Silence and management - part 9

…text about Silence in organization continues - this is part 9.


Change requires vision, energy and action, quite often change also requires voice: new ideas, astute observations and clearly stated facts which must be taken into account. Therefore it is problematic if there is silence where should be a lot of discussion. Understanding reasons of silence opens ways to create more discussion in the future. Let us not give a frustration a possibility to root itself into our organizations, uprooting frustration is everybody's business.

4.4      Frustration

Frustration means here a feeling that for some reason a person has reached a conclusion that it is not worthwhile to break to silence.

4.4.1 Speaking does not provide results

A person can end up choosing silence if s/he comes to conclusion that her/his efforts to raise issues for common discussion do not seem to provide results. Perhaps s/he feels that her/his openings are met with silence or that her/his efforts to change something have not provided results s/he would have liked to see happening.

In case one feels that s/he is being silenced that experience may evidently create even more silence in the future. At the same time we must notice that the experienced disappointment for not getting changes that someone may want is also a complex issue. Perhaps the desired changes are such which are feasible to achieve, then the disappointment of not getting desired changes could be justified. At the same token it is also possible to think that sometimes people wish changes which are very hard to make at least in the short run if not  ever. In both these cases there should be discussions in organizations that why some required changes may not be possible at the certain time, perhaps there are some justifications why even the in principle possible changes are not done at least now. As we can anticipate one problem here is silence, in other words in desired changes are not even discussed openly there is no way to handle these issues. Silence is prone to create more silence.

4.4.2 Lack of genuine interest

Sometimes one reason behind silence is that for some reason a person may have lost her/his genuine interest toward the development and success organization.  When this is a case a person may choose silence also in those occasions where s/he could instead share something valuable with others. Often silence is an easy solution, sharing would require much more, at least you would need to justify your point and make others listen. Sometimes you would have to compete with different views in order to get your voice heard. For someone who has lost her/his genuine interest, this may feel or too heavy burden and s/he just stays silent.

And also here one dictum of this paper rings true - silence create silence. A person who has assumed a silent role is assumed to remain silent by others. So, how s/he might gather the courage and energy to break silence and beat the expectations, not an easy task. In accounting so called zero based budgeting is something which has been proposed in situations where we just build on old expectations and practices without really stopping to evaluate what would be possible now. Could we apply something from zero based budgeting on human encounters, could we always be open for new realities, open that someone who has not been that active could become active today. At least we should check that our expectations towards anyone are not the ones which help the silence to linger.

 

4.4.3 Negative learning

Negative learning is a concept which I have first heard from professor Tapio Aittola, University of Jyväskylä. Negative learning refers to learning experiences which are very different than those experiences which are typically topics of general discussions. Negative learning  means that a person starts to see how difficult and sometimes practically impossible some things really are. S/he may have had, for instance, a basic idea that s/he would like to do something new, for instance s/he would like to change something in her/his organization. S/he may have an idea that when she focus on something and starts to understand it better s/he will learn new things and gradually s/he will be in a position from which s/he can make those planned changes.

However, sometimes it may happen that the world reserves negative learning experiences for any of us. This means that a person learns that for some reason it is far more difficult and perhaps impossible to make the changes s/he would like to make. Sometimes the world just is much more complex than the person had thought and therefore making changes becomes difficult. S/he may notice that s/he does not have the needed capabilities, energy or time to learn all that what would be needed in order to make changes. Sometimes there may some other reasons like political, cultural or some vested personal interests on status quo which make the changing impossible.

In sum, negative learning experiences may also lead to silence and the fewer efforts to make changes and develop new things. From the organizational perspective it might be desirable that people would not give up too easily when they encounter negative learning experiences. Quite often new openings feel at first impossible, and no one may believe that those ideas could be feasible but surprisingly they may turn into new opportunities after persistent effort.