The Reconciliation of Desire

Written By Jared Miller

Leading Well in an Extractive Culture

Overview

We live in a culture that treats desire as something to exploit—a resource to mine, monetize, or manipulate. Organizations often unintentionally mirror this pattern, reducing people to productivity inputs and rewarding leaders who can extract more, faster, with less. The result is predictable: burnout, disillusionment, stalled teams, and misaligned priorities.

The Reconciliation of Desire reframes desire not as a problem to control, but as a powerful force that can be clarified, aligned, and redeemed. Drawing on mediation practice, leadership psychology, and narrative theology, this talk helps leaders understand how desire drives conflict, fuels ambition, and shapes the emotional architecture of their teams.

When desire is reconciled—within leaders, within groups, within systems—organizations gain clarity, resilience, and sustainable momentum.

Core Idea: Desire Drives Everything

Behind every conflict, every ambition, every stuck decision is a desire—spoken or unspoken, aligned or distorted, honored or suppressed.

This talk helps participants:

  • Surface the desires operating beneath team tensions

  • Recognize when desire has become extractive or competitive

  • Distinguish between healthy aspiration and unhealthy pressure

  • Build workplaces where people can pursue what matters without losing themselves

  • Align organizational goals with human flourishing

Desire is not the enemy; disordered desire is.

Key Teaching Elements

1. The Economy of Desire: How Culture Shapes What We Want

Our broader culture trains us in an extractive imagination — telling us that more is always better and that identity comes from output.
Jared unpacks how this mindset infiltrates leadership, shaping what we reward, expect, and pursue.

2. The Conflict Beneath the Conflict

Most disputes arise because desires are colliding or competing.
Participants learn to identify the desire-patterns driving tension:

  • Desire for recognition

  • Desire for control

  • Desire for belonging

  • Desire for meaning

  • Desire for stability in change

Naming desire reduces confusion and clarifies what’s actually at stake.

3. The Trauma of Extraction: What Burnout Really Signals

Burnout is not a failure of resilience — it’s a sign of systemic extraction.
Jared helps leaders spot extractive patterns in their organizations and replace them with sustainable rhythms and reconciled expectations.

4. The Reconciling Leader

A reconciling leader:

  • Honors human limits

  • Redirects desire toward shared purpose

  • Creates conditions for honest conversation

  • Helps individuals name what they truly want and what they can realistically give

This is where leadership becomes pastoral, ethical, and profoundly strategic.

5. Designing a Culture Where Desire Can Breathe

Teams need structures that:

  • Encourage candor

  • Reduce hidden competition

  • Make expectations explicit

  • Reward mutual responsibility rather than individual extraction

Jared provides tools for designing desire-positive workplaces.

What Participants Take Away

Practical Skills

  • A method for surfacing and diagnosing desire in conflict

  • Tools for recognizing extractive patterns in teams

  • Practices for coaching people through conflicting wants and expectations

  • Strategies for preventing burnout and fostering sustainable pace

Mindset Shifts

  • Desire is not indulgence—it’s direction

  • Burnout is a relational and systemic issue, not a personal failure

  • Extraction is the enemy; reconciliation is the cure

  • Healthy teams pursue shared desire, not shared pressure

Frameworks & Tools

  • The Desire Diagnostic Map

  • The Extractive Culture Checklist

  • A reflective exercise for aligning personal and organizational desire

  • The Reconciliation Loop: name → clarify → realign → act

Why This Talk Matters

Every organization right now is feeling the pressure of:

  • escalating expectations

  • overextended teams

  • identity anxiety

  • burnout and turnover

  • mission drift

  • conflict shaped by unspoken desires

Leaders who understand how to reconcile desire create organizations where people are energized rather than emptied, aligned rather than fractured, and committed rather than compliant.

This is one of your most emotionally resonant and culturally relevant talks.

Ideal For

  • Executive and senior leadership teams

  • Nonprofits and mission-driven organizations

  • Churches and faith-adjacent communities

  • HR directors & culture architects

  • Schools, colleges, and student life professionals

  • Municipal / community leadership groups

  • Organizations facing burnout, turnover, or cultural drift

Jared Miller https://jaredmiller.ca
Next

The Geometry of Reconciliation