Latest / The Human Factor: Exploring the Intersection of Humanity, Technology, and Transformation / S2 Episode 019: Structural Silence - Why Organizations Train People Not To Speak

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S2 Episode 019: Structural Silence - Why Organizations Train People Not To Speak · The Human Factor: Exploring the Intersection of Humanity, Technology, and Transformation

• 0:05
  A director in mid size healthcare company knew about a
• 0:09
  date of vulnerability for nearly four months before anyone
• 0:13
  formally raised it. She wasn't the only one who
• 0:16
  knew. At least three other department
• 0:19
  leads had flagged it informally on one-on-one conversations.
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  None of them brought it up in the cross functional meetings
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  where it should have been discussed.
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  When the breach finally occurred, the executive team was
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  completely stunned. The director?
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  Well, she wasn't. She told me.
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  I knew it was coming. We all did.
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  But the cultural dynamics of the organization made it clear that
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  raising it would create more problems for each of us than the
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  breach itself. Wow, that story should disturb
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  every leader listening to this right now.
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  Not because of the breach, but because of what it reveals about
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  how organizations actually function.
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  Four people knew, None of them spoke, and every one of them
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  made a rational calculation that staying silent was safer than
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  telling the truth. I'm Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040,
• 1:27
  digital professor at the University of Maryland, and
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  author of the book The Truth about Transformation, Leading in
• 1:34
  the Age of AI, Uncertainty and Human Complexity, along with the
• 1:40
  Ideas and Innovations Weekly newsletter.
• 1:43
  Welcome to the Human Factor podcast, the show that explores
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  the intersection of humanity, technology, and transformation,
• 1:52
  along with the psychology behind transformation success.
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  Today I'm going solo for this episode because this topic
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  demands that we sit with it really carefully.
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  We're exploring structural silence, the invisible system
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  that trains people not to speak. And why?
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  Well, it may be the single most dangerous force operating inside
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  your organization right now. By the end of this episode,
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  you're going to understand something that changes how you
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  see every quiet room that you walk into.
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  Silence is not the problem, it is the signal.
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  This is season 2, episode 19, and if you've been following
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  this season, today's episode is going to connect directly to
• 2:43
  everything that we've built so far.
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  In the first episode of the season, we explored the identity
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  crisis, the transformation triggers.
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  In the second episode with my buddy Elizabeth Stewart, we
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  examined emotional contagion and how anxiety spreads throughout
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  organizations. In the third episode, I unpacked
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  the structural traps of middle management.
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  In the fourth episode, we looked at the algorithmic mirrors and
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  how AI reflects existing crossroad patterns and bias.
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  And in last week's episode with Jim Elliott, we explored the
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  organizational immune system, how culture deploys antibodies
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  to attack whatever it doesn't recognize.
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  My main take away from talking with Jim was how he continuously
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  stressed the need to be honest, to be forthright, to be open to
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  learning what he doesn't know, and most importantly, how he
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  expressed the importance of the human factor in leading an
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  organization. Today, we're looking at
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  something that runs counter to the sage advice that Jim shared
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  last week. It's one of the most powerful
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  antibodies in the organization's immune system arsenal.
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  Silence. Not the kind of silence that
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  comes from having nothing to say.
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  The kind that comes from having learned, through years of subtle
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  reinforcement, that seeing something carries more risk than
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  staying quiet. Every organization says it wants
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  candor. In leadership meetings, town
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  halls, strategy sessions, the message is consistent.
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  We want open dialogue. Speak up if you see something.
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  Challenge assumptions. There is a communicated
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  permission to exercise critical thinking and to be open and
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  honest without the fear of retaliation.
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  But in reality, there's often a lot of fallout.
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  The data on this is striking, and it should concern every
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  leader who's listening today. According to the Institute of
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  Business Ethics Ethics at Work 2024 survey, they surveyed
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  12,000 employees across 16 countries.
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  One in three employees who knew about workplace misconduct
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  didn't report it. Among those cited reasons for
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  staying silent, 34% said they feared jeopardizing their job.
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  Another 34% doubted corrective action would be taken.
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  Perhaps most troubling, among the 2/3 who did speak up, nearly
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  half reported facing personal disadvantage or retaliation from
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  their Co workers, supervisors and the leadership as a result.
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  Let that land for a moment. The people who did the right
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  thing were punished for it. Separate US research found that
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  43% of workers fear retaliation if they speak up about concerns
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  at work. An ISS Commission survey of more
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  than 4500 employees across five countries found that 51% felt
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  that they were unable to share their opinions freely at work.
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  And research cited widely across organizational psychology
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  estimates that approximately 70% of employees are afraid to speak
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  up due to fear of retribution. That's not a communication
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  problem. That is a system operating
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  exactly as it was designed to operate, and understanding how
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  the system works is what today's episode is about.
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  I want you to think about something as we go through this.
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  Think about your last leadership meeting.
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  Think about the room. Now ask yourself, was that
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  silence agreement, or was it something else entirely?
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  Let me start with something that might challenge how you think
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  about this. In most organizations, silence
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  is not a failure of individual courage.
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  It is a learned and rational behavior.
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  It's been trained into the workforce through years of
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  subtle reinforcement in. The science behind this is
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  really well established. Human beings are remarkably
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  sensitive to social cues. We constantly scan our
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  environments, consciously and unconsciously, for signals about
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  what is safe to say, what is risky to question, and, when
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  it's wiser, to remain quiet. These judgments, well, they
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  often happen quickly. Most, of course, are occurring
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  in our subconscious long before a hand is raised or an e-mail is
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  drafted. Amy Edmondson at Harvard
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  Business School, whose research brought the concept of
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  psychological safety into the mainstream management Thinking,
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  in whose work I reference often across this podcast and in my
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  writing, found that employees frequently withhold ideas,
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  questions, or concerns even when they believe speaking up would
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  benefit the organization. The reason?
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  Well is not apathy or indifference.
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  It's risk assessment. People ask them so simple but
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  very powerful questions. Will speaking up made me look
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  uninformed? Will I be perceived as
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  difficult? Will this harm my relationship
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  with someone who controls my future?
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  When the answer feels uncertain, silence becomes the default
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  behavior. A 2025 study published in
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  Scientific Reports confirmed this dynamic.
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  It found that employees may hesitate to engage in what
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  researchers call prohibitive voice, not because it lacks
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  value, but because it carries significant interpersonal and
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  political risks, including managerial retaliation, strained
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  workplace relationships, and exclusion from important
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  decision making processes. Now here's where this connects
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  directly to what we discussed last episode with Jim.
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  We talked about how the organizational immune system
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  deploys cultural antibodies to neutralize change.
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  One of those antibody types was narrative neutralization.
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  It's where the culture generates stories about why change won't
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  work here. But structural silence, well, is
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  even more fundamental than that. Silence prevents the narratives
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  that could challenge the status quo from ever entering the
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  conversation in the 1st place. The immune system doesn't just
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  attack foreign ideas, it trains people not to introduce them.
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  And this training happens through what I call the Quiet
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  curriculum. Most organizations only don't
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  explicitly tell employees to remain silent.
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  The lesson is rarely written in the company handbook.
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  Instead, well, people learn through experience.
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  A junior employee raises a concern in a meeting and is told
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  politely but firmly that this isn't the right forum.
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  A project manager challenges a timeline.
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  It is then labeled as not being a team player.
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  Senior leader reacts defensively when questioned, which then
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  signals that dissent carries significant consequences.
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  None of these moments appear dramatic on their own.
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  They may even seem reasonable in context.
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  Something that we've all practiced from time to time is
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  our minds make the situational assessment of what feels right,
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  all what feels completely off base.
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  But you know, the organization remembers.
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  And most importantly, the people in the organization remember.
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  Employees observe who receives recognition and who receives
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  that subtle correction. They watch how leaders respond
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  when assumptions are challenged. They notice which voices carry
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  influence and power, and which ones disappear from future
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  meetings. Over time, a pattern emerges.
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  Certain perspectives are welcome, others are tolerated,
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  some are quietly discouraged. The pattern becomes with
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  sociologist Chris Argos, described as an organization's
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  theory and use the unwritten rules governing behavior, which
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  are often very different from the values printed in the annual
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  report. If you recall from episode 18,
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  Edgar Shine describes something very similar with his concept of
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  basic underlying assumptions, those deeply embedded beliefs
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  that are so ingrained that people can't even articulate
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  them. The quiet curriculum I mentioned
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  earlier is the mechanism through which those assumptions get
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  transmitted. It's how new employees learn
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  which assumptions they need to adopt to survive and advance.
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  The official message may be candor, the lived experience
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  quietly rewards restraint, and the gap between the need to
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  belong and expressing one's voice is a direct reflection of
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  the sign curriculum at work. This connects directly to the
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  identity crisis we explored in the first episode of the season.
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  Speaking up doesn't just risk professional consequences, it
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  risks social identity. When the quiet curriculum
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  teaches you that your value in the organization is tied to
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  being perceived as a team player, as someone who doesn't
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  make waves, well, then voicing dissent becomes an identity
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  threat. You're not just risking a
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  project assignment or your annual performance review.
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  You're risking your sense of belonging.
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  And as we discussed in that episode, identity protection is
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  one of the most powerful motivators in human behavior.
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  There's also a generational dimension to this that the data
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  reveals. The IBES 2024 research found
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  that younger employees at 52% are significantly more likely to
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  experience retaliation after raising concerns about
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  misconduct. They and their older colleagues
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  at 43 percent or those 55 and over at 33%.
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  These generational differences suggest an institutional memory
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  operates in layers. Younger workers may be more
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  willing to test the system, but they are also paying a higher
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  price for doing so, which in turn shapes the silence patterns
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  of the generation that follows them.
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  So let me ask leaders a direct question.
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  If 52% of your youngest employees are being punished for
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  Speaking of, and this is the generation that fundamentally
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  needs to make an impact to stay engaged, how long do you think
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  they're going to stay around? Silence is also shaped by power.
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  Organizations are hierarchical. Systems, authority, resources,
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  and career advancement are all typically unevenly distributed.
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  That imbalance inevitably influences how people
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  communicate and what they choose to say.
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  Research and aviation Safety provides us a very vivid and
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  well documented example. Investigations in the airline
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  accidents in the 1970s and 80s revealed that copilots often
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  noticed errors made by captains but hesitated to challenge them
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  directly. Seems the difference in status
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  created a communication barrier that sometimes proved
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  catastrophic. This discovery eventually led to
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  the development of the Crew Resource Management.
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  It's a training approach designed to encourage more open
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  communication across those hierarchical boundaries.
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  The term was coined in 1979 by NASA psychologist John Labarre,
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  and while it retained a command hierarchy because that's typical
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  in organizations, the concept was intended to foster a less
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  authoritarian culture in which those with less positional
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  authority were actually encouraged to question those
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  with more of it when they observed mistakes being made.
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  The same dynamic, unfortunately, played out tragically in the
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  Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986.
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  Engineers at NASA and the company that manufactured the
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  shuttle solid rocket boosters had raised concerns about
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  launching in cold weather. They believed the O-ring seals
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  could be compromised at temperatures below 53°F.
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  But during the meeting the night before the launch, NASA managers
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  challenged those safety concerns.
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  After a 30 minute offline caucus, Morton Thalkel Senior
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  Management, the company that created much of the equipment,
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  overruled their own engineers and gave the launch a go ahead.
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  Unfortunately, the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after
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  liftoff, killing all 7 crew members.
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  The Rogers Commission, which investigated the disaster,
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  concluded that the organizational culture and
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  decision making process had contributed directly to the
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  tragedy. Dissenting voices were present,
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  they were simply overridden by the hierarchy.
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  The lesson here extends far beyond their aviation and
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  aerospace, because in any organization, the greater the
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  power distance between individuals, the more difficult
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  it becomes. The question Authority employees
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  quickly learn which leaders welcome challenge and which ones
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  interpreted as insubordination. The results here are
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  predictable. Information flows upward
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  selectively. Risks.
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  Well, They're softened. Concerns are framed cautiously
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  or not raised at all. Silence becomes a strategy for
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  navigating that hierarchy, and this is where the structural
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  traps we discussed in Episode 16 become directly relevant.
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  Middle managers sit at the intersection of these two power
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  gradients. They receive pressure from above
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  and have a responsibility for those below, and the structural
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  silence dynamic puts them in a completely impossible position.
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  They see the problems that frontline employees see, but
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  they also understand the political cost of escalating
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  those problems. So they filter, they soften,
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  they translate uncomfortable truths into palatable summaries,
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  and by the time information reaches the executive suite, the
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  signal has been diluted to the point where it is no longer able
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  to trigger any action. History shapes this behavior,
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  too. Organizations in the workforce
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  carry memory. Employees remember how dissent
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  was treated in the past. Even when new leadership is in
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  place, Department that, once punished failure may remain risk
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  adverse years later. Company that experienced layoffs
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  following strategic disagreement may see employees avoid
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  challenging senior leaders long after the event.
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  Psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague demonstrated that
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  people are far more sensitive to potential loss than equivalent
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  gains. So in organizational settings,
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  the perceived loss of reputation, opportunity, or job
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  security can easily outweigh the abstract gains of contributing
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  to better decisions. Even when leadership changes and
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  seeks to create a new energy and direction, the organization's
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  cultural memory remains solidly in place.
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  I bet most of you have a memory of a mentor offering you counsel
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  to stay quiet or experience the consequences.
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  I have a few of those memories myself from early in my career.
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  Now stay with me because in a few minutes I'm going to share
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  the data on what structural assignments actually cost
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  organizations in those numbers. Well, they're going to challenge
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  everything. You think about employee
• 19:28
  engagement. Think about the last project
• 19:32
  that surprised your leadership team when it failed.
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  I bet someone in that organization saw it coming.
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  They just didn't say anything. And that's the most dangerous
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  aspect of structural silence. It creates the illusion of
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  consensus. And this is where most leaders
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  are vulnerable. In meetings, a lack of dissent
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  may appear to signal agreement. Quiet room can feel like there's
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  alignment. Projects may proceed smoothly
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  until unexpected problems surface months later.
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  From the leaders perspective, well, everything looks great.
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  But the absence of disagreement doesn't always mean the absence
• 20:13
  of concern. It often means people have
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  learned that expressing concern is completely unproductive.
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  Think about the connection to episode 17 on the algorithmic
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  years. We discussed how AI systems
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  reflect an amplifying existing cultural patterns.
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  Most structural silence feeds directly into this When the data
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  that organizations use to make decisions is then shaped by what
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  people are willing to say rather than what they actually know,
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  then every system that's built on that data inherits the bias
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  of silence. Your analytics dashboards, your
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  employee surveys, your project status reports, they all reflect
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  not reality, but the filtered version of reality the silence
• 20:59
  allows through the broader cost is immense.
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  A 2025 meta analysis published in the journal Psychology and
• 21:07
  Health examined the relationship between employee silence and
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  burnout across multiple studies, and they found the correlation
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  to be statistically significant. Greater silence and lower voice
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  were consistently associated with higher briono.
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  Silence doesn't only cost the organization's information, it
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  cost the individual their well-being.
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  When people suppress what they know, the psychological toll
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  accumulates quietly. It contributes to disengagement.
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  It contributes to exhaustion and eventually departure.
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  That is a particularly important consideration when organizations
• 21:49
  are competing to attract and retain a highly skilled
• 21:52
  workforce, even in the current AI era.
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  You're not just losing information when silence takes
• 21:59
  home, you're losing your people. Well, and here's where the data
• 22:04
  gets really striking. According to recent McKenzie
• 22:07
  research, only 26% of leaders exhibit workplace behaviors that
• 22:13
  actually create a sense of psychological safety on their
• 22:17
  teams. Let me say that again, only 26%,
• 22:23
  only 50% of the workers say their managers create
• 22:26
  psychological safety at all. Meanwhile, 84% of employees
• 22:32
  identify psychological safety is one of the three things that
• 22:36
  they value most in the workplace, ranking it alongside
• 22:40
  regular pay raises and flexible work.
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  Mackenzie's broader research on employee engagement also found
• 22:48
  that allowing employees to voice their opinions freely increases
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  engagement by 17%. And it's not a marginal gain.
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  It's the kind of shift that separates organizations where
• 22:59
  strategy stalls from those where it moves.
• 23:02
  Yet psychological safety it's often misunderstood.
• 23:07
  Organizations sometimes attempt to create it through training
• 23:09
  programs, workshops, or leadership messaging.
• 23:13
  These efforts are well-intentioned, but frequently
• 23:15
  very much insufficient. Psychological safety here is not
• 23:20
  something later than nouns. It's something employees
• 23:23
  experience. Edmondson's research
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  consistently shows that it emerges from patterns of
• 23:29
  interaction over time, when leaders respond to questions
• 23:34
  with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
• 23:37
  Won't people notice when mistakes are treated as learning
• 23:40
  opportunities rather than occasions for blame?
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  People notice. And when speaking up leads to
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  embarrassment, dismissal, or career risk while employees
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  notice that too. Psychological safety is not a
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  program, it's a system output. Let's move from diagnosis to
• 23:59
  action. If silence is adaptive behavior,
• 24:02
  the implication is clear. The solution is not simply to
• 24:06
  encourage individuals to speak up.
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  It is to examine the system that makes silence rational and
• 24:12
  change that system. Leaders who generally want
• 24:16
  candor must ask some very difficult questions.
• 24:19
  How do we respond when someone challenges an assumption in the
• 24:23
  meeting? What happens to the person who
• 24:26
  raises an uncomfortable truth? Do our performance evaluations
• 24:30
  reward constructive dissent, or do we penalize it?
• 24:34
  Do our feedback tools encourage genuine dialogue, or have they
• 24:38
  become another mechanism through which employees learn to stay
• 24:42
  safe and, well, silent? These questions often reveal
• 24:47
  that the organization structure, the incentives, and the
• 24:50
  leadership behaviors send tons of mixed signals.
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  People are told to be candid, but the system quietly teaches
• 24:58
  them when not to be. Leaders have to address this.
• 25:03
  It requires more than new policies or another round of
• 25:06
  leadership training. It requires structural changes
• 25:10
  to how decisions are made, how dissent is received, and how the
• 25:13
  organization defines good performance.
• 25:16
  So here's some steps. First, leaders must examine
• 25:20
  their own reactions to dissent. What are the subtle signals that
• 25:24
  they're sending in meetings? How are people reacting when
• 25:29
  decisions are explained, debated, and revisited?
• 25:33
  It requires acknowledging that power, their power, shapes
• 25:37
  communications and can deliberately create spaces where
• 25:41
  those power dynamics are softened.
• 25:44
  Second, in this Kinect Star Season 2 framework, you need to
• 25:49
  make silence visible before you can address it.
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  Just as we discussed making the organization's immune system
• 25:56
  visible in Episode 18, structured silence has
• 25:59
  behavioral signatures that you can track as well.
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  Look at the gap between what's discussed in one-on-one
• 26:05
  conversations versus what's raised in Group settings.
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  Track which topics consistently. Avoid being raised until
• 26:13
  problems surface, even months later.
• 26:16
  Examine whether your employee surveys are capturing real
• 26:20
  sentiment or just measuring people's comfort with the survey
• 26:23
  itself. Third, consistency matters more
• 26:26
  than anything else. A single moment of defensiveness
• 26:30
  can erase months of trust building.
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  A dismissive response to one employee can become a cautionary
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  tale repeated across the entire organization.
• 26:40
  We know the culture travels through stories and employees
• 26:43
  remember the stories that teach them how to survive.
• 26:47
  As I shared across episodes and newsletter issues on Non verbal
• 26:50
  communication, we are more tuned into body language, facial
• 26:54
  expressions, and posture than we are to what is verbally
• 26:58
  communicated. People read the room before they
• 27:02
  read the memo. 4th Listen for what is not said.
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  Organizations often focus their attention on what people say,
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  but often the more revealing signal is sometimes what people
• 27:18
  do not say. What questions go and ask.
• 27:22
  What risks appear only after outcomes are already determined?
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  Which topics cause the room to grow noticeably quieter?
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  These moments offer clues about the invisible boundaries shaping
• 27:37
  the conversations. And 5th measure the outcomes.
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  The data tells us the closing this gap is very achievable.
• 27:45
  Perceptics research found that high psychological safety
• 27:48
  correlates with 72% greater motivation.
• 27:53
  The American Psychological Association reports that
• 27:56
  supported employees are twice as likely to avoid burnout.
• 28:01
  So when you create environments where people speak not because
• 28:05
  they are told to, but because experience has shown them their
• 28:07
  voice matters, the organizational benefits compound
• 28:12
  across every dimension of performance.
• 28:16
  Let me bring this full circle. With the Season 2 arc, we've now
• 28:19
  explored 6 dimensions of why transformation fails at the
• 28:24
  human level. The identity crisis the change
• 28:27
  triggers at the individual level.
• 28:30
  The emotional contagion that spreads anxiety through the
• 28:34
  organization. The structural traps that
• 28:37
  inadvertently block the very people tasked with driving
• 28:40
  change. The algorithmic mirrors that
• 28:43
  reflect and amplify existing patterns.
• 28:46
  The organizational immune system that deploys culture antibodies
• 28:50
  against anything foreign, and now structural silence.
• 28:55
  The mechanism that prevents the information needed for
• 28:59
  successful transformation from ever entering the conversation.
• 29:03
  These six episodes form a diagnostic framework that we're
• 29:06
  going to continue to expand upon in the episodes ahead.
• 29:10
  If your transformation initiative is stalling or
• 29:13
  failing, the answer is somewhere in this framework.
• 29:17
  People's identities are being threatened.
• 29:20
  Anxiety is spreading unchecked. Your structure is trapping the
• 29:25
  people who should be leading change.
• 29:27
  Your technology is reinforcing the patterns that you're trying
• 29:31
  to bring. Your culture is likely attacking
• 29:34
  what it doesn't recognize. And your people?
• 29:37
  Well, they've learned that staying quiet is safer than
• 29:41
  speaking the truth. The good news here is that
• 29:44
  structural silence is not permanent.
• 29:47
  It's adaptive, which means it responds to changes in the
• 29:50
  environment. When the system consistently
• 29:53
  rewards candor more than caution, the behavior is going
• 29:57
  to shift. Organizations, to succeed in
• 30:00
  this work don't simply create louder conversations.
• 30:03
  They create healthier ones. People speak not because they
• 30:07
  are told to, but because experience has shown them that
• 30:11
  their voices matter. Until that shift happens,
• 30:15
  silence will continue to function exactly as it was
• 30:18
  designed to. Silence is not the problem.
• 30:22
  It is the signal. A signal that the system,
• 30:26
  however unintentionally, has taught people that staying quiet
• 30:30
  is safer than speaking the truth.
• 30:33
  Most organizations are still choosing to ignore what the
• 30:37
  Signal is trying to tell them. If you found today's episode
• 30:41
  valuable, subscribe to the Human Factor Podcast.
• 30:44
  Wherever you watch or listen to the podcast, leave a rating and
• 30:48
  a comment. Share this episode with your
• 30:50
  leadership team as well, because understanding structural silence
• 30:54
  is the first step to breaking it.
• 30:57
  If you want weekly insights about transformation psychology,
• 31:00
  organizational behavior, and the human factors that determine
• 31:04
  transformation success, subscribe to my Ideas and
• 31:07
  Innovations newsletter on 2040 Digital's website or on Sub
• 31:11
  Stack. Every week, I share practical
• 31:13
  frameworks and research on why teens succeeds or fails.
• 31:18
  Today's episode was actually built from a recent newsletter
• 31:21
  on this exact topic. So if you want to dig deeper
• 31:25
  into the research and the data, that's a really great place to
• 31:27
  start. Next episode, we're going even
• 31:31
  deeper into the human side of transformation.
• 31:34
  We're going to explore the psychological contract, that
• 31:37
  unwritten, unspoken set of mutual expectations between an
• 31:41
  employee and their organization. Every person in your
• 31:45
  organization is operating under a contract, and nobody signed,
• 31:50
  nobody negotiated, and nobody can point to on paper, and your
• 31:55
  transformation just violated it. Well, that's episode 20, The
• 31:59
  Broken Contract. This is the Human Factor
• 32:02
  podcast. I'm Kevin Novak.
• 32:04
  Thanks for watching or listening.