Shadow Work Mining

Origin. Jungian shadow (the disowned contents of the psyche), applied to teams and organizations.

Mechanism. Locates the material that a group has excluded from admissible discussion and treats the exclusion itself as data. What cannot be said constrains what can be designed.

Procedure. Name what is not being said. Name what would be professionally costly to say. Name the failure everyone anticipates and no one has stated. Design against those.

Applies to. Post-mortems, strategic reviews, and any process where the visible options have been pre-filtered by social cost.

Limitations. Requires psychological safety to run, and its subject is exactly the situations where safety is absent. Under those conditions it produces performance rather than disclosure. The Jungian derivation supplies vocabulary only; nothing about individual psychodynamics is shown to transfer to group process.