Insights · The living company
Your company is a patient too: organizational trauma and the health of your business
What if it is simpler than all the management books tell you? What if a company is a bit like a person, with a body you can feel, and a history it carries? This article summarizes my book Je bedrijf is ook een patiënt (Your company is a patient too, in Dutch, to be published in December 2026): how to see your company as a living organism, how to recognize organizational trauma, and how to sense problems long before they show in the numbers.
By Dirk Jan Versluis, registered psychologist (NIP). Updated 15 November 2026.
Contents
You already feel how your company is doing
You walk into your own company on a Monday morning. Within a few seconds, you know how things are. Nobody has said a word, and no report has been opened. But you sense it. Something is in the air. Or: things are flowing again.
Most leaders do this every day. And most of them were never taught to take it seriously. In business we learn to measure, analyze and steer. We do not learn to feel.
My book turns this around. It asks you to put your company on the table and look at it the way a good doctor looks at a patient: with attention, with care, and with one simple question. Where does it hurt?
Putting the company on the table
In the Mauritshuis in The Hague hangs a famous painting by Rembrandt: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632). A group of men in black, with white collars, lean over a table. A doctor shows them something. On the table lies a body.
I first saw that painting when I was twelve. Decades later it came back to me, during one of our first trainings in what we now call the ECA Leadership Framework. I looked around the room. Every entrepreneur and director had brought a patient: their own company. We would put it on the table and look at it together.
As a psychologist, I could have chosen a different image: Freud’s couch. But a body speaks before there are words. You can see it, feel it and examine it long before it tells you anything.
“Freud would put your company on the couch. We put it on the table.”
There is one important difference with the painting. On Rembrandt’s table lies a dead man. Your patient is alive. He breathes, he moves, and he reacts to the way you look at him. And what we want to feel is exactly that life. The Dutch philosopher and physician Bert Keizer offers a beautiful image here: the soul is in the body the way the mood is in a party. You cannot point to it. But everyone who walks in can feel whether it is there.
The company as a living organism: four ways to look at your business
How you look at your company decides what you see. In the book I describe four pairs of glasses. In this article I call the company “he”, the way you would speak about a patient: we personify the company on purpose.
- The machine. This is the dashboard view. Red, orange, green. Every red box gets an owner who has to “fix” it before the next meeting. Clear and efficient. But it fails as soon as people are involved. Why does a good team suddenly get stuck? Why does a plan that works on paper never take off? The machine has no answer.
- The ecosystem. Now you see relationships instead of parts. Departments, clients and suppliers influence each other all the time. One new manager, one lost client, one merger, and you usually feel it everywhere. Arie de Geus, who led planning at Shell, described the company as a living being in The Living Company, with an identity, the ability to learn and a lifespan. Frederic Laloux, in Reinventing Organizations, compares the most developed organizations to a living organism.
- The person. We already say that the stock market is nervous, or that the market reacted with shock. You can look at your company the same way. Is he young or old? Does he stand up straight, or is he bent over? Is he tired, or full of energy? You cannot ask a machine how it is doing. You can ask a person.
- The patient. Every company has complaints now and then, just like every human being. That is no disgrace; it is part of being alive. If you look at your company as a patient, you admit that something is going on, you look with care instead of judgment, and you know it can heal. The question is no longer “who messed this up?” but “what does this company need to recover?”
None of these glasses is wrong. But most leaders wear only the first one for their entire career. And all four lead to the same question: is it flowing, or is it not?
You already speak the language of energy
Many leaders hear the word energy and close the door. I understand that. I am a psychologist, and I have worked with entrepreneurs and leaders for many years. So I keep this firmly on the ground.
But listen to how people talk about their work. “There is a good vibe in this team.” “The atmosphere was tense.” “That meeting drained me.” “The spark is gone.” We use these words exactly when we sense something that does not have a name yet.
You do not have to believe that energy exists. You only have to notice that you already use the language, and that it is useful. Doctors know this too: family doctors speak of their gut feeling, and it has been studied. It is part of what is called the clinical gaze: the trained eye of an experienced doctor who sees, within seconds, that something is wrong.
This is not about emotions in meetings. A healthy company actually feels calm. It is about perceiving how much life there is in a company, and giving it words. Because what is in the air and is never named, stays in the air.
Feeling means stepping in
In the army, they speak of rules of engagement: agreements about when you intervene, how far you go and when you withdraw. Sensing a company works in a similar way. And the first rule is the hardest one: are you in, or are you out?
You cannot feel a company from the sidelines. A doctor who only reads the file sees a case. A doctor who sits with the patient sees a person. Many leaders stay at the edge of the dance floor. They observe, analyze and manage, from a safe distance.
Stepping in also means looking honestly at the agreement beneath the agreement. Two partners start a company together. On paper they agree on everything. Underneath, one of them wants to grow, and the other mainly wants freedom. That hidden agreement will surface sooner or later. Read more about co-founder conflict.
And stepping in does something to you. What you feel might be yours, or it might belong to the company. Learning to tell the difference is a core skill. The nose is yours. The smell is not.
Start with the pain
Where it hurts, there is value. Pain shows you very quickly what really matters to people, and to companies. It is far more honest than a beautiful mission statement. Do not start with your policy documents. Start with the pain.
But most companies do something else with pain. They take a painkiller. The painkillers of business are clever little tricks: a new tool, a reorganization, a team outing, a new consultant, a new model the CEO read about on holiday that has to be implemented from Monday. None of these is wrong in itself. But if they are used to push the pain away instead of listening to it, they work for a while, and then you need the next one. You end up repeating the same moves, again and again.
What happens here is that people step out. As soon as it becomes painful or uncomfortable, they withdraw into their heads, away from the body. They start managing the pain, instead of going to its root.
Examining the patient: the body of your organization
The body map
A company has organs, and our language already knows it. We speak of the heart of the business, breathing space, digesting a merger, a company that is out of breath. In the book I go through the heart and bloodstream, breathing, digestion, the immune system, the nervous system and the senses, and posture and movement. Each one gives you a question to ask your company. Can he digest what comes in? Is he allergic to anything new, or does he let everything in? Is he fighting, fleeing or freezing?
Every body also has its own build. A one-person business, a family company, a large international group, a healthcare organization: each has a different constitution. A mouse has hundreds of heartbeats per minute, an elephant around thirty. Both are healthy. An elephant is not a failed mouse.
Above and beneath the skin
What you can point to, measure and report sits on the surface: the outer skin of a company. It matters. It gives shape and boundaries. But underneath lies the connective tissue: what the company carries, what is rubbing, what hangs in the air. Everything looked fine on the surface. Underneath, it did not.
The field
When you walk into a company, you step into a field: the whole of people, history, relationships and atmosphere that you can feel the moment you enter. The founder plays a special role in it. Dutch tax law has a nice term: a “silent contribution” (geruisloze inbreng), bringing a business into a company without settling the bill. I use it in a personal sense. The psychology of the founder is always a silent contribution: founders bring their personal energy into the field of the company. Nobody pays for it, and you will not find it on any balance sheet. But it is there.
Early warning signs: felt before it is seen
This might be the most practical idea in the book: problems are felt before they are seen. Often months before they show up in the numbers. I describe this as a staircase with six steps. Each step is heavier than the one before, and each needs a heavier intervention.
- Unease. Someone thinks: this is not right. But nobody says anything.
- Small malfunctions. Missed deadlines, grumbling at the coffee machine, meetings that keep running late.
- Acute. A conflict breaks out, someone leaves slamming the door, a client complaint escalates. Now everyone sees it.
- Chronic. It keeps coming back. Structural absence, turnover that does not stop, margins that drop a little further every year.
- Structural. The body itself has to change: a major reorganization, a crisis that hits the whole company.
- The end of this body. Bankruptcy. A takeover. Closure.
The earlier you notice, the lighter the intervention can be. So symptoms are not enemies. They are messengers. And sensing is not a luxury. It is intelligence.
Organizational trauma: when a company carries its history
Not only people can carry trauma. A company can also go through a shock that is never processed. The tension then stays in the system, and can grow into a trauma response of the whole organization. Organizational trauma (also spelled organizational trauma) is that unprocessed history, still active in the present.
Do not hang it too much on psychiatric concepts such as war trauma or abuse. Look at the body first. Trauma can be a blow to the head, or a hard fall on the ice. It can also be psychological. All these forms have something in common: an impact from outside crosses our boundaries. That is the element of trauma you also want to recognize in organizations.
Where organizational trauma comes from
Some sources I often meet in practice:
- a founder, or a dominant, patriarchal director
- a threatening bankruptcy
- conflict or betrayal between co-founders and business partners
- mass layoffs
- toxic leadership
- long-lasting conflicts
- periods of extreme pressure
- public damage to the company’s reputation, for example through a lawsuit
What happens when it is not processed
When such an event is not processed well, the tension stays in the system. It then calls for compensating or controlling behavior. Together, we cramp up. If you do not pay attention, a trauma response creeps into the whole company: a culture of fear, people who no longer speak up, conflicts that keep returning, control that squeezes instead of giving room. Such a response can stay under water for years. As long as it is not seen together, as a pattern we want to change, it stays.
Looking at it carefully
Care is needed here. Not every difficulty is trauma, and not every hunch is right. Recognizing it does not mean making the company sick. It means understanding why certain patterns keep returning. A few questions to start with:
- Which shocks has our company gone through in its history?
- Did we ever stop and look at them together, or did we simply carry on?
- Where do we see behavior that looks more like protecting than like doing business?
- What happens in my own body when I think back to that period?
Organizational trauma rarely stands apart from the people who lead the company. There is usually a connection between how the leader feels and how the company feels. Read more about leadership and trauma, and about trauma-informed leadership. For further reading on the topic, I recommend Stuck? Dealing with organizational trauma by the Belgian organizational coach Philippe Bailleur.
Treatment: growth comes in trimesters
The third part of the book is about what you do with all this. Starting something new is a kind of birth. In the book I describe three trimesters. In the first, an idea is conceived: a spark, an insight, a picture in your mind. In the second, it gets hands and feet: others hear about it, react to it, and you start building. In the third, everything is finished, refined and integrated, until it is ready to be born: the product goes to market, the department opens, the book is published.
Each trimester needs different people: visionaries, builders, finishers. Many problems in companies come from the right people being in the wrong phase, and from leaders who are no longer in their own place.
Bringing it into the boardroom
Of course, you will hear objections. “This is just culture, we have HR for that.” “What is the ROI?” “Energy? Are we going to light incense now?” “I only trust data.”
The book takes these objections seriously and answers them one by one. And it shows how to start small. You do not need to share feelings in a circle in every meeting. You can begin with one question at the start of a strategy session: how is our company actually doing? What does he need right now? Next to the numbers, not instead of them.
What this work is, and what it is not
This approach does not replace finance, strategy or craftsmanship. You give none of that up. You only add something: a way of looking that makes the rest complete.
There are clear limits, too. First stop the bleeding, then start feeling: in a real crisis, you act. People always come before the system. And anyone who senses things for others needs to stay sober and humble. This work is done with open, receiving hands, not with the claim that you always know better.
The question nobody asks
What you wish for a person, you can also wish for a company. That he is healthy and happy. That he is free in his body. That he can grow, not only in revenue, but in vitality. And that he is connected with himself and with the people who carry him.
So put your company on the table. Sit across from him for a moment, quietly. And ask him what almost nobody ever asks: how are you, actually? What would you like to tell me?
At Triunify
Putting your company on the table, together
With the ECA Leadership Framework (Energetic Corporate Anthropology) we examine companies as living systems: where tension is held, where energy flows or drains away, and which history is still active. For the leader, we combine psychological and body-oriented work with the language of business, because who the leader is, shows in the company.
Free and confidential, 45 minutes, online.
Frequently asked questions
What is organizational trauma?
A shock a company went through and never processed, such as a threatening bankruptcy, betrayal between partners, mass layoffs or toxic leadership. The tension stays in the system and shows up as a culture of fear, people who stop speaking up, or conflicts that keep returning.
What does it mean to see your company as a patient?
Looking at your company the way a good doctor looks at a person: as a living whole with a body, a history and complaints, instead of as a machine with parts. You look with care instead of judgment, and you ask what the company needs to recover.
Is this a spiritual approach?
No. It stays practical and grounded. It builds on language that leaders already use, such as atmosphere, vibe and gut feeling, and on research into the clinical judgment of doctors. You do not have to believe in anything.
How can you notice problems before they show in the numbers?
Problems usually start as unease that people feel but do not mention. They then turn into small malfunctions, before they become acute or chronic. Leaders who take these early signals seriously can act with a light touch, long before a crisis.
What are the “painkillers” of business?
Quick fixes that push pain away without looking at its cause: a new tool, a reorganization, a team outing, a new consultant. They are not wrong in themselves, but if they replace listening to the pain, the problem keeps coming back.
Who wrote the book?
Dirk Jan Versluis, psychologist (NIP), founder of Triunify and founder of the ECA Leadership Framework, a way to examine companies as living systems. The book Je bedrijf is ook een patiënt is in Dutch and will be published in December 2026.
Read also
Does your company need to be put on the table?
In a free 45-minute strategy session we explore what is going on in your company and what a good first step could be. Confidential, under the professional code of the Dutch Association of Psychologists (NIP).