Innies, Outies and in Between: Communication in Severance

I’m pretty sure all of us have had a fantasy of wiping the slate clean after a tough day at work. Imagine just pressing a button that clears away every unpleasant trace. Sure, it sounds tempting — but would it actually solve any of our problems?

Not according to the hit Apple TV+ series Severance. The show’s title refers to a voluntary (fictional) surgical procedure that splits a person’s brain into two parts: an “innie” who only exists in the office and an “outie” who lives out the rest of the person’s life. These two people may share a single body, but they have completely distinct experiences, with neither retaining the memories of their other half.

Severance is a metaphor for the compartmentalization that every modern employee engages in to some extent. Our work personalities might not be completely dissociated from our larger selves, but the way we act and talk and even think on the job is inevitably different from how we behave elsewhere. But unlike the show’s severed characters, we can’t just switch it on and off. Work bleeds into life, and vice versa.

By dramatizing what happens when we try to oversimplify our complex relationship to the workplace, Severance exposes the dangers of a corporate world where employees can’t express their full selves. By contrast, internal communications can be a trusted guide that helps multifaceted individuals better navigate the more constrained scope of their professional roles. But success requires a sensitivity that’s sorely lacking in the show’s fictional world. Communication failures within Severance underline the importance of treating employees as the fully rounded people they are.

(Spoiler alert in effect from here on out…)

Fair warning: If you work for an abusive, monopolistic, quasi-religious cult of a company, you won’t feel flattered by Severance. The corporation at its center, Lumon Industries, is an almost cartoonishly sinister entity hell-bent on transforming the world in their image. To protect their deep secrets, their proprietary severance procedure denies employees their full humanity by cutting part of them off from the world outside the office. Even then, the innies they create don’t fully understand the true nature of what they do, reduced to making vague statements like, “The work is mysterious and important.”

As such, Lumon’s internal communication philosophy consists primarily of keeping everyone in the dark. The corporate structure attempts to retain control and forestall rebellion by creating a labyrinthine series of conflicting teams and competing agendas, while management distracts innies with useless perks such as plastic tchotchkes and awkward dance parties.

These absurdities embody the injustice of forcing employees to feel like incomplete people. By denying the larger reality outside of the office walls, Lumon prevents the innies from the one thing they truly crave: to understand. In our daily lives, we’re hungry to connect our actions to a sense of purpose and to find points of contact between what we get paid to do and the larger scope of our lives. Internal communications is uniquely positioned to draw these parallels and imbue our work with meaning, responsibilities that Lumon feels justified in abandoning altogether.

Lumon’s corporate culture may be all the innies know, but it’s not enough to make them feel whole. They see through the company’s lies and condescension, and they whisper among themselves to get to the truth. There are few things coworkers bond over more quickly than failed (or absent) communication, which tends to unite them in shared skepticism and mistrust. Even if an employer could control every detail of its employees’ experience, it still couldn’t force them to believe it.

The lack of clear messaging at Lumon doesn’t stop its leaders from speaking. Far from it. The company’s representatives employ a pompous verbosity that bespeaks the grandiosity of their ambitions. This puffed-up language is a tool for enforcing narratives of dominance that serve the company’s leaders, but it doesn’t reflect the innies’ lived reality. Though they have little to compare it to, they naturally gravitate to more collegial interactions that reflect personal relationships over grand pronouncements.

Even worse, after establishing its tone, the company restricts who can use it. No character in the show is squeezed from all directions quite like Mr. Milchick, who becomes the manager of the “Severed Floor.” Tasked with earning the trust of his reports while satisfying Lumon’s rigid demands, he’s not set up for success. While ostensibly serving as the face of the organization, he’s denounced in a performance review for using the same sort of inflated language as his superiors. This further establishes the dangerous impression that language is a one-way street, to be inflicted on workers by their leaders.

Any employee who’s been spoken down to from a lofty height understands how artificial and alienating it feels. Such language doesn’t reflect their wider personal experience of speaking and being spoken to, and they know when something feels off. This is why communicators work hard to find the language that resonates best, which includes being clear and concrete about what the company expects and why employees should listen. Trust is built — and broken — word by word.

By the end of the second season, the severance process is not working out well for Lumon. Their attempt to create an ideal employee with no horizon beyond the next business goal is doomed to fail, since the human brain rebels against being boxed in. The outies’ messy, emotional lives intrude on each of the innies in different ways, just like in our own lives. When those feelings are denied, something is bound to crack.

In a stunning scene in the Season Two finale, the innie and outie of the main character, Mark, conduct an unprecedented conversation with each other via camcorder. It’s quickly revealed that the show’s plot twists have created a situation where they each have conflicting motivations, values and goals. The resulting clash breeds mutual resentment between Mark’s separate halves, and toward the employer that created his predicament.

This is a clever visualization of an internal conflict we’ve all experienced when feeling torn between responsibilities. While Lumon is determined to widen the boundary between innies and outies, it’s not a strategy that will work for real-world companies. Smoothing over employee anxieties requires two-way communication based on transparency and trust — providing the right messages at the right time, while creating space for employees to share their concerns before they reach a boiling point. The most powerful outcomes are built on the humility of deep listening mixed with the empathy required to advocate for employees’ needs and help them navigate their larger reality both in and out of the office, qualities conspicuously lacking at Lumon.

In today’s society, none of us are fully innies or outies, but an unpredictable combination of the two. Ultimately, communicators need to remain sensitive to this fact and do whatever’s necessary to soften that boundary. Whatever message we’re delivering, we must always remember we’re speaking with complete human beings whose lives have value outside of the job. The more we can help employees feel comfortable with their mixed identity, the more we’ll succeed — in business, sure, but more importantly, as fellow human beings.

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