A reflection on silence, responsibility and the emotional life of organisations.
A yellow tennis ball
Imagine a team-building exercise. A bright yellow tennis ball is passed from person to person. Perhaps it follows a talk about collaboration and the importance of everyone having a part to play. Someone receives the ball, holds it briefly, then passes it on. There is movement, laughter, underlying cringe and perhaps a visible sense of shared activity.
I can’t stop thinking about that ball, because it can mean two things at once. Passing something on can include others, share responsibility and make room for different voices. It can also mean that nobody holds the thing for long enough to ask what it requires of them.
Lately I’ve been thinking about what happens when work becomes a source of distress. I’ve often come across accounts of workplace bullying, disharmony and fracture. They were different experiences, and I want to keep them distinct. What links them, for me, is a question about the places we work and how they shape what can be said, felt and changed.
What happens when the thing being passed around isn’t a ball, but responsibility, unease or a concern that is hard to name? Who holds it? Who decides what it means? Does it arrive somewhere it can be thought about, or does it simply continue its journey around the circle?
The ball isn’t evidence of anything. It’s an image to think with, and its ordinariness is the point: a small, bright object that carries no meaning until the group gives it one. Perhaps organisations are like that too. Their power may come less from any single act than from what happens, again and again, between people.
When a problem changes shape
Notice how easily a concern about one person’s behaviour can become a problem with “the team”.
A question about accountability becomes a question about relationships. Unequal treatment becomes a matter of communication. A worry about management becomes a chance to rebuild trust.
I want to be fair here: sometimes that really is the right diagnosis. Teams develop patterns, trust can break down in more than one direction, and collective work can help. Nobody in these stories needs to be acting in bad faith.
But if the original concern involved a difference in power, treating everyone as equally responsible can hide the fact that people don’t have equal influence, security or freedom to speak. A team-building day can help people feel connected. It can’t, by itself, settle who is accountable for what.
There is something comforting about a team problem. Responsibility can become spread thinly, everyone is part of the difficulty, and everyone is invited into the solution. The question shifts from what happened, and who can change it? to how can we work better together? The second sounds hopeful. It may also leave the first unanswered.
Sometimes the work really is repair. Sometimes repair isn’t possible until someone looks honestly at what caused the damage. Telling the two apart matters.
The meeting after the meeting
There’s a familiar scene that never appears on an agenda. The meeting ends, chairs are pushed back, laptops close. Then, in the corridor or over a cup of tea, the real conversation begins.
“What did you make of that?” A colleague admits they wanted to speak but didn’t. Someone describes something that troubled them. Others nod; they’ve seen it too. There’s relief in discovering you haven’t been imagining it alone. others dont involve themselves as it doesn’t meet their personal agenda.
And then the next formal meeting arrives, and nobody says anything.
It’s tempting to call that hypocrisy, and sometimes self-interest does play a part. But silence often has gentler origins: fear, tiredness, loyalty, an earlier disappointment, or a sensible belief that speaking will cost something and change nothing. People make different calculations about what they can afford to risk. Someone feeling secure may find it easy to challenge a decision. Someone who feels exposed may have learned, by experience or by watching, that raising a concern can change how you’re seen.
Understanding this isn’t the same as saying silence is harmless. When concerns only circulate in private, conversation becomes a pressure valve. The recognition is real, and it matters. But the truth is shared just enough to ease the pressure, without reaching the places where decisions are made. The group knows. The organisation, in any official sense, doesn’t have to.
And whose account becomes the organisation’s reality? Not automatically the majority’s. Organisational reality is often shaped by what can be recorded, repeated and acted on. If a team gets a reputation for being “difficult”, that story starts organising what happens next. New concerns are heard through it, as more evidence that the team is difficult, rather than as possible evidence that something difficult is happening within it.
Reading the room (with apologies to Logan Roy)
If you’ve watched Succession, you’ll know the feeling. Nobody in those boardrooms is really discussing the numbers. They’re reading Logan Roy: the pause, the raised eyebrow, the question he doesn’t answer. Is the idea good? Wrong question. Is it safe? What does the room require of me if I want to stay in favour?
It’s gloriously over the top. Most of us will never be asked to prove our loyalty in a helicopter. But the quiet version is familiar. A person pauses before asking a question. A concern is softened until it’s barely recognisable. A colleague decides this isn’t the right moment, then discovers that no moment ever is. Attention splits between doing the job and watching the people who can affect it.
What makes Succession funny is that everyone is so clever and so frightened at once. What makes it uncomfortable is that we recognise the fear, even without the yacht.
What Bion and Menzies Lyth might say
Psychodynamic thinking offers one way of wondering what is happening beneath the visible activity.
Wilfred Bion, who studied groups, noticed that a group can have two tasks: the one it states, and the one it is quietly doing to manage its anxiety. Under strain, he suggested, groups tend to slip into familiar defensive modes: looking to a leader to rescue them, fighting something or someone, fleeing from the difficulty, or pinning their hopes on some future event. (He called these basic assumptions of dependency, fight-flight and pairing.) I find the idea useful, as a lens rather than a diagnosis.
Isabel Menzies Lyth, studying nurses in a London teaching hospital, found something similar in the routines of the institution itself. Procedures and rotas that gave real structure also helped staff avoid feelings that were too painful to hold. The system protected people from distress while restricting the very work it existed to support.
Seen this way, a meeting can create the feeling that something is being done, and a team-building exercise can give an anxious group a manageable task with clear rules and a ball. These aren’t inherently avoidant. The question is whether the activity serves the work or stands in for it.
The same goes for formal processes. As people wait for an outcome, the process can come to hold their hope of being heard. But activity and recognition aren’t the same thing. The paperwork can be complete while the central question stays open.
None of this proves that a particular delay is defensive, or that a particular manager is acting from hidden motives. It offers questions, not verdicts. What anxiety might the group be managing? What has become hard to think about? Which activities help us return to a sense of order, and which help us learn?
What it costs to carry
There’s a cost to working inside a team whose relationships have frayed, and it is rarely dramatic. It shows up as an alertness to who is in the room, how a comment might land, whether it’s safe to ask. People rehearse conversations beforehand and replay them afterwards. An email is overthought. The working day acquires a second, invisible job: monitoring the emotional weather.
Over time, people become experts as readers of the emotional weather. They learn which topics are welcome, which questions cause discomfort, which kinds of disagreement get remembered. And nobody needs to share the same motives for the effect to be the same. Some are protecting their position, some are keeping the peace, some are following what they believe is a fair process, and some genuinely want things to improve.
A concern is referred elsewhere. A review is commissioned. A meeting is scheduled. An action plan is drafted. Each step may be reasonable on its own, yet the sequence can leave the original conditions exactly where they were. Nobody has to plot this. The pattern is reproduced through ordinary actions and omissions: who is believed, who is asked to explain themselves, what gets written down and what stays informal. People help create the system, and they also inherit it, and it can come to feel larger than any of them.Over time, that vigilance can feed anxiety, exhaustion, poor sleep, lost confidence and isolation. Effects differ from person to person, and a difficult team doesn’t automatically mean ill mental health. But it’s worth asking what these environments ask people to carry, and how much energy is being diverted from the work itself.
For people whose job is caring for others, there may be an extra tension: helping clients make sense of threat and rebuild trust while navigating uncertainty in their own professional relationships. That isn’t a failure of competence or compassion. Therapists are affected by their environments like everyone else.
Psychological safety is sometimes treated as a perk, something to cultivate once the important work is done. I suspect it’s closer to the condition that lets the important work happen at all.
Compassion as a value, compassion as an experience
Many organisations speak the language of compassionate leadership and psychological safety. These are meaningful aspirations. But a value written into a policy isn’t the same as a value felt in practice.
An organisation can sincerely believe in compassion and still respond to challenge in ways that leave people feeling excluded or exposed. It can invite people to speak, then say little about what happens next. That doesn’t mean the values are fake. It may be more troubling than that: people can believe in them, and the routines can still make them hard to live out exactly when they’re needed. The language stays intact while the experience becomes something else.
There’s a quieter obstacle I’ve come to recognise: niceness. Not kindness, which can say something difficult and stay beside you while you hear it, but the polite, pleasant surface that keeps everyone comfortable. In a nice culture, nobody raises their voice, everyone is thanked, and the hard question is gently set aside “for another time”. It feels safe, and often it is meant warmly. But when pleasantness becomes the rule, disagreement starts to feel like rudeness, and a concern can seem like a breach of manners rather than information the group needs. People learn to smile through what troubles them. Nobody has been unkind, yet nothing has been said. Kindness sometimes asks us to risk the awkward moment. Niceness asks us to avoid it. A workplace in which nobody is allowed to disturb the peace may be peaceful only for those who can afford not to speak.
Succession shows us the version where fear is loud. Niceness is where it learns to whisper.
There’s a difference between an organisation being able to say it has listened and the people who spoke feeling heard. And there’s a difference between inviting people to take part and letting what they say shape what happens next. These distinctions seem small. Their consequences aren’t.
What would change look like?
It’s easy to become cynical when processes produce more waiting than change, but cynicism flattens distinctions that matter. Fair procedures, confidentiality and time to establish the facts are all worth having. The question isn’t whether there should be a process, but what it is for, who it serves and how we’ll know whether it worked.
Here is how I’d tell a process that holds from one that merely contains. Does anyone look at specific decisions and behaviours? Is equality of the treatment of the staff compared? Is it clear who is accountable for what? Do the people who speak up, learn what can be shared with them? Is someone asking, a few months on, whether anything has actually changed? And is the team’s work kept separate from what individuals in authority must answer for?
None of this is dramatic. It’s simply what the values look like when they’re practised. Compassion isn’t only a warm tone or a facilitated conversation. Sometimes it means tolerating the discomfort of hearing something unwelcome, being honest about what is known and not known, and resisting the urge to turn an uncomfortable question into a more manageable one.
New team members can help. They ask the questions others stopped asking and notice patterns that have become invisible. But they aren’t a solution in themselves; they also learn what is safe to say. The real question is what lets a fresh perspective change a group rather than be absorbed by it.
And who can stop the exercise? Leaders, most obviously. But it’s unfair to wait only for the most powerful. Sometimes it’s the person with a little more security who says aloud what the corridor already knows. Sometimes it’s a colleague who simply asks, “Whatever happened to that concern we raised?” Small acts, but they can be enough to let someone else breath out.
All that passes without being held…Everybody knows. Nobody says.
I keep returning to the tennis ball, perhaps because it’s so small and ordinary, and because the image isn’t sinister. People stand in a circle and pass it on. There is movement, cooperation, a shared activity. Yet a ball passed around isn’t the same as a responsibility held. A process completed isn’t the same as a problem understood, and a meeting arranged isn’t the same as a change made.
I’m trying not to make villains of anyone. We don’t know all their motives, and systems are rarely sustained by one simple intention. Some people may be afraid, some protecting their position, some trusting a fair process, and some genuinely hoping things will improve. These can all be true at once. The effects still matter, whatever the intentions.
What unsettles me is the possibility that an organisation can become skilled at containing the consequences of a problem without changing the conditions that sustain it. It can make the problem discussable in certain terms, at certain times, through certain channels. It can let the truth be spoken privately while leaving it without authority in public. It can describe the team as the problem and then ask the team to repair itself.
Perhaps the life of a system is found there: not in some hidden creature directing events, but in the repetition of familiar patterns. In what gets passed on. In what is quietly left alone. In the explanations that make some things visible and others almost impossible to see.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply why people stay silent, or why leaders fail to act. It’s how a group of people comes to sustain an account of reality that many of them privately experience as incomplete. And what it would take for the private truth to become something the organisation could bear to hear.
A tennis ball can be passed around indefinitely. At some point, someone must stop the exercise, pick it up, and ask what it was meant to help us do.
