1. The Quiet Meeting
The meeting should have been the exciting part.
SNAFU-Labs, a UK-based start-up building AI tools for customer service teams, had just raised Series A funding. The founders were expanding fast — new hires, new projects, new promises.
But this Monday’s product planning session felt heavy.
Eleanor, the new Head of Delivery, stood by the glass wall scribbling ideas on the whiteboard. “Let’s talk about the next sprint — what blockers do we have?” she asked.
Silence.
Four engineers stared at their laptops. A designer adjusted his chair. Someone coughed.
After a few seconds, one developer mumbled, “Everything’s fine.”
Eleanor knew it wasn’t fine. The last release had been delayed twice. Bugs were stacking up, and one key feature was quietly failing in production. But no one wanted to say it.
As she left the room, she noticed the CTO laughing with the CEO in the hallway. “We’re almost ready for the investor demo,” he said confidently.
Eleanor thought: Almost ready — but no one’s talking about what’s actually broken.
2. Early Symptoms
Over the next two weeks, Eleanor watched the same pattern repeat.
Meetings were polite, brief, and utterly unhelpful. Issues appeared only after deadlines. Slack messages were cautious — full of emojis and softeners like “might be worth checking” or “just a small thing.”
When she asked for honest feedback in retrospectives, people smiled and said, “We’re learning loads.”
But delivery metrics told a different story: velocity down 25%, rework up 40%.
She started to realise the issue wasn’t technical. It was cultural.
The team had learned that speaking up carried risk — not reward.
3. Finding the Friction
Eleanor invited a few colleagues for coffee and gentle probing. “What’s really going on?” she asked.
One engineer hesitated before saying, “Honestly… people stopped raising issues after one of the demos.”
He explained: a few months earlier, a junior developer had flagged a concern about data privacy in a sprint review. The CEO — known for his intensity — dismissed it as “too negative.” Afterwards, the team joked privately about not “poking the bear.”
The message stuck. From then on, everyone focused on making progress look smooth, not real.
It wasn’t malice — it was self-preservation.
4. Making the Invisible Visible
Eleanor had been trained in Systems Thinking, and recognised the signs of a feedback system gone wrong.
In SNAFU-Labs’ case, the structure of communication — how information moved between teams and leaders — created the behaviour of silence.
She drew a quick causal loop on her whiteboard:
- Fear of criticism increased withholding of information.
- Withholding information reduced problem visibility.
- Reduced visibility led to bigger surprises, triggering harsher reactions — which reinforced fear.
A reinforcing loop — self-sustaining and toxic.
(Explore more about how reinforcing loops operate in Systems Thinking and Systemic Failure.)
She realised she couldn’t fix the system by telling people to “speak up.” She had to change the environment that made silence rational.
5. The Force Field Session
Eleanor asked for permission to run a workshop — “just a reflection session,” she told the CEO. He agreed, distracted by investor calls.
She gathered a cross-functional group of ten: engineers, designers, PMs, and one founder.
On a whiteboard, she drew two columns and titled it Force Field Analysis: What’s Driving Silence vs What Could Drive Openness.
Then she asked: “Why is it hard to speak up here?”
At first, people hesitated. Then someone said, “Because bad news is punished.” Heads nodded.
They filled the left column with “driving forces”:
- Fear of CEO reaction
- Time pressure to deliver “wins”
- Lack of clarity on priorities
- Feeling unheard
Then, in the right column — “restraining forces”:
- Supportive peers
- Shared desire to build something meaningful
- Pride in quality work
- A growing recognition that hiding problems wasn’t sustainable
The balance was obvious. The drivers of silence were stronger than the enablers of openness.
Eleanor closed the session by saying, “We don’t need to remove all fear — just make honesty slightly easier than avoidance.”
6. A Small Experiment
Instead of rolling out a grand “cultural initiative,” Eleanor started with one controlled change:
At the end of every sprint, she replaced the formal “retrospective” with a short, candid After Action Review (AAR).
The format was simple:
- What did we expect to happen?
- What actually happened?
- Why was there a difference?
- What can we learn?
No minutes, no recording, no formal blame. Just a 15-minute talk.
The first time, only three people spoke. By the third session, the whole team was sharing.
Someone said, “I thought the API limit issue was mine, but turns out everyone was hitting it.”
Another added, “I didn’t raise it earlier because I didn’t want to look like I was behind.”
Eleanor noticed a shift — a sense of relief.
7. Cracks and Light
Three weeks later, a major incident hit: the chatbot API failed under customer load.
Instead of scrambling silently, the team immediately opened a shared Slack channel named #open-incident. They documented steps, shared updates, and asked for help.
The issue was fixed within six hours — half the time of the previous outage.
When the CEO joined the channel later, expecting chaos, he saw calm collaboration. “Whatever you’re doing,” he wrote, “keep doing it.”
For the first time, feedback flowed upward as easily as it flowed down.
Eleanor smiled. The silence was breaking.
8. Learning from the System
At the next AAR, the team discussed the incident openly. One engineer said, “We realised we were scared of being blamed for outages, but now that we shared everything, the fix was faster.”
Eleanor drew a new version of her causal loop:
- Psychological safety led to faster problem visibility.
- Faster visibility led to shared solutions.
- Shared solutions improved trust and confidence.
- Trust reinforced safety — a new reinforcing loop, but positive this time.
The system hadn’t been “fixed” — it had been rebalanced.
9. The Founder’s Shift
Eleanor scheduled a private session with the CEO to show the difference.
“Before,” she said, pointing to a graph, “we were optimising for performance metrics — but suppressing feedback. Now we’re optimising for learning — and delivery is stabilising naturally.”
The CEO listened. “So the silence wasn’t laziness?”
“No,” she said. “It was protection. People adapt to what the system rewards.”
He nodded slowly. “Then we should reward openness.”
A week later, the CEO shared a public message in the company Slack:
“We’ve been too focused on being right. From now on, I’d rather we be curious.”
It wasn’t a manifesto. But it mattered.
10. Signs of Change
Six months later, SNAFU-Labs’ pulse survey showed a 30% increase in employees who agreed with the statement:
“I feel safe to raise issues that could delay delivery.”
Delivery lead time improved. Turnover dropped.
But the deeper change was invisible: conversations that once stayed in private DMs now happened in public threads. Leaders began asking, “What are we not hearing?”
Eleanor called it constructive noise.
To her, it was the sound of a healthy system breathing again.
Reflection: How Silence Speaks
Silence isn’t the absence of communication — it’s the output of a system designed to avoid conflict.
In SANFU-Labs’ case, reinforcing loops of fear and pressure made silence rational. The breakthrough came from applying tools that helped people see and rebalance those forces:
- Systems Thinking made the invisible feedback loops visible.
- Force Field Analysis revealed the social pressures driving silence.
- After Action Review gave people a safe structure to talk about failure without fear.
The lesson: Culture doesn’t change through slogans. It changes when the system starts rewarding the right behaviours.
(See Symptom Sensing to explore how subtle human signals point to deeper structural issues.)
Author’s Note
This story explores how feedback systems shape behaviour — and how leaders can transform silence into learning by changing conditions, not people.
Tools like Systems Thinking, Force Field Analysis, and After Action Review help uncover and rebalance invisible forces that drive dysfunction.
Within the Failure Hackers problem-solving lifecycle, this story sits at the “understanding the system” stage — where insight emerges from patterns, not blame.
When teams stop fearing failure, they start innovating again.
And that’s when the real work begins.
