Silence Isn't Agreement

Nobody raised any concerns.

It is one of the most reassuring things a programme team can hear at the end of a design workshop. In some parts of the world it is also one of the least reliable.

In my last piece I looked at shadow systems: the spreadsheets, trackers and local databases people build when the official system doesn't support the work they actually do. Shadow systems appear everywhere. What differs, in my experience, is how you find out about them, and that has a great deal to do with culture.

The loud objection

In my experience of Western organisations, and the UK in particular, people simply won't follow a process they think is stupid or wrong. They'll tell you, often bluntly and often in the first workshop. If you don't listen, they will ignore the process and carry on doing it their own way, and they won't be especially quiet about that either.

I often laugh about this with my European colleagues, particularly the Germans and the Dutch. We are all pretty robust in our thinking and in our conversations, none more so than a wonderful former colleague I nicknamed the BBB: Bold, Brilliant and Blunt. (Yes, I did ask her permission to include that. I'd have been too scared not to!)

One of our first workshops, in Tilburg in the Netherlands, was also one of the most challenging. They didn't want the new system. They already had one that worked, so why should they engage? And they had a point: their people data flowed from agencies through HR and performance management into a genuinely impressive dashboard. It took a lot of discussion, and a lot of assurance on my part that we would make it work for them, before they engaged. But at no point was I in any doubt about where I stood.

When that kind of objection isn't heard, the workaround follows, and it is rarely subtle. I've seen a modern system go in and then only be updated quarterly, because the people using it saw it as duplicating what they already had. The result was out-of-date data, and decisions being considered on exactly that information.

It can be exhausting for a programme team. But it is a gift. When the objection is loud, you know exactly where the design is weak, and you have the chance to fix it before go-live.

The quiet workaround

In more hierarchical cultures I have seen something that looks very different on the surface. The process is presented, heads nod, nobody challenges it in the room, and the programme team leaves with what feels like agreement. Then, after go-live, the work gets done the way that actually works: quietly, alongside the official route, often in a spreadsheet nobody at head office knows exists.

I have a very old example of this from my time in semiconductors, when we had process excellence teams and a great deal of global collaboration. I was working with a team supporting a site in Mexico. They went out, had great meetings, agreed plans, and then the excellence team flew home. It took two or three visits before they realised what was happening: the local team were simply too polite to disagree. They went through all the motions while the visitors were there and, as soon as they left, carried on exactly as before.

I met a different version of it when I worked in Asia, and it took me a while to understand how the culture worked. I was working with highly intelligent people, all far better qualified than me. Three months in, I noticed that the payroll team beat their KPIs every single month, so I had the normal conversation with the "mother ship" in Edinburgh: if targets are beaten every month, they are clearly too easy and need tightening. It then took me about a month to persuade the leadership of what I had since discovered was true. The KPIs were genuinely tough. They were met every month because the team stayed until one, two or three in the morning, not just to finish the payroll but to make sure everything was completely perfect within the KPIs. Nobody had told me the targets were unrealistic. Missing a deadline or a target simply wasn't something they would do. That is admirable, but if you want a healthy workforce you have to understand that culture and work with it.

This isn't dishonesty. In many cultures, telling a senior leader or a head-office team that their design, their KPIs or their targets are wrong simply isn't the done thing. People are being respectful, even obedient. But the work still has to get done, customers still have to be served and people still have to be paid, so they find a way. Compliance on the surface and a workaround underneath aren't a contradiction. They are two sensible responses to the same pressure.

Compliance on the surface and a workaround underneath aren't a contradiction.

What the data says

Geert Hofstede's long-running research on national culture measures "power distance": how far people accept that power is unequally distributed and that the boss is not to be challenged. The UK and Germany both score 35, the Netherlands 38 and Denmark just 18. Mexico scores 81; China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE around 80; the Philippines 94; and Malaysia sits at the top of the index at around 100.

That matters because power distance affects whether people speak up. Botero and Van Dyne's research found that employees with higher power distance values were less likely to voice concerns or suggestions, in both the United States and Colombia.

A word of caution, though. National scores are averages, not descriptions of individuals, and organisational culture matters at least as much as national culture. A UK organisation with a command-and-control leadership style can produce exactly the same silence. The point isn't to stereotype anyone. It's to stop assuming that the absence of challenge means the presence of agreement.

How to hear what nobody is saying

If you are running a programme across countries, or across very different parts of one organisation, you need more than one way of hearing the truth. Asking "any concerns?" at the end of a presentation works in some rooms and not at all in others. Asking "what would make this hard to do in your country?" invites a practical answer rather than a challenge to authority. Written and anonymous input gives people a way to disagree without doing it in front of their manager.

Local champions help, but only if they have a genuine channel upwards and a senior sponsor who visibly welcomes bad news. Leaders can go first by naming the weaknesses they already know about, which makes it safer for others to add to the list. After go-live, somebody needs to spend time where the work actually happens and look at what people really use, not just what the system reports.

And this is where the closed loop I described in The Governance Gap earns its keep. Reconciliation data doesn't defer to hierarchy. If the numbers in payroll don't match the numbers in Core HR, that tells you something is happening outside the system, whether or not anyone felt able to say so.

The real test

In the UK, if people think your process is wrong, you'll usually hear about it. In other places you may not hear anything at all, until the numbers stop adding up. Either way, the workaround is coming. The question is whether you've designed your programme to hear it.

Sources

• Hofstede, G. Culture's Consequences / Hofstede Insights country comparison: Power Distance Index scores.
• Botero, I.C. & Van Dyne, L. (2009). Employee Voice Behavior: Interactive Effects of LMX and Power Distance in the United States and Colombia. Management Communication Quarterly, 23(1), 84–104.