Silence and management - part 5

…text about Silence in organization continues - this is part 5.

4.    Why people choose silence

This is not a typical empirical paper, so I will not publish any statistics how silent people are in different situations. I have not measured the level of silence in meeting rooms with technical instruments, or I have not counted how many words are said in the auditorium when CEO has introduced her/his new strategy agenda. On the other as a breathing (and sometimes thinking) person I have experienced, wondered, listened and encountered different levels of silence in numerous organizational occasions.

 

 In fact, it might be interesting as such, to do some clever measurements about silence in organizational context. Without being too serious at this point, one might for instance measure how the level of silence develops during strategy process. Perhaps it might possible to draw some silence profiles, so that in a successful strategy process the silence profile follows certain pattern and in those strategy processes which are not so successful the silence profile might follow different kind of pattern.

Certainly this discussion about silence profiles is very tentative by its nature and it has more a thought provoking role than anything grander. However, what we are talking here is not a joke of any kind. I would propose that any competent leader is very keen to follow how silence (thus in the way the silence profile) develops in her/his organization. S/he will not use technical apparatus for the measurement, but I am sure that s/he uses all his perception and thinking capability to understand what is happening in her/his organization.

But why people choose silence, let us tackle that conundrum.

4.1 Silence - the whole picture

Therefore what I try to do next is that I suggest a whole picture of a silence in organizations. I am fully aware that “whole” is insurmountable word, impossible to achieve. In addition I do not try to present any kind of fixed or well established total picture of silence. What I try to do is outline a very preliminary taxonomy which would capture this phenomenon as well as I am able to do at the moment. It would be a sheer pleasure if someone would use this taxonomy and develop it further or changed in completely.

The point in presenting this taxonomy is to try to understand why people may choose silence in different situations in different organizations. What is also important here is try to understand how silence could be approached from the managerial perspective. Here this perspective means a desire to improve the possibility for an organization to succeed. It is proposed here that those managerial actions which lower the level of silence are such interventions which create new potential for an organization to thrive.

The suggestion for whole picture of silence in organization includes four main areas which are all discussed in the next blog posts.