Communicative Suffocation and Defensive Organising under Conditions of Total Digital Disruption in Iranian Organisations

This paper offers a systems psychodynamic account of a three-month period of total digital disruption in Iran and its effects on organizations whose functioning depended on continuous internet connectivity. Its central argument is that prolonged digital disruption should not be understood only as technical failure or operational interruption. In internet-dependent organizations, communicative infrastructures form part of the holding conditions through which continuity, coordination, authority, and trust are sustained. When those conditions are withdrawn, what is compromised is not simply workflow but the organizational capacity to contain anxiety, preserve symbolic connection, and maintain coherent role relations.

The paper draws on Bion’s account of containment, Winnicott’s concept of the holding environment, and Menzies Lyth’s analysis of social defences against anxiety to argue that digital shutdown can be understood as a disturbance to the psychic architecture of organizational life (Bion, 1962; Winnicott, 1960; Menzies Lyth, 1988). It is also informed by more recent work that extends holding and anxiety-related thinking into contemporary work relations and digitally mediated settings, particularly Petriglieri, Ashford and Wrzesniewski’s (2019) analysis of holding environments under precarious conditions, alongside studies of digitally dependent collaboration and disruption in organizational life (Waizenegger et al., 2020; Kniffin et al., 2021).

The paper introduces communicative suffocation as a conceptual formulation for the condition in which an organization’s communicative space becomes so radically narrowed that its collective capacity to think, symbolize experience, coordinate across roles, and remain adequately task-focused is diminished. Under such conditions, work may continue, but increasingly in a defensive register organized around survival rather than reflection. Splitting, projection, blame, compulsive urgency, withdrawal, omnipotent control, and polarization across roles and groups are approached here not as isolated reactions but as social defences mobilized when containment weakens and anxiety can no longer be sufficiently processed at the level of the system.

Particular attention is given to the Iranian context, where a three-month total digital disruption exposed how deeply digital infrastructures had become embedded in the lived reliability of organizational life. For digital firms, internet-dependent businesses, and roles requiring sustained online coordination, the disruption did not merely interrupt access; it altered the experience of authority, weakened trust, destabilized boundaries, and constrained the possibility of collaborative meaning-making. The paper therefore distinguishes between reconnection and restoration. The return of technical access does not in itself restore containment or renew the organization’s capacity for working thinking. What is required is a process of re-containment through which damaged role relations, weakened boundaries, and injured institutional trust can be worked with and gradually restored.

By theorizing the movement from disconnection to communicative suffocation and defensive organizing, this paper contributes a psychodynamically informed account of how turbulence becomes internalized within the fabric of work. It offers a framework for understanding not only how organizations endure prolonged disruption, but what they defensively reorganize, what they lose, and what must be restored if collective work is to become thinkable again.