How to Protect the Voices Your Organization Needs the Most
Before you run out of air
Part Two of Modern Canaries: The Voices You Need the Most
The canaries that could save your organization have gone silent. I hope it’s not too late.
For centuries, coal miners carried canaries into dark tunnels as early warning systems. When toxic gases reached dangerous levels, these birds reacted immediately. They’d stop singing or fall from their perches, giving miners precious minutes to escape.
Today’s organizational canaries face a different kind of danger. Instead of toxic gases, they’re exposed to toxic cultures where leaders dismiss warnings that challenge their views or authority.
These voices don't demand radical changes. They simply identify incipient threats before they become catastrophic failures. They spot the weak signals others miss or dismiss.
Modern canaries are vital to improving – and even saving – your business. They might appear in the form of a colleague who flags team morale issues, an engineer who minors flaws before they escalate, or a strategist who senses leadership losing touch with consumer needs.
Yet many leaders who claim to value these early warning systems fail to act on them. They seem to care but do little to address them. They nod at a concerning pattern but dismiss it as an outlier. They ask for honest feedback yet sideline those who challenge them.
The consequences extend beyond missed warnings – they manifest in people quitting, broken trust, and preventable failures that executives later dismiss as "unforeseeable market shifts." Meanwhile, your most perceptive people are already updating their resumes.
Creating a culture where warning voices can thrive requires more than better listening. It’s about encouraging and protecting these vital perspectives. Protecting these voices means protecting your organization.
So, how do you create a culture that protects the voices your organization needs the most?
Here are five strategies that transform these endangered voices into an insightful edge. They go beyond superficial “open door policies” or attempts to “promote psychological safety.”
1. Protect Canaries - Just Like Miners Did
Miners didn't just pay attention to their canaries' warnings – they designed entire systems to protect these birds. The birds' distress was a vital signal. In organizations, creating a safe space is not enough – leaders must encourage and protect warning voices. Most importantly, they need to pay attention and take them seriously.
Promote warning voices through the use of both formal channels for sensitive topics and regular forums for day-to-day issues.
Swedish telecoms operator Telia has a "Speak-Up line," a dedicated whistleblowing system where employees can confidentially report concerns about misconduct. This mechanism uncovered potential fraudulent activity and breaches of standard procedures. These early warnings resulted from ongoing investment in making the system trusted. Telia’s commitment to transparency turned warning signals into a consistent organizational practice.
For day-to-day concerns, Zappos uses the Voice of the Employee mechanism to normalize sharing feedback. A few representatives are randomly selected every week to address issues affecting various teams. They act as ambassadors for the canaries, "bubbling up" concerns to management and then "bubbling down" management’s responses. This approach makes it less risky for employees to raise their concerns to senior executives.
Practice - The Stinky Fish Exercise: Use this template to uncover team tensions, from "What everyone's thinking but no one is saying" to “What’s making the team anxious?”
2. Turn Ambiguity Warnings into Actionable Intelligence
In complex organizations, vital warnings rarely arrive as clear signals. They emerge as hunches, concerns, or patterns that most miss. The canaries that matter the most often speak in whispers.
In healthcare, nurses often detect subtle changes and patient cues that most doctors miss. Spending more time with patients gives them unique insights. Nurses can sense emerging problems before they become medical emergencies. Research shows that detecting early signs of deterioration can reduce ICU admission by two to three times.
The Cleveland Clinic transformed this principle into an organizational system through tiered daily huddles. Beginning with frontline workers, concerns flow upward through 30-minute intervals – from supervisors to managers, directors, VPs, and finally to the executive team. This structure ensures warnings reach precisely the level needed for resolution without getting lost or ignored.
Practice – The Ambiguity Canvas: Use this tool to better understand and navigate uncertain situations. Increase clarity, address confusing signals, and avoid getting distracted by chaotic signals.
3. Reward Canaries in a Coal Mine
The people who spot problems early deserve celebration, not punishment. Miners protected their canaries rather than blaming them for the bad news they delivered. Public recognition of those who speak up has a positive impact on your culture. By signaling that warning voices are valued, not merely tolerated, leaders demonstrate that they value truth over power.
Financial incentives demonstrate this commitment. The U.S. Department of Justice has a whistleblower pilot that offers qualified canaries a share of the recovered funds. An employee who filed a civil whistleblower against Johnson & Johnson's improper marketing of a drug delivery device received a $3.5 million reward for preventing potential patient harm.
Yet emotional rewards are just one part of the equation – and less effective than emotional recognition: authorship increases ownership.
HCL Technologies achieved this through their "Employee First, Customer Second" philosophy under CEO Vineet Nayar. He recognized that putting clients first often silences employees’ voices. HCL Technologies launched a platform for employees to voice concerns, opinions, and ideas. This radical departure from conventional wisdom recognized and celebrated people’s voices. It wasn't just good for morale – this approach transformed HCL into one of the fastest-growing IT services companies in the world.
Practice – 'Reality Check Award': Create an annual or quarterly team ritual that celebrates courageous truth-telling, with recipients selected by peers rather than management. Celebrate both the person and the positive consequences of speaking up. This ritual reinforces that warning voices advance careers rather than endangering them.
4. Codify Constructive Dissent
When spotting potential threats is an individual choice rather than an organizational norm, speaking up becomes a personal risk rather than a professional responsibility. By formally codifying dissent as a cultural expectation, it becomes an organizational asset instead of a career liability.
Companies have found different approaches to institutionalizing constructive dissent, varying from subtle to more direct.
NVIDIA encourages this by embedding "intellectual honesty" as a core value. Employees are expected to "call a spade a spade" without hesitation, challenging decisions and proposing changes regardless of hierarchy. This approach has kept NVIDIA nimble, allowing it to pivot quickly based on employee insights when projects show early warning signs of failure.
Netflix takes a more direct approach through what they call "extraordinary candor," which is codified in its latest culture memo. Employees practice feedback as routine (like "brushing your teeth”). Leaders are expected to practice "farming for dissent" – actively seeking out different opinions rather than waiting for them to emerge. Netflix recognizes that this takes particular courage and vulnerability. Extraordinary candor has helped the entertainment company improve faster. However, some employees don’t adapt to such a direct culture, especially when they’ve been raised in a culture or company where deference is the norm.
Practice – The Devil's Canary Assignment: For critical projects, formally designate a rotating "Devil's Canary" – someone explicitly tasked with identifying blind spots and potential failures. This role could simply highlight concerns, or it might also have the power to pause proceedings if concerns are being glossed over too quickly. Document their insights even when the group decides to proceed, creating a log of early threats.
5. Promote a Culture of Courage
The burden of speaking up becomes lighter when shared across many shoulders, creating safety in numbers.
Move beyond the psychological safety bubble – leaders’ misconceptions about psychological safety, prioritizing comfort over risk-taking. This can lead to a culture of conformity and consensus, where people are afraid to be honest, push back, or hurt others’ feelings. Harmony takes over, leaving no room for productive debate or critical thinking.
True courage isn't about removing discomfort; it's about becoming comfortable being uncomfortable.
Pixar exemplifies this approach through its notion of "ugly babies.” That’s what they call their awkward, unformed, early versions of a film. They need to be challenged and nurtured before they grow into beautiful final products. As Ed Catmull explains, "No Pixar movie ever started out as funny, heartfelt, and well-written as what we see in theaters. In fact, many of them were complete disasters at the start."
Pixar employees learn to get comfortable with the vulnerability of showing work in progress. Originality is fragile. The "Braintrust" meetings create a regular structure where films under development are critiqued openly, but with the shared understanding that honesty serves to nurture ideas, not destroy them. This culture of collective courage makes individual vulnerability sustainable.
Supercell takes a different approach with a “Kill Your Own Project” culture. The mobile game studio behind Clash of Clans gives small development teams complete authority to cancel a project. Rather than executives making these difficult calls, the teams themselves decide when a game isn't meeting standards. Employees serve as both the canaries detecting when a project is losing oxygen and the brave miners who seal the mine shaft.
Supercell celebrates these courageous decisions as learning opportunities – killing our darlings is never easy. As CEO Ilkka Paananen explains, “The biggest misconception of the Supercell culture is that it is a small happy family where people just have fun (…). Nothing could be further from the truth. We set the bar extremely high."
By not interfering with developers, managers create a fearless, creative atmosphere in which people control their own destiny. Cutting a project after months of work is not seen as a career setback but a bold experiment.
Practice – Courage Commitments: Invite your team to define what a courageous culture looks like. Rather than adopting a generic mantra (“break things fast”), create your own version. For example:
"We challenge ideas, not people."
"We always speak up, especially when it's uncomfortable."
"We don't just learn from failure – we fix it."
When regularly reinforced, these commitments create a culture where being courageous is the norm, not an option.
The Courage to Hear What You Don't Want to Hear
The truly exceptional leaders aren't just those who speak truth to power. Rather, they have the courage to hear the truth from others, especially when it challenges their vision, ideas, or ego.
If someone in your team keeps flagging concerns that seem small or easy to brush off, pay attention. Don't wait; they might be your most valuable early warning system. Use the strategies I outlined above to prevent threats from harming your organization.
Because once the canary goes quiet, you’ve already run out of air.
Want to build a speak-up culture? Schedule a call and let’s discuss how my team and I can help you.