Olivia: A 2017 Gallup poll found that only 3 out of 10 employees feel their opinions count at work. Jackson: Only three? That’s… shockingly low. Olivia: It is. That means 70% of the people you work with are likely staying silent on issues they believe are important. Today, we’re talking about why that silence is more dangerous, and more expensive, than you could ever imagine. Jackson: Wow, 70%... that's a staggering number. It feels like a quiet crisis happening in every office. Olivia: It is. And it's the central focus of The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmondson. What's fascinating is that Edmondson, who's a top-ranked management thinker and a professor at Harvard Business School, didn't set out to study this. She stumbled upon it while researching something completely different: medication errors in hospitals. Jackson: An accidental discovery? I love that. So what did she find in that hospital study? What does this 'accidental discovery' actually look like?

Olivia: It looks like a story about a young neonatal nurse practitioner named Christina Price. She’s in a high-pressure NICU, a neonatal intensive care unit, where premature twins have just been born. They are at high risk, and Christina knows from her training that the best practice is to administer a specific drug, a surfactant, to help their lungs develop. Jackson: Okay, seems straightforward. Give them the drug. Olivia: Except the attending physician, a senior, silver-haired neonatologist named Dr. Drake, hasn't ordered it. And Christina recently overheard this same Dr. Drake berating another nurse for questioning one of his orders. Jackson: Oh, I know that feeling. The pit in your stomach when you have to challenge someone who you know might just explode. Olivia: Exactly. So in that split second, Christina does what all of us do, constantly, without even realizing it. She runs a subconscious risk calculation. The risk of speaking up? Being publicly humiliated, looking stupid, damaging her relationship with a powerful figure. The benefit? The twins might be better off, but she tells herself, "He's the expert, he probably knows something I don't." Jackson: And the personal risk feels immediate and certain, while the benefit feels distant and uncertain. Olivia: Precisely. So she stays silent. Fortunately, in this case, the twins were okay. But the story perfectly illustrates the core concept. This is what a lack of psychological safety feels like. It's the belief that you will be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Jackson: That makes so much sense. It’s not about being “nice” or avoiding conflict. It’s about whether the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. And that story about her accidental discovery is wild. She found that the best hospital teams were reporting more errors? Olivia: Yes! That was the paradox that started it all. She initially thought her data was wrong. How could the teams with better collaboration and communication be making more mistakes? But then she had a breakthrough insight: the better teams weren't making more mistakes, they were more willing to report and discuss them. They had higher psychological safety. The "worse" teams were just better at hiding their errors. Jackson: That is a brilliant twist. So the metric for a healthy team isn't the absence of reported problems; it's the presence of them. That flips everything on its head. But this isn't just about nurses and doctors, right? I can totally relate to that CFO in the book who stayed silent during a disastrous acquisition. Olivia: The story of the "skunk at the picnic." It's a perfect business parallel. A new CFO joins a senior team, and they're all gung-ho about a big acquisition. He has serious doubts, he sees flaws in the financials, but the enthusiasm in the room is overwhelming. Jackson: He doesn't want to be the negative guy, the one who kills the mood. The skunk at the picnic. I've been there. You just nod along. Olivia: He nods along. The acquisition goes through, and it fails spectacularly, costing the company millions. In the post-mortem, he finally admits, "I saw the problems, but I was afraid to speak up." He let the team down because the interpersonal fear was greater than the perceived risk to the company. Jackson: That’s heartbreaking. It shows that this isn't about rank or intelligence. A C-suite executive can feel just as silenced as a junior nurse. It’s a human problem. Olivia: It's a fundamentally human problem. And when this individual, human problem scales up across an entire organization, it stops being a personal regret and starts becoming a corporate catastrophe.

Jackson: Okay, so let's talk about that scaling up. The book dives into some massive corporate scandals. How does the fear of one person, like that CFO, turn into something like Volkswagen's 'Dieselgate'? Olivia: 'Dieselgate' is the perfect case study in fear-driven failure. In the early 2000s, Volkswagen's leadership, particularly the notoriously demanding CEO Martin Winterkorn, set an impossible goal: triple US sales and become the world's number one automaker. A huge part of that strategy was "clean diesel" technology. Jackson: Right, I remember the ads. They were supposed to be powerful, fuel-efficient, and environmentally friendly. Olivia: The problem was, they couldn't actually be all three. The engineers knew they couldn't meet the strict US emissions standards for nitrous oxide without sacrificing performance. But telling that to a leader like Winterkorn was career suicide. One executive in the book describes the feeling when Winterkorn was coming to visit: "your pulse would go up... If you presented bad news, those were the moments that it could become quite unpleasant and loud and quite demeaning." Jackson: So the engineers were trapped. They could either admit failure and face the wrath of the CEO, or they could find another way. Olivia: They found another way. They cheated. They designed a "defeat device"—software that could detect when the car was in a lab being tested for emissions. During the test, the engine would run clean. But the moment the car was on the actual road, the software would switch off the controls, and the cars would spew up to 40 times the legal limit of pollutants. Jackson: That is just audacious. And they got away with it for years. Olivia: For nearly a decade! They sold 11 million cars with this device. It was an illusion of success built on a foundation of fear. The engineers were too afraid to speak up about the impossible goal, so they created a lie. And that lie eventually cost VW billions in fines, a third of its market value, and an incalculable amount of public trust. An engineer involved even said, "I feel misused by my own company." Jackson: That’s the key, isn't it? The system misused him. It’s a similar pattern with the Wells Fargo scandal, right? Unattainable goals plus a culture of fear. Olivia: Exactly the same DNA. Wells Fargo's leadership launched the "Going for Gr-Eight" campaign, pushing employees to sell an average of eight financial products to every single customer. It was an absurdly high target. Jackson: Eight products? I have like, two things with my bank. Who needs eight? Olivia: Almost no one. But employees had daily quotas. Their performance was tracked on "Motivator Reports." If you didn't hit your numbers, you were coached, criticized, and often fired. One former banker said, "They warned us about unethical behavior... but the reality was that people had to meet their goals. They needed a paycheck." Jackson: So, just like at VW, they started cheating. Olivia: They opened over two million unauthorized bank and credit card accounts in customers' names. They were creating fake email addresses, forging signatures—all to hit these impossible targets because they were terrified of losing their jobs. The fear of their manager was more real and immediate than the abstract concept of ethical banking. Jackson: It's the same pattern. Fear doesn't drive excellence; it drives compliance, and when the goal is impossible, it drives cheating. So we have individual fear, which scales up to corporate disaster. It feels a bit hopeless. How does anyone even begin to fix a culture of fear?

Olivia: This is where Edmondson's work becomes so powerful and, honestly, optimistic. She argues that this is not an unsolvable problem. She provides a clear, three-step toolkit for leaders. And the best way to understand it is through the story of Julie Morath, who became the COO at a Children's Hospital in Minneapolis. Jackson: A hospital again. Back to where it all started. Olivia: Exactly. Morath arrived at a hospital where, like most, there was a culture of blame. If an error happened, the first question was "Whose fault is it?" She wanted to achieve 100% patient safety, which everyone thought was impossible. To do it, she knew she had to dismantle the culture of fear. Her approach had three parts. First, she Set the Stage. Jackson: What does that mean, 'set the stage'? Olivia: It means re-framing the work. She went to every department and said, "The work we do here is incredibly complex and interdependent. Human beings are fallible. Given that complexity, errors are inevitable. Our job is not to be perfect, but to build a system that can catch these inevitable errors before they harm a child." Jackson: Ah, I see. She’s taking blame off the table from the very beginning. She's saying, "I expect problems to come up, and I need you to be my eyes and ears." It's managing expectations. Olivia: Precisely. She reframed failure not as a sign of incompetence, but as a natural byproduct of complex work, and therefore, a source of valuable data for learning. The second step was to Invite Participation. Jackson: So she didn't just wait for people to speak up; she actively asked them to. Olivia: Proactively and consistently. She created forums and committees, but her most powerful tool was a simple question she would ask everyone, from surgeons to janitors: "Was everything as safe as you would like it to have been this week with your patients?" Jackson: That’s a great question. It's not accusatory. It's respectful and aspirational. It invites people to think about a better future, not just complain about the past. Olivia: And it worked. People started sharing stories, near-misses, and concerns they had previously kept to themselves. Which brings us to the third and most critical step: Respond Productively. Jackson: This has to be the hardest part. What do you do when someone brings you bad news? Olivia: You thank them. Immediately and sincerely. Morath trained her leaders that when someone brings forward a problem or admits a mistake, the first words out of their mouth should be, "Thank you for that." Because that person just took a personal risk to make the organization safer. You have to honor that courage. Jackson: So you appreciate the messenger, even if you don't like the message. Olivia: You have to. Then, you destigmatize the failure. You don't ask "Whose fault was it?" You ask "What can we learn from this? How can we improve the system?" This creates a virtuous cycle. When people see that speaking up leads to appreciation and learning, not blame and punishment, they do it more. And the organization gets smarter and safer. Jackson: I like that. It's not some vague 'be a better person' advice. It's a set of concrete actions: Set the stage, invite participation, and respond productively. It feels like something a manager could actually start doing tomorrow. Olivia: It is. And it shows that creating a fearless organization isn't about eliminating accountability. It's about shifting the focus from blaming individuals to improving systems.

Jackson: So when you boil it all down, after all these stories of fear and failure and eventual success, what's the one thing we should take away from this? Olivia: I think it's that psychological safety isn't a 'nice-to-have' or a soft skill. It's a fundamental prerequisite for performance in a complex, fast-changing world. For decades, we've operated under the assumption that pressure and fear are effective motivators. Jackson: The "burn the boats" school of leadership. Olivia: Right. But Edmondson's work proves that's a dangerous illusion. Fear doesn't drive excellence; it drives silence. And silence in the modern economy—where we rely on ideas, innovation, and rapid learning—is the most expensive mistake a company can make. It's the silent killer of good ideas and the silent enabler of catastrophic failures. Jackson: So the fearless organization isn't one without problems. It's one where people feel safe enough to talk about them. Olivia: That's the heart of it. The goal isn't to be perfect. The goal is to be perfectly capable of learning. Jackson: That’s a powerful idea. For anyone listening, especially leaders, what's one small thing they could do this week to start building this? Olivia: I'd suggest borrowing from Julie Morath. Ask your team one simple, genuine question: "What is one thing that would make it easier for you to bring up concerns or new ideas?" And then, whatever they say, your first response has to be, "Thank you for telling me that." Jackson: I love that. And for everyone, we'd love to hear your stories. Have you ever been in a situation where you were afraid to speak up? Or, on the flip side, have you seen a leader create real safety for their team? Share your thoughts with the Aibrary community. We learn best when we learn together. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.