The Undercurrent
"What drives your company isn’t always visible but it’s always felt."
Beneath calm waters, unseen forces shape everything. It’s not the organisation chart or the mission statement that determines how your company actually works. It's the quiet rules, the emotional atmosphere, the stories no one will tell out loud, the meetings before the meeting, promotions favouring familiarity over competence. Teams drift and high performers quietly exit. Meetings run smooth but leave little impact.You sense something is off but nothing on paper explains it.That’s the Undercurrent, a living, breathing emotional system that governs trust, power, silence and belonging, whether you choose to look at it or not. This book is a diagnostic lens for understanding the truth beneath performance. It helps you read what’s really happening in your culture and why people behave the way they do when pressure rises.This isn’t about personality, it’s about emotional function and once you can see the roles, the patterns, and the drift, you can change what’s possible.
Beyond Behaviour. Beneath Metrics.
The Undercurrent is a book and diagnostic system for exploring what truly shapes company life, trust, power, silence, role adaptation and belonging. It maps the emotional terrain beneath the surface of culture, performance and leadership.This work is not a personality test, it’s a mirror held to the emotional roles we unconsciously inhabit to survive or stabilise systems. It's to help you notice how you move, what you’ve been holding and how your emotional stance affects the system around you.The Undercurrent is an emotionally reflective book about the invisible forces shaping companies. It covers the Emotional roles we adopt under pressure, the hidden dynamics of trust, power and silence, how systems reward masks over authenticity and what it takes to navigate without losing yourself.Written for leaders, coaches, HR professionals and system-sensers who feel what others miss and want language for what they’ve been carrying. Roles are not flaws, they're functions and the system has taught us to move this way for a reason.
Diagnostics
There are two diagnostic tests available to you.The Undercurrent Awareness Assessment
This short assessment will help you to determine the level of Undercurrent likely in your company.The Emotional Roles Diagnostic
What role do you play? Once you have read the book, you will be keen to assess your own personal emotional role and that of your team members and/or all employees as you start the program to adjust and calm the Undercurrents in your company.
Emotional Roles Diagnostic
What role do you play beneath the surface? We don’t just show up at work, we adapt, we absorb, we resist and we translate. The Emotional Roles Diagnostic is a tool for exploring the roles you unconsciously take on to survive or stabilise your environment, especially under pressure. It reveals:• Your dominant emotional roles.
• Your systemic quadrant (Driver, Stabiliser, Executor or Observer).
• Where you may be over-functioning.
• Where you tend to disappear.
• Your relational costs, blind spots and internal contradictions.This isn’t about fixing you, it’s about understanding how the system shaped you and how to move with more clarity, awareness and choice because what you feel isn’t personal, it’s pattern.Take the diagnostic and begin to name what’s really happening beneath your performance.
Undercurrent Awareness Assessment
Beneath every strategy, structure or culture initiative is something deeper, a felt sense, a system of emotional truths that rarely gets named. This short reflective assessment helps you explore whether invisible emotional forces, the Undercurrents are shaping your company’s reality more than you think. It invites you to pause and ask if you are leading the system or is the system leading you?This isn’t about diagnosing people, it’s about sensing systems and spotting where emotional intelligence has been replaced by performance.Whether you're a leader, HR partner or system-senser, this tool gives you language for what you've been feeling and a mirror for how your culture is really working.Take the Awareness Assessment and discover where your company stands.
Bring the Undercurrent to your Company
Stop guessing and start sensing
If you suspect something deeper is shaping your culture, you’re probably right. Beneath the surface of performance, there’s always a system of roles, rules and emotional patterns at play. We offer:• Diagnostic sessions to surface the emotional architecture of your team.
• Workshops to explore trust, power, silence and systemic roles.
• Facilitation to help leaders navigate emotional complexity with clarity.This work isn’t about fixing individuals, it’s about helping systems see themselves and giving language to what people have been carrying in silence. If you’re ready to understand what’s really going on beneath the surface, let’s talk.Get in touch to Book a conversation
🟥 Surface CalmYou’re in the danger zone, not because there’s obvious conflict but because there isn’t. What looks like calm may actually be emotional suppression, strategic silence or curated compliance. When feedback is polite, attrition is quiet and people smile while disconnecting and it’s easy to miss the signs but that’s exactly how cultural drift begins. Slowly, invisibly and behind a well-kept surface.This is the riskiest place to lead from, not because the system is volatile but because it’s numb.Prompt: Where might you be mistaking quiet for trust? What truths could be actively avoided in your presence?
🟨 Early DriftThe system is beginning to shift and you can feel it, even if it hasn’t been named. You’re picking up small tells like slightly filtered feedback, delayed decisions or a hesitation you can’t quite place. These are early signs of cultural dissonance, when what’s said and what’s felt start to diverge. This is the point where intervention is still possible but denial is common.Drift rarely announces itself. It happens in meetings that feel too smooth, exits that seem polite and strategies that don’t quite land.Prompt: What emotional cues are being downplayed because they’re inconvenient to address?
🟧 Systemic FrictionYou’re seeing the cracks. The system is under emotional strain and people are starting to adjust around it. Friction shows up in subtle resistance, lost energy or awkward silences where truth should live. People may still be performing but the cost is rising. What once felt cohesive now feels transactional, scripted, or heavy.At this stage, systems can still function but alignment is fractured and trust may be shifting underground.Prompt: What are people protecting themselves from? What’s not being said in the name of keeping things going?
🟥 Cultural StrainThere is clarity but not enough capacity to act on it. People can feel what’s wrong and the Undercurrent is known, even discussed privately but the system doesn’t yet have the structures, permission or courage to respond. This is where emotional intelligence outpaces organisational maturity.
The risk here is stagnation. Repeated acknowledgment without repair and cultural fatigue sets in when people know the truth but see no movement.Prompt: What conversations do people keep circling but no one is willing or able to hold?
🟩 Systemically AttunedYou have emotional visibility and that’s rare. You’re not free of Undercurrents but you see them. You can track distortion, sense pressure points and likely hold trust well enough that others speak more freely around you. That clarity is a leadership responsibility and not just a trait.Now comes the real work, protecting that clarity, widening it and helping others read the system with you.Prompt: What truths are now safe to name and what will you do with them?