2026-04-14
Four Angles
Kaisa Vaittinen
Most organisations spend enormous effort on what is already visible. The visible problems are the ones that end up in reports, action plans, and quarterly reviews, and that is fine, but the things that are already in plain sight are rarely the ones causing the most damage. The most damage is caused by something that is present but cannot or will not be named. Why can it not be named? Because naming it, or even talking about it, would mean breaking one or more rules at the same time: rules of social acceptability, rules of professional politeness, rules about what one is allowed to feel, and rules about organisational culture and, for example, what is supposed to count as a safe space.
Social acceptability and concealment
We are very good at expressing things constructively. The feedback sandwich and its more sophisticated descendants, the nurturing of psychological safety, the acceptance of difference by perhaps leaving certain things unnoticed. We have considerably less skill in situations where something non-constructive needs to be brought into the open. Most often we resolve this difficulty by softening, reframing, ignoring, or making things look nicer than they are. And the more we do this, the worse our access becomes to what is actually driving our behaviour.
Social acceptability and behaving in line with it are extremely important in interaction within and between groups. Without some kind of shared agreement about what can be said and what cannot, about how one may behave and how one may not, no cooperation would work at all. But social acceptability comes at a cost: whatever is not socially acceptable is treated as bad, and is hidden away.
What is hidden beneath the surface accumulates rather than disappears. In situations that are loaded with fatigue, stress, fear, hurt feelings, or other strain, what has been brewing underneath comes up. And in those situations the things and feelings that have been concealed for months or even years come out in ways that can seem surprising and abrupt, and these situations can lead to serious conflicts.
Social acceptability and its shadow side affect both individual people and entire societies. We do not, for example, radicalise out of nowhere. The stricter the rules about acceptable behaviour become, the harder it becomes to handle the feelings, thoughts, and reactions that fall outside those rules.
My aim is to change this. The elephant is already in the room. I make it visible and then leave, so that you can talk about what I brought to the surface. You are also allowed to blame me, because permission to blame, permission to be angry at someone outside the group, can make things easier to process.
An educational perspective
Learning requires room to tolerate uncertainty and to make mistakes that are not punished. Anyone who knows anything about the educational sciences will recognise this. At the same time, tolerating uncertainty and allowing mistakes are very difficult to put into practice in any context involving adults. We do, after all, all want to end up being good, right, and accepted.
Every group that is trying to develop, whether it is an educational institution, a work team, or a leadership group, has to balance two needs. The first is the need to offer a safe environment in which people dare to be present. The second is the need to allow precisely those things to come up that are uncomfortable, because without discomfort there is nothing new to learn. Most often this tension is resolved by removing the discomfort, and at the same time removing the group's opportunity to learn.
This becomes particularly visible in adult professional contexts, where making a mistake carries a price for one's career and saying something uncomfortable carries a social price. People learn very quickly to avoid in practice the situations that produce the best learning: discomfort and mistakes. It is easier to stay within one's comfort zone, in the centre of one's own competence, and to remain silent about uncertainties. The result is an organisation that is convincing in its efficiency and, on the surface, in its impressive expertise, but which does not dare, is not able, is not capable of challenging itself or facing difficult things.
The educational sciences' answer to this is not that people ought to be braver (it really does not work that way). Instead, a learning environment has to be designed in a way that gives discomfort its time and place, and where expressing it is not punished. Creating an environment that genuinely supports learning is challenging, because designing such an environment requires, in the first place, that the decision-making level itself accepts discomfort and mistakes, including its own discomfort and its own mistakes. Everyone does this on paper, but in practice rather fewer people manage it.
A psychological perspective
At the level of the individual, what another person "causes" in me on the level of feeling already exists in me to begin with. Interaction is always dynamic and between people, and there are usually two or more parties in any situation, but the intensity of my reaction, its duration, and especially its content, often tell more about me than about whoever "caused" what came up. This does not mean that the other person's behaviour is irrelevant, nor does it apply to situations where someone is genuinely being harmed. It is mainly about everyday encounters in which the reaction is out of proportion to what triggered it, and in those it is most useful to look inward first.
This is a classical psychodynamic observation, one that has been both well known and used in clinical work for over a century. A more modern formulation of the same basic phenomenon can be found in Lazarus's appraisal theory, according to which an emotional reaction arises from how the individual interprets the situation, not from the situation itself. In everyday conversation this observation produces discomfort, because it places the responsibility for the reaction where it actually belongs, with the person experiencing it. Shifting responsibility away from oneself is easy and rewarding, and produces a momentary sense of relief. Carrying the responsibility oneself is heavy and uncomfortable, but in the longer run it produces something that projection can never produce: the capacity to live with one's own inner world without each encounter being a potential threat.
This observation is in fact deeply liberating. If the reaction belongs to whoever is feeling it, then the reaction is also something that whoever is feeling it can work with. They do not need to wait for the other person to change, to apologise, or to disappear from their life. The person feeling the reaction already has all the tools they need; they only need to understand how to use them.
On the psychological level my work helps return the responsibility for the experience of discomfort to the person experiencing it, and at the same time gives that person the chance to work with what has surfaced.
An organisational culture perspective
Organisational culture largely defines what is said and what is not said. The greater part of organisational culture is not something that has been built consciously (although a lot of effort is put into trying, almost everywhere), but rather something that builds up unconsciously, over time, through the interaction and structures between the individuals who belong to the organisation.
Over time, the things that go unsaid and the feelings that are felt but not voiced begin to build a shadow culture, which runs alongside the official culture. In the shadow culture live all the things that have no room on the official side. Fear, envy, hierarchical realities that on paper do not exist. The knowledge that some are more important than others, that the rules do not apply to everyone in the same way, and that official decision-making processes may be little more than theatre.
The most important decisions often happen precisely in this shadow culture. This is one of the most significant reasons why strategies do not get implemented, why culture change initiatives fail, and why employees resign for reasons that never end up in exit interviews. The official culture is not the place where the organisation lives; life happens on the shadow side, and because no one looks directly at it, it is very hard to change on purpose.
I help make the shadow culture temporarily visible. The point is that the organisation can see what has been built in the background, and then decide what could be done about it. The surfacing of the shadow side is not permanent; it is more like a brief window of time, which gives the organisation an opportunity to look at itself in a way that is not otherwise possible.
The four perspectives discussed all lead to the same practical conclusion: before a person, a group, or an organisation can change anything, it has to see its current situation honestly.
Through my work I make briefly visible what is being kept hidden. The intervention is intentional and bounded, and it is not for every organisation. Making the invisible visible takes courage, and it takes both the capacity and the willingness to change.
Sources and background reading
Social acceptability and organisational silence
- Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
- Morrison, E. W. & Milliken, F. J. (2000). Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706–725.
- Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.
Learning and discomfort
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
- Edmondson, A. (2018). The Fearless Organization.
- Kapur, M. (2008). Productive failure. Cognition and Instruction, 26(3), 379–424.
The psychological perspective
- Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and Adaptation.
- Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence.
Organisational culture and its shadow side
- Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership (4th ed.).
- Argyris, C. & Schön, D. (1974). Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness.
- Vaughan, D. (1996). The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA.
- Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers.