From Boeing (737MAX, 787 rollout) to NASA (Columbia, Challenger), we’ve seen disastrous examples of how bad news from people low in the hierarchy gets distorted as it moves to the top of the organization. The distortion is consistently in one direction: it mitigates the bad news, making it sound less severe and less likely than...
Q: What are some ways for people to tell if they have some invisible hierarchy? In terms of language, too. What are some of the cues, like if you were to go back and read somebody’s email, what are the phrases you look for? A: It’s in the ways that we enforce hierarchy. There...
Q: What is a major barrier that keeps people from speaking up? A: We call it the power gradient, it’s how much more important your boss is than you. It affects you like this – you don’t speak up against the boss. Information flows inversely proportional to the power gradient, so the steeper...
The power gradient is the amount of social distance there is between one person and another. The power gradient is the feeling of “how much more important are people in the next tier in the hierarchy than we are” and “how much more important are we then people below us.” In Industrial Age organizations (where...
From Boeing (737MAX, 787 rollout) to NASA (Columbia, Challenger), we’ve seen disastrous examples of how bad news from people low in the hierarchy gets distorted as it moves to the top of the organization. The distortion is consistently in one direction: it mitigates the bad news, making it sound less severe and less likely than...
