Trish's Blog

Somewhere along the way, workplaces decided emotions were a problem to manage instead of information to understand.

• If someone raises a concern with feeling attached, it gets labelled as overreacting.
• If someone highlights a cultural issue, it’s brushed off as “personal”.
• If someone senses something is off, the response is usually, “Do you have any data to back that up?”

BUT, The emotion is the data.

What we call “emotional” is often the first signal of a deeper issue

Frustration usually shows up long before burnout.

• Unease shows up long before a safety incident.
• Resentment shows up long before turnover.
• Disengagement shows up long before your engagement survey tells you you’ve got a problem.

Yet workplaces treat those emotional signals as noise instead of early warning signs.

Why emotions get dismissed

There are a few reasons:

1. Emotions feel harder to control: You can’t stick them in a spreadsheet or announce you’ve “closed the gap” on frustration levels.

2. Emotions are harder to sanitize: They expose culture, behaviour, power, and conflict.

3. Emotions force conversations many leaders would rather avoid: It’s easier to bury the discomfort under “metrics”.

But whether we acknowledge them or not, emotions are constantly feeding us information about what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs attention.

Emotions tell the truth numbers can’t

A team might hit its KPIs while quietly falling apart. A employee might look “high performing” on paper but feel completely disconnected. A program might look effective in the dashboard but cause silent frustration for the people delivering it.

Metrics show the pattern. Emotions show the impact. You need both.

Enter Weird Wisdom®

Weird Wisdom® encourages people to sit with the messy parts of workplace life; uncertainty, tension and contradiction. And emotions live right in that space. They’re uncomfortable sometimes, but they point to what’s real. They reveal blind spots. They highlight the truth behind the numbers. They show you what people will never write in a survey.

If you want a workplace that thinks clearly and adapts quickly, you need a culture where emotional signals are treated as valid data, not as disruptions.

So let’s call this what it is

Dismissing emotions isn’t being objective. It’s being incomplete.

The organisations that thrive are the ones willing to listen to what people feel as closely as they listen to what people measure. Because emotions aren’t the opposite of data. They’re part of it.

And ignoring them doesn’t make a workplace stronger, it just makes problems quieter until they get loud enough to become unavoidable.