26.287 - Make It Safer to Tell You You're Wrong

“No amount of skill eliminates all risk.”

Jim Detert, 2021, quoted in “The Enactment of Courage”

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Courage

Jim Detert studies workplace courage, ethical leadership, and the reasons people speak up or remain silent.

His work at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business examines a familiar difficulty: knowing that something deserves attention does not make raising it easy. In his 2021 book, Choosing Courage, he explores how people can prepare for difficult action, handle the moment itself, and follow through afterward. His qualification matters just as much as his encouragement: skill cannot remove every risk.

That limit also matters to the person inviting feedback. Someone can prepare carefully and still have good reasons to hesitate before questioning us. We can examine the conditions we control: when we ask, how we respond, and whether their observation reaches someone able to act. This essay takes that complementary direction. Where we shape a decision, we have an opportunity to make useful correction less dependent on another person’s courage.

The Concern That Arrived Too Late

The email is only three sentences long: “The new storage cabinets will be difficult to use with the rolling carts. Has anyone checked the clearance with a cart in place? It would be worth doing before the order goes through.”

Imagine receiving that message on Tuesday morning, the day after authorizing a custom order for a community art studio. You have spent weeks comparing prices, measuring walls, and finding something that fits a limited budget. The cabinets will replace a jumble of mismatched shelves. You feel pleased to have moved a neglected project forward. Now someone who regularly sets up the room has noticed a problem you did not test.

Your first reaction might be entirely understandable: Why am I hearing this now? The order is already in progress. Changing it may cost money. The question feels late, even though the person asking it is pointing toward something that matters. Before answering, however, it helps to ask when that person first had enough information to recognize the problem.

Working backward changes the story. The final plan appeared in Monday evening’s update. The purchase was authorized that afternoon. Earlier discussions had concerned cost and appearance; nobody had asked the people moving carts through the room to try the proposed arrangement. The concern arrived after commitment because the usable invitation did too. The person receiving the email had been living with the decision for weeks. The person sending it had been given one evening.

This imagined situation contains no obvious villain. Someone took initiative on behalf of a shared space, and someone else contributed knowledge from using it. Both were helping. The difficulty lay in how their contributions were connected. By the time practical knowledge reached purchasing authority, changing course had become harder.

The coordinator’s first response can make a difference without pretending the problem is already solved: “Thank you for catching this. I sent the layout after authorizing the order. Let’s check the clearance, and I’ll ask the supplier what we can still change.” The contributor is not asked to defend the timing or produce a replacement design. Their observation is given somewhere to go. Whatever the supplier can offer now, the studio also has a question to carry into its next purchase: how could this knowledge arrive while there is still room to use it?

An Invitation Needs a Way In

Being the person who gets things done can become a valued role. In a volunteer group, a family, or a small organization, others may depend on our willingness to make calls, sort through options, and carry a project across the finish line. That contribution deserves recognition. Yet when we carry most of the organizing work, we can also become the person who decides when everyone else gets to see it.

A group can quietly teach its organizers that competence means arriving with the loose ends tied up. We praise the person who has found the supplier, settled the price, and prepared the announcement. A rough sketch may feel less impressive, even when it is exactly what others need in order to contribute. If we wait until a proposal looks complete before sharing it, we may be asking for correction at the moment when accepting it feels most costly.

A finished-looking plan can also make disagreement feel like an interruption of someone’s generosity. The person pushing the cart may appreciate all the work that went into the cabinets. They may still see a problem. Making room for that combination matters: gratitude for the effort and concern about the result can belong in the same conversation. The organizer can help by being specific about what is open, rather than leaving others to guess whether an announcement is also an invitation.

For the next purchase, the studio could put a different sequence in place. Before selecting a layout or authorizing an order, the coordinator could share the available options with the people who move materials through the room. They could try turning a cart, reaching the shelves, and passing one another in the aisle. A concern would not have to arrive as a polished alternative plan. “I cannot get this cart through here” would be enough to begin an inquiry.

Suppose, for that future purchase, a supplier can hold a price through Friday. The coordinator could arrange those trials early in the week, allowing time to investigate problems before placing the order. The invitation would name both the real deadline and the choices still available. People would know when their knowledge could affect the purchase, and the coordinator would have made time to consider it. Sharing a plan early would become part of doing the work well.

The route matters as well. Not everyone will attend a meeting, feel ready to object in a group, or have time to compose a formal response. Someone might demonstrate the problem in person, send a short message, or ask a designated colleague to pass it along. Those options should lead to a named recipient who can investigate and either make a change or take the matter to someone who can. A welcoming inbox is of limited use if nobody owns what happens after a message arrives.

Practical protections need equally practical descriptions. If only the coordinator and one other person will read a message, say so. That is different from promising that the sender cannot be identified. In a small group, the details of a concern may reveal who raised it even when a name is omitted. Making participation safer requires honesty about these limits, discretion in handling information, and attention to any exclusion or hostility that follows. An invitation should never depend on reassurance the organizer cannot support.

In that redesigned process, contributors would also receive an answer before the order was placed. If testing revealed a clearance problem and a narrower cabinet solved it within budget, the coordinator could explain that change. If a proposed change cannot be made, the response should explain why and what, if anything, can be done about the underlying concern. A shared record can describe the issue and the decision without exposing a person’s private circumstances.

This is a modest form of procedural fairness: people can understand when their knowledge is wanted, where it goes, and how it enters the decision. It does not give each contributor a veto. Nor does it require agreement before anything can happen. It asks the person holding responsibility to make consideration visible, including when the answer is no.

Leave Room to Be Changed

There is a personal difficulty beneath these practical arrangements. We may want useful criticism and still prefer it to arrive in a form that leaves our work intact. A suggestion about a minor detail feels collaborative. A concern that sends us back to the beginning can feel like a failure to appreciate what we have already done. When we are tired, being asked to reconsider may sound very much like being told that our effort did not count.

That is a moment worth recognizing without turning it into an indictment. Effort does count. The coordinator’s research, persistence, and care for the studio remain valuable even if the layout needs revision. Another person’s observation can improve the use of that effort. Receiving it does not require pretending the interruption is convenient; it requires allowing its possible value to remain visible through the inconvenience.

One useful distinction is between a constraint we inherited and a commitment we made. A supplier’s delivery schedule may be outside our control. Paying a deposit before asking others may have been our choice. Both can make revision difficult, but they tell us different things about what to change next time. Examining that difference lets us take responsibility for the sequence without pretending we control every condition around it.

We can help ourselves by deciding in advance where reconsideration belongs. If a plan contains a deliberate opportunity to test assumptions, a concern arriving there is doing what the process was designed to invite. We have made room in the schedule and in our expectations for learning something. It may then be easier to respond with curiosity: finding a problem is part of preparing the decision, rather than evidence that all the preparation has failed.

Consider the difference in a family planning a shared holiday. Asking about travel limits before paying deposits gives people room to describe what they can manage. Asking afterward may require them to become the person who unsettles everyone’s excitement. The same underlying concern carries a different social burden at those two moments. Although a family is not a workplace research setting, the practical question travels well: have we invited someone’s reality into the plan while the plan can still accommodate it?

There are limits. Some decisions are urgent. Some options are already closed by cost, responsibility, or circumstances outside our control. Openness means naming those constraints accurately and identifying what remains adjustable. It also means taking an important concern seriously, even when it arrives late. A response deadline helps organize participation; it should not become a reason to ignore newly discovered danger or a substantial problem.

Over time, this can broaden what it means to be the capable person in the room. We can take pride in bringing knowledge together, including knowledge that changes our original plan. The deeper capacity is to distinguish responsibility for a decision from ownership of every good idea within it. We can remain accountable while allowing someone else’s knowledge to change the result. In fact, responsibility may require us to seek out knowledge that our position does not supply. The person who orders the cabinets knows the budget. The person maneuvering the cart knows the turn. A better room depends on bringing those forms of knowledge together.

For someone with less influence, this essay is not an instruction to disclose more, object sooner, or demonstrate courage on demand. The work here belongs chiefly to whoever can change the invitation and its consequences. Where we have that influence, even in a small part of life, we can use it to reduce the burden on others. We can ask earlier, receive more carefully, and make our response something they do not have to chase.

Return to the studio before its next purchase. There is a sketch on the table, tape on the floor, and a cart waiting to be pushed through the proposed space. The coordinator has named what is still open and when an order must be placed. Someone notices a tight corner, and the group has time to examine it. Nothing dramatic has happened. A person’s experience has entered a shared decision at a useful moment, and the room they are building together has become a little more likely to work for the people inside it.

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Practice: Open a Door for Correction

Estimated time: 15 minutes

Choose an upcoming decision over which you have some influence. Identify when changing it will become substantially harder, then place an opportunity for input before that point. Name what is genuinely open, who needs a chance to contribute, and an accessible way for concerns to reach someone who can act.

Specify who will receive the input, what privacy you can realistically offer, and when a response will follow. Prepare a brief record of the concern, the action or decision, and the reason, keeping private details out of any shared version.

The intended result is one usable opportunity for correction, with enough time and clear responsibility to make consideration possible. This is a reflective planning exercise, not a guarantee of safety or a substitute for an appropriate formal reporting process.

Scientific Summary

A mailbox can collect every message sent to it and still leave every problem untouched. A working repair desk needs more: someone willing to hear what has happened, someone with the means to respond, and a way for the sender to learn the outcome. That comparison helps us follow a concern beyond the moment it is spoken. It also reveals two different questions: will the message get through, and can anything useful happen once it does?

Research on employee voice examines both parts of that journey. In a study of 3,149 employees and 223 managers in one restaurant chain, Detert and Burris (2007) found an association between perceived managerial openness and improvement-oriented input. Employees’ assessments of psychological safety helped account for the relationship statistically. This association concerns the conditions surrounding speaking up, rather than whether a suggestion is later implemented. Further along the journey, research by Burris and colleagues (2023) examined the recipient’s capacity to help implement what had been suggested.

That distinction is useful because willingness to listen and ability to act are different qualities. Across two field studies, involving insurance sales employees and a separate multiindustry sample, Burris and colleagues found that the recipient’s competence and hierarchical position mattered. Competent managers could draw on resources; competent peers could contribute through their ability to act. A friendly reception, in other words, is only one part of the question. The research directs attention toward what the recipient can help make possible after hearing an idea (Burris et al., 2023).

These findings do not establish a guaranteed chain from invitation to improvement. The restaurant study does not show that a particular question causes candor. The implementation studies cannot fully rule out reverse causality or other explanations. And people are not repair tickets: their concerns may involve competing needs, uncertainty, or a disagreement that has no simple fix. The analogy helps us ask where a process might stall; it cannot tell us what every concern deserves.

The timing and follow-through proposed here are our practical application of those distinctions. Neither research project tested the studio’s purchasing sequence, the family example, or this worksheet. Their value for this inquiry is in separating the act of receiving input from the conditions that allow it to matter. Before asking someone to speak, we can consider what their knowledge would actually be able to change.

References

• Burris, E. R., McClean, E. J., Detert, J. R., & Quigley, T. J. (2023). The agency to implement voice: How target hierarchical position and competence changes the relationship between voice and individual performance. Organization Science, 34(5), 1695–1715. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1640

• Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869–884. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.26279183

• Doris, A. (2021, July 8). The enactment of courage. Darden Report. https://news.darden.virginia.edu/articles/the-enactment-of-courage

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