Picture the following situation: your startup is at a breaking point. Runway is shrinking, the next funding round is on the table, but the boardroom just exploded. The CEO and the CTO are screaming at each other. The CEO claims the CTO "is trying to diminish him and take over the company," and the CTO is certain the CEO will never appreciate his hard work and always takes all the credit. If you listen to their tone and their words, you'll sense that something there isn't rational. This isn't a discussion about KPIs, equity, or a roadmap. It feels too personal, too charged, as if this exact argument has already happened a thousand times before. You'd be completely right. This argument has indeed happened before, just not at this company.
The Human Bug: Repetition Compulsion
In the world of psychology there is a fascinating concept called repetition compulsion. The term was originally coined by Sigmund Freud, but it was Carl Jung who carried it into the territory of healing and of business and personal growth.
Jung explained that our subconscious has a powerful tendency to recreate and reproduce painful or unresolved situations and relationships from our early past (our "complexes"). Why would anyone do this to themselves voluntarily? According to Jung, the subconscious isn't trying to destroy us, it is trying to heal us. It reproduces the same old drama once again, in the unconscious hope that this time, with this partner, in this startup, we will manage to "fix the ending," gain control, and win.
In the tech world, founders tend, without realizing it, to choose business partners or investors who sit precisely in the slot of their "old wound." A CEO who experienced an overly critical father will recreate that dynamic in front of the board. A CTO who felt overshadowed in childhood by a more successful sibling will feel that a business partner is appropriating his success. And so, instead of running a company, the parties end up running a theater production of their childhoods.
From Conflict Management to Psychological Refactoring
Once this infinite loop is activated, no logical solution will help. The parties are stuck in what is known in mediation as "the loop", an obsessive repetition of the same claims and the same injuries. If left to continue, they will burn through their runway, put the intellectual property at risk, and ultimately dissolve the company. This is exactly where modern mediation steps in as a loop interrupt. The mediator doesn't arrive to judge who is right, but to perform a complete refactoring of the management dynamic:
- Identifying the architecture of the loop: the professional mediator immediately recognizes when the discussion stops being about business and becomes a replay of a repetition compulsion. Simply pausing the discussion and reflecting the pattern back to the parties ("notice that we keep returning to the same emotional point") helps shift the event from the brain's emotional region to its rational one.
- De-coupling: the mediator helps the parties disconnect the figures from the past from the people actually sitting across from them in the room in the present. Once the CEO understands that the CTO in front of him is not his father, and the CTO understands that the CEO is not his sibling, the emotional charge drops by about 90%.
- Writing a "new ending" for the product: according to the Jungian approach, crisis is a gateway to growth. Mediation allows the parties to stop trying to "fix" the past, and start defining new, healthy, interest-based rules of the game for the continuation of their shared path.
Bottom Line
If you notice that your management team, or a startup you are advising, has a conflict that keeps repeating in a loop that is hard to explain rationally, don't wait for the code to break completely. This is a classic repetition compulsion. In situations like this, a focused, sharp, and sensitive mediation process is not a luxury, it is the only structural fail-safe that can save your company from itself.