Introduction: When Hidden Forces Erupt
Imagine a Netflix series where a seemingly ordinary teenager spirals into darkness, influenced by toxic online mentors and hidden pain. Adolescence, a recent drama, does exactly that – it follows 13-year-old Jamie, an average boy from a loving but imperfect family, who becomes caught in a tragic sequence of events driven by covert forces. These hidden influences include online radicalization, toxic masculinity, and the devastating power of secrets and grief.

For those of us in Organizational Development (OD), Jamie’s story is more than compelling drama – it’s a powerful metaphor for what happens when covert dynamics remain unaddressed in any human system – whether in the workplace or the family. Just as unnoticed turmoil within a family can lead to tragedy, unresolved issues and unacknowledged dynamics within organizations can quietly undermine even the most carefully planned business initiatives.

Why use a TV show to talk about organizations? Because powerful stories like Adolescence can vividly illustrate complex, abstract OD concepts in a way everyone can understand. In this two-part exploration, we use Jamie’s journey – through radicalisation, anger, and heartbreak – as a springboard to unpack two core themes: online radicalization and toxic masculinity. Along the way, we draw connections to OD concepts explored in CORI Module 6, “Seeing covert dynamics in our organisation.” The goal: to help anyone – not just OD specialists – spot those unconscious, unspoken and unspeakable dynamics that quietly shape workplace culture.

Note: No major spoilers beyond the basic premise. The focus is on themes and lessons, so even if you have not seen Adolescence, you’ll be able to follow and won’t have the show ruined.

From Online Radicalization to Echo Chambers in Organizations
In Adolescence, Jamie is drawn into an online echo chamber, the "manosphere," where misogynistic ideas distort his worldview, fueling his anger and isolation. He’s essentially radicalized by an echo chamber of extreme ideas. While organizations don't usually deal with internet trolls, they frequently experience similar echo chambers internally: project teams, departments, or cliques where a certain mindset goes unchallenged, certain perspectives dominate and opposing views are silenced or ignored.

Have you ever observed a department or project team becoming increasingly “siloed,” only validating their own ideas and rejecting outside input? That's an organizational echo chamber at work. Just as Jamie’s YouTube binge of chauvinist content fueled his anger, an insular team at work might silently feed on rumors or a shared resentment. The result can be groupthink, resistance to outside input, or even a subgroup of employees who start to feel at odds with the rest of the organization’s values. 

OD practitioners often describe these echo chambers – isolated pockets within organisations – as covert dynamics: unconscious undercurrents that, when left unchecked, silently build resentment. Over time, these hidden dynamics lead to fragmentation, ignite open conflicts, or result in abrupt departures, catching leadership completely off guard – just like Jamie’s unsuspecting family who remained blind to what was unfolding beyond their sight.

From Toxic Masculinity to Toxic Workplace Culture
Another powerful theme in Adolescence is toxic masculinity. Jamie’s journey into darkness is marked by increasingly aggressive behavior – demeaning and intimidating others as a way to assert dominance and control. At one point, he belittles his female psychologist just to feel in control. This mirrors a sadly familiar workplace covert dynamic: toxic cultures, where an aggressive ethos, though often not officially acknowledged, dominates. 

We have seen it in companies where an aggressive “winning at all costs” culture goes unspoken, subtly communicating that aggression, competition, and emotional detachment are signs of strength, while empathy and vulnerability are viewed as weaknesses. Employees may endure or even perpetuate toxic behaviors, thinking, "that's just how it is here." 

These “unspeakable” dynamics are unconscious forces — issues that are culturally taboo or too risky to address directly. Yet they persist in jokes, side comments, or the behavior of influential figures. If left unaddressed, this toxic energy becomes part of the company’s unconscious habits – the kind of covert dynamic that erodes trust, inclusion, and resilience. Everyone senses something is wrong, but it’s hard to pin down in polite conversation. When these toxic patterns persist unchallenged, trust and morale erode, often leading to quiet dysfunction beneath a veneer of professional composure. Over time, it can lead to dysfunction as teams fracture along the lines of power and fear.

From Adolescence to Organizational Realities
Both themes—online radicalization (echo chambers) and toxic masculinity (toxic culture)—clearly illustrate how covert dynamics function. They highlight the importance of recognizing and addressing what is unconscious, unspoken, or culturally unspeakable within organizations. CORI Module 6 emphasizes that these invisible undercurrents are potent forces; ignoring them risks organizational health and effectiveness.

A Reflective Teaser
What happens when a workplace ignores grief and emotional wounds after a crisis? And what can organizational leaders learn from family systems shattered by unspeakable trauma? Join us in Part B, where we will explore even deeper layers of covert dynamics — family breakdown and their echoes in organisational life — and share strategies to bring these hidden issues safely to the surface.

In Part A of this series, we explored how the Netflix show Adolescence uses themes of online radicalization and toxic masculinity to mirror organizational challenges. We discussed how online echo chambers in the show reflect workplace echo chambers that reinforce groupthink, and how toxic masculinity in the story served as a metaphor for toxic work cultures. Now, in Part B, we revisit Adolescence to explore two more poignant themes – family breakdown and grief – and their echoes in organizational life: how teams fragment, and how organizations hold unresolved trauma.

From Family Breakdown to Team Fragmentation
One of the powerful threads in Adolescence is a family in turmoil. The series portrays how a family is shattered by an unspeakable incident. Jamie’s parents and sister start as a flawed but loving family unit, but the fallout of his actions leaves that family in pieces. The show portrays the heartbreak and grief of this breakdown: Parents and siblings drift into their own corners, avoiding the hard conversations. What happens when a family falls apart? In the show, we see emotional walls go up and each member struggling alone with confusion and perhaps, resentment. This scenario is all too relatable — not just at home, but in our workplaces as well.

In organizations, fragmentation often follows unprocessed trauma, signalling a system in mourning. A scandal, sudden retrenchment or the loss of a beloved leader can rupture the psychological contract – triggering anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, and disorientation. Yet, in many work cultures, these affective undercurrents remain unspoken, or suppressed, leading to deepening silos, blame and mistrust. The once-cohesive unit begins to splinter. 

As with the Miller family in Adolescence, who struggle with shame and sorrow, the trauma in an organization lies not in just what happened but in what could not be named. Without collective sense-making, systems unconsciously defend against pain: fragmenting into silos, replaying historical tensions, or emotionally checking out. What manifests as visible dysfunction – missed targets, chronic misunderstandings, high turnover – is often the organisation’s way of expressing unresolved grief, shame, fear or the presence of unacknowledged wounds no one dares to name.

Have you felt the shift? A moment when the team just didn’t feel the same anymore – where the atmosphere grew brittle and distant, but no one could quite say why. Often, just beneath the surface, lies a wound left untended: a hurt unspoken, a rupture glossed over. Maybe a reorganisation redrew reporting lines without explanation, leaving staff disoriented – like children struggling to make sense of their parents’ separation. Or perhaps a high performing “star” employee began violating norms with impunity, and the silence around it bred quiet resentment. These unacknowledged fractures erode the relational fabric of team cohesion. Over time, small cracks deepen into relational rifts. Like families in distress, when communication shuts down, the system retreats into defensiveness. Connection gives way to coping. Intimacy gives way to avoidance. And the system becomes a shell of its former cohesion. 

In Dialogic Organizational Development (OD), fragmentation is not viewed as a personnel problem but as a symptom of covert dynamics within the system. These dynamics are the unseen, unspoken, and often unconscious patterns that shape how we relate in groups, teams and organisations. When a team appears “dysfunctional,” OD practitioners ask: What is the system defending against? What grief, fear, or unacknowledged truth lies beneath the surface? 

Perhaps team members had unconsciously cast a long-serving boss into a parental role – and when that figure left, they experienced a deep loss they couldn’t name. Rather than mourning together, they emotionally withdrew, becoming disengaged. Or maybe two departments currently in conflict are unknowingly re-enacting unresolved historical rivalry, passed down like a family feud. These covert dynamics do more than quietly shape culture; they dictate whether a system coheres or fractures. 

As Adolescence reminds us, when a system denies its emotional reality, it begins to unravel. People don’t just burn out. They check out. And the organisation becomes a house filled with empty chairs and unspoken grief.

The takeaway? Teams don't fall apart only because of external factors; it can also break from within due to what’s left unsaid. Covert interpersonal wounds between colleagues – much like the unresolved hurt in a family – don’t disappear with time; they wait to be named and acknowledged. 

Preventing fragmentation begins with noticing those subtle cues: the hesitation in a meeting, the silence after a change, the joke that lands too hard. These are not minor glitches – they are signals. When we attend to them with care rather than judgment, we begin to surface what’s beneath the surface of our workflows: the emotions, tensions, and unspoken relational scripts that shape how we work together . Sometimes, that means having the difficult conversation that’s long been avoided. Sometimes, it calls for a neutral OD practitioner to hold the space for what the team cannot yet name.  Most of all, it means cultivating a culture where people feel safe enough to say: something doesn’t feel right. Catching these signals early can prevent quiet unravelling and save our “work family” from an untimely breakup.

From Grief and Loss to Organizational Trauma
Another theme Adolescence navigates with care is grief and loss. Without giving away spoilers, the show explores the aftermath of a tragic event in a young person’s life. It shows the heavy, confusing emotions that come with loss – sadness, anger, guilt – and importantly, how adults, peers, and the community struggle to address these feelings. We watch characters carry on with their routines, while inside they are anything but “fine.” Grief, when unspoken, becomes a silent weight that drives every interaction. In the series, a character’s inability to express or process loss leads to risky behaviors and emotional outbursts that others can’t quite understand. This is a powerful mirror for what can happen in our organizations when collective grief or trauma goes unaddressed.

Do companies grieve? At first glance, workplaces are about rational goals, not emotions. But organizations do experience forms of loss and trauma. Consider a startup that pours its heart into a project that then spectacularly fails, a nonprofit that loses funding and has to lay off staff, or a long-established firm where the beloved founder suddenly passes away. These events are shocks to the system. People in the organization feel them deeply: there may be fear, insecurity about the future, sadness for colleagues or work that was “lost,” even guilt in survivors (“Why did I keep my job while my friend was let go?”). When such painful events happen, the memory of them doesn’t just vanish. It lingers in the organizational psyche, much like personal trauma lives on in an individual.

Psychologists describe organizational trauma as a collective wound that overwhelms a system’s usual coping mechanisms, leaving it vulnerable or fundamentally changed. For example, a company that went through a public scandal might, even years later, find its employees overly cautious, distrustful of leadership, or reluctant to innovate – even if the original actors have long departed. It’s as if the organization has a scar. In day-to-day terms, unhealed organizational trauma can show up as chronic low morale, high turnover, fragmentation, and an “us-versus-them” mentality. But it also appears more subtly as a kind of energetic collapse : people quietly “check out”, disengage from initiatives, or do just enough to get by. The organisation might look busy on the surface, but underneath, there is an underlying sense of the system being too tired or afraid to risk trying again. When trauma is left unacknowledged, this residue lingers. The scar shapes every move the organisation makes, long after the crisis has passed. In other words, when a company doesn’t heal from a major blow, it struggles to function at its best going forward. 

Why do these wounds stay open? A big reason is that grief and pain become unspeakable at work. In Adolescence, the young characters often lack a safe outlet to talk about their losses – the adults around them either don’t notice the depth of their pain or don’t know how to respond. In organizations, leaders might similarly avoid discussing a traumatic event, perhaps thinking “Let’s focus on moving ahead” or fearing that opening up emotional discussions will be unproductive. There is also a cultural norm in many workplaces of “leave your personal feelings at the door”. The irony, of course, is that grief isn’t just a personal feeling when it’s shared across dozens or hundreds of employees – it becomes a collective mood, part of the workplace climate. If everyone is silently hurting but pretending to be fine, that pain goes underground, re-emerging as irritability, resistance to new initiatives, or a pervasive distrust.

Without some process of organizational mourning, the workplace can develop what feels like a permanent malaise or anxiety. The Adolescence narrative urges us to confront trauma – the psychologist in the show tries to get Jamie to talk about his feelings, hinting that naming the pain is the first step to healing. Likewise, in organizations, acknowledging collective grief (“Yes, that project’s failure hurt us all”) can be the first step to repairing trust and moving forward. Ignoring it, on the other hand, risks the trauma deepening its roots in the company psyche.

The key insight from Adolescence is that “ the unsaid organises the system.”  In fact, the covert, unspoken content often is what drives behavior and outcomes, more than the official policies or strategies. Every organization carries two stories: the “official” story (annual reports, KPIs, etc.) and the hidden story (fears, hopes, conflict, unprocessed hurt, etc.). When the hidden story is denied, it leaks out in covert ways and fragments the system e.g. subtle sabotage of new projects, chronic misunderstandings, or a culture of silence where everyone tiptoes around the real issues. OD practitioners understand that every system holds what it cannot say – and when these unspeakable forces are left unaddressed, they do not disappear. They seep into culture, distort communication, splinter trust, and create fractures that no strategy can mend, draining the collective energy needed to move the system forward.

So, how can we apply these insights to foster healthier organizations? Below is a reflection section with practical prompts and questions to help uncover the hidden dynamics in our work lives, plus some suggestions for how to engage in reflective practices. Consider these as invitations to start “seeing the covert dynamics” in your own work system to make the unspeakable speakable in a safe, constructive way.

Reflection: Bringing Light to the Unspoken
Before we wrap up, it’s useful to pause and reflect. Whether you’re a leader looking at your whole organization or an individual thinking about your team, examining these themes can reveal valuable insights. Here are some prompts and practices to get you started:

For Organizational Leaders (Systems-Level Reflection)

• Identify the Elephants: What topics or tensions in your organization are known by everyone yet never discussed openly? Why might people feel these issues are “undiscussable,” and what is the cost of that silence? Consider how you might safely bring those elephants into the room for honest dialogue.
  
  
• Gauge Psychological Safety: Do team members feel safe disagreeing with you or other leaders? How do you know? If important feedback or bad news tends to be watered down or delayed, it may indicate people are afraid to speak up. What steps can you take to signal that all concerns are welcome and won’t be met with punishment?
  
  
• Handling Conflict and Failure: How does your organization typically handle conflict, failure, or loss? For example, when a project fails or a valued employee leaves, is there a forum to talk about what people are feeling and learning? Or is the message “move on, don’t dwell on it”? Consider introducing rituals or meetings to acknowledge setbacks (even briefly) so that people feel their experience is recognised.

For Individuals (Personal Reflection)

• Your Unspoken Story: Reflect on a time at work when you didn’t speak up about something important. What held you back? How did that silence affect you and others? This could be an idea you had, a disagreement with the direction of a project, or a concern about a colleague’s behavior. What might have happened if you voiced it?
  
  
• Experiencing Fragmentation: Have you ever been part of a team that felt like it was “breaking apart”? What were the signs? How did it impact your sense of trust and motivation? Looking back, were there underlying issues (like a conflict or a leadership void) that no one explicitly addressed? How did that feel for you personally?
  
  
• Grief and Loss at Work: Think of a loss or major change you’ve experienced in your work life – it could be the loss of a mentor, a restructure that dissolved your favorite team, or even a personal loss that you carried with you to the office. How did your workplace handle it? Were you supported, or did you feel you had to pretend everything was okay? How did you cope, and is there any unprocessed feeling still lingering?
  
  
• The “Unspeakable” for You: Identify one thing in your workplace that you feel is “not okay to talk about,” but wish you could. Why is it unspeakable? Is it fear of judgment, company culture, past reactions? And what would need to change for you to feel comfortable bringing it up? Just acknowledging this to yourself is a first step; you might even write it down in a private journal.

Practices for Healing and Learning

• Dialogic Inquiry Sessions: Create structured opportunities for open dialogue in your team or organization. For example, host a monthly “safe space forum” where anyone can raise concerns or questions about how the team is working together. In these sessions, leaders should mostly listen. The goal is to surface hidden sentiments in a respectful setting. Ground rules (like confidentiality and no retaliation) help create a safe container for truth-telling.
  
  
• Acknowledge and Ritualize: Just as communities hold vigils or memorials, workplaces can benefit from small rituals of closure or appreciation. If a project ends in success or failure, consider holding a debrief not only on the tasks but on the experience. If a colleague leaves, take a moment to share memories or lessons learned from them. These practices help teams process events together, rather than each person privately dealing with it. It can be as simple as a dedicated agenda item or an informal gathering to say “this happened, and it matters to us.”
  
  
• Leadership Modeling of Vulnerability: Leaders set the tone. By openly acknowledging your own feelings and learning moments, you signal to others that it’s okay to do the same. Try phrases like, “I have to admit, I felt anxious when we lost that client, and I know some of you did too. Let’s talk about how it’s affecting us and how we can support each other.” This kind of transparency can defuse the unspeakable. It transforms hidden fears into shared problems the team can solve or carry together.
  
  
• External Support and Safe Channels: Sometimes internal dynamics are so stuck that you need an outside perspective. Consider bringing in an OD consultant, coach, or trained facilitator who understands group psychodynamics to help “unstick” the conversation. Additionally, providing anonymous channels for feedback (like surveys or suggestion boxes) can give voice to issues people might not be ready to attach their name to. Treat these as starting points to dig deeper, not as nuisances to brush off.
  

Conclusion: Making the Unspeakable Speakable
Adolescence may centre on teenagers, yet its lessons land squarely in organisational life. Families and companies are both human systems – built on trust, open dialogue, and shared resilience. When unspoken conflict or unacknowledged grief erodes those foundations, the fallout can be severe. The first act of repair is to name what lies hidden; only then can a system heal, adapt, and ultimately emerge stronger.

The same challenge applies to organisations: identify the covert dynamics and bring them safely into the light. Leaders who create space for difficult truths – about power, loss, or fear – transform “unspeakables” from corrosive secrets into shared problems the group can solve.

Behind every org chart and strategy, there are real people carrying real emotions. A truly resilient organisation cares not only about what work gets done, but how its people are really doing. That takes courage: to ask hard questions, listen for the quietest voices, and sit with discomfort until insight dawns. What remains hidden controls us; what is spoken can be understood and managed.

Let’s keep the conversation going – because making the invisible discussable is the first step toward meaningful, lasting change.