Mining The Unstructured Emotional Data
How Mining Emotional Data Can Make you A Smarter Leader
Data is the foundation of everything. What if the most valuable data we will all need to process in the new GenAI age is unstructured emotional data?
When I was a trader at Morgan Stanley, I spent my days decoding financial markets and pricing derivatives using complex mathematical models and large datasets. After business school, I joined a series of high-growth startups. For a logical brain like mine, the chaos and unpredictability of human emotions in the workplace felt like a new language—one that was often hard to comprehend.
Years later, after holding several leadership roles, I came to the realization that this "new language" was actually critical, unstructured emotional data—data that could be processed and translated into something understandable and actionable. And it wasn’t just my own emotions; it was the emotions of others, of groups, and even of entire companies.
We’ve all felt it: you walk into a meeting, and your mood shifts suddenly. You bear the tension in a high-stakes discussion, return to your desk, and notice passive-aggressive undertones in a Slack thread. Later, you try to push forward a cross-functional project, only to encounter unspoken resistance or suspicious enthusiasm. And at the end of the day, a thoughtful comment from a colleague saves a conversation from derailing. These moments are often dismissed as noise, but they are anything but. Emotions are unstructured data—rich, complex, and often overlooked. When properly decoded, they can transform how we lead, strategize, and execute.
The Emotional Data Interpretation Framework
I’m a nerdy person at heart, and when something piques my curiosity, I dive deep to understand it. This curiosity led me to the Tavistock Clinic, a renowned British psychology institute that takes a multidisciplinary approach to leadership development. Since Mid 2023, I am undergoing a two-years study in clinical psychology, its application to organisations, and training to become a group dynamics specialist.
After many years of making sense of dynamics in companies, recent deep dive in academia and training in groups, I am delighted to share a framework to systematically interpret emotional cues and turn them into actionable insights. The Tavistock specialist training is far from straightforward—I have to dig into my own psyche and learn intricate techniques like projective identification, projection, and interpretation. It feels akin to learning the stochastic calculus model during my derivatives pricing days. To simplify, the framework comprises four key steps that operate in parallel and iteratively, rather than linearly:
Capture unstructured Data
Observe tone, body language, and group dynamics. The mechanism for capturing data involves observation as well as a psychological technique called projective identification. The data we capture includes split-off emotions being projected onto others, projected into ourselves, held by certain group members, or even floating in the room’s atmosphere.
Make Iterative Interpretations
This is an iterative process, and insights are only valid for the moment. As consultant or leader, we need to continuously feed interpretations back into the system to shift dynamics and generate more data for the next iteration. These interpretations aren’t just random thoughts—they’re grounded in frameworks linked to individual and group psychology, as well as management knowledge related to tasks, leadership, authority, organisational structure and strategy. These interpretations also bridges the interpersonal emotions to group’s status and then to signals for strategy and execution.
Create a safe and reflective Environment
Build a safe and reflective environment so unspoken emotions and dynamics can surface and being worked through. This could happen in a 1:1 conversation between consultant and leader, between leader and team member, or a facilitated group setting where team takes time together to reflect on how they work together. The English psychologist Winnicott call this “containing-contained” relationship. Techniques include co-creating psychological safety, establishing boundaries, leveraging the leader or consultant’s reverie, attuning and mirroring emotions, designing space for vulnerability, and anchoring safety through routines.
Generate Actionable Insights
After several iterations of interpretation and hypothesis testing, and working through individual and group emotions, the dots will start to connect themselves—from individual behavior to team dynamics to strategy. Sometimes, this happens serendipitously, when everything just clicks, and you reach the pinnacle of an "aha" moment. Achieving this require another uncommon skill: pulling back on the need for certainty and being patient, allowing insights to emerge when there is space. As the English poet John Keats called this, "negative capability."
Case Study: Ambivalence In Bringing On New Partner
In following case study of a consulting process between an organisational consultant and client, we explore how a leader’s individual emotions connect to decision-making and firm strategy. Name and firm changed for privacy reason. Credit to Larry Hirshhorn (1999) Primary Risk paper.
Jeremy, a lawyer who owns his own practice, shared a situation about his law firm bringing on a renowned lawyer, Peter, who also teaches part-time at a prestigious law school, as a third partner.
The dilemma arose during negotiations when Peter, given his professional brand, felt he should not have to contribute as much to the “buy-in” as the other two partners. Jeremy intended to use the buy-in to fund more marketing and he was annoyed Peter’s arrogance—on the verge of quitting the negotiation altogether. Initially, I suggested to Jeremy that they might be interpreting this as Peter not wanting to put as much skin in the game. Jeremy confirmed that he believed true partnership required an equal financial commitment. However, his tone carried a hint of hesitation.
As we spoke further, Jeremy revealed another concern: if they heavily invested in marketing and built upon Peter’s reputation, they could expose themselves to significant risk if Peter later decided to leave. At that point, I revised my hypothesis. I suggested to Jeremy that the real issue was not Peter’s willingness to take a risk, but rather their own. This didn’t come as a surprise to Jeremy - as if he knew this at the back of his mind but somehow suppressed because he didn’t quite want to deal with the risk associated with either option, and blaming on Peter’s arrogance felt easier.
What initially seemed like an interpersonal issue—someone’s arrogance—was, in reality, a strategic dilemma: should they focus on building an equal partnership, or should they take the risk of bringing in a star with an unequal financial investment? There was a clear ambivalence in their decision. Each option carried its own risks—choosing equal partnership might mean losing the star, while opting for an unequal investment might mean losing their financial stake later on.
While we have clarified the strategic challenge, we still need more data to understand the ambivalence about taking up the risk. When I asked Jeremy what he enjoyed most about his work and why he felt the need to bring in Peter, he admitted that he now saw himself more as a client relations person and a generalist in his field rather than a hardcore specialist lawyer. In the meantime, market competition has solidified and the firm needed more specialised expertise to build more differentiation. Essentially, he was moving into a more supportive role for the star lawyer. He said this with a mixture of resolve and a dash of contempt.
As our conversation continued, he become more animated when he mentioned his role in supporting his disabled brother while growing up and the conflicting emotions tied to that experience—his deep love for his talented brother, contrasted with the resentment of having to sacrifice his own desires as a teenager. Wasn’t there something familiar here? wasn’t his animation expressing something unacknowledged but clearly played an important role for him? My interpretation was that Jeremy’s firm stance on every partner sharing financial risk was a rigid code of conduct masking deeper, more chaotic emotions linked to unacknowledged desires.
This resonated with Jeremy. He realize his ambivalence about strategy was partly about facing the risk associated with bringing in a star and partly about his longstanding association with the role of a supportive brother. Acknowledging this allowed him to separate what was personal from what was strategic, enabling him to make a clearer, more intentional decision about the way forward.”
Start Mining Emotional Data
Emotions are often dismissed as “soft” or irrelevant in the workplace, but they are anything but. They are data—which signal resistance, anxiety, fear and can be translated into alignment, strategy and opportunity.
In a world where generative AI can crunch numbers, write code, and even draft strategies, the human ability to interpret emotional data is becoming a rare and valuable skill. Leaders who can decode these signals will be better equipped to navigate complexity, build resilient teams, and drive performance. Why not utilize the skills of a trained emotional decoding specialist the same way you would utilize an engineer’s expertise?
In a world marked by uncertainty and ambivalence, where the cognitive data we receive about the external world is noisy and increasingly difficult to trust, why not turn our attention to the unstructured but intuitive data we all possess, waiting to be understood? Why not learn from an organisational consultant’s ability to "decode the emotions" to gain a strategic advantage?