Psychological Safety, Business, and Climate Change
Every Body Knows the Climate is Changing
Human bodies have sensory systems that recognize patterns. Human cultures have sensory systems that recognize patterns over generations.
Have you ever been having an apparently random bad day and realized later that it was an anniversary of a particularly difficult event? Our bodies don’t know calendars, but they recognize the length of days, temperature, patterns of clouds, and humidity.
If you have ever said, “This doesn’t feel like December”, you have been responding to sensory patterns your body has learned.
Whether people have consciously accepted the reality of human-induced climate change or not, their bodies know it is happening.
Anxiety about climate change is embodied.
Even climate change deniers have awareness of the changing climate in their bones.
Climate Change Denial is a Trauma Response to an Existential Crisis
Aggressive refusal to face facts is a dissociative psychological move.
Collective denial of facts is cultural dissociation from reality.
Climate change is an existential crisis on several levels.
The human race is facing the possible end of the planet’s ability to sustain human life.
The dominant culture must sacrifice it’s way of life for the human race to survive. In order to reverse the damage, humans who have succeeded according to the old society’s values must choose to give up what makes them feel comfortable, successful, powerful, and confident.
Individuals know that participating in the social system is killing their descendants, but not participating in the social system is not possible if they want to survive themselves.
For many people, this knowledge is overwhelming and triggers classic trauma responses: attempts to escape to other planets, addiction to anything soothing, violent self-protection behaviours and fight for resources, blaming others for the pain being experienced, paralysis and inaction, denial, performative positivity and submission to abuse, pride in ability to endure abuse.
Every action that we take that isn’t consciously including an attempt to reverse the destruction of life-sustaining climate systems is retraumatizing.
Talking About Business Without Addressing Climate Anxiety is a Form of Escapism
Business leaders are caught in a very difficult situation. They must lead their organization in a way that responds to realities of climate change within the structures that are creating climate change.
Business leaders are working at the centre of the trauma of the entire human race.
The economic system is the driver of climate change. Business leaders have succeeded wildly as individuals at the expense of the entire human race. Facing this directly requires taking on an enormous amount of responsibility for causing harm to other humans. It requires dissociation from human compassion or facing an overwhelming amount of pain, survivor’s guilt, and shame.
It is much easier on the human being to compartmentalize, filter out the consequences, and focus only on playing the game of business based on the old rules than it is to face the and larger reality and figure out how to change the rules.
Facing the Grief and Guilt is Required for Psychological Safety
Any disconnect between what bodies know and what minds allow into consciousness creates a self-gaslighting impact.
Not talking about climate impact of business requires employees to split their psyches into pieces. The spectre of climate change hovers like a storm cloud over every room. Boarding up the windows can’t keep the knowledge out. The fact that the windows are boarded up is a constant reminder.
The physical energy required to compartmentalize at work and ignore the environmental costs of the systems we can’t escape is enormous.
The need to compartmentalize is so great that over-protecting oneself from seeing painful truths generally becomes a habit. Speaking truth is no longer wise. There is no psychological safety when we must pretend not to see the harm being done by the process by which we survive.
In order to create psychological safety, we must develop the capacity to face reality. We must find ways to feel the feelings wothout becoming overwhelmed.
This is Too Much Grief For Individual Bodies; It Requires Collective Leadership
The model of a single leader taking responsibility for saving the village doesn’t work at this scale. There is too much stress for individual bodies. And the systems are too complex for any one individual to sense enough detail to make sense of the whole.
Individual leaders who are required to take the blame are scapegoats. Granted, we decorate these scapegoats with riches, glitter and shine so they look beautiful as we sacrifice them on the altar of our guilt, giving them the blame so the rest of us can avoid facing our complicity in the system. In return, they give up their compassion and ability to belong. As a culture, we ostracize leaders in gilded cages where they are forced to take the blame for things they cannot control.
The alternative to this requires more people to take more responsibility and more action. And taking responsibility requires feeling and working with the wildly unpleasant emotions that emerge in natural healthy response to the lineage of human destructiveness we have inherited and are perpetuating.
We of the dominant culture must learn from those who have skills in working compassionately and collectively with the emotional realities around death: hospice workers, chaplains, death doulas, and those who honour the sacrifice of other livings as they become our food.
We must make peace with the reality that humans cannot live without killing while training ourselves in the restraint necessary to avoid stripping the planet of the ability to generate the resources we need. We must collectively hold ourselves accountable. We must collectively remind ourselves and each other why we discipline ourselves to take only what we need and replenish for the next time.
If we cannot build a regenerative structure, we cannot thrive.
The Risk of Not Speaking Up About Climate Change is Getting Worse
Psychological safety is an emergent property of collective risk analysis.
More and more people are deciding that the risks of not speaking up are worse than the risks of speaking up.
In general, the loudest voices are from people who have not “succeeded” in the game to become the sacrificial gods. The loudest voices are finding alternative games to play, building extra-corporate and extra-governmental ways to stop propping up the system.
What Does This Mean at Work?
For business leaders, this is creating a massive challenge. Businesses that create enough psychological safety to face the realities of climate change will not be businesses that make investors rich or give executives power and luxury. Business that want to create enough psychological safety to face the realities of climate change will have to treat their constituents with more dignity and respect and will need to honour the sacrifices workers make for business profits in ways that feel meaningful to those workers.
The old way of paying people more and giving them markers of status as they sacrifice their compassion and belonging can not work with this much grief and guilt.