Types of Silence

The authors of this literature review “Silence in organizations and psychological safety” from 2015, describe a number of group dynamics that can lead to silence, and more interestingly, describe a few different types of silence, drawn from existing research and their own analysis. Here are the core types they suggest, and there are more sub-types described in the paper.

• Acquiescent Silence: Withholding of ideas, opinions and suggestions due to a feeling that they, or their suggestion, won’t make a difference.
• Defensive Silence: Withholding information, concerns or mistakes due to a fear of being penalised or reprimanded.
• Prosocial/ relational Silence: This is a kind of “good” silence that reflects withholding confidential information or proprietary knowledge, with the intention of protecting people or the organisation.
• Deviant Silence: Silence with a malicious intent, including the aim of inducing a colleague or superior to make a mistake (or at least not stopping them).
• Diffident Silence: Related to Defensive Silence, but this is more passive, and stems more from someone’s past experiences, insecurities or self-doubt, than from a conscious belief about the group they’re in.

Pacheco, D.C., Moniz, A.I.A. and Caldeira, S.N., 2015. Silence in organizations and psychological safety: a literature review.

These different types of silence have varying degrees of connection to psychological safety itself, and they offer useful framings of the various reasons that people may not speak up in groups. There are many more reasons why people don’t speak up, and we’ll get into some of those in future newsletters; for now, let’s examine this concept of silence.

Silence isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We use a heavily modified version of this table in some of our workshops and I also suggest that there’s at least two more “types” of silence.

1 – Preparatory Silence

First is the temporary silence which occurs when someone takes time to work out how to articulate the thing they want to say. Too often, managers, leaders, facilitators etc think “silence is bad”, and it can be. But it can just be the pause that people need – preparatory silence. And there’s no way of knowing how long that might take. We should give people the time and space they need to get their thoughts together, recognising that some people, and some ideas, will require more time than others. Some people may be able to begin speaking and trust that the words will come to them, others less so. Personally, I often prefer to take some time to work out what I want to say and how I want to say it: it doesn’t mean I feel unsafe, but it may mean that I’m temporarily silent.

2 – Filled Silence

We should resist the idea that all silence is bad, including not acknowledging the need for preparatory silence. because that approach leads to the second kind of silence – the kind that is actually filled with voice. In some contexts, particularly if the expectation is for us to speak up, we may be compelled to fill that silent void with low-risk & low-value speech (or non-verbal communication in some cases). This noisy chatter, this filled silence, may imply that people feel safe to speak up, and satisfyingly tickle the confirmation bias of the facilitator or leader of the space, but in fact people are hiding behind this pseudo-voice because they don’t feel safe to say the things that really matter. 

The Many Types of Silence

In practice, there are probably infinite “types” of silence, ranging from the defensive and protective to the cultural and respectful. There’s the respectful silence we observe at funerals, the subservient silence we pay when someone we admire is speaking or the culturally appropriate silence that the Japanese observe when someone higher in the hierarchy is speaking. Then there’s the comfortable silence that we can only really enjoy when we feel very safe with someone else.

“Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then you can detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.“
-Samuel Beckett

Thanks to Ben Hutchinson for tagging me in a LinkedIn post about this article, and his thoughts over on his blog.

I also wrote about this concept of silence back in 2017 at my personal blog, in a post titled Embrace The Silence.

References:

Pacheco, D.C., Moniz, A.I.A. and Caldeira, S.N., 2015. Silence in organizations and psychological safety: a literature review. European Scientific Journal, (Special Edition), pp.293-308. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/61446587.pdf 


Further Links:

Speaking up at work
Non-Violent Communication
Embrace The Silence
The Power of Silence in Creating Psychological Safety
Four types of silence: conversation, thematic, textual and situational. A Typology of Silence.
Seven Modalities of Silence: the unthinkable, the unspeakable/unsayable, the ineffable, the inarticulable, the unnoticeable, the unknowable, and the unconceptualizable.

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Psychological Safety in practice

Suerza

How we communicate matters. The words we choose, even the words we intentionally avoid, convey meaning beyond just the content of the message, and nestle into the minds of the people hearing them as well as the person saying them. “Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in The Wave Of The Mind. We’re back in Andalusia again, and this week I learned the word “Suerza” – a combination of the Spanish words for luck and force: suerta and fuerza. It means a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.

The view across Granada to the Sierra Nevada

Micromanagement

One of the most effective ways to erode psychological safety is to micromanage the people on your team. I love this Modern Toss cartoon from a recent issue of Private Eye magazine.

Robin Dunbar

I love this episode of “Unsiloed”, with Greg LaBlanc, featuring Robin Dunbar, the chap behind Dunbar’s Number, which we covered in “Dunbar’s Number, Psychological Safety and Team Size“. Robin makes some excellent points about the power, and uniqueness, of storytelling as a fundamental part of our humanity: “fictional and even factual stories about places far away, metropolis tales, are all about things that we can’t physically see. We have to imagine in our minds, and religion is part and parcel of that spread.“

This week’s poem:

A Minor Bird, by Robert Frost

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.