Containing Commercial Turbulence: The Unconscious Life of Sales Organisations and What It Reveals About Holding at Work

A sales manager I work with recently described her team’s default under pressure as “retreating to price.” It struck me as a powerful phrase. Not because it was new, anyone in commercial life would recognise it but because of what it might reveal when read through a systems psychodynamic lens. What if the retreat to price is not simply poor selling, but an organisational defence against the anxiety of claiming value in a turbulent market? What if commercial organisations develop their own characteristic social defence systems, just as Menzies (1960) described in nursing, and we have not yet paused to name them?

Systems psychodynamic scholarship has given us rich accounts of unconscious life in healthcare, education and the public sector. Stein (2011; 2016) extended the lens to financial institutions, identifying a ‘culture of mania’ and a ‘fantasy of fusion’ in the lead-up to successive economic crises. Lawlor and Sher (2023) have called for the tradition to engage with new organisational contexts. But commercial sales organisations, ones where people face quarterly pressure, constant rejection and competitive threat have received surprisingly little attention. This paper draws on my consulting practice across Australian and New Zealand foodservice, FMCG and financial services organisations to offer a psychodynamic reading of commercial life. My interest is in what happens beneath the surface, and what this might tell us about containment and holding more broadly.

I examine three interventions from my practice and reinterpret them through Bion’s (1962) container-contained model. The first is account tiering, which is categorising customers as Gold, Silver or Bronze and allocating attention accordingly. I wonder if this functions as a reality-testing process, supporting a shift from paranoid-schizoid splitting, where all prospects feel equally urgent, toward what Klein (1946) described as the depressive position: tolerating the painful complexity that some relationships matter more than others. The second is temporal structuring through 90-day sprint cycles. When a team is told ‘we will focus on this, for this long, and then review,’ the sprint creates something close to what Winnicott (1965) might recognise as a holding environment by making commercial turbulence survivable because it is bounded. The third is the discovery process a facilitated cross-functional diagnosis that surfaces what the organisation knows but has defended against knowing. Where activity has been substituting for progress. Where deference has replaced judgement.

I also explore resistance to these interventions as meaningful communication. When organisations struggle to tier their accounts, the difficulty is rarely technical. Saying ‘this customer is Bronze’ means tolerating loss. It means relinquishing the manic belief that every prospect is equally promising, which may be a version of the very dynamic Stein identified in the financial sector. When teams resist process discipline, they may be defending against the depressive anxiety of confronting commercial reality. These patterns, understood through Menzies’ (1960) social defence framework, suggest that sales organisations develop their own defences against the primitive anxieties of commercial life: annihilation anxiety in losing the account, abandonment in being replaced by a competitor, and shame in failing to meet target.

The paper extends the socioanalytic tradition (Long, 2013) into commercial territory. Jarrett and Vince (2024) have shown how leadership groups provide psychological containment during radical organisational change; I want to explore whether the consulting intervention itself serves a parallel function. My sense is that consultants working with sales organisations are already doing containment work by holding the space for leadership teams to confront commercial reality. The question is whether making these unconscious dimensions explicit might strengthen both the intervention and the consultant’s capacity to hold the turbulence their clients bring. And if so, what might we learn about holding more broadly when we finally enter the organisations where turbulence is most acutely felt?