March 4, 2021

Safe Emotional Container
For a group to enter this transformative space, a safe emotional container is essential. For the group, psychological safety is vital to talk about their feelings, deal with conflict, and move forward together.

For an organization to create emotional safety, nurturing the culture of trust and openness is a necessity. These values, behaviors, and norms are vital for a group's ability to feel safe, Edgar Schein, an expert on organizational culture, offers a beginning strategy: "If you want to understand an organization's culture, go to a meeting. Who speaks and who does not, who is listened to, and who is not, which issues are addressed directly and which ignored or addressed by innuendo are powerful clues to how an organization actually functions" (Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers) (48).

People who feel personally safe open their hearts to a healthy dialogue and seeking solutions. The safety of the group’s container is essential to handling healthy disagreements and conflict. According to John Paul Lederach, a professor, and leader in the areas of conflict resolution and mediation, "Our language talks about a journey. In conflict more than any other human experience, we see ourselves and others in new and profound ways, and we seek to restore truth and love in ourselves" (Lederach 14).

Learning and growth are the heart of any transformative organization.

Learning and growth are the heart of any transformative organization. The members must feel safe for them to risk and explore. If the cultural climate leads to people feeling insecure, then the organization becomes stagnant and misses new opportunities. Thus the culture that fosters organizational renewal nurtures the appetite to explore new ideas and services while challenging the existing reality.

Current and future organizations must develop a disciplined path toward becoming learning organizations. There is a tendency to seek release from fearful emotions by choosing immediate solutions which can create comfort, yet often block creativity. Daniell Susskind, in his book A World Without Work, emphasizes the need for continual learning, "In that sense embracing lifelong learning is a way of insuring ourselves against the unknowable demands that the working world of the future might make of us"(161).

Organizations today are committed to emotional safety as one of their highest priorities. This principle is imperative to embrace the emerging questions and competing values that shock their existing framework. These unsettling emerging issues confront existing mental models, services, and internal structures. The members thus feel vulnerable and insecure and experience a sense of disillusionment. A compassionate presence of listening, honest communication, and empathy is crucial to navigating this path. These qualities allow individuals and groups to be open to their essence. Conversations tend to have intense emotional swings ranging from enthusiasm and excitement to anger and energetic disagreement. The gift of deep respect and reverence of the other is at the core of their being in fostering a safe emotional container.

Transformative Communities recognize that a safe emotional container creates a community able to be flexible and adaptable to the shifting winds of change. This gift of safety allows each person to reach their fullest potential while moving the shared vision forward. Thus the organization intensifies its foresight for being agile and creative in a changing paradigm.

The collective security is always three dimensional:
the listener, the people sharing, and the group responding.

Research has shown that a group can achieve its purpose when members feel safe and secure. The collective security is always three dimensional: the listener, the people sharing, and the group responding. Marc Brackett, the Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in Permission to Feel, quotes Plato: "All learning has an emotional component" (27). When individuals and groups feel scorned, they tend to engage in adaptive behavior. If this becomes the norm, it leads to the erosion of the collective mission and services. For any organization to be successful both within and without, people need to have the permission to feel. A safe container is a place that nurtures and develops through honesty and transparency.

A transformative community must ask and answer three crucial questions to develop an emotionally safe culture:

• Does the organization's culture foster honesty and transparency in the exploration of diverse opinions, innovative approaches, and values?
• Does the organization recognize healthy conflict as a means of learning and expanding the group beyond current prejudices and biases?
• Does the organization foster both intergenerational and intercultural understanding?

How the group addresses these questions determines whether or not the organization is a culturally safe emotional container. The answers open the door to an organization’s developing into or growing as a regenerative, learning, and mission-driven group.

to be continued in next issue
Works Cited 
Brackett, Marc. Permission to Feel. NY: Celadon Books, 2019.
Day, George S. and Paul J.H. Schoemaker. See Sooner, Act Faster. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019.
(https://developingchild.harvard.edu/collective-change/key-concepts/learning-communities/).
Lederach, John Paul. reconcile. Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2014. O'Leary, Daniel. An Astonishing Secret. Dublin: Columba Books, 2017.
Senge, Peter, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers. Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. 2004
Susskind, Daniel. A World Without Work. UK: Allen Lane, 2020.