Brené Brown

So if I work for you and you're using power over to lead me, you're threatening me with my job, you're threatening me with consequences, you're threatening me with demotion, one of two things is going to happen for me neurobiologically.

I am either going to

just become numb to it, it's not, it's not going to be able to, you're not going to maintain, I can't maintain that constant level of fear.

It's just too demanding, just physically demanding.

Or I might get hyper normalized.

I might just like, this is what I work in.

This is like crazy.

This is it, you know, but every now and then you're going to have to do something that demonstrates to me how chaotic and cruel you can actually be.

Like you're going to have to engage in periodic acts of cruelty to remind me that the fear is real and to put me back in it.

And so one of the things you're seeing right now, I mean, like we in the U.S., the deportation and immigration issues, right?

This is not a president that has tightened his belt on immigration more than other previous presidents.

But we've never seen masked people grabbing people off the street while children hold onto their legs screaming, mom, mom, mom.

We've never seen that before, right?

But we've had other presidents probably exceed that.

deportation numbers that we're seeing, but we've never seen that level of cruelty and display.

That is a real display of cruelty as a reminder of who holds power and who does not.

I'm a big systems theory thing.

I'm a systems theory person.

I think in systems theory, I was trained in systems theory.

I think if you don't understand systems theory, at least if you're leading an organization right now, you're going to fall behind because the complexity inside and outside of organizations is such that we need a framework to understand how all of these individual systems are bumping up against each other.