The Conspiracy Of Silence - how silence fails…and sometimes kills.
In reading Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, authored by multiple authors (more detailed comments from the book coming soon - definitely a good and recommended read), I came across this interesting set of studies that look at the impact of the “conspiracy of silence” that reigns in many organizations.
One study focused on hospitals, and looked at how the conspiracy of silence held in place powerful norms that kept people from speaking up when colleagues violated hygiene, safety or any other protocol - leading to unnecessary deaths. Take those numbers - 84% of doctors have seen co-workers taking shortcuts that could be dangerous to patients, yet fewer than 10% of physicians, nurses and other clinical staff directly confront their colleagues about their concerns. The main drivers leading to this type of culture in hospitals are the risks of lawsuit and infamy. You can find more on that study at www.silencekills.com.
Another study looked at other industries and found that the same code of silence sustains unhealthy behavior across the board. The vast majority of product launches, reorganizations, mergers and improvement initiatives fail or dissapoint because of it. In fact, the researchers found that 91% of all large scale corporate projects collapse because people fail to speak up and be heard. They argue that a deadly form of corporate silence lies at the root of all failed projects. Project problems are in fact people problems. For more information about that project and to download the findings of the study, go to www.silencefails.com.
Most of us have been in organizations where it is politically unacceptable to speak openly about what is going wrong - only to see projects fail because of weak sponsorship, unreasonable constraints, unmotivated team members, or plain old politics. It is sort of ironic that while not speaking up will eventually kill the organization in which you work and thus your current job prospect - it is job preservation that drives this behavior.
What most organizations do not realize is that this is not based on individual behavior, but rather on social behavior. Fixing this problem will not happen by focusing on changing individual behavior first, but instead by changing the social norms that drive the social behavior - and that is not a trivial task.
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March 27th, 2008 at 8:20 am
This is fantastic stuff - and very true. If you think about it, silence when things are going wrong probably kills a lot of interpersonal relationships as well.
Ours is a culture of the upbeat - of positive thinking - of accentuating the positive. Healthy organizations that I have seen will fight and scream and face conflict and problems wen they occur, not wait until the obstacle is almost insurmountable.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:32 am
That’s a very timely article for this moment in my life.
In the workplace, you can understand that nobody wants to rock the boat, as it may cause bad feeling or unpopularity. And nobody is perfect, so glass stones and all that.
But the main problem with corporate silence is fear of being noticed and then being sacked.
Many corporates try to lie as low as possible, so they go unnoticed as part of their strategy to outlive a 3~18 month sacking culture. Corporates run by financial officers, instead of CEOs, can not see the woods for the trees.
Most modern corparates are about instant results and few invest in long term growth, or despite ISO9001, invest in people.
Look at the rapid flow of staff at telecoms comapnaies like Vodafone.
With several corporates it’s new marketing staff every 3 months, as each seasonal campaign fails.
Management are becoming conditioned that the only safe decision is someone elses and even then not to endorse or agree with anything, in case it fails.
Nobody wants a culture of NO people.
YES men, whilst positive, are equally useless.
But the current culture of “MAYBE” people, is one that will bring most corporates to their knees within the next decade.
And I can only say that because I am freelance
Peter
March 27th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
[…] Usually I try not to think about gruesome things like Genovese’s untimely end, and I would never make a straight-up comparison between the frustrations we face in the workplace and the murder of an innocent woman. But I was reminded of Genovese and the bystander effect by a short, powerful item by Francois Gossieaux that I came across this morning.1 The Conspiracy Of Silence - how silence fails…and sometimes kills. […]
March 31st, 2008 at 10:58 pm
[…] that should get you hot…and worried. Francois Gossieaux at Emergence Marketing offers a very powerful reminder of the price organizations pay by not honoring agitators. He writes: Most of us have been in organizations where it is politically unacceptable to speak […]