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Reactive thinking is one of the many dysfunctional symptoms of our often chronically imbalanced corporate cultures in which doing eclipses being, the left brain dominates the right brain, and sensing, feeling, intuiting, and the transpersonal are relegated to the outer fringes of life.
Reactive thinking is one of the many dysfunctional symptoms of our often chronically imbalanced corporate cultures in which doing eclipses being, the left brain dominates the right brain, and sensing, feeling, intuiting, and the transpersonal are relegated to the outer fringes of life.
For all the extraordinary technological progress we have made, the tragedy and great danger of modernity is that this has been completely normalised. In so doing, we have all but lost our deep kinship with the earth, with the trees, the birds, the oceans. We live in a kind of desperate existential exile, in our tiny, isolated bubbles of separateness, largely disconnected from our bodies, our hearts, and all too often from our souls.
I notice more and more in my consulting work that we are in an epidemic of loneliness. Despite the mirage of the widely used word ‘connected’, the sad truth is that we have quite possibly never been more disconnected. This alone accounts for the huge mental health crisis we face, as well as the greatly increased rate of suicides and suicidal ideation in young people.
In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing business landscape, the pressure to stay ahead and adapt quickly is immense. But the increasing prevalence of reactive thinking is posing a significant threat both to life and to businesses worldwide. Reactive thinking refers to the tendency to respond immediately to challenges and opportunities without taking a moment to pause, reflect, and strategise. This impulsive approach usually leads to decision-making based on short-term gains rather than long-term sustainability. It comes from a place of fear and rarely generates anything positive. It is quite different from a highly attuned speedy response, arising from a place of great centeredness.
These are some of the specific problems caused by reactive thinking:
Lack of strategic planning. Reactive thinking often prevents business leaders from engaging in strategic planning. Instead of defining clear goals, identifying potential risks, and devising long-term strategies, they find themselves constantly chasing after immediate solutions, and putting out the next fire.
Poor resource allocation. When businesses operate in a reactive mode, resources are frequently allocated on ad hoc basis, rather than being strategically distributed. This can lead to inefficient use of resources, as decisions are made hastily without considering the broader implications. In the long run, this can exhaust valuable resources, preventing investments in critical areas such as research and development or employee development.
Inconsistent decision-making. Reactive thinking often results in inconsistent decision-making. When decisions are made impulsively, without careful consideration and analysis, it becomes challenging to maintain a coherent and consistent strategy. This inconsistency can confuse employees, clients, and stakeholders, eroding trust and undermining the organisation’s credibility.
Missed opportunities. A reactive mindset can blind businesses to potential opportunities. By constantly focusing on immediate challenges and firefighting, organizations overlook opportunities for innovation, market expansion, and strategic partnerships. Proactive thinking, on the other hand, allows businesses to anticipate trends, identify gaps in the market, and seize opportunities to stay ahead of the competition.
Leaders unable to break free of reactive thinking impulses will also almost certainly be unable to create healthy relationships, because they have little availability to listen to people.
They have only their own incessant mental chatter on their ‘screen’ of awareness. They may well also lose sight of any kind of the meaningful larger purpose that has become increasingly important in corporate life.
Out of interest, I asked AI for recommendations about breaking free from reactive thinking. Here is a summary of the answers:
These are perfectly reasonable answers, yet, not surprisingly, do not go nearly deep enough. They do not address the basic state of internal fragmentation that reactive thinking arises from. When body, heart, mind and soul are not in any kind of real alignment, then our minds very easily take over, and anyway, this is what our culture supports from the early stages of education.
Furthermore, reactive thinking often arises from an emotional territory of anxiety. There are few people who do not carry anxiety within them in these increasingly unstable times, be that related to personal circumstances, or the various societal and global catastrophe scenarios unfolding. Because we are so frightened of our emotions, we usually do not do the one thing that is needed, the one thing that will calm our whole nervous system—to create safe enough relational space to simply feel the fear without in any way trying to make it change or go away.
This is part of what I consider to be the two essential pillars of development that I believe all leaders should be required to commit to.
The first is the practice of meditation, mindfulness and the body practices such as yoga, qigong or a martial art, in order to break the obsession with thinking, and restore it to its correct function as a servant rather than a master, as Einstein asked of us. This is far more than the use of meditation/mindfulness to manage stress, useful as that may be. We are speaking here of a fundamental inner ‘relocation’. Instead of showing up as ‘I am primarily thinker’, I gradually learn to show up as a deeper Presence, within which there is deep embodiment, an open heart, an attuned intuition function, and a highly sophisticated mind.
Another way of saying this is that there is a deep integration of ‘being’ and ‘doing’, not as an either/or but rather as an interdependent unity—this is the basis of all peak performance, whether in the arts, in sport or in leadership.
The other is firstly to rewrite our whole approach to emotion, and to abolish the idea of ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ emotion, and then to recognise the extent to which the dysfunctional parts of our adult personalities are formed by our unintegrated childhood experiences of hurt and wounding, as well as intergenerational trauma patterns, and to find mentors who are able to work with the healing of these; healing that takes place not by changing or fixing them, but rather by creating a relational space of sufficient warmth and unconditionality such that we can finally feel that which we have spent so much energy to not feel.
Then we will have leaders who are rooted in the river of life, and who create cultures that support the collective flow and natural intelligence of life, and who understand that, far from trying to control it, the urgency now is to learn how to be servants of it.
These are what I call ‘Leader as Healer’ And the toxicity of reactive thinking will be something we remember as a bizarre aberration, with a wry smile.
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