I was talking with a group of people in very senior positions in a multinational organisation about fear: their fear of having genuine conversations with one another, their fear of telling the truth.This, an organisation in which decisions made affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
"They won't like what I have to say.""They won't like me.""I won't be in control of what happens.""It will damage our relationship.""I won't know what to say.""It will open a can of worms."
Each of their fears, when held up to scrutiny, turned out to be quite slight compared to the importance of the conversation - a conversation, not had, that affected them, their colleagues, and the many people who depended upon them.How could it be, then, that they were so paralysed?When we try to account for ourselves and what holds us back, we're often looking in the wrong place.Because we're often not so scared of what will happen in the world through speaking up. We're terrified of our feelings about it. We're scared of our shame. We're scared of our guilt. We're scared of the gripping, swirling bodily feeling of being uncertain. We're fearful of feeling fear. We imagine we won't be able to tolerate it. And, of course, we're scared that we'll feel all of this if we start to talk about feelings or what goes on in our bodies.And so it becomes self-sealing. We'll do whatever it takes, including making up unsound explanations, to avoid encountering what we're scared to feel.And the more we avoid the conversation about all of this - about what we're really scared of - the more we trap ourselves in an endless cycle of inaction, denial and turning away.
When you're talking with another person, remember that there are always more than two of you present.At the very least there's you, and them, and your 
A story about the trouble caused when we can't talk about shame and anxiety in organisational life:A global retailer struggling to meet the expectations of the markets, brings in a new measurement system for its stores, with more than sixty targets to meet.A daily ratings table of stores is published internally, naming those meeting the targets and those falling short. It's described as a logical move to increase performance in difficult times. And at the same time, it allows the board to deny the anxiety they're feeling: "we've done everything we can do, and we've responded in a clear and rational manner to market conditions".Meanwhile, the ratings system has very effectively pushed the anxiety onto the store managers, where even respected, skilful, long-serving managers are reduced to a daily jostle for the top few spots. Unable or unwilling to challenge the system itself (after all, it's apparently a rational response to the current difficulty), they start to put pressure on their department heads for the daily delivery of the targets. And, unable to start a conversation about how all of this feels to everybody, the department heads - fearful of being shamed - look for whatever they can do to hit their targets.This is where the real trouble begins.Because in the face of unnamable anxiety and the unbearable threat of shame, even respected, diligent department heads start to look for ways to game the system.Numbers are fiddled. Statistics reinterpreted. Orders are left piling up in the warehouse because nobody can keep up with the new standards for shelf layout. Items in the store are relabelled so that products look like they're available when the mystery shopper team comes around. Staff members are taken off other important duties to work on the tills when queue-length is measured, but the queues are allowed to reach enormous and frustrating lengths at other times.The target numbers are, frequently, met - aside from for those few unfortunate store managers who aren't wily enough to play the system - but standards drop relentlessly across the group and customers start to take their business elsewhere.Public shame, skilfully dealt with. Skilful gaming of the system, denied. The organisation becomes a system for avoiding anxiety rather than serving customers. Nobody talking about it - "it'll open a can of worms".You can see this same drama played out in hospitals, whole health systems, schools, retailers, service industries, transport, government, with huge and debilitating effect.And in most places nobody's talking about what's really going on, because we've made mood undiscussable.If we're going to deal with all of this - and we must - we're going to have to wake up to the fact that organisations are always made up of people, and people are always caught up in moods that shape what can be seen and what's possible. Our insistence on understanding people as detached, strictly rational parts of a well-oiled machine is not doing anything to address these difficulties.And without the courage to do this, we're going to condemn ourselves to a future of looking good while we undo our best and most important efforts.
Time and again, we human beings have had to find out that what we took to be most secure and most solid, was nothing of the sort.We put down roots, build houses of bricks and mortar, make plans for ourselves. And then, perhaps, we find them swept away in a storm or flood, in a war or earthquake, in political or economic upheaval, in illness or accident, in the ever surprising turns of life.And sometimes we realise this is how things are for long enough that we remember to turn towards the people around us, our travelling companions on this most audacious and risky of journeys, and appreciate their beauty and magnificence, their sadness and their love, and are able to just be with them for a while.
Once, perhaps not so long ago, we had a sense that there were activities worth doing for their own sake.But perhaps without realising it, we've more and more taken on an understanding that the only value worth serious attention is economic performance.It doesn't take too much looking to see how much of human life is of an importance far beyond any number we can put on it. People try, but can a figure placed on the value of friendship, a walk in the park, a forest, or time spent in the presence of great art or beauty ever hope to express its true value in our lives?And when the nurturing and sustaining of human relationships with friends, family and community has little measurable economic value, but long hours of office work apparently do, is it any wonder so many people, without realising how they got there, now find themselves so painfully, terrifyingly lonely, even in a crowd?
There's a myth in many places of work that emotions aren't part of it."We're professional," you might say, "no place for feelings here".And in saying that, you've bought wholly into an enormously unhelpful misunderstanding: mood as an essentially corrupting, messy, distracting element of human life - better left alone than faced, better ignored than talked about, better suppressed than felt.But moods didn't go away just because you're pretending they don't have a place, and they didn't stop shaping the world of possibility available to you just because you don't want to look at them.Somehow, we're going to have to start talking to each other, in even the most 'rational' of organisations, about personal and organisational mood, and about the way gratitude, resentment, anxiety, resignation, love, shame and cynicism shape what's possible for us and those around us.And that's going to entail widening our understanding of what human beings are, and what it is to engage in work together.
One thing to know about the 
If you want to take action on the almost-invisible ways in which 
In so many organisational settings we seek to turn human beings into measurable things, assessed for productivity, efficiency, and for ability to match a prescribed list of behaviours. Yes, I understand, we have to measure in organisations. The era we're living in, in which economics is the narrative by which we account for the worth of just about everything, demands this of us. And there are solid reasons to track, with rigour, how things are going.But most of what's most important about human beings can't be reduced to an objective measure, a behaviour chart, or a figure to put on your balance sheet.If you treat people as resources, you call on them to act as if they are resources.Resources don't exhibit wholeheartedness, care for the people around them, or a capacity to discern and dedicate themselves to a noble pursuit that genuinely matters. And the resource narrative does much to reduce us to individualistic, self-serving shadows of ourselves, pursuing the measure rather than doing what's of enduring value.We're going to have to do better than this if we want to create organisations that have people - and society - flourish. And we're going to have to face up to our fear of all the things that could happen if the people around us were freed up to be fully, fiercely, and uncompromisingly alive.
