Building Bridges in the Boardroom: Holding Turbulence Through Psychodynamic and Systems Thinking in Board Dynamics

In Building Bridges in Board Dynamics, developed with contributing author Leo Smith, I set out to ask a question that has occupied me across years of practice: is it possible to bring psychodynamic organisational systems thinking to bear on the board landscape — and if so, what does that inquiry reveal about the unconscious dynamics shaping organisations from the inside out, and how do we as individuals act within this organisation? Boards of directors hold a structurally distinct position in organisational life, convening as a collective only four to six times each year, yet carrying ultimate fiduciary and strategic responsibility through a period of accelerating societal turbulence; and it is precisely that compression of authority, uncertainty, and relational encounter that makes the boardroom so acute an arena for the forces this symposium seeks to illuminate.

Three research questions orient the work. First, when boards are subjected to consecutive, compounding crises — the climate emergency, a global pandemic, the outbreak of war, escalating cybercrime, and a fracturing geopolitical order — what psychological and systemic dynamics are activated, and what does it actually look like to govern under that accumulating weight? Second, how can psychodynamic organisational psychology, neuroaffective relational therapy, and other psychological frameworks together constitute a coherent theoretical lens for understanding the board as a distinctive organisational form — one whose compressed rhythms, fiduciary weight, and relational intensities place it apart from other collective structures? Third, how does that understanding translate into concrete analytical tools and conscious skills for the individual board member: the tools not only to read the boardroom situation with competence and decide how to act, but to recognise the pitfalls, to recover, and to practise — through real training examples — as basis for individual confidence, competence, and conscious awareness?

The methodology is grounded in a mélange of psychological theory. I draw on live cases and on a board established specifically as a laboratory for this project — a real governance body operating with structured pre-briefs and debriefs, generating case material and reflective narratives from board members themselves.

This bridge-building between above-the-surface governance norms, roles, and structures and the below-the-surface psychodynamic field — transference, projection, containment, and role dynamics — is, I would argue, among the least examined and most consequential dimensions of organisational turbulence in boards of directors to date. My deeper purpose in bringing this work to the symposium is to advance the recognition that boards are organisations in the fullest sense: places where leadership and followship, teamwork, organisational development, and personal development all operate, and where the field of systems psychodynamics has both much to offer and much still to do.