At the recent EU AI network meeting some colleagues and I fell into a conversation about working with the organisational shadowside. I thought it was interesting enough to share.

What is the organisational shadowside?

While discussion our work, we identified a common experience, when working with faith organisations, of encountering such a strong surface ‘story’ about what it meant to be a good person of this faith that it was impossible for the organisation to talk about actions and feelings in the organisation that didn’t fit that story. In one example it was the hurt, anger, betrayal, resentment and other difficult feelings following a round of redundancies that had taken place the previous year that was unmentionable. In another it was the difficulty of working and living within the constraints of monastic vows that was pushed under the carpet. The challenge we encountered wasn’t the stories themselves, it was the sense that we were being drawn into a secret or ‘shadow’ conversation that couldn’t be fitted into the accepted organisational story.