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Forbes
9 hours ago
- Forbes
The Contagious Stories Your Team Creates When You Don't Communicate
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.
Forbes
14-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Manifest And Mobilize: The New Leadership Job
With the incessant chaos swirling all around us, it's natural to want to bury your head in the sand. ... More But as leaders, it's our job to manifest and mobilize the team, and to direct their anxious energy towards productive action. getty In this moment, with the incessant chaos swirling all around us, it's natural to want to bury your head in the sand. At the individual level, keeping your head down seems like a pretty good strategy. But at the organization level, where leaders need the team to stay engaged and to move fast as the context changes, the 'turtle' strategy can be disastrous. A boost of energy and optimism is a good way to get your own head out of the sand. One way I reset is through an annual wellness retreat. Spending a long weekend hiking outdoors, exercising, and listening to wellness experts reorients me to the power that lies within each of us. But since leaders can't feasibly send their entire organization backpacking, they have to find a different way to re-energize and inspire. We know what doesn't work: Encouraging employees to 'do more with less' Canned corporate-speak about how 'this too shall pass' Leaders who hide from their teams because they don't have all the answers Delegating team health to HR because that's their job Here's a new idea: viewing your job as a leader to manifest and mobilize the team. According to the Cambridge Oxford dictionary, manifest means to show something clearly , through signs or actions . If you have a clear picture for what you want the team to be focusing on, you need to paint it just as clearly for them. And if you don't know exactly what you want them to be doing, then it's time for you to figure it out. For example, if you're in a services business where the economic uncertainty is impacting both you and your customers, you may want your account managers proactively reaching out to customers. If so, then it's essential to provide them with clear messaging and guidance for how to engage. The more specific and tangible your guidance, the more likely the team will faithfully execute it. Guidance such as 'By the end of next week, I want every single major customer to know how we're navigating the supply chain uncertainties and how we will protect their interests…' helps the team understand the time frame and the messaging. Then provide the bullet points to support the specifics. To manifest and mobilize, you have to be highly visible and attuned to the state of the organization. And it's critical to keep yourself grounded so that you're not unintentionally sending contradictory signals to your 'We got this' message. One thing that can help, according to the Center for Trauma and Leadership, is to rely on someone outside the organization to be your 'calm brain' to talk things through, so you can be the 'calm brain' for the rest of the team. As we navigate this BANI – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible – environment, the role of leaders has never been more important. Do your team the favor of putting them to work to direct their anxious energy towards productive action.
Forbes
11-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Strategic Resilience And Agility: 4 Essentials To Thrive In A BANI World
VUCA vs BANI a new acronym to describe the world infographic template with icons have 4 steps such ... More as volatility (brittle), uncertainty (anxious), complexity (non-linear), ambiguity (incomprehnsible). Strategy has always been challenging, even during times of greater stability and predictability. Yet, plenty has been written about strategic contexts as increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) and BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible), making strategy ever more challenging. As Forbes contributor Kevin Kruse describes, 'the systems, structures, and supply chains we depend on are shockingly fragile. The world isn't just volatile; it's brittle, like an old dried bone. It appears strong but one crack and it shatters.' This fragility has been evident in the recent global trade wars initiated by President Trump. Whether it's COVID-19, Trump's trade wars, or the next unforeseen disruption, there is a renewed emphasis on the need for strategic resilience and agility with four essential foundations. Perhaps the biggest mistake in strategy is not attending to the nature of the risk embedded within it. For example, companies and sectors worldwide have been caught off guard by the trade wars, assuming more certainty about trade than is warranted. Many nations had trade agreements with the United States that were not upheld. What has become apparent is that it is not just trade agreements that are vulnerable but the rule of law itself, as noted by William Roberts, an American correspondent for the International Bar Association, in November 2024. Mechanisms intended to provide checks and balances on a system are not functioning reliably. With 'Trump's tariffs tipping the US economy perilously close to a recession,' as noted by Forbes writer Derek Saul, it is stunning to witness the inability of companies, consumers, politicians, bureaucrats, and a range of stakeholders to influence decisions. Because the trade wars have revealed that just a few individuals can amplify VUCA and BANI, strategy can no longer ignore such risks. Although the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that such amplification existed in systems more generally, it was often termed a 'black swan' event, capturing that the event was rare and hard to predict but had a significant impact. While these events may be hard to predict, they are no longer rare. The key lesson is that strategy must be resilient to shocks, and organizations need to be agile to adapt. One practical way to ensure you don't underestimate risks is to entertain the perfect storm of catastrophic events that could undermine your strategy. This isn't just a matter of listing the risks. It entails using the principles of systems thinking to understand the interconnected nature of those risks. Such an exercise is best done in groups, with the aim to challenge blind spots and entertain the possibilities, as unlikely as they may seem. In a strategy workshop I conducted one week before COVID-19 hit, the organization recognized the potential threat of a global pandemic and realized it had not addressed the risk in its strategy. Unfortunately, the pandemic hit faster than it had time to prepare for a response. Although you can and should cultivate awareness of risks and opportunities, the complexity, uncertainty, non-linearity, and the potential incomprehensible nature of contexts necessitates ongoing awareness by everyone, not just a select few, or in select moments, and it means accepting that contexts are not entirely controllable or knowable. This also means having the strategic clarity to know what, how, and when you can pivot while fostering the organizational learning and agility to pivot. To have a resilient strategy, organizations need first to understand it. For the last 25 years, my Executive MBA Strategy classes have been tasked with identifying the strategy of their business unit or organization, with a basic framing to determine the coherence of four strategy components: goals (metrics by which they measure year-over-year success), value proposition, portfolio of products/services and markets, and the core activities that support them. In most cases, executives struggle to identify the strategy components, and once they do, they often begin to see the lack of coherence in the strategy. The second part of the assignment is to assess the weakest link between the strategy and one of the following: environment (what they need to do), resources, organization (what they can do), or management preferences (what they want to do). Although the strategy components may be coherent, the organization may not have the resources or capabilities to deliver on it, or the strategy may fall short of what it needs to do given the environment, or there can be tensions between the strategy and what management wants to do. This last area of tension is often ignored, but at the organization's peril, as my colleagues and I describe in our Strategic Analysis and Action book. Strategy is ultimately a human endeavor that relies on people to construct and enact it. If they are not on board with the strategic direction or don't understand it, strategic agility will suffer. For example, when Trump launched the trade wars, organizations needed to know their pivoting options, which meant fully understanding their strategy, the strategic choices they had made and why, and the pivoting options. Events like COVID-19 or the trade wars are undeniable and grab attention. An equal challenge is the ongoing opportunity to read weaker signals of threat and opportunity that can impact strategy. The classic case of Blockbuster turning down the acquisition of Netflix, which in hindsight was devastating, but at the time seemed insignificant. As former Forbes contributor Greg Satell described, 'Netflix proved to be a disruptive innovation because Blockbuster would have to alter its business model—and damage its profitability—to compete with the startup. Despite being a small, niche service at the time, it had the potential to upend Blockbuster's well oiled machine.' Cultivating a resilient strategy that is dynamically responsive to a shifting environment is easier said than done because it is based on the individual and organizational capacity for learning, which is perhaps the least understood and developed. When I started my doctoral studies in strategy in the mid-'80s, I was perplexed that strategy didn't seem to be rocket science, but organizations seemed to do it so poorly. I soon discovered that the major shortcoming was their capacity to learn. I devoted the next twenty-five years to understanding organizational learning and strategic agility but missed the critical underpinning of individual character. It wasn't until my colleagues, and I identified the essential role of leader character (or lack thereof) in explaining the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, that I turned my attention to understanding what character is, how it can be developed and embedded in organizations as described in the two books I co-authored, Developing Leadership Character, and The Character Compass. Subsequently, along with several co-authors, we examined how leader character shapes organizational learning at the individual, group, and organization levels and the dynamic feedforward and feedback flows between the levels, as shown in Table 1. In my Forbes article 'The Crisis of Leadership Character," which I followed up with 'From Good to Great: 10 Ways to Elevate Your Character Quotient,' I describe the interconnected nature of character and how it can operate in strong, unbalanced, and weak states. Linking the three states with the levels and flows of organizational learning produces a set of behaviors that reveal why organizations struggle with agility and resilience. Although organizations want the behaviors in the left-hand column, they often get behaviors in the right-hand column. They struggle with how to move from the right to the left. Table 1 - Character Configurations and Their Impact on Learning When organizations are dissatisfied with their culture or find they lack organizational and strategic agility, the first place they should examine is character. The 10-question survey in the From Good to Great article provides a metric on how well individuals and organizations understand and are developing character. Organizations likely suffer because they haven't understood or invested in leader character development. Because there has been a great deal of misunderstanding about character and how it influences judgment and decision-making, many organizations have cultivated leaders with unbalanced character. Unbalanced character leaves the individual and the organization vulnerable and producing the behaviors in the right hand column of Table 1. Moving from the right hand column to the left requires investing in character. There are a lot of prescriptions for navigating a BANI world, but the scarcest resource will be the strength of leader character at the heart of organizational agility and strategic resilience. It is individuals who have to make sense of the world, collaborate, make the tough strategic decisions, and bring the strategy to life through their actions. In the Cracking the Code: Leader Character Development for Competitive Advantage article I co-authored with Corey Crossan and Bill Furlong, we describe steps to investing in character. One practical approach we use in our strategy classes and organizations is the practice of improvisation. Improvisation is a type of organizational learning ideally suited to co-creating strategy in real time. My strategy colleague, Dusya Vera, and I have extensively researched this field of research and practice. The practice of improvisation stress-tests character, and character is needed to effectively improvise as Corey Crossan, Cassie Ellis and I describe in Character and Improvisation: A Recursive Relationship. Another great resource is the Question of Character Podcast Episode with skilled improviser Kate Ashby describing how improvisation can support character development. Leader character needs strategic competence to harness the human potential arising from character. Organizations can have leader character and strategic competence but underestimate the influence of BANI. Cultivating an appreciation for BANI helps to stress test leader character and strategic competence. These four foundations will help build strategic resilience and agility in a BANI world.
