What happens when people stop feeling recognised by the system
Everyone has come across this kind of haircut: shaved sides and a crest running straight down the middle of the head. Years ago, someone saw in that hairstyle a simple and vivid metaphor for what happens in our brain.
That someone is Bessel van der Kolk, psychiatrist, researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, in which he uses the phrase “the Mohawk of self-awareness” to describe a series of structures located along the midline of the brain, whose shape, seen from above, closely resembles a Mohawk crest.
It is a metaphor van der Kolk uses to describe our ability to sense what is happening inside us, connect physical sensations with emotions, make sense of our experiences, and guide our responses. We can think of this crest as a line tying together a few fundamental questions:
What is happening?
What am I feeling?
What does this mean to me?
How do I choose to act?
When we feel safe enough, we have the space to observe, understand, explore and decide. Under pressure, our perspective narrows: attention fixes on risks, leaving less energy available to imagine, collaborate and learn.
The metaphor was conceived to describe individuals. Yet, looking at business life, it is natural to ask whether an organisation also possesses its own capacity to sense itself—a kind of organisational Mohawk capable of linking decisions to their effects, data to human experience, and strategy to the meaning it holds for those who must deliver it.
When an organisation stops hearing the news
An organisation senses itself when it captures what emerges from its people, spots signals before they escalate into issues, and retains the ability to reflect even while moving at pace. This sensitivity lives in everyday conversations, in the way questions are welcomed, in how mistakes are handled, and in the attention paid to what still lies outside standard reporting.
It weakens whenever urgency becomes the default operating mode, meetings are packed with status updates rather than genuine dialogue, decisions are handed down without context, every difficulty immediately requires someone to blame, and any hesitation is misread as resistance.
Work carries on, projects move forward, and performance indicators may stay healthy for a long time. Beneath this apparent continuity, however, the way information travels through the system changes entirely.
A minor problem stays contained within the team that discovered it; a doubt is packaged into a more reassuring message; a risk only surfaces to leadership once there is enough evidence to shield whoever raises it; an idea is held back because it would challenge a decision that has already been signed off.
The organisation continues to receive information, but mostly the kind that confirms what it is already prepared to hear.
In these cases, silence tells us very little about the absence of problems; it tells us a great deal about the journey those problems would have to make to be genuinely welcomed.
A study by Ethisphere, based on nearly two million responses across more than 120 countries, makes this disconnect visible: 93% of people say they would report misconduct. Yet among those who actually witnessed it, only 50% went on to report it. Of those who chose silence, 48% feared negative consequences, and an identical percentage believed the organisation would take no action at all.
While this finding comes from ethics and compliance research, it points to a much broader phenomenon: the gap between what an organisation formally invites people to do and what daily experience tells them is actually safe or possible.
A company can have clear procedures, regular surveys and well-designed feedback channels; the genuine freedom to speak up is measured by what happens next: the manager’s reaction, the follow-through on the issue, the protection offered to those who spoke up, and the ability to provide a clear, constructive debrief.
People learn by watching the system
Every company communicates through values, policies, internal campaigns and leadership statements. Yet people learn primarily by observing the real consequences of actions.
An organisation may state that mistakes are learning opportunities, but public criticism will teach people that it is safer to hide them. It can champion innovation, but an endless approval chain will teach them to wait. It can promote autonomy, yet micromanagement signals that every decision must mirror the manager’s exact expectations. It can claim to welcome dissent, but sidelining those who voice a different view makes it plain what form of participation is truly rewarded.
Day by day, an implicit map of the organisation takes shape. People learn whether they can ask a question, admit a mistake, ask for help, voice disagreement, or raise a concern before having a ready-made solution.
The answers are rarely found in the code of conduct; they are stored in the memory of lived experience.
Picture a manager sending the same short message to four team members: “Tomorrow I’d like to talk about the project.” The words are identical, yet the experience can be entirely different: one person expects a routine update; another spends the evening wondering what they did wrong; a third brushes it aside; a fourth wants to ask for clarity but decides to stay quiet.
Meaning is also shaped by the history of the relationship: does that manager give fair warning on important matters, provide regular feedback, honour commitments, explain decisions, or frequently leave people hanging?
The trust with which we receive a communication begins long before the message is sent.
Change requires meaning
The ability to connect decisions and experiences becomes even more vital during business transformations—when structures, technologies, processes and roles change swiftly, while people strive to understand what will remain, what contribution will be expected of them, and where they will fit in the new landscape.
PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2024, surveying 56,600 workers across 50 countries and territories, revealed that 62% had experienced an acceleration in the pace of change at work, and 44% stated they did not understand its purpose.
Nearly one in two people was navigating a transformation without being able to connect what was being asked of them to the bigger picture.
When purpose does not circulate, the vacuum is quickly filled by assumptions, anxieties and speculation. Each department crafts its own version of the change, individuals try to work out what will happen to their roles on their own, corridor conversations outpace official communications, and valuable energy needed for delivery is lost trying to decipher what is going on.
Explaining change means revealing the link between the reasons that made it necessary, the choices made, the expected outcomes, and the contribution each person can make. A coherent narrative makes the context easier to read, allowing people to navigate forward even when not all the answers are yet available.
The organisational Mohawk does precisely this: it connects what leadership envisions with what people are experiencing, what the numbers show with what they cannot yet capture, and what the organisation aims to achieve with the meaning its choices carry along the way.
Managers make the system legible
For many team members, the organisation takes shape through the behaviour of their direct manager. Strategy may be defined at the top, but the day-to-day experience of work is forged in the relationship with whoever sets priorities, allocates responsibilities, evaluates performance, and chooses how much room to leave for questions.
A manager makes the system legible by keeping promises, following up on conversations, separating what has already been decided from what remains open, being candid about what is still unknown, and explaining the reasoning behind a decision—even when that decision is difficult.
Predictability reduces the cognitive load of decoding ambiguous signals: people can dedicate their energy to the work itself, rather than spending it trying to read between the lines.
Feedback serves this exact purpose: when it is specific and timely, it helps individuals understand what worked, what can improve, and what contribution is expected of them. Recognition, likewise, becomes meaningful when it highlights the connection between an individual behaviour and collective impact.
Saying “well done” feels nice; saying “your heads-up allowed us to step in before the issue reached the client” allows the person to see where their work made a real difference.
A manager’s role therefore also involves safeguarding the quality of information: creating the conditions for problems to surface while they are still manageable, asking questions that invite dialogue, and welcoming bad news without conflating the messenger with the problem being raised.
How a manager reacts to the first piece of bad news teaches the team how to handle every piece of bad news that follows.
Sensing the organisation once again
The organisational Mohawk bridges what is all too often managed in silos: data and lived experiences, strategy and day-to-day work, decisions and their consequences, performance and the conditions that enable it.
Reactivating it takes tangible behaviours: an important decision must be explained; an issue raised must be addressed even when the request cannot be met; an objective needs clear priorities; feedback must arrive while it can still shape action; a question deserves a straightforward answer.
A sustainable organisation continues to set demanding expectations; it navigates pressure, mistakes, conflict and tough decisions. At the same time, it preserves the ability to understand what these experiences are creating within its people and its overall functioning.
The Mohawk of self-awareness leaves us with a compelling image: a central ridge connecting what we feel, what we understand, and how we choose to act.
Organisations need a similar symbolic framework: a dedicated space capable of capturing signals, interpreting them, and translating them into action. Because a system that listens to its people sees sooner, understands better, and decides based on reality rather than assumptions.
When people are able to sense themselves, they understand what is happening around them with greater clarity; when an organisation listens to its people, it senses itself once again.
Further reading
