NAVIGATING ORGANIZATIONAL SHADOWS
Unconscious Dynamics and Defensive Routines in Leadership
Uncover organizational shadows through theatre pedagogy—making unconscious defenses, anxiety-driven routines, and undiscussable dynamics visible—enabling learning, containment, and transformative change every OD leader seeks.
What This Programme Is
Navigating Organizational Shadows develops capacity to recognize and work with unconscious processes shaping organizational behavior. Drawing on Susan Long's pioneering work in organizational psychodynamics, Bion's work on basic assumption groups, and Menzies Lyth on social systems as defense against anxiety, this program helps leaders understand how organizations create collective defense mechanisms, how anxiety drives organizational structure and behavior, and how to work with projection, splitting, and unconscious collusion. Theatre-based exploration makes invisible dynamics visible and workable.
Who This Is For
Leaders recognizing that persistent problems have unconscious dimensions
Anyone working with organizational anxiety and defensive routines
OD practitioners supporting deep organizational change
Executive teams addressing undiscussable dynamics
Leaders creating conditions for organizational learning by reducing defenses
Format
Highly experiential using Stanislavskian subtext work (speaking official narrative vs. what cannot be said), shadow theatre exercises externalizing organizational shadows, organizational archaeology sculpturing defensive structures, and Forum Theatre addressing defenses.
What You'll Develop
Core Capabilities:
Recognizing defensive routines and social defenses in organizations
Understanding how anxiety drives organizational behavior and structure
Working with projection, splitting, and unconscious collusion
Building authority to address undiscussable organizational dynamics
Organizational role analysis: person-in-role-in-organization-in-environment
Creating containment for organizational anxiety
Key Competencies:
Social defenses: collective mechanisms against anxiety (Long)
Bion's basic assumption groups vs. work groups
Unconscious collusion: how groups avoid difficult truths
Systems psychodynamics: integration of psychoanalytic and systems thinking
Authority and containment: holding anxiety without enacting defenses
Working beneath the surface: subtext and shadow material
