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Insight

In the looking, is what is seen: Adaptive leadership and the metacrisis

1 July 2025

Leadership development
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By David Sibley

Introduction

Across sectors, organisations voice a growing unease: how can leaders be prepared to engage with, influence, and navigate change amidst rising complexity and unpredictability?

Too often, leadership development efforts fall short, not because of a lack of skill building, but because the task demands something deeper. It calls for a shift in how we know, perceive, and make meaning.

Emery and Trist 1 , early Tavistock theorists in the 1960s, coined the term ‘turbulent fields’: environments so dynamic and interconnected that no single organisation or actor can exert control. The present environment has intensified into what many describe as an unfolding metacrisis 2. A tangle of interwoven, mutually reinforcing breakdowns, ecological, social, cultural, economic, technological, and even spiritual. Risks 3are now deeply interconnected, part of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous landscape 4 that can leave us emotionally and cognitively disoriented 5.

What kind of leadership approach can meet these demands, one that engages not just with systems, but also with the inner lives of those within them?

The systems psychodynamic approach

Systems psychodynamics is a framework that integrates psychoanalytical ideas, the study of groups, and systems thinking. It offers a deeper lens on organisational life, one that works not just at the cognitive level but with the emotional and unconscious processes that shape behaviour beneath the surface. It reaches aspects of experience that conventional frameworks often miss, enabling deep, transformative personal and organisational development.

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Photo by Jensine Odom on Unsplash

Interventions like coaching, reflective practice, team coaching, and work discussion groups create spaces where people can engage with the implicit, the unspoken, and the emotionally charged.

Leadership today is less about mastering certainty and more about cultivating perception.

For example, a senior leadership team was in conflict. A newly appointed leader was being subtly undermined, with unprofessional behaviours and power struggles disrupting progress. While it appeared to some that the leader was the problem and to others, it was the team that was at fault, formal attempts to address the dysfunction had failed.

Through systems psychodynamic interventions with team and individual coaching the team surfaced the underlying dynamics. Beneath the disruption lay shared anxieties: grief over the departure of a previous leader, fear and hope of change from new technology, and competition for influence in a shifting service landscape where demand is increasing and resources are more limited.

As these dynamics became thinkable and speakable, the team could reframe what was happening. What had felt like personal failings were now seen as symptoms of systemic pressure and unresolved loss. Boundaries were reset, roles clarified, and the group was able to return to its core task. The dynamic between leader and team shifted, from blame and projection to shared ownership of the challenge and renewed focus on the task.

These spaces support the subject-object shift6, developing emotional intelligence. How individuals can shift from being subject to their experience, unconsciously immersed in their thoughts, feelings, and assumptions, to making that experience object: something they can observe, reflect on, and work with. This expands leadership capacity, and enabling more thoughtful, adaptive responses to challenges at work. However, this work is not easy, because it asks us to face the parts of ourselves and others we’d rather turn away from. This support is needed to engage with, the painful and unwanted aspects of human experience such as shame, fear, competition, envy and loss.

Role of the Tavistock consultant

The systems psychodynamic consultant does not bring answers, but presence, a capacity to think with, rather than think for. Someone who helps the system think what it cannot yet think alone. Drawing on the work of Wilfred Bion7, a psychoanalyst who explored how groups process emotion and anxiety, the consultant acts as a “container” for unprocessed emotional material helping others think previously unthinkable thoughts.

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Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash

This approach is critical for adaptive leadership in the metacrisis. In conditions of complexity and existential risk, solutions are not pre-formed, they emerge. But emergence is not possible when anxiety overrides leaders’ ability to think. The consultant’s role is to help leaders and systems stay in the storm long enough to notice, metabolise, and make sense of their experience. Only then can greater clarity begin to take shape.

Return on investment

Adaptive approaches are no longer optional. They are necessary in the face of turbulent, fast-changing environments where the problems we face defy ready-made solutions. Systems psychodynamic offers an approach to organisations and leaders to help them find ‘new ways of seeing and thinking 8.  This approach offers a profound and often under-recognised returns on investment for organisations.

a black and white image looking down a spiral staircase

Photo by Axel Vandenhirtz on Pexels

Conclusion

“In the looking, is what is seen” is a line from Nora Bateson’s poem Breathable 10, which captures an essential insight for leadership: that perception shapes reality. How we see a problem determines how we understand it, how we respond, and even whether we notice what lies beneath the surface.

Leadership today is less about mastering certainty and more about cultivating perception. It involves a shift from being subject to our roles, assumptions, and defences, to becoming observers of the patterns that shape them.

In a metacrisis marked by fragmentation, acceleration, and loss of coherence, even the smallest arcs of organisational life can become invitations to larger and deeper circles of inquiry11, developing the capacity to see, stay with, and think within complexity differently. In doing so, leadership becomes not just a practice of navigation, but of transformation and of how we come to know.

References

  1. Emery, F.E. and Trist, E.L., 1965. The causal texture of organizational environments. Human relations, 18(1), pp.21-32. ↩︎
  2. Vervaeke, J., McGilchrist, I. and Schmachtenberger, D., 2023. The psychological drivers of the metacrisis. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7i1ughRGcQ [Accessed 30 May 2025]. ↩︎
  3. World Economic Forum, 2025. The Global Risks Report 2025: 20th Edition. Geneva: World Economic Forum. Available at: https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2025.pdf [Accessed 30 May 2025] ↩︎
  4. U.S. Army War College. (1992). Strategic Leadership Primer. Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College. ↩︎
  5. Cascio, J., 2020. Facing the age of chaos. [online] Medium, 29 April. Available at: https://medium.com/@cascio/facing-the-age-of-chaos-b00687b1f51d [Accessed 30 May 2025]. ↩︎
  6. Kegan, R., 1982. The evolving self: Problem and process in human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ↩︎
  7. Bion, W.R., 1963. Elements of Psycho-Analysis. London: Heinemann. ↩︎
  8. Roberts, V.Z., 2019. Consulting to oneself. In: A. Obholzer and V.Z. Roberts, eds. The unconscious at work: A Tavistock approach to making sense of organizational life. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, pp.252–254. ↩︎
  9. Schön, D.A., 1983. The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books ↩︎
  10. Bateson, N., 2016. Small arcs of larger circles: Framing through other patterns. Axminster: Triarchy Press, p. 18. ↩︎
  11. Bateson, N., 2016. Small arcs of larger circles: Framing through other patterns. Axminster: Triarchy Press ↩︎