Healing Organisation Principle #3 | Express emotions

‘The mind is built on emotions’ — Jaak Panksepp

What do we admire most in authority figures? Resolve. Calm under pressure. Ability to control emotions. Shrewd strategizing. Straight answers.

And that is absolutely what we need from authority figures. Controlling emotions is perhaps one of the most powerful capabilities of a person in authority.

However, developing a healing capacity requires us move in the opposite direction. As individuals healing, we must learn to express our emotions. And when leading a healing process, we must encourage others to express theirs.

So, on the one hand, as a source of stability, leader-managers in Healing Organisations must encourage regulation of emotions. However, they must also create spaces for people to freely express their emotions as a source healing and growth over the long term.

There are several examples of this manifesting as operational practice. In de Bono’s thinking tool “Six Thinking Hats”, in the Red Hat round participants are encouraged to “express emotions and feelings and share fears, likes, dislikes, loves, and hates.”

Another example is Holacracy’s Governance Meeting. When people make a proposal in this process, next up is a Reactions round. In the Reactions round, “one at a time, each person reacts to the proposal as they see fit. No response or interruption is allowed during someone’s reaction. Any type of reaction is welcome, from intellectual critiques to emotional outbursts.”

To take this idea of ‘expression spaces’ a step further, in 2016, AbdelRahman Saad set up a Scream Room in his Cairo cafe for customers to use to de-stress from their daily lives. Could we imagine Healing Organisations embracing similar ideas to encourage their employees to vent to their feelings?

Right now, companies employing the types of processes in Holacracy are rare. However, in Healing Organisations of the future, we can envisage open emotional expression becoming part of the flow of conversations and interactions. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp once said ‘the mind is built on emotions’. For us to heal and for us to really know each other’s minds, we must each learn to express our emotions.

For the entire series on the Healing Organisation, start here.