consultants or internal designers and researchers who step into the position of making the invisible visible. There is some power, and certainly courage, that comes with this, but it also carries the age-old risk of being the messenger of unwelcome or unexpected news. Carefully building a shared point of view creates a coalition across functional areas and hierarchical levels so that the risk is not borne by those with the least protection.

But in the AI era, where knowledge and, even, expertise, is no longer the engine of value and reward, nor the driving force in how much power, prestige, and position you could accrue, we need to ask ourselves what capabilities are uniquely human?

AI can surface patterns across thousands of data points faster than any research team. But it simultaneously buries its own reasoning — its conclusions appear, its logic doesn’t. The black box is a defining feature of the technology. So we’re living in a strange paradox: we crave radical transparency while navigating a technological revolution whose workings are fundamentally opaque.

We believe that making the invisible visible is fundamentally an act of ‘sensemaking care’ – for customers, leaders, employees, and the organization’s future. Sensemaking care centers on shared context and meaning. The alternatives — willful blindness or actions absent of human needs — leads to the 70% change failure rate and products that nobody uses, which drains energy, morale, and revenue.3

What is currently invisible inside your organization or team? How could making it visible spark improvements to an aspect of organization effectiveness and/or customer experience? What would it take to draw it out? What’s stopping you?

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Where you can find Robin: Ubuntu Culture Company, The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff, and LinkedIn. Feel free to set up a complimentary 30-minute Discovery call.

Where you can find Uday: Critical Design Ventures, Ghost in the Pixel, and LinkedIn.

It is often taught as a model for interpersonal awareness but I believe this framing is too small, too narrow. In practice, Johari’s Window can explains how both individuals and organizations can grow and learn past their blind spots through intentional, albeit uncomfortable, effort.

“Blind spots won’t disappear on their own. As a leader, it’s your job to create the conditions where learning happens, blind spots shrink, and consequences are avoided.”

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The Four Panes

The model was developed in 1955 by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham (the name “Johari” is a portmanteau of their first names). It was originally designed to help people understand how self-disclosure and feedback shape interpersonal dynamics. At its core, it maps what is known and unknown across two dimensions: Self and Others.

Across the top, we have what the Self knows or doesn’t know. Down the side, what Others know or don’t know.

• Open / Arena — Things we know about ourselves that others are also aware of. This is the space of genuine, productive interaction. The larger this pane, the more authentic and effective our relationships tend to be.

• Hidden / Façade — Things we know about ourselves that we intentionally or unintentionally keep from others. Everyone maintains this pane to some degree. Context determines how appropriate that is.

• Unknown — Areas where neither the Self nor Others have awareness. This might include unconscious patterns, latent talents, or experiences so buried they haven’t surfaced yet. It’s humbling, as Einstein noted, to acknowledge that “the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”

• Blind Spot — The pane where Others can see something about us that we do not yet see in ourselves. It’s this last pane that has kept me thinking about Johari’s Window–with a little chill down my spine–decades after I first encountered it.

Our Blind Spot is the “Yikes” Zone

As individuals, the idea that others can see things about us that remain invisible to us is, frankly, a little terrifying. Sociologist Erving Goffman described a related social tension through face-work—the ongoing effort to preserve a positive social identity, especially in moments where it might be threatened. 1We do this because we want to be well-regarded and in control of how others perceive us. But there will always be behaviors, quirks, and patterns that others register and we don’t. That is why this pane is called the blind spot, and I’m willing to bet that you, like me, feel a flicker of vulnerability just reading about it.

The size of the panes isn’t fixed. They shift in response to two forces: self-disclosure (sharing more of the Hidden pane) and soliciting feedback (reducing the Blind Spot). Both require trust. Both require what Amy Edmondson has called psychological safety — the shared belief that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks without fear of punishment or humiliation. Without psychological safety, people rationally protect their façade and avoid the exposure that learning requires.

Using the Model: Individual Practice

For individuals, Johari’s Window is most useful as a practice rather than a static snapshot. A few approaches that actually open up your awareness:

Structured feedback requests: Rather than asking “how am I doing?” (too broad, invites platitudes), ask specifically:

“What’s one thing I do in meetings that gets in my own way?”

OR

“Where do you see me defaulting to a behavior that undermines what I’m trying to accomplish?”

Specificity reduces the social friction of honest feedback.

360 review with debrief: Structured 360 reviews reveal pattern-level blind spots — themes that emerge across multiple raters that a single feedback conversation might miss. The debrief is where the learning happens. Even if your organization does not do formal 360 reviews, it is a good idea for the manager and/or the employee to solicit feedback from peers and direct reports at review time.

Accountability partnerships: Ongoing relationships where someone has explicit permission to name what they observe. The key word is permission — it transforms feedback from an intrusion into an agreement. This agreement is grounded in trust, respect, and desire for improvement and learning.

These are not comfortable practices. Luft and Ingham’s Johari model predicts exactly this: the blind spot shrinks only when we create the conditions for honest two-way exchange.

Organizational Blind Spots are Expensive

Here’s where I want to make a turn that I think doesn’t get made often enough.

Blind spots don’t only exist at the individual level. Organizations have them too — and the consequences of organizational blind spots scale accordingly. What makes an individual vulnerable can be cataclysmic at the scale of a firm.

Take my former employer. Wells Fargo held tightly to its sales culture and practices even as customers and employees raised concerns for years prior to regulators exposing the sales scandal in 2016 — which, to date, has cost the firm over $3 billion plus in fines and settlements.2 Among other factors, Wells Fargo’s blind spot was actively reinforced: the organization was structurally unwilling to hear and integrate opposing viewpoints. The information existed but the Blind Spot pane persisted because people in positions of power did not want to examine what was in it.

This is not unique to Wells Fargo. Organizational blind spots form when:

• Dissenting voices are systematically ignored or filtered out before they reach decision-makers

• Success reinforces existing assumptions (what Roger Martin calls “the logic of the winner”)

• Customer and employee signals are collected but not acted on, creating the illusion of listening

• Leaders surround themselves with people who reflect their worldview back to them

Making the Invisible Visible

Just as individuals can cultivate practices to reduce their blind spots, organizations can engage in deliberate learning practices that expand organizational awareness — of how employees, customers, partners, and even competitors perceive and experience them.

The goal is to widen the “Open” arena and shrink the other window panes.

Below are practices that Make the Invisible Visible. In highly volatile, uncertain environments, they’re not optional — they’re survival-critical. Some that work:

• Employee listening systems with feedback loops: Pulse surveys mean nothing–and actively erode trust–if employees don’t see evidence that responses were heard and acted on.

• Customer ethnography and journey mapping: Moving beyond satisfaction scores to understanding the experience — what people actually feel, do, and struggle with — often reveals gaps invisible from the inside.

• Red teaming and pre-mortems: Deliberately assigning people to find the flaws in your assumptions before the market does. This is institutionalized blind spot reduction.

• External advisory voices: People with no stake in protecting the current story — customers, critics, outside experts — who are given genuine access and genuine hearing.

What these practices have in common is that they require intentional structure to work. Individual courage alone won’t surface what the organization doesn’t want to see. The mechanism has to be built on top of the value to prioritize learning–and unlearning.

As you read this, I’d invite you to sit with these questions:

• What is your organization doing to look critically at its assumptions?

• Where, in your organization, does uncomfortable truth get filtered out?

• What signals are you collecting but not acting on?

• Who has permission to name what they see?

Blind spots won’t disappear on their own. As a leader, it’s your job to create the conditions where learning happens, blind spots shrink, and consequences are avoided.

Book complimentary time to explore how to uncover and learn from blind spots.

Next month, I’m collaborating with fellow Substacker, Uday Gajendar, to go deeper on another “make the invisible visible” practice: using visualization as a tool for organizational learning. Because sometimes the invisible becomes visible only when we find a new way to look and see.

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” — Alan Watts

Organizational change is hard.1

Not intellectually hard.

• Emotionally hard.

• Relationally hard.

• Systemically hard.

Most teams can describe where they are. Many can articulate where they’d like to go. The part that gets murky is the space in between.

That middle zone is where culture either shifts or retrenches.

This month, I’m sharing a tool I designed for a recent client workshop on employee engagement: The Ubuntu Culture Company Change Canvas. It helps teams think clearly and deeply together about how change actually unfolds.

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The Thinking Behind the Canvas

The structure is loosely inspired by Kurt Lewin’s early change model.

I’ve always appreciated the simplicity of Unfreeze → Change → Refreeze.

Before something new can take root, something old has to loosen. Eventually, new behaviors solidify once again into “the way we do things around here.”

In practice, though, organizations tend to rush from vision to action. The unfreezing — the preparation, the conversations, the small steps that build readiness — doesn’t get the same attention.

That’s the gap this canvas is designed to address.

TODAY → SHIFT → TOMORROW

The canvas moves horizontally across three phases:

TODAY

• What is the lived reality right now?

• What patterns reinforce it?

• Where are people grinding?

• What are we tolerating?

This part requires honesty and the safety to really name what is actually going on.

TOMORROW

• If things were meaningfully better, what would be different?

• How would decisions feel?

• How would collaboration work?

• What would employees notice?

Specificity matters here. Vague aspirations don’t move systems, behaviors and tangible outcomes do.

SHIFT

What has to happen between TODAY and TOMORROW? This is the liminal space where we identify:

• What assumptions and beliefs need to loosen?

• Who needs to be engaged, influenced, bought in?

• What conversations need to take place that haven’t happened yet?

• What small moves build momentum?

SHIFT is where willingness and resistance both show up. It’s also where thoughtful planning, facilitation, and storytelling make the biggest difference.

Why I Add Visualization

After teams complete the canvas, I ask them to translate it into a simple storyboard — a comic strip of the journey.

There is always groaning.

“I can’t draw.”

That’s fine. Circles and stick figures are enough.

When ideas move from abstract discussion into visual form, thinking evolves. People see gaps in logic. They notice missing steps. They spot unrealistic leaps. The conversation deepens beyond “today sucks and tomorrow will be amazing” to “how will we actually traverse this chasm and succeed in this whole journey?”

Research on visual cognition consistently shows that humans detect relationships more easily when information is spatially arranged. We remember it better, too. Drawing makes thinking tangible.

It doesn’t need to be beautiful. Like a prototype, a visual artifact gives people who weren’t there something to respond to, add to, and engage with. Designer and fellow collaborator, Uday Gajendar, refers to visual concepts as “anchor objects” — artifacts that help to ground the conversation.

The Groan Zone

In a very recent client workshop, I warned the group:

It was the second of four sessions, and they were being asked to dig beneath surface-level ideas. They had to examine the assumptions reinforcing their current culture and identify small, credible shifts toward something better.

It got uncomfortable.

That discomfort has a name: The Groan Zone — the messy space between divergent thinking and clarity. It’s a normal part of collective sensemaking. If you move through it thoughtfully, insight emerges and breakthroughs happen. If you avoid it, you get superficial change.

The canvas gives structure during that dark night stretch and coalesces the group just enough to do the deeper work.

From Artifact to Alignment

Once the storyboard is created, it becomes an artifact for feedback and iteration.

It gives people who weren’t in the room something concrete to respond to. Instead of debating abstractions, they react to visible steps in a journey.

• “This leap feels too big.”

• “We’re missing socialization and buy-in here.”

• “This assumes trust we haven’t built yet.”

• “We have to say this differently or people will get defensive.”

The voices included is widened making the change process gain momentum.

Designing Change

Change does not happen because we want it or, even, declare it. It happens because we design the conditions that make it possible.

The Change Canvas helps teams:

• Clarify current reality

• Envision a credible future

• Design the transition intentionally

• Create visible artifacts for feedback and refinement

If you’re working on culture, engagement, strategic alignment, or leadership development and your team feels stuck between “where we are” and “where we want to be,” it may be time to spend more attention on the SHIFT.

If you’d like to explore a challenge using this canvas, reach out. I’m always happy to talk through real situations.

Sometimes drawing it out is exactly what makes it move.

Please comment, heart, and share - it helps people find me and the ideas I share on The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff.

“Right, you joined their gameboard,” I said. “But you are not playing that game.”

She brought it up next time we spoke.

“I can’t tell you how much that helped,” she said. “It snapped me out of ‘I’m failing’ and into ‘I’m choosing something different.’”

The game she named for herself was clear: building a sustainable practice that offers excellent, personal healthcare to her community while protecting her family life. That was the game — until she decides otherwise.

I share this because I think a lot of us are unaware of the game we are–or should–be playing. We may be judging ourselves, and being judged by, systems and definitions of “winning” that no longer fit the world we are actually living in.

Understatement alert: Right now, the world feels profoundly unstable. We are Living in a Time of Polycrisis. If you feel trapped – you’re not alone, a recent article published in The Guardian, gives language to the profound disorientation that runs so deep it reaches into motivation itself and, at its most despairing, borders on nihilism.

When uncertainty presses in from all sides, we lose our emotional and, at times, our behavioral compass. We don’t know how to plan, how to commit, or how to maintain hope.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that multiple games are being played simultaneously. These games are often misaligned and colliding along dimensions such as time horizons and individual versus collective needs.

Threat saturation gives way to cognitive narrowing—when multiple uncontrollable stressors pile up, people’s brains tend to oscillate between freeze, flight, and fight.

Losing the Future

The moral injury is the loss of hope for a better future. Foresight theory tells us we have to “practice the future” we want to live into and create. Design practices, like prototyping, are a form of “slicing off a piece of the future” and pulling it toward us.

But what if we can’t imagine the future because we can’t even grasp what’s happening in the present? What if we can imagine the future and, well, it terrifies us?

Therapists, like Dr, Steve Himmelstein, whom journalist Theresa MacPhail quotes in this same article, are reporting that clients much more frequently want to talk about polycrisis issues, not only the typical personal issues about family dynamics and work. He is quoted as saying that “most of his clients have ‘lost the future.’”

That line stopped me cold.

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Last year, I convened a dialogue group to read organizational theorist Margaret Wheatley’s Who Do We Choose to Be? One question haunted our conversations:

Wheatley insists that the time for meaningful change when it comes to the inevitable collapse of the current planetary, political, and economic system has passed. She wants people to stop toking on the “hopium pipe” and find other reasons than hope for a better future as motivation for tending to one’s work.

As a very work-oriented person and lifelong equity and justice advocate, this perspective is very difficult for me to accept. And yet, I’ve found it a deep and confronting inquiry to ask: What is my work to do even if I cannot affect the future? Here, I wrestle with my arrogance, my desire for control, and the way hope has catalyzed and sustained my motivation.

This quote from the same Guardian article echoes what I have come to know–I’ve been primarily motivated by working toward a better future.

“I hadn’t fully grasped how much the idea of a better future sustained me – how it made life more livable, hardship more bearable and creativity possible.”

—Theresa MacPhail

I know many wise, important voices urge us not to lose hope and to trust the long arc of history. But we’ve also had a long arc of what Tony Fry named defuturing.

Defuturing–acts that actively rob us, and other living things, of our future–includes persistent, structural inequality, the myth of limitless growth through extraction, the pursuit of economic growth at all costs, and focus on short-term results over long-term consequences. These acts are the communal equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes, drinking five martinis, and eating red meat and French fries every day – they actively narrow the futures available to us.

Finite and Infinite Games

This is where philosopher James Carse offers a frame that feels especially relevant, distinguishing between finite and infinite games.

Finite games are played to win. They have clear rules, boundaries, and endpoints. The purpose is victory—someone wins, someone loses, and the game ends.

Infinite games are played to continue the play. The rules can change. The players can change. The purpose is not winning, but sustaining aliveness, adaptability, and meaning over time.

Here’s the problem: many of our institutions talk as if they are infinite games—but increasingly operate as finite ones. Quarterly targets replace long-term stewardship. Engagement is treated as a performance lever. “Resilience” becomes shorthand for tolerating conditions that should be changed.

This misalignment is exhausting people. And the effect of this psychological and, even spiritual, dissonance looks like lack of engagement, cynicism, and burnout at work.

So where do we go from here?

As it pertains to just being human, I find it helpful to ask the question:

What game am I playing?

This moment to pause instantly brings me back to my values and grounds me there. And it serves as a reminder that I will never be able to know or control the future. But I can become clearer about the next right thing to do.

I call this stance “high involvement, low attachment.”

If there is something I want, I go after it with full enthusiasm. And if I don’t get it, I metabolize that loss through seeking connection and learning forward. In other words, I try to play an infinite game whose rules center on asking:

What’s next?

and

Where can I contribute?

In my personal life, one “the-future-I-want-to-live-into” move I’ve made is establishing a monthly Soup Night ritual where neighbors drop in for a bowl of nourishment and connection. Nobody has to RSVP or bring anything. We don’t dress up. I make a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian soup, put out the bowls and spoons, and welcome all who show up. It’s given me a huge boost in dark times and, as one attendee put it, “this feels like a warm hug.”

I invite you to try something similar to create more community and connection for yourself and others. I love the 2025 New Year’s resolution Amanda Litman and her husband made to have people over for dinner every single Saturday night.

What about at work?

And as an organizational psychologist, I find myself asking:

To what end are we improving workplace engagement, productivity, or efficiency?

• For survival—or for thriving?

• For extraction—or regeneration?

• To prop up aging systems—or to help birth something new?

Depending on where I am emotionally—somewhere between ennui (“How can I meaningfully contribute?”) and panic (“How will we survive?”)—my answers shift. Should we hunker down and manage the present? Or articulate bold futures and invite people to co-create them?

Leadership in these times — or any times, really — is not about having the right answers. It’s about choosing the right game. This is how I help my clients do that consciously:

First, see the water they are swimming in.

Yes, things are really intense. We are living in BANI times–what some call a polycrisis. Your confusion and uncertainty and, even, grief, are normal. You are not alone; this is a collective experience.

Second, ask better questions than, “What’s wrong with these people?” such as:

• Why are we seeing these behaviors/trends/scores and what underlying indicators do they signal?

• What are some small moves we can make to enhance the conditions for thriving right now?

• What must we surface and protect for the long arc?

• What values and promises will we NOT bend, backslide, or abandon – even under pressure?

A leader’s job is not to hunker down and push, nor is it to sell a vision of the future that might not come to pass. As I wrote in What Do Middle Managers Do?, a leader’s job is to care for people and create the conditions for thriving so that business outcomes can be met sustainably.

Start asking infinite-game leadership questions

These questions help leaders discern good decisions for this (hopefully) infinite game called humanity—the one we want to keep playing long after our individual lives are complete. They help ensure we are not simply improving engagement so people can survive broken systems longer, or perpetuating structural inequality more efficiently.

The diagnostic, then, becomes not only “What game are we playing?” but also “Does it make the world more free, more connected, and more regenerative?”

Victor Udoewa introduced me to the term “afro-pessimism” at last year’s Design for Dignity conference (it’s coming up in March and I highly recommend attending). The concept names what African Americans have been doing for generations: Persistently working for liberation regardless of the likelihood of eradicating racism, oppression, and systemic inequality and doing so because 1) it is the right work to do and 2) doing it aligns with personal and communal values as well as 3) honoring ancestors, past and future.

What is your infinite game?

Mine is to do work that makes business more human through:

1. Creating clarity about an organization’s current state

2. Helping leaders imagine and build something attuned to their vision

3. Designing the infrastructure and actions that make it real

Tell me about your infinite game in the comments (really!).

And, as always, you are welcome to book an exploratory call.

We may not get to choose the conditions we’re facing. But we do get to choose the game we’re playing.

And in times like these, when so many of us are worried about the future, choosing an infinite game—rooted in dignity, learning, and care—may be one of the most practical leadership acts available to us.

Language doesn’t simply describe organizations. It actively produces them. It signals what is valued, what is possible, what is taboo, and what counts as truth.1

“Realities are socially constructed in the conversational interplay between people.” John Shotter

This piece introduces a simple sensemaking framework that uses language as both data and leverage for change.

System Sensemaking Model

Listening to the System

The first task of sensemaking is to listen closely to how people talk.

• What language do they use to describe their work?

• Which acronyms and terms seem to govern attention?

• What metaphors do leaders instinctively rely on?

• What terminology, lingo, or jargon is unique to this organization?

When new people step into a new organization they often describe acclimation as “drinking from a firehose.” This sense of overwhelm is often about decoding unfamiliar language. As a consultant, I often ask for translations: What exactly does that term mean? How is that acronym used here? But established teams should be asking these questions too instead of assuming shared understanding.

Language shifts are often the earliest signs of cultural change. Transformation rarely starts with new behaviors. It begins with new interpretations of experience that first surface in speech. The progression often looks like this:

A mindset shifts. New language emerges. Over time, decisions and behaviors follow.

In one enterprise-wide initiative I led years ago, the team felt discouraged by the slow pace of change. I asked them to listen. Pay attention to how people had begun talking differently about sales and service. Earlier, people described the sales organization as “untouchable” or “the third rail.” After learning that service enables sales by building trust, new language emerged: “yin and yang,” “balance,” “interdependence.”

Nothing structural had changed yet. But the culture had begun to reinterpret itself. That is the earliest form of movement.

Understanding the System

Every organization is a story it tells about itself. That story lives in the metaphors people choose. We don’t just use metaphors; we live inside them. The metaphors in play reveal the deepest assumptions about what the organization is and what it can be. Metaphors are not decorative. They are cognitive tools that filter reality, spotlight certain dynamics, and obscure others.

As Gareth Morgan argues in Images of Organization, metaphors don’t just help us describe organizations. They shape what we can see, know, and attempt. Whether we call our company a machine, a family, or a platform isn’t just semantics. It’s a window into how we see power, purpose, and possibility.

Morgan’s famous line captures this clearly:

“Every way of seeing is a way of not seeing.”

Industrial Era metaphors—machine, assembly line, factory—shaped management thinking for more than a century. They reinforced assumptions about control, predictability, efficiency, and standardization.

The internet era introduced what I call the Techno-Optimist lens: disruption, hyper-growth, speed, scale, “move fast and break things.” Morgan did not anticipate this metaphor, but it sits on top of the Industrial metaphor, reinforcing linearity, extraction, and performance at all costs. The quest for unchecked growth through disruptive innovation is encapsulated in the design thinking prompt, “How might we?” which is rarely accompanied by the reflexive, “And at what cost?”

Metaphors eventually become invisible. They calcify into a worldview that seems natural and inevitable. Once embedded, they define what counts as legitimate strategy, what risks are tolerable, who holds power, and how success is measured.

In my consulting work, I often run a simple Metaphor Audit to uncover how an organization currently sees itself. I ask questions like:

• “If this organization were an ecosystem, what would it be?”

• “What words show up most in meetings, reports, and rituals?”

• “When things break down, what kind of imagery emerges?”

The answers reveal the culture’s sensemaking mental map. Sometimes the metaphors contradict each other — “we’re a family” and “we need to move fast and break things.” That tension can mark a deeper incongruence, where the espoused and the reality do not mix harmoniously.

Influencing the system

Language also shapes the future. When leaders choose different metaphors, they shift what people believe is possible.

During the early days of personal computing, Steve Jobs told his design team: “Don’t think computer. Think appliance.” That simple shift opened space for a radically different interpretation of what a computer could be.

I once had a dear, very execution-focused colleague who urged product teams to “drive a truck through it.” What she meant was “stop dithering and deliver.” But the subtext minimized the importance of discovery, alignment, and problem framing. Her metaphor created a values tension within the team and debate about what constituted “real work” and our highest priorities.

When leaders describe an organization as something — a machine, a family, a team, a living system — they’re not just speaking figuratively; they’re setting boundaries around what counts as sense, success, and reality.

“Metaphors are not merely poetic or rhetorical. They structure our perceptions, our actions, and our relations to others.” GeorgeLakoff & Mark Johnson

The metaphors we live in silently guide:

• How we interpret change

• What gets rewarded

• How leaders lead

• Which possibilities feel viable

Organizations grow into the language they habitually use.

Metaphors for a BANI World

We now live in a BANI world: brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible. Old metaphors fail here. When we describe organizations as engineered systems, we expect stability and control. But today’s environment refuses both. The machine cracks under pressure. The “move fast and break things” mantra has contributed to a landscape of fragility, extraction, and social exhaustion.

• Industrial metaphors assumed predictability.

• Techno-Optimist metaphors assumed speed.

• Both collapse in a world defined by complexity and interdependence.

As AI accelerates uncertainty in education, work, and knowledge itself, we need metaphors that help organizations become more adaptive, humane, and resilient.

Organizations as Regenerative, Living Systems

If we want organizations that can thrive in perpetual upheaval, we need metaphors drawn from ecology. Living systems adapt. They cycle. They compost. They regenerate. They respond to stress not with collapse but with reorganization.

A living systems lens reframes organizations not as linear machines, but as ecosystems—relational, interdependent, and dynamic. In this worldview, growth is seasonal. Rest and regeneration matter as much as output. Learning behaves like photosynthesis: it requires light, attention, and time.

If you want to experiment with life-generating language, try using words like:

These are not cute metaphors. They are cognitive scaffolds that support a different way of interpreting reality.

Words make worlds

Language doesn’t just describe neutrally. Language creates reality. It is a world-building force. As the indigenous South African philosophy of ubuntu reminds us, nothing alive exists alone. Everything living is in relationship. Organizations are no different. Thriving is not about functioning like efficient machines in a chaotic world, but like resilient ecosystems in a changing one.

So here is the invitation:

• Are you paying attention to the language you use in daily interactions?

• Is your language helping create the world you want to inhabit?

Because whether we notice or not, our words create our world.

We make meaning in relationship. If this opened new ways of seeing your organization’s culture, I’d love to hear what it sparked for you. What language is guiding your organization right now? Join the discussion below — your perspective adds to our collective sensemaking.

References

Cascio, J., Johansen, B., & Williams, A. F. (2025). Navigating the Age of Chaos: A sense-making guide to a BANI world that doesn’t make sense. Berrett-Koehler.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.

Morgan, G. (1996). Images of organization (Updated ed.). Sage Publications.

Shotter, J. (1993). Conversational realities: Constructing life through language. Sage Publications.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage Publications.

Wheatley, M. J. (1999). Leadership and the new science. Berrett-Koehler.

Neuroscience makes plain that stress - especially when our emotional or physical safety feels at risk - literally shrinks our brain’s capacity. This is often referred to as an “amygdala hijack”1 when the fight-flight part of our brain takes over and the only thing grabbing our attention is survival. That means that higher order functioning goes out the window. You’ve seen the result at work. Curiosity shrinks. Collaboration stalls. People stop raising their hands and start guarding their turf - or leaving altogether.

I don’t know any organization leader who would want employees with most of their brains shut down due to stress and yet an alarming 80% of U.S. Workers report that their mental health suffers at work. Ninety-three percent say their employer is not doing enough to support a healthy work environment, and 80% (up from 67% in 2024) characterize their organization as “toxic.” That’s an operational risk, not just a moral one. A stressful, toxic, or unsupported work experience costs organizations the very capacities they most need to innovate.

If you want employees who are engaged and happy, creating a culture of care and high engagement must become a set of core capabilities that your organization designs, operationalizes, and measures. That’s where an employee experience framework can really add value.

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What an Employee Experience Framework Is (and Isn’t)

An employee experience framework connects two things:

1. What it feels like to work here, and

2. How we intentionally design and manage that experience.

It’s not your org chart, not your benefits menu, and not a poster of values. Yet it translates values into the structures, practices, systems, and routines people actually live every day.

In 2022, the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General released a groundbreaking report: The Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being. It offers a clear, durable model for workplace mental health and well-being, developed through employee listening across industries and expert input from economists, sociologists, public health leaders, organizational psychologists, and labor voices. It proposed that workplaces can become “engines of mental health and well-being” by focusing on five essential elements:

I first learned about this work through workplace designer Ashleigh Reeves, who helped lead the effort at HHS and now applies it inside Amazon. The attributes I value most in the model: it’s simple enough to remember and robust enough to matter. This framework also mirrors what organizational behavioral science and human-centric workplace design have taught us for decades: human thriving and business performance rise and fall together.

How to Use the Five Essentials in your Workplace

My approach is to treat any existing model as a sacrificial concept2 — a spark for inquiry co-design, and adaptation, not wholesale adoption. We can use the five essentials to guide discovery, to prototype better ways of working, and to measure what changes. Here’s a lightweight path I use with clients and teams.

1) Inspiration and Learning

• Skim the framework report and whichever recommended resources grab you.

• Turn each element into questions aimed at your organization that you can test over the next 30 days. For example, under “Connection & Community,” you might ask: where does connection already live, and where do handoffs break it?

• Capture hypotheses to validate with employees.

2) Current-state Assessment

• Make it safe to tell the truth by being transparent that the organization wants to understand employees’ current experience so that it can be improved.

• Engage in employee listening across the organization.

• Run a survey that contains questions on each of the essential elements of workplace wellbeing.

• Pair qualitative stories and insights with quantitative signals and sizing.

• A good listening system combines contextual sensemaking and insights with communication and action.

3) Future-state Vision

• Host a short workshops to sketch “an ideal employee experience that fuels organizational success” one year out for each element.

• Keep it visible and behavioral: meetings, rituals, artifacts, decision rights.

• At the conclusion of the workshop, ask each participant to write down what this would feel like.

4) Diagnose and Design with Real Levers

• Analyze the gap between current and ideal state.

• Choose one or two high-leverage moments to redesign.

• Map changes to the levers people actually feel: structure, processes, roles, tech tools, skills, and norms.

5) Make Learning Visible (Scorecard, not report card)

• Create an Experience Scorecard with one or two indicators per element.

• Usefulness matters more than frequency. I’ve seen annual engagement surveys and weekly pulses; daily pop-ups are too intrusive to recommend.

• The goal is to spark curiosity and action: “Here’s what we heard; here’s what we’re trying next.”

Treat the scorecard as the other half of the listening feedback loop - we listen to employees and now we reflect as leaders. Communication combined with action is key: publish what changed so people see their fingerprints on the culture.

Tales from the Field

In my consulting work, I’ve used the Five Elements model as both diagnostic and design tool. One organization found that onboarding was a major friction point. We redesigned it through the lens of Connection and Community and established a practice of pairing every new hire with a “Best Friend at Work” who guided them through their first month, both technically and socially. The result wasn’t just happier employees; it was faster integration, stronger retention, and more cross-team collaboration.

Another team applied Mattering at Work to rethink recognition. Instead of annual awards, they built micro-recognition rituals - peer shoutouts in meetings, “gratitude rounds” in retrospectives, small symbols of appreciation visible to all. What mattered wasn’t the size of the reward, but the regular signal that people’s contributions were seen.

A Few Concrete Moves to Consider, Pilot, and Adapt

• Connection & Community. If onboarding is brittle, assign every new hire a BF@W (Best Friend at Work) with explicit responsibilities: lunch in week one, “map of who matters” introductions, and a checklist to get access to tools and folders. Recognize the buddy role in performance conversations so it sustains and feels like real contribution, not “shadow” work.

• Mattering & Recognition. Go beyond annual reviews. We know from research that recognition is not one-size-fits-all. Blend peer shout-outs in team meetings, spot bonuses, and growth privileges like conference slots or demo stages. Design for variety so recognition lands across personalities and preferences.

• Work-Life Harmony. Ask teams to audit their recurring meetings and after-hours pings. Challenge them to discontinue two meetings. Considering adding “no-meeting” blocks to employee calendars for heads-down thinking and working.

• Protection from Harm. Name three potential “dignity violations” in your current environment - e.g., blame-heavy postmortems, public shaming in meetings, ambiguous decision rights. Redesign one ritual to reduce threat cues and enhance dignity.

• Growth & Development. Publish a simple capability checklist for the employees according to their function / role. Allow for self- and manager-ratings to guide coaching, development opportunities, and to calibrate on future growth. This turns “where do I stand?” into a shared alignment on a career path.

Your organization can also use journey moments to focus on by mapping the employee life cycle: join → onboard → contribute → grow → belong → evolve.3 Choose one moment each quarter and make it better end-to-end.

Building the Human Operating System

Where most organizations stumble to improve employee experience is in execution. They confuse perks for system design - like, launching a meditation app while leaving structural stressors intact. They treat “engagement surveys” like report cards rather than learning feedback loops and ongoing action.

An Employee Experience Framework bridges this gap. It’s the structured design of how the system functions for the people in it - it is the connective tissue linking what it feels like to work somewhere with how the organization actually runs.

As Steve Job pointed out, design isn’t about aesthetics, design also determines function and feeling. Intentional design of the employee experience allows organizations to shape, scale, and measure performance enabling conditions in their workforce and concretely translate values into the way work happens on a day-to-day basis.

The most effective leaders approach employee experience like any complex system: holistically, iteratively, and with data. Workplace wellbeing isn’t a program to deploy; it’s a living system to steward. When leaders treat employee experience as design, not decoration, they build cultures that learn faster, adapt better, and innovate more responsibly.

The soft stuff - safety, belonging, growth - isn’t soft at all. It’s the architecture of thriving at work.

Ready to redesign your employee experience? I can help you surface the hidden truths of your current workplace reality, uncover what’s blocking engagement, and design for measurable engagement improvement - the kind that fuels innovation and the bottom line.

Let’s talk

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Here’s what happened: my data analytics team had created a tool that could make life easier for a partner team—if they did a bit of upfront work. When they didn’t, my frustration built. My colleague Mark was patiently trying to understand the situation, “I just want to try and understand…” That’s when I cut him off with: “I want to understand why your team isn’t doing their job!” Then I marched out of the room.

Yes. Two days after a daylong mindfulness retreat.

Later, after apologies and repair, we managed to laugh: “The conference didn’t work for Robin. She’s demanding a refund.” Humor helped. Still, I look back on that moment with regret. I suspect at least one person in that room never fully trusted me again.

It may seem strange that I—an organizational psychologist committed to making business more human—would have such a “brat attack” at work. While not a pattern, I’ve had to work at managing my fiery streak (hello, Aries sun, Enneagram 8). And here’s the thing: most conflict advice hasn’t always spoken to me. It often assumes you’d rather avoid conflict, or it suggests strategies that feel inauthentic.

“So what I hear you saying right now is…”

OMG. Kill. Me.

These type of rote statements make my skin crawl.

So how do we approach conflict in a way that feels honest, grounded, and reparative? When conflict arises—and it will—I want it to clarify perspectives and deepen relationships. My long-term connections matter too much to risk with reactive behavior. I want the steady self-confidence that comes from standing on solid emotional ground.

I want to act my age, not my shoe size, as Prince advised.

Self-regulation and emotional maturity is vastly important not just to sustaining healthy work relationships but ALL relationships. And when it seems that the earth is spinning off its axis with conflict, let peace begin with me. Here are 3 practices that help me cool down.

Get on the balcony

I’ve written about this concept before: I’ll See you on the Balcony. When you feel triggered, imagine stepping off the stage and onto the balcony, looking down at the situation with perspective. From the balcony, you might ask yourself:

1. What is really going on here?

   • Why am I getting so riled up about this?

   • Is one of my values being violated? Is a boundary getting crossed?

2. Is this really worth it? Will this issue matter in an hour, a week, a month, or a year?

3. Is this issue even my business?

I use “balcony” as a handy mnemonic and just say it to myself when I start to feel activated.

Breathe

The simple act of taking a deep breath is like hitting a reset button for your nervous system. Take. A. Breath. Better yet, try box breathing:

A deep breath is like an antidote to amygdala hijack. Even two rounds of box breathing can calm your nervous system and bring your brain back online. When you’re activated, remind yourself to breathe - the deeper the better. (Pro tip: don’t tell other people to breathe in the heat of the moment—it rarely goes over well. Ask me how I know.)

Ground in your Values

Values are your bedrock. Tools like the Good Project’s values sort exercise can help you identify yours. But that is just the first step.

The next step is noticing the behaviors that show up when you’re aligned with those values—and when you’re not. For example:

• Aligned with my value of respect: I listen and ask questions.

• Out of alignment: I interrupt and push.

I offer this template for this very simple but powerful tool. This “above the line / below the line” awareness creates solid footing instead of leaving you at the mercy of reactivity.

Radical Responsibility + Self Compassion

When anger has flared and shame creeps in after the fact, the work is to step out of blame and shame and into accountability and compassion. Brené Brown emphasizes that interpersonal repair requires vulnerability — admitting the misstep, apologizing cleanly without excuses, and being willing to change

Accountability begins with asking, “What is my part in this conflict?” That might require deeper reflection about one’s own reactivity and triggers. What value was compromised? What boundary was crossed?

And then with radical honesty make amends to those you harmed. Here are some best practices:

1. Use “I” statements as much as possible and avoid “you” statements

2. Never follow an apology with the word “but…”

3. Ask what repair looks like for the other person

4. Use non-violent communication process when you feel another has wronged you:

   1. State the behavior with no interpretation - “You have shown up late to our last three meetings.”

   2. Share the impact that behavior had on you - “My time is as equally valuable as yours and I feel that you don’t respect my time when you are late.”

   3. Make a clear request - “I would like you to prioritize being on time for our meetings.”

We’re only human

Kristin Neff reminds us that anger is part of being human, and the self-compassion stance is to notice our own pain and hurt, hold it with kindness, and remember we’re not alone in losing our cool.

The path forward after conflict is a blend of self awareness, honesty, and courageous repair. That’s the way back to trust and integrity. And now that you know better, you can do better!

What is your personal development learning edge and how are you developing greater personal and relational mastery in your life? Share here or drop me a note!

Leadership Development starts with the self. Ready to take accountability and make progress? I coach individuals and intact teams. Feel free to set up a complimentary consultation and we can assess if my approach is a good fit for your needs.

Please subscribe and share this article. The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff is always free.

Whatever you call it, there’s a predictable stage in any complex initiative or problem-solving effort when everything feels murky. You fear you may never arrive at clarity, certainty, or solutions ever again.

Picture this: your leadership team gathers to make weighty decisions.

• Should you buy a building?

• Where will new revenue come from?

• How will you allocate this year’s budget?

You look forward to the sense of relief, clarity, and accomplishment that comes with a decision. The meeting begins with a flurry of ideas — or more precisely, perspectives. In design thinking, we call this divergent thinking. Yes, this is the famous post-it-note phase.

Eventually, of course, the goal is to converge — to select the most promising possibilities to refine, prototype, and test. This process is often depicted as a diamond: diverge, then converge.

Some thrive in the divergent stage. They can brainstorm endlessly, connecting concepts until the cows come home. Others feel itchy, wanting to narrow fast. In business especially, there’s a premium placed on being decisive: solving problems quickly equals value.

When I facilitate design thinking sessions, I often reassure people during the diverge phase:

“Don’t worry. We will evaluate soon enough. Right now, our only job is to generate as much raw data as we can.”

In our data-obsessed world, this seems to calm problem-solvers down, frees up their thinking, and produces a few more sticky notes. But here’s the hard truth: when the issues are complex — and let’s be honest, what problems today aren’t complex? — the path to meaningful solutions is anything but straightforward.

A Stanford Case in Point

This was illustrated through a wonderful story told to me recently by Michael Barry at Stanford's dSchool.

Here it is in broad strokes:

The Problem: Stanford students were getting injured in bicycle accidents at alarming rates. The health and safety office asked a team to develop solutions.

The First Solution: The team observed that many cyclists didn’t wear helmets. So they launched a program: a free, Stanford-logo helmet placed on every freshman’s dorm bed. Problem solved, right?

The Result: Injuries actually increased. Worse, students actively rejected the helmets — white, shiny symbols of conformity that clashed with Stanford’s risk-taking, entrepreneurial culture.

Wait. Whaaat?!

Here’s the paradoxical truth bomb:

When linear solutions are applied to complex problems, the problems often get worse.

This is the essence of a “wicked problem” — messy, multi-stakeholder, full of conflicting perspectives and unintended consequences.1

Enter the Groan Zone

This is where the Groan Zone comes in.

I first heard the phrase last week during advanced facilitation training with Community at Work in San Francisco, and it landed with me.2 It perfectly names that uncomfortable middle space where clarity feels far away and frustration runs high.

You know you’re in the Groan Zone when you hear:

• “Are we even making progress?”

• “We’re going in circles.”

• “Why are we still debating this?”

As an ethnographic researcher, I know this terrain all too well. We call it analysis — that swampy place between fieldwork and insight where nothing seems to cohere. I often joke: “It’s not analysis until somebody cries.”

It’s painful. It’s disorienting. And it’s essential.

What Teams Need in the Groan Zone

The instinct is to push through, grasp for the obvious solution, or declare victory too soon. But what actually helps is slowing down, zooming out, and unpacking the system around the problem.

This is precisely where skilled facilitation is invaluable. A facilitator can:

• Track the conversation so no perspective gets lost.

• Use active listening and paraphrasing to validate different viewpoints.

• Create psychological safety so people can stay with discomfort.

• Summarize points of agreement and clarify differences.

A skilled facilitator helps the team stick with the problem and get even more curious about it.

A trusted advisor once told me at a time I was thrashing about in uncertainty, “Everyone wants to be in the sun. But the gold is in the cave.”

In other words, a facilitator helps the team stay in the cave long enough to discover the treasure.

Back to Stanford

The head of the safety department enlisted folks from the dSchool to go deeper into the cave.

They learned that Stanford students see themselves as risk-takers, entrepreneurial mavericks and bicycle helmets ran counter to this identity. New students were quickly indoctrinated into this cultural script when they were teased by upper classmen for sporting the bright white, logo-emblazoned helmets.

When the bicycle safety team dug deeper, they reframed the problem: the issue wasn’t helmets, it was traffic flow. The university tested new roundabouts that forced drivers to pay closer attention. Collisions dropped, bicyclists became safer — not because of headgear, but because the whole system changed.

The real breakthrough only came because the team endured the Groan Zone.

The Takeaway

The Groan Zone is the cave of group decision-making. It’s uncomfortable, yes. But it isn’t where progress dies - it’s where breakthroughs are born.

But most teams can’t navigate it alone. Without skilled facilitation, frustration mounts, time is wasted, and solutions miss the mark.

If your team is wrestling with wicked, persistent, or high-stakes problems — whether it’s delivering on a mandate, reframing a stubborn challenge, or charting a new strategic course — don’t short-circuit the process by forcing a premature solution.

Give yourselves the gift of expert facilitation. With the right guide, your team can move from chaos to clarity, from groans to gold.

👉 Curious how this could look for your team? I can help - let’s talk about moving from stuck to breakthrough. Book a complimentary conversation with me.

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There is nothing like being there.
To understand. To shift thinking.
To see with new eyes.

The Spark

Twenty-plus years ago, I had just accepted a position at a large financial services institution as its first user research manager—on one condition:

I could take a designer and a business person on the road for three weeks of in-home research with customers focused on how they manage their finances.

You can read more about that project in the case studies section of Ubuntu Culture Company’s website, but here’s the bottom line:

Those three weeks sparked insights the bank drew on for the next six years.

In the short term, Product realized their approach to budgeting tools was out of sync with people’s lives. In the long term, we learned that keeping design tools—like personas, task models, and journey maps—alive and updated ensured we stayed connected to what mattered.

Real Insight Requires Reflection

In the age of generative AI, behavioral dashboards, and a flood of digital content, it’s tempting to believe that human experience can be algorithmically inferred.

But real insight—transformative, gut-level, world-shifting knowing—doesn’t come from data alone.

It comes from:

• Experiential and reflective immersion

• Deep hanging out

• Witnessing life unfold in its natural environment

• Listening with openness and humility

• Revealing our hidden assumptions

That’s the power of team-based ethnography.

Why It Works

Ethnography—the foundational method of anthropology—is about understanding human behavior in context.

It’s not about abstract personas or focus group quotes.
It’s about being with people, in their world, seeing how they move through it.

When small, cross-functional teams engage in this work—not as outside observers, but as intentional learners—the impact is catalytic.

Team-based ethnography shifts the question from
“What do people want from us?” to
“What does the world want from us—and who do we need to become?”

From Insight to Innovation

When employees step into the homes, workplaces, and lives of those they serve, and when they observe, listen, and reflect together—they learn more than just where their product fits in.

They often rediscover purpose and reconnect with the deeper meaning of their work.

“My understanding is so much broader and deeper after just one session. We thought we knew what customers wanted. But being there changed everything. There is so much value that is unlocked when we really listen and pay attention to our own assumptions about what we think we know.”
—Team Member, Ethnographic Research Project

This is not market research. It’s not a tool for validation.

It’s a practice of reflective sensemaking—a way to surface blind spots, reveal and challenge deeply held assumptions, and open space for new possibilities and paths forward.

Dr. Barbara Perry, a cultural anthropologist and cherished mentor, calls ethnographic inquiry “a reflective practice of seeing, feeling, and understanding across boundaries.” It’s as much about internal transformation as external discovery. And it’s essential for innovating in times of perpetual upheaval where everything around us is in flux.

As I’ve written before, in times of constant change, the only thing we can control is how much and how fast we learn and team-based ethnography helps us learn holistically—with our head, heart, and spirit.

Intentional Learning Matters

New learning and innovation research, from Dr. Amy Edmondson and colleagues, summarized in the Harvard Business Review confirms what team-based ethnographers have long known:

Innovation thrives not through continuous information intake—but through cycles of learning and reflection that are intentionally sequenced.

Teams that try to do everything at once—fieldwork, reflection, idea generation—often burn out or stall.

Team-based ethnography is designed to naturally follow this rhythm:

• First, immersion in the real world

• Then, spacious reflection and meaning-making

• And finally, translation into action and strategy

Like music, learning needs both tension and release to come alive.

How I Help You Bring This to Life

A team-based ethnography engagement typically unfolds over 2–3 months and follows this arc:

1. Define the Inquiry
   Frame the strategic question and identify the people whose voices matter most.

2. Name Your Assumptions
   Articulate what you think you know—and what you’re ready to unlearn.

3. Prepare the Team
   Train a small, internal team in the mindsets and methods of ethnographic research.

4. Fieldwork
   Conduct immersive interviews and observations in real-world environments.

5. Meaning-Making & Mindset-Shifting
   Look for patterns, tensions, surprises. Revisit your assumptions. Reflect together.

6. Codify & Share
   Translate insights into usable artifacts—stories, personas, journey maps, experience principles.

The outcome isn’t just insight. It’s transformation.
You get shared understanding between the world “out there” and your assumptions “in here.”

What Changes

Here’s what you can expect when your team does this work together:

• Breakthrough perspective shifts that spark innovation

• Actionable insights grounded in real life—not guesses

• Cross-silo collaboration that builds trust and organizational memory

• Clarity on what matters to the people you serve

• Reconnection to purpose and mission

• Reduced risk through alignment with lived experience

And maybe most importantly:

You start seeing yourselves—and the purpose of your work—with new, sharper, more focused eyes.

Learning That Sticks

Organizational learning requires:

• Emotional engagement

• Shared reflection

• A willingness to be changed by what we learn

Team-based ethnography cultivates all three.

Because when we learn together—
when we sit with complexity together—
when we listen with open hearts—
something shifts.

Not just in what we know,
but in who we become.

We become people who care, connect, and create—together.

Ready to unlock the learning that sparks innovation?

Let’s talk about how team-based ethnography can transform your team’s perspective and your business outcomes.

Schedule 30 minutes or reach out: robin@ubuntuculturecompany.com

Let’s dive beneath the surface and into the soul of the matter.

In spite of African Americans’ migration to Marin in search of opportunity and to contribute to the war effort, the county’s population remains overwhelmingly white. Black residents make up just 2.3% of the population, largely concentrated in Marin City.

Today, children from Marin City attend mostly segregated elementary and middle schools before being funneled into Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, a town that is 83% white and less than 1% Black. It is important to understand that this occurred by design: Marin City was shaped by decades of redlining and segregation that kept new African American residents out and relegated existing Black residents to the small community north of Sausalito.1

Tamalpais High School has faced several documented racist incidents in 2023-24, prompting community outcry and calls for action.2 In response, a new initiative was launched, creating The Hub, a support center for Black students offering mentorship, academic guidance, and athletic support. The program was showing significantly positive results. Reports of belonging increased. Absenteeism fell. D, F, and Incomplete grades dropped significantly.

Then, in June 2025, the Tam District School Board voted 3–2 not to renew contracts for the two antiracist community and education consultants who designed and led the program over the past year.

The reasons given? Some board members claimed they were “bullied” into approving the initial contracts, that they are following the law by discontinuing, and that the Hub’s services can be handled internally. Some also cited that the funding, because it applies to only one of the district’s five high schools, was inequitable.

But to the students, parents, and staff who experienced the Hub’s success firsthand, it feels like betrayal. The program signaled support for Black student success and it was working. At cross-high school events over the past year, panels made up of mostly students of color, shared heart wrenching stories of how racist incidents have negatively impacted their ability to learn and succeed academically, socially, and emotionally at the high school. At the final event of 2024-25 school year, several students mentioned that, with the existence of the Hub, their experience was improving.

High School administration staff and teachers rallied to persuade the school board to reinstate the contracts. They acknowledge they presently lack the culturally relevant expertise to adequately support Black students and create the conditions for them to thrive.

"I have students who would have failed except for their interventions. They support my students every day in ways that I can’t and the administration can’t."

Outcry as Marin school board ends support services for Black students

What has Dignity got to do with it?

The June board meeting where this decision was made was a cascade of emotional testimony. People shouted. Cried. Pleaded. Accused. And beneath it all were countless dignity violations—a concept at the heart of leadership failure and repair.

If we can zoom out past the binary thinking of right vs. wrong, what we can see is a relational system in pain. Donna Hicks, PhD, conflict-resolution researcher, professor, consultant, and international advisor, names these relational breakdowns “dignity violations.”

“The emotional volatility associated with having our dignity honored or violated cannot be overstated. When people feel that their value and worth are recognized in relationships, they experience a sense of well-being that enables them to grow and flourish. If, in contrast, their dignity is routinely injured, relationships are experienced as a source of pain and suffering.” - Donna Hicks

Dignity violations have affected every stakeholder throughout the Tamalpais District stakeholder ecosystem:

• Students of color, especially Black students, subjected to racism that erodes their psychological safety and ability to learn

• Consultants dismissed despite positive outcomes

• Teachers told “it’s your job” despite evidence that they lack the cultural attunement and skills to succeed

• Parents watching needed supports for their kids to succeed being withdrawn

• School Board Trustees Board members feeling pressured and unsupported in their decision-making

• Tam District Superintendent blamed, scapegoated, and characterized as acting illegally and unethically for expediting the contracts and advocating for continuation

Wait. What is Dignity Again?

I’ve written about dignity before but as a refresher:

Dignity Is a Design Choice

I’ve spent my career helping leaders and organizations navigate complexity, and I’ve noticed a persistent myth: that human-centered skills are innate. That we just “know how to human.” But dignity, like empathy or collaboration, is a discipline—one that must be learned, practiced, and embedded into culture.

I had the honor of bringing this practice to life at the Dignified Futures 2025 Conference at Emory University, where I prototyped a new workshop: Designing Dignity-centered Organizations.

A lot of organizational change, workplace wellbeing, and conflict management frameworks embed dignity as a key aspect. This workshop offered participants the rare opportunity to focus exclusively on dignity. Dignity is as amorphous as it is visceral. It can be enhanced or violated through words, actions, and conditions and situationally experienced across these four levels–individual, interpersonal, group, and organization.

Drawing from Dr. Hicks' research, I created two decks of cards—one with dignity-enhancing strategies, the other with dignity violations—and a “Dignity Canvas” for analyzing the workplace scenarios I created.

In small teams, participants applied dignity strategies to workplace dilemmas.

Halfway through, I threw in a “violation card”—prompting them to adapt and respond.

What emerged were profound, relational conversations. People didn’t just talk about dignity—they felt it. Dignity becomes actionable when we name the specific, often subtle, words, actions, and conditions that affirm or violate it.

What If We Led with Dignity?

Now imagine if the Tam District stakeholders had gone through this workshop. Imagine if dignity was centered in their process—not as an abstract value, but as a relational design principle and goal for reaching decisions.

The decision might still have been difficult. But the process could have been different. Less adversarial. More imaginative. Perhaps the board could have scaled back the contracts but retained consultant support to coach staff. Perhaps they could have pursued grant funding. Or agreed to a time-bound pilot to further assess impact. Many alternatives are possible when the conversation shifts from opposition to mutual understanding.

We need Dignity-centered Leadership–Now

Dignity is a hallmark of our humanity. It exists at the individual, interpersonal, group, and organizational level. And it’s something every human being can feel—viscerally—when it’s honored or denied.

As leaders, our ability to create the conditions for dignity is no longer optional. In a world of perpetual upheaval, relational leadership is not a soft skill—it’s the hard edge of sustainable advantage.

Dignity is a human right, yes, but the capability to center dignity in systems is not an automatic “comes with” circumstance. But dignity-centered leadership in organizations is learnable. It requires training, a shared vocabulary, and a commitment to new relational norms.

Relationality is the future’s most vital competitive advantage.

When we use dignity-centered processes to navigate conflict, remarkable things happen:

• Trust is rebuilt

• Complexity becomes navigable

• Systems begin to heal

If you’re a leader who wants to upskill your team’s dignity-enhancing capabilities—or if you’re navigating a high-stakes, emotionally charged situation—I can help.

Let’s explore how to embed dignity into your systems, culture, and decisions.3

👉 Book a free consultation

Let’s build a dignified future—together.

• Workforce reductions (RIFs) and layoffs

• Return-to-office mandates

• DEI commitment rollback and cultural whiplash

In my article, What Do Middle Managers Do? I argued that middle managers are strategic executors, emotional shock absorbers, and culture creators. You walk the tightrope of aligning with corporate priorities while protecting the team's morale and mental well-being. It’s not easy. But it’s essential.

Because here’s the truth:

Feeling a sense of connection, mattering, and belonging are core human needs isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s a biological necessity, as vital as air or water. Everyone wants to feel that what they work on together everyday has meaning. And one of your most powerful jobs as a leader is to weave a thread between your organization’s strategy and each team member’s contributions. But it doesn’t stop there. You can do more—and it starts with how you gather your team.

Reframing the Leadership Challenge

Instead of asking stale and honestly meaningless questions like “How can we grow 10x?” I invite you to make inquiries of yourself and the leaders around you that I believe are far more urgent and human:

• What do people need right now?

• What does effective leadership look like in a time of constant disruption?

• What can I actually control in a world that feels out of control?

• How can I create islands of sanity in my workplace—and lead from there?

“In a world we cannot recognize, how do we find a way forward? In this world we do not understand, how do we know what to do? When so little is comprehensible, what is meaningful work, what is genuine contribution?”

Margaret Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?

There are infinite intentional moves leaders can make to foster connection and clarity. But this post focuses on one deceptively simple, deeply effective lever: the design of your all-hands team meeting.

Your Sphere of Influence

Use the Sphere of Influence framework to guide your thinking. This is the space where you can create the conditions for others to thrive. This is where culture is built—not through company-wide initiatives, but through everyday interactions, rituals, and practices.

This is where we build what Margaret Wheatley calls islands of sanity, microcultures where people feel seen, safe, and motivated.

All-hands Meetings with Heart and Soul

Below is a concrete, repeatable design for an all-hands meeting that fosters learning, belonging, and a culture of appreciation. Explore, use, and adapt this blueprint to increase engagement and safety in the midst of chaos.

Spoiler: This one-hour meeting could become the most energizing part of your team’s week.

Scheduling

Make it regular. Weekly if possible. Really take advantage of the community-building space to meet, connect and engage.

In my last corporate role, we met Fridays at 9 a.m. My co-leader Mark McCormick1 called it “the one hour at work you’ll actually look forward to every week.” He was right.

If you manage other managers, co-create this format with them so they feel ownership—and less like it’s “one more thing.” Try saying:

“I’ve been reflecting on the energy and usefulness of our team meetings and want to make them more engaging. Here are some ideas—I'd love to hear yours.”

Share the stage

Great leaders don’t center themselves—they distribute power.

Shift from “my meeting” to “our meeting.” Rotate roles. Invite participation. This isn’t a performance. It’s a community practice and a playground for team members to work on meeting facilitation and presentation skills.

Create a shared signup sheet for key roles:

Set expectations that everyone will contribute at least once a quarter (or whatever cadence makes sense for your team size). You might want to model the MC role first before handing it off to the broader team.

Agenda Blueprint

The meeting agenda will remain consistent even as the topics change.

Run of Show

The MC opens the meeting with warmth and levity. The MC can make this their own by sharing trivia / fun facts / famous birthdays - “it’s National bake a cake day which is great because it’s also Barbara Streisand’s birthday so be sure to bake a cake for Babs when you get home.”

The MC could also do a random-question team poll (popcorn style - not everyone has to share): "What’s your weirdest shopping return story?"2 The MC should also make any team announcements like upcoming mandatory training deadlines, reminders to track time if that’s a thing, and provide an overview of the agenda.

Next, the MC cedes the floor to the Learning Topic presenter. This can be project-based (e.g.,”this is how we did it”) or a deeper dive into a tool or skill. It’s a peer-teaching moment that builds competence and confidence across the team.

Then comes the palate cleanser: Recognition.

First, any formal updates—promotions, launches, milestones—typically announced by the person’s direct manager.

Then, open the floor for informal appreciation: peer-to-peer shout-outs, thank-yous, and “you made my week easier” moments. Here’s where people name the good, out loud. It’s powerful.

“I want to recognize Heather for the workshop facilitation last week—it helped us align and reframe our thinking. Thank you!”

This normalizes asking for and offering help—something Phyl Terry teaches thousands so beautifully through Collaborative Gain and Never Search Alone. Leaders who ask for help don’t appear weak—they grow stronger and go farther. As the African proverb says:

“If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.”

The goal of formal and informal recognition is to build a culture of care, gratitude, and helping one another. The MC will need to manage time since this could get a little long - “we have time for one more informal recognition announcement…going once, going twice…”

Finally, the Belonging Topic. A team member shares something important to them. It could be a personal story, cultural identity, volunteer work, or a favorite hobby. No pressure to be vulnerable—just real. Every employee has unique life experiences and every human has a fundamental need to be known and to belong.

This 15-minute practice nurtures empathy, connection, and humanity at work—especially critical now as formal DEI programs are scaled back, which leaders have shared with me candidly is having a negative affect on employee morale.

As a leader you can deepen relationships and a culture of care – the bedrock conditions for collaboration, learning, and innovation - by carving out space for people to share who they are and what they care about.

The Leadership Power Hour

Let’s bring it home.

In a world spinning with uncertainty, one thing remains within your reach: the ability to shape how your team experiences work. You can create an hour each week that’s rooted in humanity and connection—an hour that reminds people they matter.

Don’t underestimate the power of that.

Culture isn’t built in expensive offsites or strategy decks. It’s built in the consistent, courageous container you create each week.

Start with one hour. Start now. Create your island of sanity.

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Got a leadership, team, or organizational challenge you want to discuss? I’m a great listener. Schedule a complimentary 30-minutes.

Robin Beers, PhD (she/her) is an Organizational Psychologist and the founder of Ubuntu Culture Company. Robin partners with brave, caring leaders to navigate this era of perpetual upheaval and guides them to develop cultures, strategies, and capabilities to thrive in uncertain times. Leveraging 25+ years of corporate leadership experience she creates value through approaching organizations as connected systems, a deep understanding of human behavior, and an incisive ability to diagnose where organizations need to learn, change, and adapt. The result is workplaces where employees can contribute fully, collaborate fearlessly, and unleash innovative potential to enable the organization to thrive.

If stranded on a desert island with just one song, I would choose Stevie Wonder’s “As,” from Songs in the Key of Life.1 And If I was limited to a single, solitary organizational insight, it would be this timeliness gem attributed to Peter Drucker:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Peter Drucker, commonly referred to as the "father of modern management,” reminds us that even the most brilliant strategic plans are vulnerable to failure without a supportive organizational culture.2 Yet culture remains paradoxically both over-discussed3 and undervalued—often dismissed as “fuzzy” or "soft" despite its power.

Apple’s Chief Information Officer, Timothy Campos, likens organizational culture to a company's "operating system." As he highlighted at UC Berkeley’s Culture Connect conference, he has learned that dismissing or ignoring culture is akin to running a business on faulty software infrastructure which will inevitably lead to systemwide crashes and failures.4

The culture-as-operating-system metaphor is useful in our technologically steeped world, even as I bristle a bit at its mechanistic undertones. But it doesn’t capture culture’s deeply human essence. Anthropologist Drew Jones strikes a nice balance with the definition of culture he offers in the Open Culture Handbook:

Culture is the human capacity to share and learn information, knowledge, skills, stories, emotions, and innovation capabilities that empower human groups to adapt and thrive in their unique ecosystems.

Drew Jones5

Culture, like technology, is practical and useful. But culture–consisting of values, beliefs, artifacts, and behaviors– is a human-generated conduit for learning the “ins and outs of how we get things done around here.” Culture is the original information superhighway.

As a living, breathing system facilitating connection, adaptation, and innovation, you can see why, indeed, culture can and will eat strategy for breakfast, lunch AND dinner. Here are the implications for leadership.

How Culture Shapes Organizational Outcomes

1. Culture Determines Behavior

Employees' daily actions are governed not by lofty strategies but by underlying cultural norms, values, and emotions. Strategy may direct goals, but culture dictates real-world behavior. If culture and strategy conflict, culture will always prevail.

2. Culture Drives Strategic Execution

Strategy represents the firm’s aspirations, intentions, and plans for the future - the what. Culture dictates how—or even whether—these plans are implemented outside the boardroom. If a culture is resistant, risk-averse, siloed, disempowered, or toxic, even “perfect” strategic plans falter. Culture and strategy must be intentionally brought into alignment.

3. Culture Impacts Real, Bottom-line Results

Sustainable success comes from employees’ day-to-day decisions, attitudes, interactions, and ability to contribute, all of which are shaped by culture not from strategic directive statements. A supportive culture amplifies productivity, innovation, and employee commitment, directly enhancing performance and “hard” outcomes.

4. Alignment is Essential

The highest-performing organizations ensure their strategies and cultures align closely. Effective leaders understand this relationship deeply and intentionally shape culture to support strategic goals.

Attending to organizational culture in today's environment of perpetual upheaval is one of the few levers leaders can truly control. Intuitively we all know that the what and the how are interconnected and that both need to be managed together.

Why Traditional Employee Culture Surveys Fall Short

So why then do many companies collect employee feedback and engagement data like they're checking off a box or being issued a report card?

I’ve worked in companies that conduct a big engagement survey annually and ones that send out short “pulse check” surveys a couple of times a month. But what is truly learned from the data and what changes? Often the answer is “not much.”

Collecting feedback on employee’s satisfaction and engagement with the organization is the first step.

Let’s take Gallup’s Q12 (named such because the survey only has twelve questions) as an example employee feedback instrument. The survey’s questions are organized into a hierarchy-of-needs-type structure from basic needs up through career growth..

The final report metrics are comprised of each question’s calculated mean (average) score in addition to an aggregate engagement metric. The data can be sliced and diced in different ways but, basically, there are a lot of bar charts and scores between 1-5. This makes it easy to pick out the lowest and the highest scores, but not much insight or action typically takes place.

Turning Data into Cultural Action: A Sensemaking Approach

Don’t let this valuable data–and the opportunity for genuine learning and transformation–slip away.

Here is a "collaborative sensemaking and action planning” approach that turns quantitative and qualitative data into powerful learning and meaningful actions to evolve and strengthen organizational culture.

1. Data to Insight: Move beyond averages to identify significant trends and hidden opportunities within employee responses.

2. Collaborative Sensemaking: With a skilled facilitator and your leadership team, align on the most meaningful insights, uncovering what's truly impacting your culture and employee experience.

3. Action Planning: Develop a concise, measurable, and realistic culture roadmap with periodic touch points to provide updates on actions taken.

4. Communicate: Share insights, planned actions, and ongoing progress regularly with employees through intentional communication—turning feedback into tangible results.

This process takes hours not months and allows organizations to actively and consistently integrate culture (the how) with strategy (the what).

Ready to Upgrade Your Culture?

Building and nurturing a healthy culture isn't a peripheral activity—it's central to organizational success. Strategic initiatives that underestimate and proactively engage current cultural realities put their success at risk.

Building a strong, supportive, and adaptive culture is no longer optional; it’s critical in these tumultuous times. When employees experience psychological safety, belonging, and purpose, organizations become places where innovation flourishes, talent stays engaged, and teams thrive.

Interested in genuinely harnessing your organizational culture to drive innovation and growth?

Let’s connect—I’d love to explore how your culture can become a regenerative wellspring of goodness.

30 minutes on me

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Several years ago, during a career conversation with a professional friend, we were discussing my strengths and what sets me apart professionally. He said, “Your warmth is your superpower.”

I laughed and responded, “Well, I can’t put that on my resume!”

Instead of feeling seen or flattered by this compliment I felt a bit embarrassed–as though “warmth” was irrelevant in business. I had a similar reaction when I took the Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment and “Connectedness” emerged as my #1 strength to lean into and lead with–again, not something I’ve seen on a job description.

“Why do I have to have the hippie strength?” I thought. “Why can’t I have “Achiever” or “Strategic” instead of this “everything is connected,” useless strength? I mean, really, where’s the money in that?”

But, perhaps, a worldview that sees all of life as interconnected is what is needed in these chaotic times.

The Leadership Elephant in the Room

Warmth, kindness, and interbeing aren’t currently on the political leadership menu, especially in the United States. Recently, Elon Musk proclaimed that empathy is a Western civilization “suicide response” and a “bug” that is “destroying society.”

Amy J. Wilson, in her wonderful book Empathy for Change, defines empathy as connection plus action:

Empathy is responding to the thoughts and emotions of others with the purpose of meeting each other’s needs. p. 43

I don’t know what you are thinking, but that sounds pretty awesome to me. What threatens society is not an overabundance of empathy, but rather an “empathy deficit” (Wilson, p. 9).

Many of us have been shaped by the industrial-era belief that “business is business” and success requires toughness, detachment, and a purely rational approach; it’s not personal. I call B.S. on this outdated paradigm and I’ve got the research receipts to back it up. Study after study points to long-term business success driven by relational intelligence rather than transactional leadership.

Leadership scholarship and organizational research over decades demonstrate that emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998),1 psychological safety (Edmondson, 2019),2 and displaying warmth even before competence (Cuddy et al., 2013)3 earn greater trust and influence than dominance or assertiveness.

Yet, here we are. The current U.S. government administration and the richest, most powerful corporate CEOs would have us believe that everything is transactional. When people are fired, deported, or bombed it’s because they don’t matter or didn’t play the game right. Being “right,” getting the deal done, and winning are the only things that matter. Everything is viewed through an us-vs.-them lens and dominating to win becomes the only goal.

https://raminnazer.com/

We are in Transition

When a woman is in labor there is a moment referred to as “transition” when everything changes. There is no going back. Labor becomes incredibly intense and difficult; it seems impossible to keep going. A woman in the transition phase of labor will often say things like, “I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this.” But, of course she will because the only way forward is through the pain. The laboring woman must access her innermost reserves of strength and surrender to the care and support of the people attending to her as she struggles to bring forth a new life.

What looks and feels like a regressive manosphere intent on stripping people of their dignity and humanity by exerting divisive domination, patriarchal power, and racist oppression–even amid all of this–something new is wanting to be born. At the horizon’s edges of the future, outworn, outdated structures are showing cracks. Binary ways of thinking and living are blurring. People say to me, “Community is what matters most to me now,” and “I don’t need to make as much money as I used to if I can do work that fills me with meaning and helps make the world better.”

What do we need to birth a new way of contributing and living? We need imagination and vision, new lenses on the world, and new stories that pull the future to us.

New lenses reveal new possibilities

The universe is made of stories,

not of atoms.

Muriel Rukeyser The Speed of Darkness

I opened my qualitative dissertation with Rukeyeser’s lines of poetry but, lately, these words mean more to me than “stories are important,” or even, “stories carry knowledge.” I’m becoming aware that the stories we tell - and the stories we live in - make our reality.

What if the birthing story could be our reality? What if more and more of us believe–and act–as though on the other side of all this pain and panic was a more just, joyful, balanced future? What if the collective grief many of us are grappling with is not a bottomless well of despair but a portal to hope?

It’s hard to imagine this when we look through an individualistic, extractive lens. And yet, we know that the collective trajectory we are on is not working.

Something is terribly wrong. An anguish at the heart of modern living. The phrases “existential dread” and “fear of the future” come up everyday in conversation. We are being actively defutured for as we rush to secure our individual short-term futures under capitalism, we erode the possibility of a longer-term future for all.”

Relationality. An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human. Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, Kriti, Sharma. 2024. p. 2

The story of modernity is centuries in the making and we are living it as our fixed reality. “Reality” tells us we are separate individuals, resources are scarce so we have to secure ours to ensure we have enough. We must protect ourselves from “the other.” The key to security is fortressing ourselves off from those who don’t belong.

During the pandemic, we glimpsed a different story and directly experienced our interconnectedness. This deep realization of our shared humanity contributed to why the Black Lives Matter movement became global after the murder of George Floyd.

And then we forgot but, even worse, we are denying that we ever remembered.

We can be outraged, but outrage doesn’t create new stories of new futures that we can live into.

Hold on to You

Don’t allow global power structures to gaslight you into suppressing your humanity. Yes, the pendulum has swung dramatically away from dignity-centered leadership but your humanity is bigger than this moment.

In the midst of all this upheaval, it’s easy to feel unsettled, anxious, and afraid. Psychologists report that the concerns of clients have shifted from personal and professional woes to processing overwhelm about the state of the world. But, again, consider that perhaps our current grief is a portal to a new future. Let’s reframe “hope” not as a passive wish but a call to action. We can go within, lean on one another, bear down, and get this baby out.

If you are in any way a leader, changemaker, teacher, or guide, you have work to do.

Define your values

Determining how to contribute to birthing a new future requires identifying and defining your personal values. Here is a free assessment that can help you.

Remember that it’s important to both identify and define your values. The same value can mean different things to different people.

For instance, I could identify “meaningful relationships” as one of my core values. I might define that as a “big tent” of relatives, friends, and community members. Someone else may also choose “meaningful relationships” as one of their core values but they define that as “a small, trusted circle of people I’m biologically related to or have known my whole life.”

The more specific you are the more you will recognize when your actions are in and out of alignment with your values. Lastly, narrow your core values down to just three or four, tops. Get really clear on what is important to you. It is from this clarity that you can choose and take consistent action.

Establish your ground of being

During times of chaos and upheaval, it’s important to have a firm ground of being. This means being rooted in values that you ascribe and adhere to even when the political or organizational winds are blowing this way and that. The New York Times has been publishing stories about how people in Washington are afraid to speak up for various reasons–some fear for their jobs and others for their safety.

I recently heard that Rosa Parks was thinking about Emmett Till when she declined to move to the back of the bus. In this one act that sparked a whole Civil Rights movement, she was honoring the past, the present and the future.

Who and what are you honoring with your actions? What work is yours to do now? How are you helping in this time of transition to birth a future where everyone belongs and everyone can thrive?

In closing, here are a a few inspirational leadership stories to inspire and awaken your imagination of what is still possible:

Humanistic Leadership in Action- Visit to Barry Wehmiller

Love as a KPI - Utibe Bassey

The anti-CEO playbook | Hamdi Ulukaya

If you’re inspired or curious, book 30 minutes with me to explore new career directions, leadership challenges, or ways to create thriving organizations.

If this resonates, please like, share, and subscribe to help others discover The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff.

“In a world we cannot recognize, how do we find a way forward? In this world we do not understand, how do we know what to do? When so little is comprehensible, what is meaningful work, what is genuine contribution?”

Margaret Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be?

Welcome to the Era of Perpetual Upheaval

We made it through January. That’s something, isn’t it?

Wherever you are reading this, I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. The polycrisis is no longer a distant concept—it’s our daily reality. Climate change, political polarization, income inequality, technological disruption, and global economic uncertainty press in on us from all sides.

Just since November, the U.S. has endured devastating hurricanes on the East Coast and unprecedented wildfires in urban Los Angeles. If you lead an organization, your people—directly or indirectly—are feeling the effects of increased stress.

McKinsey has termed this the “era of perpetual upheaval” and it certainly feels like it. Crisis management is no longer a specialized function owned by risk professionals focused on emergency protocols and business continuity planning. Today, every leader is a crisis manager. The problem? There are no checklists for the unpredictable.

Sure, knowing where the emergency exits are matters. But how do you prepare for a world in which the ground is constantly shifting? How do you lead when existential stress fogs the future?

Here are three ways you can show up for yourself, your employees, and your organization in uncertain times.

1. Be Human First

“I am just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human.”

John Trudell, Native American author, poet, actor, musician, and political activist

The pandemic reminded us of something fundamental: We are interconnected. We banged pots together. We wore masks to protect each other. We rediscovered that we are responsible for one another.

I believe that remembering our interconnectedness provided the opening for many to realize that so many things about our own lives and society were out of balance or just patently unjust.

Then we started to forget.

As vaccines rolled out and infections waned, so too did our collective sense of obligation. Today, our workplaces reflect this amnesia. When leaders default to “business as usual” in times of extraordinary stress, they risk appearing, at best, tone-deaf—and at worst, callous.

And now it would seem that the “arc of the moral universe” isn’t bending toward justice, but rather, increased intolerance, separation, and dehumanization. Indeed, it’s time to ask ourselves ‘what is our work?’ and ‘how do we want to lead?’

Leaders create containers for work. The nature of that container matters. If it prioritizes control above all else, policies like rigid return-to-office mandates emerge. If it balances flexibility with connection, hybrid models take shape. Gallup research shows that increasing the number of employees who feel their opinions count can lead to a 40% reduction in safety incidents and a 12% increase in productivity. Meanwhile, a well-executed study published in Harvard Business Review on Trip.com’s hybrid work model found it lowered turnover and increased profits.

A CIO I met with last week at a Southern California university put it plainly: “The community is trying to balance resilience, compassion, and getting on with life with crushing grief, uncertainty, fear, and horror.”

She gets it. And she knows that as humane leadership requires balancing “the work” with what is happening in our current reality.

Leading effectively means leading with empathy. It also requires cultivating self awareness. Before any high-stakes meeting, I ask myself: How do I want to show up? That simple question gives me a moment of choice—to regulate my emotions and set my tone.

2. Acknowledge Reality

“Let your wisdom as a human being connect with the power of things as they are.” Chogyam Trungpa, Buddhist Teacher

In January, I convened a dialogue group on the ideas in the book Who Do We Choose to Be? Margaret Wheatley urges us to put down the “hopium” pipe and face reality. At first this freaked me out. No Hope? Isn’t hope essential for motivation and perseverance?

Then, someone in the group—who had just returned home after the L.A. wildfire evacuation—said that surrendering the need for false hope had actually made her feel lighter. We laughed, recognizing that constant grasping and wishing for a different, better reality was exhausting us all. Sometimes, the most stabilizing thing we can do is call a spade a spade.

Uncertainty is scary. And things will continue to happen in our personal lives, organizations we work within, and our world. We are going to have to face hard truths. And, we know from neuroscience and personal experience that ambiguity raises a human's stress response.

Acknowledging reality while leading people to continue to contribute at work is a tricky needle to thread. It’s increasingly difficult to discern real from fake human voices created with AI. But I know for certain that employees are still quite astute at detecting inauthenticity when it comes to “corporate speak.”

I recall times as a corporate leader when I’ve had to deliver austerity messages like, “no travel” at the same time the company is reporting record earnings. It’s hard to justify these types of discrepancies and trying to silver-lining bad news can come across as insincere or, worse, downright lying. And, it most definitely breeds cynicism and lowers trust.

If you don’t know something, say so. Transparency builds trust. And in times of upheaval, trust is a leader’s greatest asset. I’ve found it best to deliver information in a transparent, straight forward way that might still be disappointing but that employees can believe.

3. Identify What is in your Sphere of Influence

Disappointing events will happen in your organization. You will have to lead through them.

I learned this firsthand in 2016 when the Wells Fargo sales scandal broke. An early career employee wrote to me and my managers, devastated: “How can you stay at a company that engaged in such misdeeds?”

I couldn’t change the reality of the situation. But I could acknowledge her disillusionment. I spent a good chunk of a Saturday morning writing a response. I shared my own disappointment and loss (we had been touted as one of the few “good guys” in the 2008 financial crisis). I explained why I stayed—to mentor people like her and to focus on work that genuinely benefited our customers.

I also made it clear that if her values no longer aligned with the organization, leaving was a valid choice. She stayed for five more years.

The Leaders We Need Now

We are all crisis managers now.

The leaders of tomorrow will not succeed by clinging to outdated “business as usual” playbooks.

To lead in an era of perpetual upheaval, you must cultivate resilience, creative problem-solving, and complexity navigation—not just for yourself, but for those who look to you for guidance.

The leaders we need now are not just decision-makers. They are sensemakers—guides who can acknowledge uncertainty, honor our shared humanity, and create spaces where people can do meaningful work in an unstable world.

This is the work I do at Ubuntu Culture Company—helping leaders cultivate cultures of resilience, connection, and deep adaptability in an era of perpetual upheaval. My approach is rooted in the belief that organizations don’t just need new strategies; they need new ways of being. If this resonates with you, I’d love to continue the conversation.

For more on human-centered leadership, check out these two previous posts, Creating Islands of Sanity at Work and What Do Middle Managers Do? I discuss leadership qualities most needed in times of upheaval and crisis like displaying compassion, care, and fostering connection. And, I’ll See You on the Balcony shares my varying success at taking the reflective pause before action.

All of these ideas can be customized and delivered as keynote talks.

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Michael Pollan wrote in The Omnivore's Dilemma that our food preferences are shaped by culture, which actually means “the food your mother made.” I’ve always found this an apt and hilarious way to describe culture. My mom didn’t “make” mint chip ice cream but she introduced me to it, and fast forward 50+ years, it’s still my numero uno, absolute favorite flavor.

A few years ago, I retired my daily wine habit, and my sweet tooth came roaring back. My go-to treat was, you guessed it, mint chip ice cream. By this point, my tastes had become more discerning and I preferred white minty ice cream with irregular chocolate chips. Tillamook mint chip ice cream fits this bill completely and became a regular purchase from my local Andronico’s grocery store.

One day, it wasn’t in stock. Fine. I probably shouldn’t eat so much ice cream anyway. But then this went on for weeks. When the checker asked me if I found everything I was looking for, I finally spoke up about the missing flavor. He said he’d pass my request along to the manager. Weeks went by, and still no Tillamook mint chip. I resorted to an inferior brand.

In line, I brought it up with the store manager, Johnnie, and a look of dismay crossed his face.

“Well, you’ve always had it; it’s just in the last few months it hasn’t been stocked. I think it’s just a glitch,” I say. “Maybe when the Tillamook delivery person comes you can just tell him to put some mint chip ice cream in the case.”

Then Johnnie blasted through my naivete and revealed a bit about the underbelly of inventory control. He explained that managers aren’t allowed to change or customize the inventory for their store. If they do, they risk getting in trouble with Corporate. At night, when the store is closed, inventory workers (who the daytime people never see or interact with) take pictures of the shelves and send them to Corporate. In this case, “Corporate” is Albertsons, which owns Safeway, which owns Andronico’s. If the photos show unauthorized products, the manager could face repercussions. His face showed defeat, the tone of his voice registered disempowerment.

Let’s pause this epic saga to notice the intersection of customer experience, employee empowerment, and corporate control idiocracy. As a customer, I won’t get to buy what I want because employees aren’t empowered to act locally and use their disccretion to fulfill my request. The manager loses face with the customer by revealing his lack of authority and decision making autonomy. In the low-margin grocery business, Corporate has decided that the path to efficiency and profitability lies in micro-optimizations, tight inventory control, and a surveillance culture.

A normal person would be annoyed and go on about their life. An organizational psychologist (me) goes home and sends emails to both Tillamook and Andronicos. Tillamook sent this lovely response in the mail on thick letterhead and included two coupons for free ice cream, which I promptly used for mint chip at a competitor not owned by Albertsons.

Albertsons, however, responded with a generic, cut-and-paste email unintentionally containing different font sizes, suggesting I shop at a different store they own but that isn’t part of my weekly shopping routine. From a customer experience standpoint, this shifted the burden to me to meet my own needs while conveniently keeping the profit in their ecosystem. They also promised to forward my request to the store manager. Why? If the manager were empowered to meet my request, we wouldn’t be having this email exchange.

Now I’m just having fun and write back to say that I’m unsatisfied with this response. A week later I get this much better response from Harry, with whom I’m on a friendly, first-name basis.

This more detailed and care-filled response from Harry at Albertsons did feel much better than the first email but I'm still without mint chip at my usual store.

On a particularly busy shopping day, store manager Johnnie opened another checkstand and called me over from standing in a long line. I gave him a brief rundown of my efforts. An expression passed over his face that was at once a combination of appreciation, fear, and something like, “this chick is weird.”

After I reassured him I hadn’t used his name in my emails, he told me he was grateful I was pursuing the issue. He shared more stories: an elderly customer longing for a discontinued pretzel and offering to buy an entire case, multiple requests for Shake ‘n Bake which they no longer carried, both requests he’d been powerless to fulfill.

Then he said something that touched me deeply; it is the reason I’ve devoted my career to improving customer and employee experience:

“I really love this place, and it hurts me when I can’t make things right for customers.”

I mean, isn’t that what any company would want in an employee? Why would it put processes and systems in place to obstruct that pride and love? When employees or customers use the word “love,” executives should sit up and listen. (Check out Utibe Bassey - Love as a KPI). Love is where passion, loyalty, commitment–and, yes, profits—live.

Here is what really bugs me about this: Albertsons approaches inventory management from mechanistic perspective, prioritizing rigid control and uniformity over flexibility and trusting managers to use sound judgement to meet customer needs. Employees are surveilled by faceless entities empowered to flag discrepancies and penalize them. Where is the reciprocity in this relationship between company and employee?

In the near future, AI will likely play a central role in grocery store inventory management, potentially eliminating human inventory workers. Will AI enable greater responsiveness or reinforce rigidity? The answer depends on the assumptions baked into the system. If the core priority remains uniformity and top-down control, the technology will only amplify the current shortcomings. Different assumptions yield different strategies, process designs, and business outcomes. As Steve Jobs famously said, “Design isn’t how it looks; it’s how it works.”

Great process design, whether analog or technology-enabled, starts with three principles:

1. See the Whole: A systems approach lets you see the interactions between parts and how they affect the whole. Does the solution work for all stakeholders, or are there winners and losers?
   

2. Unmask assumptions: Articulate assumptions explicitly. Is the goal cost-cutting efficiency, customer experience, or both? If both, how can they harmonize? If only one, what are the trade-offs?
   

3. Recognize socio-technical dynamics: Human and technical dimensions are intertwined. Analysis is required to account for their complex interplay. Think beyond the spreadsheet. Have you considered how your solution plays out in real life? Can you pilot-test it to refine and learn?

The best business and organizational solutions reconcile human needs and technical efficiency, challenge underlying assumptions, and take a holistic view of the system.

In the Industrial Era–which still dominates many leader’s thinking today–factories gained efficiency and profitability through breaking wholes into smaller and smaller parts. But we no longer live in a world of discrete inputs and outputs. Today, in a world of perpetual upheaval and complexity, we must simultaneously pay attention to interdependencies and dance with shifting dynamics.

While I’m waiting for my mint chip ice cream to be restocked, I’d love to help your organization design strategies and processes that work for the whole. Let’s set up a 30-minute discovery chat to start figuring out how to put the pieces back together again.

“The only thing we can control is how much and how quickly we learn.”

Tom Chi, Former Head of Google X Labs.

It’s been nearly a decade since I heard Tom speak these words at a former bishop’s mansion transformed into a maker/innovator space on the edge of Alamo Square in San Francisco. I had gathered twenty people from my former company to take part in a multi-day rapid prototyping experience. As a scholar of organizational learning and a design research leader, this statement struck me like a thunderbolt and has stayed with me as the world grows ever more complex and difficult to navigate.

Organizational learning has long been touted as a lever for achieving competitive advantage and spurring innovation success (Note: Google Glass was not a success). But how do we– individuals and organizations–learn? And, how can leaders create fertile ground for learning?

This week I directly experienced how a leader can catalyze group learning, support individual growth, and cultivate the blossoming of human potential. The setting? A performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where twenty or so student musicians performed an ambitious set of Latin Jazz compositions under the leadership of Professor Rebeca Mauleón.

Before the performance, Mauleón explained to the audience that she never knows, semester to semester, the mix of students and instruments that will walk into her class.

“Some semesters, I may have two tuba players, four bassists, and ten drummers.”

For this performance, the stage featured four bass players, a guitarist, a pianist, a violinist, clarinets, three drummers and hand percussionists, two vocalists, and a diverse brass section. Mauleón then revealed that many of the performing students had never, ever played Latin Jazz music and the vocalists had never sung in Brazilian Portuguese.

“So, we will see what happens,” Mauleón said with a smile.

And you know what happened? These kids blew down the house.

It’s difficult to adequately describe Profe Mauleón’s joyful, steadying presence but I am going to try because she epitomized the qualities of a caring, life affirming leader and elegantly modeled the principles of organizational learning, collaboration, and creative risk-taking.

We will get back to the story, but first, here’s a snapshot of key organizational learning concepts to provide a bit of theoretical grounding.

In a nutshell, learning happens at the individual, group, and systems level, involves explicit and tacit dimensions, and is supported by conditions of collaboration, learning-by-doing, and psychological safety.

A Masterclass in Organizational Learning

So how did Profe Mauleón embody the principles of successful organizational learning?

1. Attending to Both Individual and System Dynamics. Mauleón assessed the talent available and flexibly adapted the composition choices and arrangements to suit the musician’s skill level and the available combination of instruments.

2. Setting Ambitious Goals While Encouraging Play. The students performed amazingly complex pieces. Mauleón set the expectation with the audience that it might be a “rollercoaster ride” at times, but if there were missed notes, we didn’t notice. What we did witness was total commitment, engagement, and intense joy radiating each member of the ensemble.

3. Participatory, Status-Neutral Leadership. An accomplished Latin jazz expert who has composed for and played with legends like Tito Puente and Carlos Santana, Mauleón did not separate herself from her students. Instead, she offered a strong, steady backbone of support while centering their musicianship. She praised often, celebrated their risks, and after one particularly complicated number, she commented to the audience, “That is the best we’ve ever played that tune!”

4. Creating a Culture of Care and Connection. The students’ respect and affection for Mauleón—and their support of each other during solos—signaled a culture of psychological safety. This “ensemble mindset” allowed individual talent to shine within the collective effort.

The result? A beautiful example of individual potential blossoming within an environment of deep play and collaboration, where the whole definitely added up to more than the sum of its parts. It brought tears to my eyes. It felt like love.

How You Can Cultivate a Learning Organization

Leaders - particularly middle managers - are the linchpin of organizational learning. Here’s how to make these concepts relevant in your day-to-day work:

1. Address Misalignments (Argyris/Schön): Is something off or not adding up? For instance, is the company strategy out of sync with what customers want? Dig in and ask, “What assumptions are we not questioning?”
   

   Practical Tip: Challenge ingrained habits by using customer research as a reflexive lens through which to view, and interrogate, strategic assumptions.
   

2. Break Silos (Senge): Systems thinking helps you identify how isolated decisions impact the bigger picture. Ask: “How does this decision affect other players and/or future outcomes?”
   Practical Tip: Scan for and map consequences to anticipate decision ripple effects across your stakeholder ecosystem, especially in high stakes situations.
   

3. Make the tacit explicit (Nonaka & Takeuchi): When people leave, their know-how often goes with them. Make your team’s tacit knowledge (experience-based know-how) explicit and scalable.

   Practical Tip: Use storytelling or informal knowledge-sharing sessions to capture the “secret sauce” of how results were achieved, not just the outcomes themselves.
   

4. Cultivate Innovation (Seely Brown, Wenger, Edmondson): Learning happens best in action (think: apprenticeship) and safe environments.
   

   Practical Tip: Foster communities of practice—informal spaces where teams solve problems and share ideas—and create safety to fail and experiment.
   

5. Navigate Uncertainty (Snowden, Berger): Complexity isn’t going away. Managers must adapt to shifting challenges.
   

   Practical Tip: Use the Cynefin framework to classify challenges and act appropriately. Assess your own and other’s complexity fitness using the adult learning development framework.

From Learning to Becoming

If, as Tom Chi suggests, learning is one of the few things we can control, leaders have a critical role in fostering conditions for it to happen.

Organizational learning is not just about acquiring expertise; it’s about developing emotional maturity, adaptability, and agility—essential for navigating today’s BANI world. As a leader, your role is twofold:

1. Grow Yourself: Develop your own sense-making, self-awareness, and learning capacity.

2. Create Conditions for Others: Cultivate environments where your team can thrive, take risks, and grow together.

Organizational learning starts with you—in your meetings, your projects, and your everyday conversations. Profe Mauleón leads the way through music. How will you lead the way in your organization?

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Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst

Dignity. The word seems to be everywhere lately. I scanned through my inbox one recent morning and three mentions of the concept jumped out at me. First, a Harvard Business Review article, How Does Dignity Fit Into Your Leadership? highlighted dignity as essential for effective leadership. Next, a conversation between Elena Bower and Laura McKowen explored dignity within friendship and what it means for the future. Finally, Maria Popova's newsletter, The Marginalian, highlighted Doris Lessing’s (1919-2013) essays, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (what a title!), emphasizing that we have the dignity and power to shape our world intentionally.

As a big believer in following signs and signals, the synchronicity of these mentions in the span of a few minutes felt significant and prompted me to reflect on how dignity—both as a concept and practice—has profound relevance in today’s organizations. At its core, dignity is about recognizing the inherent worth of every individual and is closely aligned with the indigenous philosophy of Ubuntu and is at the heart of Ubuntu Culture Company’s ethos.

Ubuntu represents a universal concept of oneness and interdependence with all living things. Through an Ubuntu worldview, we realize our full humanity through our relationships with others. In business, cultivating Ubuntu fosters collaboration and co-creation of regenerative, life-affirming solutions in ecosystems of trust and dignity.

What Is Dignity?

Dignity isn’t earned, nor is it conditional. It is intrinsic to our shared humanity. Defined as the quality of being worthy of honor and respect, dignity reflects our universal need to feel valued, listened to, and appreciated. In the workplace, dignity manifests when people are treated as humans first—rather than employee numbers or as replaceable cogs in a machine.

I’ve mentioned that my dissertation research identified “high care cultures” as a necessary enabler for organizational learning. A key aspect of high care cultures is “honoring humanness,” which in essence, is recognizing the inherent dignity of others:

Honoring humanness simply means recognizing that organizations and project teams are made up of real people who have emotions and desires for connection with one another. Individuals want validation for their unique contributions and the ability to be recognized as multifaceted beings. One of the study’s participants expressed the belief that it is precisely the act of honoring humanness that makes a team work:

“It’s the human dimensions. That’s what makes it work. Paying attention to those, whether it’s a technology tool you are developing or the team that you are working with, it’s the human dimensions. It’s feeling recognized as a human being that makes people want to contribute to a team. It’s being spoken to at all levels of experience that makes people say, ‘Oh, here’s value for me.’ Whatever way it’s packaged you want to speak to people as people and respect them as whole human beings.” Beers, R, p. 138

Dignity-centered leadership operates from the same principles as “honoring humanness,” ensuring that every team member feels seen, heard, and valued.

The Ripple Effect of Dignity

The impact of dignity-centered leadership extends far beyond employee satisfaction. Studies consistently show that when employees feel respected and valued, they are more engaged, innovative, and loyal. A culture rooted in dignity enhances collaboration, reduces turnover, and positions organizations to adapt more effectively to change.

Moreover, dignity-centered leadership drives business results. Companies that prioritize respect and equity often outperform their peers, enjoying higher customer satisfaction, improved reputation, and greater agility in uncertain times.

When Dignity is Violated

The absence of dignity in organizations is all too common. Consider recent layoffs in the tech industry, where employees discovered they were terminated via impersonal emails or were locked out of their corporate systems without warning. Worse, some companies publicly label the group of laid-off workers as “low performers.” These actions strike at the heart of an employee’s dignity, reducing their humanity to a performance metric or financial target.

When dignity is neglected, it also disrupts the psychological contract between leaders and employees. Trends like the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and the continued debate around full time return to office mandates, underscore this breakdown. Employees disengage or leave when their inherent worth is overshadowed by transactional priorities.

Three Levels of Dignity in Leadership

Dignity-centered leadership can be cultivated at three interconnected levels: the self, the manager-employee relationship, and the organization as a whole.

1. At the Individual Level: Dignity starts with feeling respected and valued for one’s contributions. It’s about feeling a sense of autonomy over one’s responsibility to drive impact, seeing opportunities to grow and the leeway to learn, and appreciation for contributions.

2. In Manager-Employee Relationships: Managers play a critical role in upholding dignity by treating every individual—regardless of rank or status—as equally worthy of respect. Simple acts, like giving full attention to a direct report’s ideas or offering genuine recognition, create relationships rooted in trust and collaboration.

3. At the Organizational Level: Cultures that prioritize dignity build environments where employees feel a sense of belonging. For instance, preserving some of the flexibility gained during the pandemic or resisting the urge to micromanage or surveille signals to employees that their dignity is respected. What might shift in the ongoing debate about return-to-office if we put dignity at the center?

Why Dignity Matters

Research shows that teams with higher levels of dignity experience less conflict and greater psychological safety. Even when disagreements arise, dignity acts as a buffer, enabling constructive dialogue and fostering solutions. As Donna Hicks, author of Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict, emphasizes, dignity-centered approaches “create a gateway to deeper engagement” by validating concerns, feelings, and experiences.

Organizations that center dignity also see tangible benefits in engagement, retention, and innovation. Employees who feel respected are more likely to stay, contribute their best work, and build collaborative relationships. See this beautiful example of dignity at work in the leadership story of Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, a manufacturing company in Phillips, Wisconsin who built a culture of dignity as a result of his epiphany that every person he encounters at work is somebody’s precious child.

Practical Steps Toward Leading with Dignity

The first step in dignity-centered leadership is acknowledgment. Leaders must actively listen, validate others’ experiences, and respond with empathy. This isn’t platitudinous empathy—it’s a deep commitment to seeing the humanity in others.

Second, leaders must model reciprocity by creating spaces where everyone’s perspective is valued. Simple practices like asking questions, appreciating contributions, and showing curiosity about employees’ lives outside of work can have profound impacts.

Finally, dignity-centered leadership requires addressing dignity violations. This means confronting systemic inequities, like racism or sexism, and creating organizational cultures that honor every individual’s worth.

While the concept of dignity may feel abstract, its implementation is deeply practical. Leaders can cultivate dignity through intentional practices that embed respect and fairness into the fabric of their organizations.

1. Listen Deeply
   Active listening is a cornerstone of dignity-centered leadership. Leaders who take time to understand the perspectives and needs of their employees demonstrate that their voices matter. Create regular opportunities for open dialogue, solicit feedback, and act on what you learn.

2. Lead with Empathy
   Empathy bridges the gap between individuals and fosters mutual respect. By acknowledging the emotions and experiences of others, leaders can create environments where people feel understood and valued.

3. Model Inclusivity
   Go beyond statements of support for diversity. Build systems that ensure all employees have equitable opportunities to succeed. Recognize and address unconscious biases that may impact decision-making.

4. Recognize and Celebrate Contributions
   Take time to highlight achievements, no matter how small. Publicly acknowledging team and individual successes reinforces their value and creates a culture of appreciation.

5. Address Dignity Violations Swiftly
   When dignity is compromised—whether through inequitable policies, disrespectful behaviors, or exclusionary practices—leaders must take swift action to address and rectify the harm. This signals that dignity is a non-negotiable value in the organization.

The Future of Work Demands Dignity

Relationships are the heart of work, and dignity is the foundation that allows them to flourish. In the age of AI, automation, and hybrid work models, the human element of leadership is more crucial than ever. While technology continues to reshape industries, dignity remains a uniquely human need that no algorithm can fulfill.

What would your workplace look like if dignity were at the center? What behaviors would you embrace? What would you let go of? These are the questions leaders must ask to truly lead in a way that honors our shared humanity.

Ubuntu Culture Company helps caring leaders create cultures and craft strategies to drive successful outcomes. Set up a 30-minute complimentary conversation designed to provide value regardless of ongoing collaboration.