Systems thinking for the soul

“When I am worried,” Versace says, “I draw.”

I am paraphrasing, but this is broadly the sentiment in one of the many memorable scenes in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. It’s a sentiment I’ve related to ever since I saw it. Except for me, it’s not pictures, it’s words. Writing is my way of dealing with an inner world of worries.

Sometimes, this blog becomes less about documenting a professional journey and more about documenting the inner journeys that inevitably affect our professional lives. The single best thing anyone’s ever said about my writing is that it makes them feel seen. So, here are a few things I see in myself when things get darker than I’d like them to be.

The unpredictable logic of anxiety

Emotions hit you when you least expect them. This is both the peril and the joy of learning to trust them (a lifetime’s work in itself).

• The Peril: It feels dangerous to know you’re not in the driver’s seat of your own perceptions.

• The Joy: It is oddly comforting because it means it’s not all on you. Phew.

Circumstances don’t even have to make sense. I’ve had depressive episodes while having some of the best holiday breaks I can remember.

The Reality of Triggers: On February 5th, 2025, I had an anxiety attack on my daughter’s birthday. In purely logical terms, it made no sense. My daughter was having a wonderful morning as we packed up from a short trip to the English seaside, but my inner passenger was raging like mad. What. The. Fuck.

In hindsight, the dots connect. It was about a year after the last time I had spent time with my late mother. A bad piece of feedback at work had triggered memories of another bad piece of feedback from a year prior (which preceded me being made redundant). That was sufficient for my brain to decide that was going to be the moment we lashed out at my partner. Fun times.

Breaking the guilt cycle

The guilt cycle is real. The moment you feel your emotions bursting out of you, the guilt of knowing you didn't pay attention to them early enough shows up, too.

This is my pattern: I hold everything in and try to fix things by myself. I keep driving until a harsh exchange of words forces me to realize that my inner demons are not my partner’s fault. She was indeed right when she pointed out eight months ago that perhaps it might be good to go back to therapy to cope with losing my mother.

Anxiety will always find a reason to latch onto something. If it weren’t this, it would be something else. You don’t lose your anxious predispositions; you just find ways to avoid them latching onto everything all at once. All you can do is minimize it. This is where knowing what you can control, specifically your response to your emotions, if not the emotions themselves, helps a load.

Two lessons for strategists, leaders, and teams

Apart from writing to keep the worries at bay, are there practical lessons here for our professional lives? Absolutely.

1. Radical workplace empathy

No one would have guessed I was dealing with this level of internal turmoil based on my external behavior. Even I didn't realize I was so deep into it until it was too late to properly manage.

The takeaway: Never assume you know what your colleagues, peers, or clients are going through. Keep this in mind when they speak, make decisions, or act out.

2. Internal vs external systems thinking

A less obvious lesson is that the discipline of systems thinking applies just as much to our internal psychology as it does to external corporate structures.

In complex systems, unlike merely complicated ones, a tiny change in one isolated part can create enormous damage across the entire network because everything is deeply interconnected. Basically:

[Work Feedback] + [Grief Anniversary] -> [Internal System Overload] -> [Anxiety Attack]

When you look inward, you notice similar dynamics. The clearer we get at spotting the root problem and knowing where it comes from, the better we can remedy it before the internal system crashes.

The strategist in me likes to think our job is always to solve massive problems. But perhaps, every now and then, all we can settle for is preventing even bigger ones from emerging in the first place.