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You know your business needs to change, but you’re caught in the emotional and relational dynamics that are holding you back. Welcome to Noble Metal, the podcast that helps you forge a new kind of leadership. Host Phillip Weiss, a seasoned executive coach and organizational consultant, reveals how to become a more resilient, deliberate, and less-anxious leader.
Through powerful insights based on Bowen Theory and systems thinking, you’ll learn to navigate complex workplace relationships, manage challenging strategic issues, and lead your team to sustainable change. Get the clarity and tools you need to forge a new path for your business.
Ep20
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Submarine Crisis
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[00:00:00]
Phillip Weiss: October 27th, 1962, a Soviet submarine called the B59 is sitting submerged off the coast of Cuba, and it is, by every account that we know of really, a small metal hell. Air conditioning has failed. It's over a hundred degrees in some of the compartments, and the crew has been wa-- rationing water for days.[00:01:00]
Directly overhead, American destroyers have spotted them, and they are dropping small depth charges, not to sink them, but just to force them to try to sur- to surface. But no one on the sub knew that. They-- Nobody on the sub knew what they, you know, why they were doing that. As far as they were concerned, the Americans were attacking.
They've had no contact with Moscow in days, and as far as they know, probably, like, World War III has already started somewhere above them. The captain is a man named Savitsky. He reaches a conclusion that in the m- in the moment seems pretty rational to him: "We're under attack, and we should fight back." So this, this particular submarine, though, happens to be carrying something the Americans don't know about, and that is a nuclear, a nuclear torpedo roughly the size of the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima.
Arkhipov Says No
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Phillip Weiss: Savitsky gives the order to [00:02:00] arm it. Protocol, though, on most Soviet subs required two officers to agree before a launch like this. And on this particular submarine, because of what happened, I guess because of who happened to be on board, it required three, officers of agreement. And the third man, a flotilla chief of staff named Vasili Arkhipov said no. That's it That is almost literally the whole hinge the world swung on in that moment. One man in a room full of heat and fear and very good reason to say yes, thoughtfully, intentionally said no.
He argued that the Americans were signaling and not attacking, and he was right. He talked the captain into surfacing instead of firing. And a nuclear exchange that would have almost certainly ended in full-scale war didn't [00:03:00] happen because one person in that system did not catch what everyone else around him had.
For decades, almost nobody knew this guy's name. It only became public apparently in two thousand and two, forty years later, when a historian said flatly, "A man named Vasili Arkhipov saved the world." His own wife said he never talked about it like it was really remarkable. ~ ~
Thermostat Versus Thermometer
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Phillip Weiss: I opened with that story on purpose because I want you to notice something about it before we go any further. Arkhipov didn't win that moment with a better argument.
He won it by being the one person in a room full of truly justified panic who himself was not panicking. And that's the whole episode really today. Welcome back to Noble Metal, where we explore leadership at work and in life through the lens of Bowen Family Systems Theory. So nothing in your inbox this week is [00:04:00] most likely a live nuclear torpedo, but the mechanism underneath that story is identical, just smaller and really slower. And it shows up maybe in your Tuesday morning staff meetings as reliably as it showed up on that submarine. Here's the question I'm asking. I'm asking you to think about anyway for the rest of this episode. When the room gets anxious, are you the thermostat or are you the thermometer?
I'll get back to that in a second.
Bowen Theory Refresher
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Phillip Weiss: Quick refresher, though, on the lineage, uh, regarding Bowen Family Systems Theory here for anybody joining us sort of mid-series or who needs a reminder. This show leans heavily into Bowen Family Systems Theory. Murray Bowen, who built it back in the nineteenth century-- excuse me, twentieth century.
Michael Kerr, who mapped it, very much alongside of Bowen. And then I also want to note [00:05:00] and shout out in this particular ep-episode Ed Friedman, who was the one who pointed all of it directly at leadership and non-family systems. Friedman's the one who gave us that thermostat line, actually, and it's worth, I think, engaging here.
A thermometer basically just registers whatever the temperature is already. A thermostat, though, sets the temperature. It changes the room instead of reporting on it. And Friedman's argument, and it's a, I think it's kind of a radical one, is that a leader's single most important function in a crisis isn't necessarily their strategy, their intelligence, or even their decisiveness.
It's whether they can stay a thermostat when everybody else around them has become a thermometer. Thermometers reflect whatever anxiety is already in the air.
Less Anxious Presence
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Phillip Weiss: Friedman's own name for this quality is the [00:06:00] non-anxious presence, and I want to give him full credit for it. It's his term and it's, and it's the one you'll find if you go looking for, you know, for him in the source material.
But I'm gonna use a different label for it the rest of this episode and really going forward in this series and, and in the work we do, we use this term, which is the less anxious presence. And here's why. Because in my opinion, non-anxious implies a finish line that I'm, I'm not sure any of us can actually cross.
I know I, I'm not non-anxious, and you're probably not either. There's always some kind of resonant anxiousness humming around us.
Nobody in a real leadership role is walking around with zero anxiety and pretending that that zero is the bar just I think sets people up to feel like they're failing at something that's not attainable. To me, less anxious is, uh, just a little bit more realistic. [00:07:00] Bowen himself gave us the clinical version of this in his, famous Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, that is his tome.
He defines a differentiated self as someone who, quote, "Can maintain emotional objectivity while in the midst of an emotional system in turmoil, yet at the same time actively relate to people in the system." Let me repeat that. A differentiated self is someone who can maintain emotional objectivity while in the midst of an emotional system in turmoil, and at the same time actively relate to key people in that system So think about this because it's doing two things at once, that quote.
It's doing two things that most of us treat as kind of opposite, opposites really. --Staying objective and staying Not objective instead of engaged, but objective [00:08:00] while engaged. That phrase, I think, emotional objectivity, is really worth holding onto for the rest of this episode. I don't mean by it or, and Bowen theory doesn't mean by it detachment.
It doesn't mean being unaffected by what's happening around you, but it means seeing the system clearly enough, and especially your own place in it, that you don't just become another kind of data point in the panic. Being able to step away to, uh, actually quote Bowen's term himself, "Get up into the bleachers.
Look down on what's going on." Be again, objective and curious about what's really happening. Bowen had a word for what spreads through a room that we're really describing here, and that word is, or that phra- two words, emotional process Anxiety isn't just a feeling one person has.
It moves, it's [00:09:00] contagious. It moves faster often than facts do. Bowen theory suggests most of what we experience as, for example, quote, "The team is upset about the reorg," is really just anxiety bouncing around a system amplifying itself with the actual reorg itself maybe beside the point. And I'll just kinda put a little teaser out there. The idea is sort of the content versus the emotional process.
So often we get up-- get caught up into the facts of sort of what's going on around, like, hey, the, the reorg, reorg is upsetting everybody, versus sort of the underlying emotional process, and that's something we'll dig more into in another episode.
Not Calm At Any Cost
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Phillip Weiss: But before I go further, let me clear up the thing I think that people usually get wrong about this less anxious presence, because in a way, I mi- I think I misunderstood it too initially.
It doesn't mean calm at any cost. It does not [00:10:00] mean nodding, you know, just to, to be in agreement. It doesn't mean avoid having the hard, hard conversation or being the person who never raises their voice. Friedman was actually pretty allergic, I would say, to that version, of what he called non-anxious presence, and he was referring to this idea of peacemongering.
We just-- we get so anxious and uncomfortable about the potential reactivity that we just start engaging in behaviors that are gonna be sure, you know, to minimize any potential, negative response. Again, he called it peacemongering, which is leaders who mistake the absence of conflict for the presence of health, when really they've just gone numb, essentially, to protect themselves from that anxiety in the room.
So a less anxious presence still shows up. It takes positions, and it still has hard conversations. The difference is that they do [00:11:00] it from a more regulated place instead of a more reactive one, and that really is this emotional objectivity in practice. Bowen's whole point was that the differentiated self stays actively related to people and doesn't withdraw from them
So Arkhipov, our Russian, our Russian star here, didn't stay quiet on that submarine.
He argued, and apparently forcefully with his captain. He just did it without matching the panic in the room, and he did it with data. That's the whole distinction. He was engaged. He was not reactive. He was data, if you will, equipped. He was present and steady.
Parenting Panic
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Phillip Weiss: So picture the scene that almost, you know, probably every parent can relate to.
It's the last stretch of, let's say, a long car ride, or it's the last hour before bedtime. And that's when often one of the kids loses it over something probably pretty small, [00:12:00] a broken toy or a round of some game that went haywire. Somebody else looked at somebody, you know, cross-eyed On paper, by and large, it's very minimal and nothing.
But it doesn't feel like nothing because their panic has a way of finding you. Your blood pressure kind of climbs right along with theirs. And the easy move, the move that feels like leadership in, in the moment, is to raise your voice to get everybody to calm down. Which, if you've ever tried it, honestly works about as well as you'd expect.
It really most likely and most often doesn't. Because at that moment, you're not a thermostat, you're just a louder thermometer. What actually works when we're able to do it is going in the other direction, stopping in the moment, pausing, interrupting what, what might have been a go-to response. Maybe literally getting quieter instead of [00:13:00] louder, slowing your voice down.
I do believe these body dynamics make a difference. And maybe asking one calm question instead of issuing a decree. Somehow, within a minute or so, the temperature in the room comes down, not because the actual problem got solved, but because one person in that room stopped adding their own anxiety to the pile.
Same kids, same crisis, same parents. The only thing that changed was whether, in this case, literally the adult in the room was reflecting the panic back or absorbing it
Worth naming, I think, why this particular story fits here at all. Families are where Bowen theory was built in the first place. Bowen was studying families before anybody applied it to any particular organization or non-family [00:14:00] entity.
Family is kind of where we start. It moves fast and it's very intense, often more intense than our organizations. If you've ever wondered why you can walk into your parents' house as a fully competent adult and regress to a 15-year-old within about-- within a few minutes, that's, that's the mechanism we're talking about here.
Systems have long memories, and they pull you back into those roles very quickly.
Chronic Anxiety At Work
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Phillip Weiss: One of the reasons I wanted to do this episode now sp-specifically, I, I, I want to note here. I think that most of you listening to this podcast right now are possibly managing more chronic anxiety than almost at any point in your careers.
Not one crisis, but a low, constant hum of them. That's the chronic idea. And specifically, I'm referring to AI. AI is rewriting what people's jobs look like, [00:15:00] sometimes month to month, even day to day, and it's doing it faster than most organizations, I think can, can really keep up with. Budgets are tighter.
Reorgs are starting to happen with less warning than they used to. I was just on a call the other day with somebody based in Seattle talking about their, their technology-oriented friends in that area who are losing jobs due to AI. So underneath all of this is a question nobody really wants to say out loud in a team meeting, but it's some version of, "Is my job going to exist next year?
Is it gonna exist next month?" And that question doesn't really need an answer to do damage. It just kind of needs to be there unaddressed, sort of generation-- rating that sort of low-grade hum of anxiety, that chronic, hum, if you will. And I personally, I don't think that, the static is gonna go away anytime soon, and I don't think, I don't think it's a job as a leader necessarily to make it go away.
We [00:16:00] can't. But what you can do is decide whether you're gonna amplify it or absorb it.
Acute Versus Chronic
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Phillip Weiss: And Bowen actually made a useful distinction here that I think gets missed, and that's the difference between acute anxiety and chronic anxiety, which really are different animals. So let me take a minute to clarify this.
Acute anxiety is the depth charge. Think, think Russian sub story. A real in-the-moment specific time-bound threat Chronic anxiety, again, using the Russian sub analogy, is, is the heat in the compartments that's up or the water rationing. It's the ongoing condition that nobody can quite name or fix, but it's there lowering everybody's threshold for panic until something really relatively small gets treated like an actual depth charge.
Most of what's draining your team right now isn't [00:17:00] the crisis of the week. It's most likely that chronic anxiety hum wearing a series of different, maybe call it acute costumes And that's exactly, I think, the condition a less anxious presence is built for. Because I don't believe that you can out-strategize chronic anxiety.
But I do think, I do wonder if you can maybe out-regulate it. Think about the last time a project slipped a deadline in your organization, let's say. if the system underneath it is already chronically anxious, that one slipped deadline doesn't get treated necessarily as just this one slipped deadline.
It gets treated as proof that the whole thing, for some people, is falling apart. Evidence that whatever fear was already circulating, you know, that leadership has lost their way, that nobody around here knows what they're doing. It gets all confirmed. The deadline was the [00:18:00] depth charge. The organization's chronic anxiety is the hundred-degree engine room that made everybody ready to assume the worst So let's, let's make this a little bit more practical.
Three Thermostat Moves
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Phillip Weiss: Three moves I wanna suggest to you if you wanna actually be more of the thermostat, the one that's regulating, instead of the thermometer, the one that's just kind of reporting and mimicking. First, notice your own temperature before you try to manage somebody else's. This sounds obvious, but it's almost never done because it is hard to do.
Before you walk into the tense meeting, the, the hard conversation, the, "Hey, can we talk?" Slack message, take fifteen seconds or even five seconds. I've heard somebody refer to the five-second vacation, which is just a really nice, solid, deep breath where you're getting oxygen into your lungs. And by the way, when you get oxygen [00:19:00] into your lungs, it within milliseconds gets to the brain, which calms us down and creates clearer thinking.
So take a few seconds and ask yourself: What, what am I sensing? Where's this coming from?
Not because your feelings are wrong, but because whatever you're carrying, you're about to hand to everybody else in that room, whether you say a word or not Again, this is harder than it sounds because most of us honestly are, are not so great always at noticing our own temperature in real time. We maybe notice it 90 minutes later, say in the shower when we suddenly realize why we snapped at somebody over a scheduling question that was maybe legitimate.
That five to 15-second version of this is just a habit of pausing at the threshold in the moment and asking an honest question, "What am I bringing into this room right now that may have nothing to do what's on the agenda?" [00:20:00] It's a genuine willingness to look at that emotional process, to create that objectivity, to create enough distance from your own reaction to actually see it before it walks into the room with you
Remember Arkhipov, our, our hero in that Russian sub story, didn't win the argument on that submarine with a speech by and large. He won it by walking in with regulated, deliberate, clear thinking Secondly, again, using this Russian sub incident, learn to tell a depth charge from a declaration of war. Is it a real threat?
Ask yourself a genuinely under-asked question. is this really as urgent as it seems? Or does it just feel urgent because everybody around me is treating it that way? Friedman used to point out that chronically anxious systems lose the ability to distinguish a genuine crisis [00:21:00] from a habitual one.
Everything getting treated as a five alarm, which means nothing actually gets the response that it needs Your job isn't to match the room's temperature, but it, it, it may very well be to accurately diagnose the temperature, so to speak. So pic- picture a leader who gets a panic message from, say, three different directions in the same afternoon, all about the same, let's say, missed number, all with slightly lift-- you know, different levels of doom attached to it The easy instinct for that leader is to match that energy.
Call a meeting, loop in the board, the whole fi-- you know, the whole five alarm thing. An example of the harder but possibly better move might be to take an hour, go aside by yourself, pull the data yourself, and find out whether it's an actual miss or just a reporting error If you lead with the room's temperature [00:22:00] instead of your own deliberate thinking, you can spend a week managing a crisis that probably never really existed.
Thirdly, and this is the one I think sometimes people might tend to skip, regulate before you communicate Not after. Regulate before you communicate. Don't send the email while you're still hot. Don't walk into the room still carrying whatever just happened in the meeting before. Create some space so you can regulate.
I'm, I'm not talking about suppressing what you feel. Bowen was clear that stuffing your emotions doesn't make, m-make you really a thermostat. It just makes you, in a sense, a thermometer with the volume turned down, and it usually leaks out sideways later on I'm wondering if regulating means metabolizing or processing it first on, kind of on your own time, [00:23:00] so that what you bring into the room is something closer to your actual thinking, not necessarily your rawest reactivity to it.
Practically speaking, that might mean taking a walk around the block or down the street before that tough conversation. There is so much to be said by-- about getting outside, breathing fresh air, opening... Again, getting more of that oxygen into our lungs. It might mean drafting the hard email and sitting on it for an hour or two or a day or two.
Not necessarily to soften it up, uh, maybe, but to make sure that it's actually saying what you mean instead of what your adrenaline is maybe wanting to say in the moment None of this is about being slower for its own sake. It's about making sure the version of you that shows up is the most defined one and the least reactive one
Define Yourself Under Pressure
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Phillip Weiss: Here's [00:24:00] where this kind of connects everything we've been building across this, little series as of late regarding relationship quality, and we keep coming back to that. The quality of your relationships as a leader is directly correlated to how clearly you've defined yourself within these relationships.
A less anxious presence isn't a personality trait some leaders are lucky enough to have and others aren't. I really, I really do believe that. It's what, it's what self-definition looks like under pressure Bowen's own differentiated self of staying objective while still relating.
It's the practical output of actually knowing who you are, what your role is, where you're headed, what you believe, what you don't believe, what you will do, what you won't do, what you will say, what you won't say Because the leaders who cave into the room's anxiety are [00:25:00] almost always the ones who haven't done that kind of work
The leaders who can stay a thermostat aren't calmer by temperament. they're actually clearer by definition, meaning they work at it. This is a skill. It's not necessarily a personality trait. And if I may say, I think the, the hardest work, but some of the best payoff is doing it in our own families.
That is the most intense environment where this work of differentiation takes place.
Closing Challenge
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Phillip Weiss: So here's what I want you to carry out of this as we come to a wrap. Somewhere in the next week, you're gonna be in a room, a real one, not, not a submarine, where the temperature's rising and everybody in it is reaching for the nearest justified reason to match it And you're gonna have roughly the same choice that Arkhipov had, just on a smaller scale. Are you gonna reflect the [00:26:00] temperature or are you actually gonna set it? You don't need to win the argument. You just need to be the person in the room who isn't panicking in the moment That's the whole job some days, honestly.
It was enough actually to save the world one time, and it's probably enough for you in your Tuesday staff meeting. And if you don't quite manage it this week, I get it. You know, that automatic reactivity gets hold really fast. If you match the temperature instead of setting it, that's okay. This is, this is a process and as, as we like to say in our work, these are things we experiment with.
We work at it. The goal is never to stop being a thermometer entirely. I'm not sure that's totally possible. But it's, it's more noticing... It, it's about noticing, I, I would say more quickly and resetting just a little bit sooner. And you do that, and the room resets with [00:27:00] you So as we look at our next, uh, episodes, I just wanna mention to you what we've got coming up.
If you've been liking what you've been hearing so far, we are gonna dig more specifically into the family business dynamic in the next several episodes. So stick around for that. In the meantime, keep working it, experimenting, and I'll see you next time. Thank you.