The Contagious Stories Your Team Creates When You Don't Communicate

Forbes

4 hours ago

In the face of uncertainty, we create our own narratives.
Human nature abhors a vacuum. When no one knows the answer to a question, stories rush in to fill the gap. Thirty years ago, we felt compelled to give an uncertain world the label VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Now we talk about BANI—brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible. We see polarization, geopolitical instability, and the rise of artificial intelligence that both amazes and terrifies us.
In the face of uncertainty, we create our own narratives. But as the late Professor Sigal Barsade of Wharton demonstrated, we are not "emotional islands." The stories we tell ourselves ripple outward, whether we intend it or not. Our feelings and narratives—often unreliable and false—spread like viruses through workplace networks, becoming toxic to productivity, performance, and culture.
The Quiet Crisis of Story Contagion
You've witnessed this phenomenon. Every AI capability announcement triggers whispered conversations about obsolescence. Every automation headline spawns new theories about who's "really" at risk. Every leadership change generates elaborate conspiracy theories about hidden agendas.
These aren't isolated concerns—they're contagious fears that spread faster than any official communication. Remember "quiet quitting"? What started as individual psychological withdrawal became a viral behavior pattern as colleagues observed disengagement and adopted similar approaches. Turnover follows the same trajectory: when one respected employee leaves, research shows others become more likely to follow, creating cascading resignations that can devastate teams.
The mechanism is both simple and devastating. As Barsade's research revealed, emotional contagion occurs through subconscious pathways—facial expressions, body language, tone—rather than words. Her studies found that "people do not live on emotional islands but, rather, that group members experience moods at work, these moods ripple out and, in the process, influence not only other group members' emotions but their group dynamics and individual cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors as well."
Here's the kicker: negative emotions have more powerful contagion effects than positive ones. One anxious conversation doesn't stay contained—it becomes organizational reality.
The Leadership Trap: When Solutions Become Problems
Most leaders, sensing building anxiety, rush to provide answers—any answers—even when they don't have them. The instinct is understandable: people are worried, so offer reassurance. Problem solved, right?
Dead wrong.
When you offer false reassurances or half-baked solutions, people sense the disconnect immediately. Now you've created a bigger problem: they're still uncertain about the original issue, plus they've lost trust in your authenticity. The stories they create become exponentially worse: "If leadership is this disconnected, things must be catastrophic."
Most uncertainty stems from forces beyond any single leader's control—market volatility, industry disruption, technological change. Pretending otherwise makes you look either delusional or dishonest. But here's what you can control: how your team processes uncertainty collectively.
The Development Solution: Building Collective Containers
The antidote to destructive story contagion isn't better individual communication, it's what organizational psychologist Manfred Kets de Vries calls creating "safe transitional spaces" where teams can collectively process uncertainty. In these spaces, people 'have permission to talk about issues they never had the opportunity to confront before."
This approach recognizes uncertainty as a developmental opportunity rather than an information problem. When teams have structured ways to explore collective anxieties, several powerful dynamics emerge:
Emotional Containment: Research on group interventions shows that psychologically safe spaces to talk about feelings and the complex aspects of work help people manage difficult emotions more effectively.
Shared Recognition: A "join the human race" effect occurs when people realize they're not alone in their confusion, giving people a sense of being understood and that their feelings are validated and accepted.
Enhanced Perspective: Groups develop greater insight and enhanced understanding of complex challenges and can learn to hold judgement on issues.
Collective Resilience: Teams that process uncertainty together build what researchers call "stronger team feeling, a sense of cohesiveness.'
The Power of Surfacing Cloud Issues
When groups explore uncertainty openly, what Kets de Vries terms "cloud issues" emerge—collective anxieties like "fear of abandonment, shame, guilt, and fear of engulfment" that float unspoken through organizations. These aren't individual neuroses; they're shared concerns that, when surfaced and examined together, lose their power to generate destructive narratives.
Consider the difference in impact:
Individual Approach: Employees of your organization are concerned about AI replacing their roles. You thoughtfully approach your team members in one-on-ones about their individual worries. Each leaves temporarily calmer, but without a shared understanding protecting the team, the underlying anxiety in the organization infiltrates again.
Group Development Approach: You create space for the team to explore AI-related concerns together. People discover shared anxieties, examine realistic scenarios, identify uniquely human capabilities and develop collective strategies. The anxiety transforms into shared understanding and proactive planning.
Building Developmental Containers: The Practice
Creating these developmental spaces requires more than good intentions. Research on group interventions reveals several elements:
Clear Developmental Purpose: Teams need an explicit understanding that they're building collective capacity to navigate uncertainty, not solving every problem immediately.
Structured Psychological Safety: This goes beyond psychological safety to actively creating conditions where people can surface anxieties everyone knows about but no one discusses.
Time and Commitment: Research shows consistently that meaningful group development requires sustained engagement, not one-off sessions.
Vicarious Learning Opportunities: People learn from their own experiences and from observing how others navigate similar challenges, creating exponential learning effects.
From Problem-Solving to Capacity-Building
While one-on-one uncertainty conversations can provide temporary relief, they don't address the systemic nature of story contagion. Here's the key insight: processing uncertainty becomes more powerful when it happens collectively. Individual reassurance creates temporary calm but doesn't build lasting organizational capacity. Group development creates what researchers call "improved learning culture" conditions that become self-reinforcing.
Think about it this way: instead of playing whack-a-mole with individual anxieties, you're building your team's collective immune system against destructive narrative contagion.
The Leader's Choice
Leaders face a clear decision: individual damage control or collective capacity building. Organizations that will thrive in our uncertain world won't be led by people with all the answers, but by teams that have developed collective ability to navigate questions together.
The investment is significant. Creating developmental containers requires time, skilled facilitation and organizational commitment to learning over quick fixes. But consider the alternative: allowing destructive stories to spread through your organization, creating compounding costs in productivity, innovation and cultural health.
The stories your team creates when you don't communicate will always be worse than reality. But the stories they create together when you give them structured opportunities to process uncertainty collectively? Those stories can become the foundation for organizational resilience that no individual leader could provide alone.
The choice isn't between certainty and uncertainty—it's between isolated anxiety and shared capability. Choose wisely.