Safe to Speak
Here, are ideas and tools to help you say more and listen more at work, and to enable others to do the same. Practical guidance about the cognitive and emotional work required in situations ranging from the welcoming to the overtly hostile.
These resources are based in my doctoral research to understand how some people, in some situations, resist being silenced. The people I interviewed thought of conversation as an opportunity to understand how others think and to create and explore how to think and behave differently. People who can be hard to silence – who are capable of being ‘constructively awkward’.
I came to question the assumption that failing to speak up is evidence of a personal failing; and that the way to improve things is to simply hold those failing individuals to account. To think and act like this is to silence two questions this site investigates:
Why is it so hard to hear what some people have to say?
How do we account for the people who have helped create and replicate the work culture in which others are deemed to have ‘failed’?
The site is organised around three workbooks:
I need to say something - Read this if you anticipate a difficult conversation. This workbook explores how we face a basic question as we listen and anticipate speaking - what is being asked of me, given my experience and role?
Start workbook 1
I need to help people say more – Read this if you want to make it safer for others to speak up and listen more. This workbook examines small changes to help people, at risk of being silenced, to speak and be heard.
Start workbook 2
I want to investigate the conversational culture - Read this if you are trying to understand why a failure to speak, to communicate has occurred. This workbook will help you look beyond simply blaming those directly involved, to think about how others, and the work culture, contribute when communication ‘fails’.
