When there is any deviation from expectations, grief show up, we just don’t call it that…
A brilliant conversation with Angela Fusaro, an emergency medicine physician and CEO, and our conversation completely shifted my perspective. Here is the powerful idea that really resonated with me: what if these feelings, these un-budgeted operating costs of change, are actually a form of grief? Not just the traditional grief we think of, but a “non-traditional grief” — any deviation from our expectations.
It’s a game-changer for understanding how our teams truly function, and how we can manage navigating the unseen costs of organizational change as levers for business growth. We explore how acknowledging non-traditional grief can improve team performance and leadership identity in an AI-driven world.
Our brains are wired for pattern recognition, and when expectations aren’t met, our brains interpret it as a threat. This kicks us into defensive & undesirable behaviours we often see: micromanagement, rumination, or even just general irritability. Naming it as loss or grief, rather than anger or frustration, disarms it and creates a path to deal with it constructively.
This reframe is crucial because it allows us to move from a place of blaming to a place of understanding. We can’t control everything, especially with things like AI changing our landscape so rapidly, but we can control how we process these moments.
Leaders have a responsibility to take this bold step, as their role offers a level of protection that individual contributors may not feel, and building this space for explicit co-regulation is what will keep performance and safety at a level where business and people can grow and thrive in the AI era.
The main insights you’ll get from this episode are :
- Leadership in the ER involves facing grief and being comfortable with loss, yet deviation from expectation affects all professional settings and elicits the same human response.
- Human brains are wired for pattern recognition, and to have intention or want a desired outcome, but this loss of expectation is often not acknowledged, leading to irritability, rumination, and micromanagement in teams.
- The brain interprets deviation as a threat, but naming grief disarms it; many leaders see the discussion of vulnerable topics as a loss of authority but normalising vulnerability helps co-regulation, which improves performance.
- Unprocessed grief threatens confidence, certainty and control – it entails complexity and pain, which are important signals that can be leveraged once acknowledged.
- Holding grief and gratitude at the same time is a necessary leadership skill but requires practice and training our brain to believe; we use gratitude to cope with loss rather than alongside it (as part of a transition process).
- ‘And’ is a powerful word in terms of polarity: in systems thinking, it reframes processes, decision-making, and outcomes from a duality perspective and instils worth and authenticity in the process.
- AI is increasing how often leaders have to let go of what they think would work: as AI fulfils more complex tasks for us, our ability to process being human and connection to each other will have to accelerate.
- Leaders will have to model this, demonstrating a shift away from outcome-based KPIs to KPIs that value decision-making quality and the bravery to make decisions in ever-increasing ambiguity.
- Leaders must take stock with their team after a setback to acknowledge it, reframe regret, and commit to doing things differently going forward; accountability requires a safe environment to prevent the ‘blame game’.
- Accountability will be the last thing to be delegated to AI, e.g. in medicine, the responsibility is still on the physician – AI is unable to handle the complexity of being human, to hold polarities, to metabolise loss, etc.
- People with authority must take the first bold step to acknowledge the truth and reflect for themselves if they can self-regulate before tackling co-regulating others.
Find out more about Angela and her work here :
