Remaining Calm in the Storm
August 2024
By Alastair Colin-Jones,
Senior Director, Business Transformation & Learning,
Mutual Value Labs
I’m usually a glass half full kind of person. I believe it’s possible to solve some of today’s major global challenges. But I have to admit, there are times when I start to lose my nerve.
A couple of books that open with vivid descriptions of what the world might be like ten or twenty years from now have stayed with me. They imagine how the dark realities of the climate crisis, growing economic inequality, and technological change could impact the world.
It’s not hard to envisage a dystopian future of famine, heatwaves, riots, political polarization, pandemics, growing criminality, the collapse of democracy, civil wars, global wars, nuclear conflict, mass migration, and dangerous AI.
Faced with the possibility of such realities, it’s understandable that we sometimes feel anxious. Indeed, climate anxiety is a growing phenomenon, particularly among Gen Z. Then there’s the other anxieties of more local issues such as homelessness, broken healthcare systems, the loneliness epidemic, or the cost of living crisis.
These worries can often bleed into the leadership of those working in organisations concerned about social and environmental impact - organisations characterised by purpose where people want to tackle these types of problems.
Such anxiety might keep us moving in short bursts - but it also clouds creativity, stalls imagination, erodes compassion, and eats away at our general wellbeing. It doesn’t improve our likelihood of achieving great things over time.
It can also be contagious - if leaders are stressed, their teams are probably stressed too. It’s easy for a sense of impending disaster and chronic anxiety to percolate around the organisation.
This anxiety contagion is one of the key arguments from the work of Edwin Friedman in his excellent book, Failure of Nerve. He contends that systems are fundamentally emotionally driven, whether they are corporate, institutional, or familial, and anxiety in particular spreads through systems like a virus. As a trained family therapist, he translated his decades of experience into the leadership space, concluding that the key task of leadership is to ‘hold your nerve’ and not be pulled into anxiety-driven behaviours. He calls this self-differentiated leadership, being connected to the system, the people, the problems but without being overwhelmed by short-term solutions and reactivity.
As global crises get bigger, leaders feel the weight of their responsibility growing, while their control over outcomes weakens. If we want to see and do business differently, we need a different way to respond to the anxiety all around us.
Again, Friedman has a simple but profound insight. He calls for leaders to themselves become a ‘non-anxious presence’ in their organisation. A non-anxious presence helps to calm the system, reducing overall anxiety and fostering a healthier, more stable environment. The leader acts as a stabilizing force, preventing the spread of anxiety and encouraging others to maintain their composure. They don’t have to possess the answer, nor do they need to carry the responsibility to solve problem per se, but instead create the emotional environment and psychological safety for everyone to play their part.
We are right to acknowledge the severity of the challenges, but rather than being overwhelmed by their size, we must realise that the responsibility for solving them does not fall squarely on our shoulders. The world is not ours alone to save.
We are part of something much bigger, and we are simply called to play our part alongside the many, many others who are fighting the same fight. We also have a lot of control over how we play that part, how we choose to act, and be, in the face of crises.
Ideally though, we want to go beyond being non-anxious. We want to replace anxiety with something else - hopeful vision.
If I start feeling overwhelmed about future possibilities, I sometimes think of a book I read growing up called The Last Battle – the final edition in C.S Lewis’ Narnia series. There’s a scene at the end where characters from many of the different Narnia stories find themselves in a new place. This place contains the Narnia they knew and the other worlds they grew up in, but those places are at once both unmistakably the same and completely different.
Published in the aftermath of the Second World War, Lewis was sharing a vision of hope with a generation that had lived through the horrors of a global conflict that had delivered unmatched suffering upon humanity. His words painted a picture of a world where redemption, restoration and renewal had come to fruition, with an abundance of joy, peace and beauty.
In the decades after 1945, society rebuilt and many wounds were healed. Indeed, large parts of the world entered an unparalleled era of peace and prosperity. In 2024, as that hard won progress sometimes seems to be on the brink of collapse, perhaps we can draw inspiration from the hopeful vision Lewis sets before us.
The future he casts is powerful because it offers us hope that something different is possible. I think the best visions of a hopeful future are just like the one we see in The Last Battle - deeply grounded in current reality (however dark) and yet expanding far, far beyond it into a new, restored version of the world.
At Mutual Value Labs we talk about character rather than values. One of the character traits we prioritise is being a hopeful problem solver. Hopeful because we must have the courage and care to pursue systemic change, while being unafraid to fail. We certainly fail and sometimes fall short of having the problem-solving impact we desire, but hope reminds us, in Lewis’ words, that, “this is the morning”. Hope is the fuel of a non-anxious leader, because it doesn’t ignore the night, or even wish it away, it just knows that a morning is coming. After all, every morning needs a night.
If we, as leaders, can share a vision like that with our teams and organisations, they will see, and be fuelled by, hope instead of fear. They will be moving towards a purpose instead of simply away from a crisis. If we can remain calm in the storm of anxiety around us, we can start to make a real difference in the world.
