The Silence is Deafening

...and dangerous

First: My apologies for the long hiatus between posts. I’ve been finishing a complicated project (which I’ll write about eventually) and generally drowning in over-commitments. This too will be a topic for a post (together with one about exhaustion) but in the meantime, normal service is being resumed. Thanks for your patience.

In an age of political polarization, what’s going on at work? I’ve asked a number of business leaders and mentors and their answers surprised me: Nothing. Apart from within very small, intimate and longstanding groups, nothing big was being discussed. A new war? Shrugged off. The threat of rising unemployment? Raised eyebrows. DEI? Silence. Inequality? Never mentioned.

This is both surprising and unsurprising. Surprising because there is certainly a lot going on in peoples’ minds: whether they will lose their jobs to AI, if their kids should bother with university, what kind of world they will inherit, never mind the high cost of living and visible inequality in restaurants that have become unaffordable or just obnoxious. This—and much much more—is roiling around. And it’s cognitively costly: distracting and often alienating. I’ve spent more than a few hours in companies thinking I must have come into the wrong meeting, so unconcerned have executives appeared to be about the considerable social and political threats impacting their business and their employees. Their pragmatic calm can feel alarming surreal.

Organizational silence is generally attributed to two causes: fear and futility. The fear is around conflict. Most people don’t enjoy it, feel unconfident about their ability to manage it and are afraid of saying the wrong thing. This a common root cause of wilful blindness, but it also limits contribution overall because nobody does great thinking when afraid. So the silence isn’t golden; it’s unhealthy, unproductive and can make people feel very alone. That’s a long way from engagement. It frequently results in mutually assured stalemates, a phenomenon where everyone worries about the same problem but, in their silence, ensures that it isn’t addressed and therefore the matter gets worse.

What are today’s mutually assured stalemates? Ai for sure. Boardrooms talk about its adoption, cost and what they imagine to be enormous cost-savings as they hope massively to reduce the workforce. Meanwhile employees start experimenting with Ai, out of curiosity and self-defence, but they don’t talk about it. They don’t know what their firm’s AI plans are and hope it’s might not be as bad for them as they fear. What could, and should, be a pragmatic collaboration becomes a standoff.

DEI is another deafening silence. In the U.S. and U.K., the retreat from diversity has been swift, visible and very confusing. Many organizations deeply dependent on U.S. government contracts swiftly changed website copy, while executives frequently reassuring their workers that company commitment to diversity remained stalwart. IBM, once famous for hiring disabled and female workers decades in advance of legislation, has disbanded its diversity council, no longer links pay to diversity goals and has shifted requirements of its suppliers—at the same time as saying that it remains committed to hiring “people who have the personality, talent and background necessary to fill a given job, regardless of race, colour or creed.” In citing their ‘inherent tensions’ IBM joins many of the largest employers in the U.S.

To call this confusing would be a massive under-statement. In the U.K. the slinking away from diversity has been subtle and ambiguous. Many firms have abandoned targets while vocalising their continued commitment. I’ve heard executives (men and women) insist that it’s actually good news that targets and measurement are gone—because now they can’t be accused of political correctness; what was performative can finally be authentic! But simultaneously, I am seeing protection against unfair pay and sexual harassment fade away.

Every firm has its own silent subjects, the ones that everybody worries about but nobody acts on. Every family does too. It typically doesn’t end well. Opportunities for change and invention are missed and the people with a sense of agency, responsibility and self-respect leave. The resulting futility and learned helplessness derives from the toxic idea that there is no point addressing difference because it can only make polarization worse.

That is a mad, bad and dangerous idea, giving refuge to scoundrels, entrenching prejudice and deterring invention. It makes the energetic lose heart as the opportunity for change is missed. Pessimism and cynicism run rampant, producing… nothing.

But more on that in my next post, which will come far sooner than this one did.

If You Want to Go Deeper

The original work on organizational silence was led by Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken and has spawned much good thinking ever since. Like the best academic research, it was inspired by their own experience, in which a departmental initiative, widely disparaged, was agreed at a meeting in which nobody spoke up, Sound familiar?

(M&M were not the very first people to notice this phenomenon, of course. There is, after all, the Emperor’s New Clothes and, more seriously, Hirschman’s famous Exit, Voice and Loyalty. What I love about the more recent work is the realism with which the thinking is brought up to date. Thanks to reader David Friedensohn for remind me!)

For the Love of It

Last week I went to the Royal Academy of Art’s Summer Exhibition. This features the work of 1,700 artists, a few of whom (Tracey Emin, Larry Achiampong and the late great Norman Ackroyd) are famous and many are members of the public who may never have shown their work before. It’s a triumphant extravaganza, displaying the vast range range of human creativity

© Lev Bratishenko 2023