The color we see is what isn't integrated

On polarity, pedagogy and organizational behavior

Photo by Kumiko SHIMIZU on Unsplash

There is a familiar fact in the field of optics that still manages to surprise people when they hear it clearly:

Plants appear green not because they use green light, but because they reject it.
Green is what is reflected, not what is absorbed.

Chlorophyll absorbs red and blue wavelengths efficiently. Those wavelengths do the real metabolic work. Green light is excess to requirement, so it is reflected back to the eye. What we perceive as ‘the plant’s colour’ is in a literal sense, the absence of integration. This inversion turns out to be a useful lens well beyond botany..

A vocal coaching disagreement

Many years ago when I worked as a vocal coach, I taught primarily through somatic imagery. I would say things like:

• “walk your tone around the corners of the room.”

• “Fog an imaginary mirror in the back of your throat/nose”

• “Imagine the vowel shape elongating without effort”

From a physics / anatomy lens, these instructions were nonsensical. Sound doesn’t walk, tone doesn’t float, and rooms don’t receive vowels.

And yet, they worked.

The imagery helped singers bypass over-control and let deeply trained musculature coordinate itself. The body already knew how to sing, the imagination simply removed the interference.

But a colleague of mine who I’ll call ‘Fred’, strongly disagreed with this approach. He was a brilliant ‘mechanist’ in the vocal arts. To him, the voice was an elegant machine. He taught:

• how formants shift with tongue height and placement

• how vowel modification affects harmonic alignment

• how breath pressure and resonance interact physically to constrain or ‘free’ a tone

From his perspective, somatic teaching risked imprecision and without explanation, could feel irresponsible. If you don’t explain why something works, you leave students dependent on intuition and metaphor rather than mastery.

Fred and I both facilitated excellence in singers. And yet, we stood in quiet opposition.

The false binary forms

Here’s the important detail: I was not only a somatic teacher. I had formal training in speech pathology and understood the mechanics deeply. I did explain formants, breath, and anatomy, often before introducing imagery.

But once Fred framed the landscape as mechanism vs somatic, something subtle happened: the somatic approach became threatened. And when a valid way of knowing is threatened, it tends to harden into identity.

I leaned more visibly into somatic teaching, not because it was all I was, but because it was the part at risk of being dismissed. The defense sharpened the contrast. The contrast reinforced the polarity. The polarity obscured the original integration.

This is not a personal failure, it’s a structural one.

What gets defended gets reflected

This is where our friendly plant analogy gets useful.

In healthy systems:
what is integrated becomes quiet,
what is metabolized disappears from attention,
function does not announce itself

But when something can’t be absorbed (when a system lacks the capacity to integrate a valid signal) that signal is reflected outward.

It becomes:

• louder

• more visible

• more identity-shaped

In plant optics, that reflection is green. In human systems, that reflection is polarity. The defended position becomes what everyone sees, even though it may not be where the real work is happening.

Organizational behaviour: the same pattern at scale

Organizations repeat this pattern constantly. A few common examples:

• “We’re too emotional” vs “We’re too rigid”

• “We need structure” vs “We need freedom”

• “This place is all process/rules” vs “This place is all chaos”

Often, the loudest tension in a company isn’t where energy is being metabolized, it’s where energy cannot yet be taken in. Someone defends the underrepresented pole (with good intent). Others push back (also with good intent). Positions harden. Nuance collapses. The organization organizes itself around what it cannot digest.

Like leaves reflecting green light, the system broadcasts its absences.

The uncomfortable implication

Here’s the part that’s hardest to sit with:

Defending a truth too early can prevent it from being integrated.

Protection can turn possibility into identity, identity invites opposition, opposition stabilizes polarity itself. No villains are actually required - we do it all on our own.

This is especially tricky for people who are sensitive to ‘coherence’ loss - people who instinctively step in when something valid is being flattened or erased. And that instinct is honourable, but the timing is everything.

Moving toward a different kind of intervention

The alternative may feel like silence, withdrawal or neutrality, but it’s actually something more subtle:

• sensing whether a system has the metabolic capacity to absorb what’s being offered

• distinguishing between holding space and holding position

• Knowing when not to add more light to a surface that can only reflect it

Sometimes the most effective move is to wait for the chlorophyll to develop. This isn’t resignation, it’s respect for readiness.

In Closing and Predicted Continuation

There is more to say here about leadership, facilitation and timing; about why some truths land softly while others ricochet, and about how bridge-builders can accidentally become polarization engines, but for now it’s enough to name the pattern:

What we see most clearly in a system is often what it cannot yet integrate

Green leaves
Defended positions
Organizational stalemates

Same structure, different scale..

Journal Prompt: Before defending a position, what would it look like to ask: Does this system have the capacity to integrate what I’m about to add?