Eros: The Forgotten Energy in Organizations

There is a word that has nearly vanished from the vocabulary of organizations. We talk endlessly about strategy, performance, productivity, innovation, engagement, competencies, purpose, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. We have built sophisticated management systems to measure almost everything that happens inside a company. But there is one question that rarely appears on any dashboard: are people alive here?

I am not talking about corporate happiness, artificial motivation, or the naive idea of turning work into a place where everyone is permanently satisfied. I am talking about something deeper: vitality. The capacity to desire, create, engage, be surprised, form bonds, imagine futures, and feel that what we do is part of something worth existing.

The ancient Greeks had a word for a dimension of that experience that today seems to have been almost entirely forgotten: Eros.

And recovering Eros is one of the most important conversations we can have about the future of leadership. Because an organization can be functioning and still be dead on the inside.

It can deliver results, hit targets, grow, hire talent, launch products, and increase market share. It can have excellent processes, cutting-edge technology, and healthy indicators. And yet, within it, there can exist a quiet sense of absence: people perform, but no longer desire; they comply, but no longer create; they stay, but no longer belong.

Perhaps we have made a conceptual error by confusing functioning with life.

A machine functions; a living system pulses. That difference is fundamental.

Eros is far greater than sexuality

When we use the word Eros today, we immediately think of sexuality. That association is not entirely wrong, but it is shallow and insufficient for grasping the depth of the concept.

In Plato's Symposium, Eros appears as desire. But not simply as the desire to possess something. Diotima presents Eros as that which moves toward the beautiful, the good, toward what one does not yet have and wishes, in some way, to bring into being. The erotic movement does not end with the acquisition of the desired object. It finds its highest expression in generation: generating beauty, knowledge, virtue, thought, works, and new forms of existence.

This reading completely transforms our relationship with the concept. Eros can be understood as a force of creation.

It is that which makes us look at something that does not yet exist and feel that it deserves to exist.

A company, a new way of educating, a new way of leading, and even a new society.

In this sense, Eros is deeply connected to the human capacity to co-create the future.

And that is precisely what seems to be missing in many contemporary organizations: not the inability to execute the present, but rather enough desire to create a future different from the reality we see today.

The problem of an organization without desire

There is an important difference between a person who works because they must and a person who, beyond that necessity, can find in their work some space to express their intelligence, creativity, contribution, and desire to build something.

We need not romanticize that difference. Work is also necessity, responsibility, livelihood, and social structure. Not every activity needs to be passionate. Not every day needs to produce meaning. And an organization cannot depend on constant emotional motivation to function.

But there is a limit. When the logic of productivity begins to occupy every available space of human experience, something disappears.

Curiosity diminishes. The capacity to play with ideas diminishes. The willingness to take risks diminishes. The relationship with others becomes instrumental.

Work comes to be executed, but not necessarily lived. And then a question arises that may be more important than any climate survey: what happens to an organization's creative capacity when people stop desiring what they are building?

An organization without Eros may remain efficient for a time. But it will find it increasingly difficult to produce novelty. Because creativity does not arise from competence alone. Creativity is born from the encounter between competence and desire.

Rollo May perceived something that remains deeply relevant today. In Love and Will, he explores the relationship between love and will as fundamental dimensions of human existence. For May, Eros must not be reduced to sex. It is connected to vitality, the capacity for encounter, care, creativity, and the experience of being genuinely engaged in life.

There is something especially pertinent in this for leadership: love and will should not be separated.

Will gives us direction, the capacity for choice, determination, and action.

Love connects us, makes us capable of perceiving others, and acknowledging that what we do has consequences beyond ourselves.

When we have will without love, we may produce control, domination, and instrumentalization. When we have love without will, we may fall into passivity, dependency, or an inability to act.

Mature leadership is precisely that which can integrate both. Having enough strength to act without losing the capacity to care, having direction without turning people into instruments, and having ambition without losing sight of the system of which we are a part.

This is where I begin to see a deep connection between Eros and Regenerative Leadership.

Because to regenerate is not simply to care. It is also to create. And it is not possible to truly create without desire.

Desire as a strategic force

Over recent years, we have polarized far too much what we call strategy from what we call desire.

Strategy seems rational. Desire seems subjective.

Strategy belongs in the boardroom. Desire seems to belong to private life.

But that separation does not hold. Every strategy is, ultimately, a decision about a future we wish to build.

When an organization decides to invest in a particular technology, enter a particular market, transform its culture, or create a particular product, it is responding — explicitly or implicitly — to a question: what future do we want to make possible?

For this reason, a strategy without desire quickly becomes mere optimization.

We begin to ask only how to do things better, faster, cheaper.

But we stop asking: better for whom? Faster toward where? More efficient in service of what future?

This is where Eros becomes strategic once again. Because Eros does not only ask "how do we do it?"

It asks: "What deserves to be born?"

That is a leadership question.

Byung-Chul Han and the society that lost the other

It is impossible to think about the contemporary crisis of Eros without engaging with Byung-Chul Han.

In The Agony of Eros, Han describes a society shaped by the logic of performance, positivity, exposure, and consumption. In his reading, one of the consequences of this model is the weakening of alterity.

And this is deeply relevant for organizations. Because Eros needs the other.

The other who is not me. The other who surprises me. The other who contradicts me. The other who does not immediately confirm what I think. The other who unsettles me.

When we turn the other into an object of consumption, a resource, a competency, a profile, a data point, or a function, we lose precisely what could transform us through relationship.

This is why so many organizations today struggle to produce genuine collective intelligence.

We have diversity, but we do not always have alterity.

We place different people in the same room, but we often expect them to quickly learn to think alike.

We speak of collaboration, but we reward conformity. We speak of innovation, but we penalize what disrupts. We speak of psychological safety, but we still interpret disagreement as disloyalty. And without the capacity to truly encounter what is different, the organization loses one of its greatest sources of creativity.

The new is frequently born from the encounter with what we have not yet managed to integrate.

The paradox of high performance

One of the greatest contradictions of our time is that we have never had so many resources for producing, and yet it has never seemed so necessary to discuss the human conditions required to keep producing.

We are permanently connected. We have access to virtually unlimited knowledge. We can work from anywhere. Artificial intelligence is beginning to take on a growing number of cognitive tasks.

But this does not necessarily mean we are more alive. We may be more productive and less present. More connected and less related. More informed and less wise. More efficient and less creative. Busier and less engaged.

This is where Han's critique of the performance society meets the corporate world.

When the individual becomes responsible for continuously producing their own performance, even desire can be captured by the logic of productivity.

We need to desire more. Produce more. Learn more. Travel more. Grow more. Show more. Even rest can become a tool for returning to produce better.

And there comes a moment when the question shifts from "how can I produce more?" to: "Who am I becoming while I produce?"

Perhaps that is one of the fundamental questions of contemporary leadership.

What kills Eros inside an organization?

Eros does not necessarily disappear through a single major decision.

Sometimes it dies slowly.

It dies when every idea must pass through ten hierarchical levels.

When a person is ridiculed for asking a question.

When mistakes become grounds for punishment rather than learning.

When the leader must always have the answer.

When disagreement is interpreted as a threat.

When creativity must fit inside a spreadsheet.

When urgency becomes permanent.

When no one has time to think.

When relationships become purely transactional.

When people discover that what they say does not matter.

When the stated purpose does not correspond to actual decisions.

When the system rewards results exclusively and ignores the way in which they were produced.

Little by little, desire recedes.

People learn to do only what is safe.

And an organization can continue to function perfectly while quietly losing its capacity to be alive.

Eros, safety, and relational intelligence

We can now understand why this discussion connects directly to the themes I have been developing throughout my articles.

1- Psychological safety creates space for the person to show up.

2- Relational intelligence increases our capacity to perceive and transform the quality of relationships.

3- Systemic kindness reminds us that the way we act produces consequences across the entire field.

4- Eros adds an even deeper dimension: what are we alive together for?

Because it is not enough to create environments where people are free from fear.

We need to create environments where they can also desire, create, experiment, learn, and participate in building something that does not yet exist.

Safety prevents life from being suffocated by fear. Relational intelligence improves the quality of encounter.

Eros restores to the system the capacity to desire the future. That sequence, to me, is fundamental.

Eros and Regenerative Leadership

This is where I find a connection to my own research on Regenerative Leadership.

When I speak of regeneration, I am not speaking only of sustainability, well-being, or harm reduction.

I am speaking of increasing the life capacity of a system.

A regenerative system is capable of producing more than results. It produces the capacity to learn, create, repair, adapt, build relationships, imagine, and generate future.

Eros is one of the forces that nourishes that capacity.

For this reason, a regenerative leader must begin asking different questions.

Where is the vitality of this team?

Do people still desire to build something together?

Is there space for the unexpected?

Is there beauty?

Is there curiosity?

Is there room to disagree?

Is there time to think?

Is there enough freedom to create?

Do people feel that their work is expanding their life or consuming it?

And perhaps the hardest one: Is the system we are building increasing or diminishing people's capacity to be fully alive?

These questions do not replace financial indicators.

They broaden our understanding of what organizational health truly means.

The leader as guardian of possibility

I am beginning to think that one of the most sophisticated functions of a leader is not to control the energy of an organization.

It is to protect the conditions for life to emerge.

To protect curiosity, divergence, creativity, relationship, the right to question, the space of silence necessary for thinking, and that which does not yet have a name.

Because the new does not arise from planning alone. There is an emergent dimension to life.

Something that appears in the encounter between people, ideas, circumstances, and possibilities.

And the leader must know how to recognize when something new is trying to be born.

That may be one of the greatest differences between control-based leadership and regenerative leadership.

The first asks: "How do I make the system do what I want?"

The second asks: "What is this system trying to become, and how can I create the conditions for that to happen?"

Those are entirely different questions.

Artificial intelligence and the return of Eros

There is yet another reason why I believe this discussion will become increasingly important.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to take on tasks that for centuries we considered exclusively human: writing, analyzing, synthesizing, coding, creating images, researching, organizing knowledge, and supporting decisions.

This does not diminish human value. But it compels us to redefine it.

If machines can produce ever-better answers, our differentiator lies not only in answering, but in knowing what is worth asking.

If machines can generate infinite possibilities, someone will need to decide which possibilities deserve to be realized.

If machines can optimize processes, someone will need to decide which process is worth optimizing.

If machines can produce content, someone will need to ask which story deserves to be told.

If machines can simulate futures, someone will need to desire a future.

And here Eros returns to center stage. Because Eros is precisely this capacity to be moved by a possibility and to move toward it.

It is the desire to bring the new into existence.

The future does not need human beings competing with machines in intelligence.

It needs deeply alive human beings, capable of discernment, relationship, meaning-making, and choosing what deserves to be born.

What is trying to be born here?

That is the question I would like to leave with every leader.

Not only: How much will we grow? How much will we sell? How much will we produce? What will our next indicator be?

But: What is trying to be born here? What kind of relationship? What kind of culture? What kind of organization? What kind of leadership? What kind of society? What kind of human being?

Because leading is not only managing what already exists.

Leading is consciously participating in the birth of what does not yet exist.

And that demands more than competence.

It demands presence, courage, discernment, trust in what cannot yet be seen, relationship, imagination, care, and desire.

We have spent far too long trying to make organizations more efficient and far too little time asking whether they are still alive.

The next leap in leadership is not only about doing better. It is about deeply desiring once again what we are bringing into the world together.

That is why Eros is not a peripheral concept for thinking about the future of organizations.

It may be one of the keys to understanding what no metric can fully capture: the difference between an organization that functions and an organization that is truly alive.

And that is precisely the root essence of Regenerative Leadership: not merely preserving what exists, not merely reducing what ails, but creating the conditions for life, creativity, relationship, and the future to keep on emerging.