Jenga Building

The tower looks structurally sound, so why not make it taller?

Perhaps we could even put a rotating restaurant on the top.

There is only one problem. Nobody wants to pay for the additional structure.

No matter. We have plenty of material already. We can simply remove a few blocks from lower down the tower and use them at the top.

Look at the result. A magnificent new restaurant and it has cost almost nothing.

There will, inevitably, be people who worry about the missing blocks. Risk managers, engineers and health and safety experts will point towards the increasingly fragile structure underneath.

It is tempting to dismiss them as barriers to progress.

After all, the tower is still standing.

And therein lies the problem.

The absence of catastrophe is easily mistaken for evidence of safety.

History repeatedly tells us that major organisational failures rarely arrive without warning. Warning signs existed before the Grenfell Tower fire, before major infrastructure failures and before the 2008 financial crisis. The circumstances were profoundly different, but there is a recurring organisational lesson: risks can become visible long before an organisation is prepared to accept what they mean.

So what happens when your organisation wants its rotating restaurant but does not want to pay for the structure required to support it?

What happens when you notice that the blocks are being removed?

Do you raise your hand?

And what happens when doing so might affect your own career?

Most large organisations now have policies encouraging employees to speak up. In healthcare we have formal Freedom to Speak Up arrangements. In law, certain disclosures may receive protection as protected disclosures.

The existence of a policy, however, tells us remarkably little about whether people actually feel safe enough to use it.

An organisation does not need a secret policy for silencing dissent.

It simply needs people to learn that raising uncomfortable questions carries a cost.

Perhaps the person who repeatedly raises concerns stops being invited to meetings. Perhaps they acquire a reputation for being “difficult”, “negative” or “not a team player”. Perhaps legitimate concerns are repeatedly acknowledged but nothing changes.

Eventually people learn.

Not because somebody has instructed them to remain silent, but because they have watched what happens to those who don’t.

And so another block is removed.

The tower remains standing.

Which, perversely, becomes the evidence used to justify removing the next one.

David Turnbull

Clinician, expert witness and writer exploring why people, systems and organisations succeed, drift and sometimes fail.