Can literature change the dynamics of your organisation?

📚 What book are you reading? How is it shaping your leadership? Can literature change the dynamics of your organisation?

➡️ Organisations today are still struggling to balance 2 essential forces:
Instrumentality - getting things done efficiently - and Humanism - fostering growth, connection and empathy.

When this balance is lost, polarisation creeps in. You are probably all familiar with the effect of 'polarisation' when 2 groups are pitted against each other and its spiral:
Disidentification: "I'm not like you."
Moralisation: "You're wrong - so you must be bad."
Dehumanisation: we forget that the "other" has the same fears, dreams and struggles as we do.

⚠️ The result in organisations? Creativity suffers. Misunderstandings multiply. Trust erodes. How do you break down this polarisation that often undermines teams and internal fluidity?

✅ The INSEAD Executive Education/INSEAD Lifelong Learning's webinar "Leading Between the Lines | Limitless", led by Professor Jennifer Louise Petriglieri and animated by Nazia Sajawal&Alex MacDougald, opens a surprising path: literature can be a powerful tool to humanise your organisation and improve its effectiveness. A striking study: men with adult daughters tend to change their views about women in the workplace. Why does this happen? Because they understand them through this intimate connection.
➡️ https://lnkd.in/eMPxnURm

‍❤️ Fiction does the same thing. Stories ask us to inhabit someone else's inner world and invite us to walk in someone else's shoes - not passively, as in a film, but actively, through our imagination. It literally rewires our brains for empathy. It provides a shortcut to connection - even with people we don't know, resemble or understand. By activating the emotional brain, it builds connections across differences.

😄 So if you want your team to better understand IT, neurodiversity or anyone else's mindset? Get them reading.
🔗 Literature is a mirror - but it's also a bridge.As leaders, you need to remember that: you are not outside the problem.
As the example of The Picture of Dorian Gray from the webinar shows, we all hide our own contradictions (our "portrait") in order to project our shadows onto others. But great leadership begins when we stop projecting them onto others and start facing them. It's in this reckoning that bridges are built.

🙏 My takeaways are:
1. 🔍 Embrace introspection: What "portrait" are you hiding?
2. 📖 Integrate fiction: Share stories that spark real dialogue.
3. 🌍 Cultivate common ground: at the heart of every conflict are universal needs - security, meaning, recognition.What does that sounds like to you now?

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