What We Are Seeing in Our Training Rooms

On individuals and teams under VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), and what has actually atrophied.

Two scenes.

First, the individual. Look at the executive who arrives for the first session of the offsite. She has been moving fast. Her calendar is dense. Her email shows her marking things complete inside meetings with her direct reports. Her body looks composed, her language is precise and she will tell you with conviction that she is fine. You are watching her, and you can see something is wrong. You cannot quite say what.

Now, the team. Three hours later, the same group is in the room. They are not arguing. They are not aligned. They are giving carefully worded versions of agreement that mean very little. The conversation has the surface-level appearance of collaboration, yet none of its substance. Decisions are being made that no one is fully willing to own.

This is what VUCA is doing to our stakeholders. It’s more than a concept on a slide. The volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous conditions have accumulated over years, operating on individual physiology and on the collective intelligence of teams that have been navigating these moments with no recovery in between.

I want to name what is actually happening.

Two Perceptions of Time

In 1889, the French philosopher Henri Bergson defended his doctoral thesis, Time and Free Will. He argued that we routinely confuse two very different things and call them both time.

The first is clock time — measurable, divisible, every minute equivalent to every other. The second he called duration. Duration is what we actually live. It is the continuous unfolding of experience, qualitatively different at every moment, irreducible to units. A minute spent waiting for news is not the same as a minute spent in conversation with someone you love. The clock says they are. Experience says they are not.

Bergson’s claim was that modern life had been steadily replacing duration with clock time, and that we were losing access to the kind of consciousness and awareness that duration makes possible. We are now further inside his diagnosis than he could have imagined.

The executive at your table has been living in clock time for years. What has atrophied is not her productivity. It is her access to duration — the qualitative continuity of her own life. The difference between moving through her day and truly inhabiting it. She cannot get it back by herself. The conditions of her work are designed to prevent it.

The Brain Under Pressure

The data tell the surface version: 41% of employees experience significant daily stress (Gallup, 2024). Under sustained stress, the prefrontal cortex narrows further (Arnsten, 2009), impacting a person’s executive functioning. It becomes harder to think beyond the near term, cognitive flexibility decreases and our capacity to focus on the broader picture contracts.

The underlying phenomenon is older than stress research. Stress is what happens when a person made for duration is forced to operate in clock time for years.

Something similar happens at the level of the team.

Karl Weick (1995) showed that the capacity for collective sensemaking depends on a shared interpretive ground — the felt sense, among people in a room, of what is going on together. Under VUCA conditions sustained over years, this ground erodes. People are looking at the same data and arriving at different stories. The team meets; however, the team does not meet, not really. Each person is processing alone, then performing alignment in the room, rather than sorting through uncertainty and owning their collective decisions.

Staw, Sandelands, and Dutton (1981) documented this pattern forty years ago: under perceived threat, groups narrow information channels, tighten control, restrict participation and fall back on dominant responses.

The moment the team needs to think differently is the moment it cannot.

Amy Edmondson’s work since 1999 has shown that the conditions for genuine team learning — psychological safety, shared attention, the willingness to surface what is actually present — are conditions a team has to operate inside, not skills they can be trained in.

The team in front of you is not failing to collaborate. They have lost access to the conditions inside which collaboration is possible. The individual has lost contact with her own sense of duration; the team has lost contact with its shared one. These are the same loss, observed at two scales.

Restoring the Capacity for Duration

This is what we have been training, for years, without always knowing it. The capacity to hold a room — individually and collectively — in conditions where duration and shared sensemaking can return. It’s not about techniques. It’s about restoring the conditions.

The shift is in our posture. From delivering content to creating an environment supportive of alignment. From running a session to attending a room. The framework you have built is not the problem. It was always meant to be the scaffolding. What changes is the kind of time you bring inside it, and the kind of room you make possible.

Three Steps for a More Conscious Training Experience

#1 – Before your next session, ask one question of yourself.

What kind of time are these individuals living in, and what kind of time has this team forgotten how to share? If both have collapsed into clock time, you have one kind of work. Not strategy work. Not framework work. Conditions work. Write the answer to this question down. Keep it where you will see it before you walk in.

#2 – Slow your own rate before the deck opens.

Before the agenda. Before the introductions. Take three breaths at the front of the room and let the room watch you do it. The first invitation into duration is your own contact with it. Individuals entrain, matching the emotional and attentional state of those around them. Teams entrain. They cannot follow you to a place you have not gone.

#3 – Track one individual- and one team-level signal each session this quarter.

For the individual: notice when the shoulders drop, when the voice slows, when the face becomes available for expression that was not possible before. For the team: notice when someone says what no one had been saying, and what happens in the room thirty seconds after. These are your data points. The room is teaching you what your work has been doing all along.

Your capacity to bring awareness and presence into your training rooms is a distinctly human quality – one that no AI system can do for you. It’s what will create the conditions for understanding, alignment and collaboration between people and teams.

Learn more about how you can elevate your own presence and support the performance of the leaders and teams you support. Associates: Join us at in Denver, Colorado, on June 24-25, 2026, at Elevate! Contact our team at brains@emergenetics.com for registration details.

 

References

Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648

Bergson, H. (1910). Time and free will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness (F. L. Pogson, Trans.). George Allen & Unwin. (Original work published 1889)

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Gallup. (2024). State of the global workplace: 2024 report. Gallup, Inc.

Staw, B. M., Sandelands, L. E., & Dutton, J. E. (1981). Threat-rigidity effects in organizational behavior: A multilevel analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4), 501–524. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392337

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage.

 

This piece was developed in conversation with Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. The clinical material, the lived observations, and the voice are my own.

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