Refugia: Islands of Social Awareness in Disrupted Earth Systems

An organisational leader’s evolving mindset at times of significant systemic disruption frequently determines the quality and efficacy of the organisation’s response to dramatic change.

This article describes patterns of conscious and unconscious thinking, emotion, and containment in a group of business leaders during a disruptive earth system trauma. The context is the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquakes of 2010 through 2014 and the critical incident narratives that inform the mental stance leaders assumed with their organisations. There has been little research on leaders’ evolving mental stance or how they “show up” in traumatic times, in terms of the practices and behaviours they exhibit, and how these in turn manifest as containing environments within disrupted systems. I call these environments “islands of social awareness”. Within these refugia, the organisation, with its collective sense-making potential and action optionality, cooperates on the critical tasks of survival, human connection, and activation of resilience.

I propose that turbulent social unconscious processes and the leader response to consequent emotional arousal ultimately underlie leaders’ motivation and behaviour in times of disruption. These same perspectives may be applied to other complex earth mega-system crises, informing organisational preparedness for extraordinary events.