In the badlands of Chakwal, in north-central Pakistan, Bestway Cement is transforming plots of dry earth and olive and peach groves into a forest of solar panels.
Its efforts will add 6.34 megawatts of generation capacity by the end of the year, the company says, in addition to the 26 MW of photovoltaic cells currently in place. Already, solar generates over a quarter of the electricity powering its cement plant.
“It’s the only way we can compete,” says Abdul Waheed, the general manager at Chakwal, which produces over 3 million tonnes of cement per year. “Our rivals have already gone in this direction.”
Oracle’s proposed investment in 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects for New Mexico comes as local opposition could delay development of the Project Jupiter data center that Oracle is building for OpenAI.
The two tech companies are developing the $165 billion Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, as part of the broader Stargate AI infrastructure project announced by President Donald Trump in 2025. But Project Jupiter faces local protests and court battles over concerns about its environmental impacts—and the latest Oracle announcement on September 8 seeking proposals for renewable energy projects does not change the fact that the data center will be powered by fuel cells that consume natural gas.
“Like all matching programs, this would be synthetic in the sense that 2 GW of renewables wouldn't directly power the data center,” wrote Michael Thomas, CEO of the Cleanview data platform that tracks renewable energy and data center projects, in a LinkedIn post.
Donald Trump is presiding over an unexpected clean energy boom, as rising electricity demand spurs investment in new capacity despite the US administration’s efforts to thwart a solar and wind rollout.
Clean energy additions will rise by a record 45 gigawatts this year, according to S&P Global Energy—equivalent to the average electricity demand of Turkey. The increase is roughly 25 percent higher than the record set in 2024.
The US president’s war in Iran, which has driven up global energy prices, along with surging power demand from AI data centers and developers’ rush to capitalize on expiring tax credits, are driving the cleantech boom, said analysts. Trump’s administration has also been pragmatic in the face of its energy needs.
It’s been a wild first half of the year in the US power sector, with announcements of gigantic natural gas power plants and some long-awaited renewable energy projects coming online.
At times of rapid change, forecasting is difficult. So I feel a measure of comfort focusing on something concrete like the list of 368 utility-scale plants that began operation from January to June, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration. The group is dominated by utility-scale solar.
This is a top-heavy list, led by SunZia Wind South and SunZia Wind North in New Mexico, which went online this spring and are the largest wind farms in the country, with a combined generating capacity of 3,650 megawatts. SunZia has been in the works for about a decade and arrives at a time when US onshore wind power development has dwindled for a host of reasons related to regulations and public opinion.
On Thursday, a US District Court in Oregon ordered the US government to restart the process of approving wind projects. All new wind development in the US has been on hold since August 2025, when the Department of Defense (DoD) stopped participating in a process that allows it to compel developers to alter projects in order to limit their interference with radar equipment. The court ruled, however, that the DoD's national security claims did not allow it to opt out of a process that is legally mandated.
The Trump administration has made many attempts to block wind development, both offshore and land based. Its attempts to stop offshore wind included the same approach at issue in this case: Claim that drone developments mean that radar interference by wind turbines creates a national security risk. The courts were not sympathetic to this claim, including in cases where judges examined a classified report that the DoD was using to justify blocking offshore wind construction. As a result, the administration has turned to paying companies not to pursue wind development.
In parallel, the government was pursuing a similar approach for onshore wind. Here, a law lays out a process for the DoD to evaluate any problems posed by wind turbines and negotiate changes to planned wind farms with the developers. As laid out in the new decision, the government simply stopped participating in this process in August 2025, first by refusing to sign off on previously negotiated agreements, and later by refusing to draft agreements entirely. Eventually, it simply refused to participate in negotiations at all. This has brought a halt to all wind development in the US.
The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology.
The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.
Last week, just before the US started its break for the July Fourth holiday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed a new rule that would change how it regulated exposure to radiation. The Trump administration has been pushing to restart construction of nuclear power plants in the US, and many pro-nuclear advocates have been complaining about the US's existing regulations, portraying them as the main barrier to the flourishing of the industry. So, it had seemed likely that major revisions were coming.
Instead, the NRC's proposed new rules endorse the science behind its current rules and suggest that any problems are largely in the vagueness of the terminology that it has been using. So, instead, it's endorsing standards that are meant to accomplish the same thing, but avoid using some of the language it had relied on. Probably the clearest indication of the evolutionary change at play is that the NRC estimates the changing rules will save industry—not just power, but also medical and research applications—only about $9.5 million a year.
LNT and ALARA
There are two technical abbreviations at the center of US nuclear regulations. The first is LNT, which stands for "linear non-threshold." It's in reference to the issue of whether there's any level of radiation that is so low that it no longer produces harmful biological effects—the "threshold" in LNT. The "non-threshold" implies that it doesn't, and that's in keeping with biology, which has demonstrated that even single particles or photons of radiation can damage DNA and that the mechanisms cells have for repairing that damage are inherently error-prone. The "linear" in LNT simply describes how the impact of radiation scales directly with the dose.
US homeowners have embraced home batteries in record-breaking numbers in early 2026, spurred on by state incentives while seeking to offset rising residential electricity costs. The trend could even unlock a more flexible energy supply for power grid operators and even AI data centers.
New home battery installations reached a record 673 megawatts of energy storage in the first quarter of 2026, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That trend was driven by states with high electricity prices that have implemented policies to incentivize home battery installation, Bloomberg News reported.
This residential battery trend stands out as a natural next step for states that have already successfully boosted rooftop solar adoption among homeowners, given how batteries enable homeowners to use stored solar energy at night. California and Hawaii accounted for the majority of new residential battery storage, while Texas and Arizona also saw significantly higher numbers of installations.
Tenerife, the power gradient, and the calculus of voice
On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on a runway in the Canary Islands, and 583 people died. It was the worst disaster in the history of civil aviation, and it happened on the ground, at Los Rodeos airport on Tenerife.
Neither flight was ever meant to be at Los Rodeos. They were bound for Gran Canaria, until a separatist group detonated a bomb in the terminal there and fear of a second one meant the airport was closed for safety. All flights headed to Gran Canaria were diverted to nearby airports such as Los Rodeos: a small, typically rather foggy airport on Northern Tenerife, with a single runway and a handful of taxiways. By the afternoon the apron was full of large international aircraft that had been diverted, and many of the taxiways were blocked by the planes parked on them. When the all-clear to start leaving finally came, the planes that wanted to leave couldn’t taxi around to the runway as usual, because there was no room. They had to taxi down the active runway itself, turn around, and take off back the way they had come.
By Mtcv for Dutch wikipedia. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1091580
Speaking up on the flight deck
The KLM 747 was piloted by Captain Jacob van Zanten (11,700 flight hours), with First Officer Klaas Meurs (9,200 flight hours) beside him and Flight Engineer Willem Schreuder (17,031 flight hours) behind. Van Zanten taxied down the runway, turned the aircraft around, and got ready to depart. Behind them, the Pan Am 747 was still taxiing down the same runway, under instruction to turn off at the third exit.
Van Zanten pushed the throttles forward and began preparing for takeoff. Meurs, somewhat surprised, told him they didn’t have ATC (Air Traffic Control) clearance for taking off. Van Zanten replied and briskly said (in Dutch) “No, I know that. Go ahead, ask.”
The ATC tower then radioed KLM a route clearance, the instructions for after departure, which contained the word “takeoff” without actually being a clearance to take off. Meurs read it back and tailed off with the words “we are now at takeoff.” Van Zanten, already releasing the brakes, said two words over the top of him:“We’re going.”The controller, who could not see the runway through the fog, answered “OK,” and then, after a pause, “Stand by for takeoff, I will call you.“ At that exact moment however, the Pan Am crew keyed their microphone to say they were still on the runway. The two radio transmissions collided, producing a squeal that meant neither were audible. The only word that reached the KLM cockpit cleanly was “OK.”
The tower then told the Pan Am to report when it was clear of the runway, and Pan Am acknowledged. It turns out that the big 747 was too long to make the sharp turn left onto taxiway 3, and so they were still on the runway, heading to taxiway 4 instead. This much was audible in the KLM cockpit, and Schreuder heard it. He then asked the question that could have prevented disaster:
Schreuder: “Is he not clear then?”
van Zanten: “What did you say?”
Schreuder: “Is he not clear, that Pan American?”
van Zanten, emphatically: “Oh, yes.”
As he replied, Van Zanten increased the throttle, accelerating the 747 along the runway.
And then both Schreuder and Meurs remained quiet. For the ten or fifteen seconds that remained, while the KLM 747 sped up to takeoff speed, they said nothing, until the fog ahead cleared, at about 160 miles an hour, showing the Pan Am 747 directly in their path, pointing straight at them. Both crews tried to take evasive action. The Pan Am pilot turned left toward the grass verge beside the runway; whilst van Zanten pulled back hard enough to drag the tail along the tarmac, trying to take off straight up and over the Pan Am. However, Van Zanten had sensibly decided to refuel during the long wait, and combined with the full complement of passengers and luggage, it meant the KLM was heavy, and they didn’t make it. The wheels and one engine of the KLM ripped into the Pan Am, and the KLM hit the ground. The collision killed everyone aboard the KLM and most of those aboard the Pan Am. 583 people died as a result.
Wreckage on the runway of Los Rodeos after the Tenerife airport disaster of March 27, 1977
“But if it really matters, won’t people speak up?”
If we take one thing from this, it is this: people do not speak up with their concerns, and they especially do not speak up again once they have spoken up and been dismissed, even when their own lives and the lives of others are at stake. The interpersonal costs and risks of speaking up loom so large that they outweigh the benefits of doing so – even when lives are on the line.
Willem Schreuder was not inexperienced. He had more flying hours than either of the men in cockpit with him. He was aware of a potential problem and named it, twice. And then, having seen his concern bounce off the captain’s apparent confidence, he stayed silent, in an aircraft accelerating along a runway he had good reason to think was occupied by another plane. This isn’t cowardice or stupidity. It is how the interpersonal cost of speaking up feels for all of us. The official investigation reached the same conclusion. “Perhaps influenced by his great prestige, making it difficult to imagine an error of this magnitude on the part of such an expert pilot, both the copilot and flight engineer made no further objections” (quoted in Weick, 1990, p. 574). Van Zanten’s expert power in the cockpit actively suppressed the correction of his error.
This the outcome of the tacit calculus of voice, combined with Prospect Theory: we weigh the almost certain and immediate cost of speaking up against a possible benefit in the future. The cost of pressing the experienced captain a third time is immediate, social, and certain. We will be the person who second-guessed the chief instructor, out loud, on the basis of a belief, and if the runway turns out to be clear we will have aborted his takeoff for nothing. We all tend to over-estimate the immediate costs of speaking up, especially against someone with greater seniority or experience, so the calculus tips towards the negative and we remain silent. This is all very human and normal.
And we should take note of the form the doubt took. Schreuder did not say “there is an aircraft on that runway, stop.” He asked whether the Pan Am was clear. This is normal: we tend to raise concerns in mitigated forms, as hints and questions rather than statements and commands, and the softer the form, the lower risk it is to us, but also the easier it is to dismiss (Fischer and Orasanu, 1999). The calculus of voice also shapes how we say something as well as whether we say it at all.
Here’s the main takeaway though – if the calculus still tips toward silence when the downside is death for ourselves and others, then we should not be surprised that it tips toward silence in a marketing meeting, an ideation session, or a finance catch-up. In most of the meetings and conversations we have at work, the risk of death is fairly low. The high stakes that might justify the risk of speaking are not even close to this example, which means the silence makes even more sense. Tenerife is actually a fairly ordinary case of low psychological safety, but with a particularly tragic outcome.
KLM captain Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten featured in a 1977 advertisement for the airline
Whilst the disaster was playing out, as the Pan Am taxied through the fog toward an aircraft they couldn’t see, the crew talked about the KLM captain: “he’s anxious, isn’t he,” one said, “after he held us up half an hour, now he’s in a rush.” (The KLM had unintentionally blocked the Pan Am in while they refuelled). The Pan Am crew had read the situation well – crew members in both cockpits felt that something wasn’t right.
The Power Gradient
The second thing this disaster surfaced was the difference in power between the most powerful person in the space, and the least. The aviation safety literature of the period called it various things, the authority gradient, the cockpit gradient, the power gradient. They are all pointing at the same thing: the steeper the difference in power between the person at the top and the person who has something to say, the harder it is to say it. The literature at the time called this “safety silence”, “attenuated voice” or “mitigated speech”, but it’s all describing a lack of psychological safety. There is a great deal of evidence on how status differences shape cockpit communication and coordination (Milanovich et al., 1998, Hagen, 2013). The steeper the gradient, the more that voice is suppressed – it’s much harder to speak up against someone with greater power – power over your future, your reputation, your job, or your status. Power gradients are one of the most important things, perhaps the most important thing, governing whether people speak up.
“Power” is a large and ambiguous word though, so it helps to break it down. Drawing on French and Raven, we talk about four kinds of power.
Formal power (positional power) is the obvious kind, the kind that is described and written down on an org chart. Role, rank, title, seniority, grade, etc. It is the most legible form of power, and being visible, it’s also often the easiest to navigate.
Informal power is much harder to see, because it is rarely written down. It’s affected by social standing, reputation, popularity, the size and shape of our networks, our reputation, who we know and how many people we know. It’s largely invisible, which makes it harder to navigate.
Demographic power is mostly the power we have little or no control over – height, race, age, gender, sexuality, class, accent, socioeconomic background and more. It endows, or otherwise, different degrees of power in different contexts.
Expert power is what we know: our qualifications, our experience, our demonstrated competence in this particular context. A brain surgeon in a cockpit has very little of it (probably, although they may also be a qualified pilot). A highly trained and experienced surgeon in an operating theatre probably has a lot of expert power.
The Four Types of Power
Pulled apart, you can see that all four are usually in play at once, each to a greater or lesser degree. Sometimes one takes precedence, sometimes one compensates for another and sometimes they accumulate into something larger than any of them alone
In van Zanten they all stacked up. His informal power was significant: he was the face of KLM’s advertising, the man in the in-flight magazine, photographed under the line about the people who made punctuality possible. He was, at least in the world of the airline, a minor celebrity. There was demographic power too, in the tall, tanned, silver-haired Dutchman in a captain’s uniform. And his formal and expert power was as high as it went: he was KLM’s Chief Instructor on the 747, the man who taught other pilots how to fly, the airline’s recognised authority on this type of plane. He was who KLM would later try to reach to help investigate the crash, before they realised that he had been at the controls. Just a few weeks earlier, conducted Meurs’s qualification check on the 747. The first officer beside him owed his certification on the aircraft to the man he was trying to challenge.
All that combined meant the power gradient in that cockpit was incredibly steep.
It’s also worth noting that as Chief Instructor, Van Zanten had spent almost the preceding three months in the simulator, where the instructor clears himself to take off, and one likely explanation for starting to roll without clearance is simply that he reverted to the habit his role had built into him. Karl Weick, in the classic scholarly analysis of the disaster, calls this regression: under pressure, people fall back on what they learned first and know most thoroughly. He was also very aware of his own reputation for being punctual – indeed, that was what he was famous in KLM for – and combined with recently introduced safety rules on operational hours that meant if they didn’t take off soon, they’d be grounded overnight, this likely led to a great sense of urgency for Van Zanten. The reputation he was known for was now driving the throttle forward under his hand.
An easy version of this story makes van Zanten a tyrant, but the evidence doesn’t support it. Colleagues who knew him, including Jan Bartelski, a fellow KLM captain and later president of the international pilots’ federation, describe him as studious and introverted but warm, a believer in partnership who insisted his first officers call him “Jaap” rather than “Captain.” Here was a man trying, by temperament and stated belief, to lessen the gradient, but it still wasn’t enough, and psychological safety eroded in his cockpit regardless. The gradient doesn’t dissolve because the person above you is, personally, a good sort. We can work to mitigate the power gradient and we should, but being decent alone won’t do it.
So it’s not helpful here to say it was Van Zanten’s fault, or that having power is something to feel guilty about. Power is how we get things done. Most of us will, in some room at some time, be the most powerful person in it. What we are obliged to do is recognise and acknowledge it, because the gradient forms whether or not we want it to, and it has effects whether or not we intend them.
What we learned from the wreckage
The response to Tenerife, and to the accidents around it, was Crew Resource Management. It came out of a NASA workshop on human factors in 1979, which itself was catalysed by the Tenerife disaster, along with others, and was first adopted comprehensively by United Airlines in the early 1980s. Within a remarkably short space of time, it was taken up by nearly every airline in the world. It is, with some justification, often called the most successful safety programme humanity has ever created and is a large part of the reason that getting into an aeroplane is now one of the safest way to travel.
CRM emerged in aviation specifically to reduce catastrophic errors by changing culture: communication norms, authority gradients, briefing practices, and coordination under pressure. It has also been adopted in medicine, especially in emergency response and surgical teams. It trains people how to speak up when something looks or feels wrong, to challenge decisions regardless of seniority, to cross-check decisions, and to share situational awareness. In doing so, it creates a structured environment in which speaking up becomes expected and legitimate (Weller, Boyd and Cumin, 2014). The sense that it is safe to raise a concern is not a mysterious precondition that must somehow emerge. It is, at least in part, the result of concrete practices, training, and norms that make voice a normal part of the work.
It began life as Cockpit Resource Management and became Crew Resource Management, as further disasters taught more lessons. At Kegworth, cabin crew outside the cockpit could see what the pilots could not, and the information never made the journey forward. A steep power gradient between cockpit crew and cabin crew held it back. Accidents like this aught us that it is not enough to train only the people at the controls. Cabin crew, ground crew, air traffic control, operations staff: everyone in the system needs to be able to speak up to power at the moment it matters, and everyone needs the people above them to listen when they do. The safest crews are the ones where leadership is, in effect, shared: cabin and cockpit prompting and correcting one another rather than information travelling in one direction (Bienefeld and Grote, 2014).
CRM works on the problem from both ends. It scaffolds the act of speaking up against a gradient, giving people recognised, legitimate ways to push information upwards. And it works on the gradients themselves, building in practices that share power and distribute authority so that the slope is shallower before we have to climb it. Both are necessary. We can’t just teach the person at the bottom of the slope to be braver; we also have to make the slope less steep. And it’s a continuing effort – mitigated speech still persists even in trained crews, which is why CRM has to be lived rather than merely delivered (Perkins et al., 2022).
Walking ourselves up the ladder
One of the practices that came out of this world is PACE, a graded assertiveness tool, which is a scaffold built precisely for the situation Schreuder and Meurs found themselves in.
We begin with a Probe: a low-threat question that surfaces the concern without confronting anyone. “Is that red light meant to be on?”, “That Pan Am, is he clear yet?” Schreuder’s question was, in effect, a probe. If the probe doesn’t get traction, if it doesn’t draw attention to the thing we are actually concerned about, we escalate to an Alert, which names the hazard more clearly. “Oxygen is at 90% and falling.” or “We don’t have ATC clearance for takeoff.” Meurs’s first objection was an alert. If the alert doesn’t work either, we go to Challenge: stating the problem and proposing a different course of action, which is much harder, because now we‘re not just raising a worry, we’re suggesting the powerful person does something other than what they have decided. “I don’t think it’s safe to take off yet. There may be an aircraft on the runway. Let’s hold and check.” And if even that fails, we reach Emergency, an unambiguous command: “Stop. This is unsafe.” This is very interpersonally challenging and risky, but is less so if we’ve walked ourselves up the PACE steps already – and hopefully we don’t need to get to Emergency anyway, having addressed it somewhere down the ladder.
We see the same pattern far outside aviation. Elaine Bromiley died in 2005 during what should have been a routine operation, when her anaesthetists became fixated on intubating her and lost track of the time she’d spent without oxygen. The nurses in the room saw what was happening, and someone even fetched the kit for an emergency tracheotomy. But they didn’t speak up and directly challenge the anaesthetists, because the power gradient between nurses and consultants was just as steep as the one in the KLM cockpit (Harmer, 2005). Elaine’s husband Martin, an airline pilot, went on to found the Clinical Human Factors Group, and has spent the years since bringing aviation’s hard-won human-factors lessons into healthcare.
What Tenerife taught us
We have learned an enormous amount from this disaster, as we have from many others. The conditions that produced the silence in that cockpit are not rare or unique to aviation. A steep gradient, a confident expert in charge, and a team under time pressure isn’t just a description of a 1977 runway. It is a description of an ordinary leadership meeting in a board room, a weekly catchup with our manager, or any number of other comparatively mundane contexts (with the merciful difference that the stakes are usually lower). The silence itself is a natural outcome of conditions that organisations produce and reproduce in themselves (Morrison and Milliken, 2000).
That difference between a cockpit and a meeting is also a risk. Because the stakes are lower, silence is cheaper, and the scaffolding that aviation was forced to build under the pressure of mass fatalities is scaffolding that many of us are never offered. If two skilled people would not press a third time with their own lives on the line, we cannot reasonably expect anyone to press in a meeting where the worst case outcome is mild embarrassment or relationship damage, unless we have deliberately built the conditions that make speaking up worth the cost.
Weick’s 1990 analysis remains the best single account of how this happens. He described Tenerife as a vulnerable complex system: interrupted routines, interdependencies pulling tighter, pressure eroding cognitive capacity, and power gradients distorting communication, combining so that small errors multiplied and spread. None of them were using the term psychological safety because it wasn’t yet in mainstream use, but they were describing the exact same thing. The power gradient suppresses voice; the silence risks disaster; and the work is to build the conditions, structural as well as interpersonal, in which the least powerful person can say the thing, to the most powerful person, that needs saying while there is still time to act on it. Van Zanten’s last two words on the matter were ‘We’re going.‘
If you enjoyed this piece on the Tenerife Disaster, Jan Hagen’s Confronting Mistakesis a great book to read, because it works through similar disasters and explores why they happened, what might have prevented them, and what we learned from them. For the fullest blow-by-blow reconstruction of the accident itself, Admiral Cloudberg’s account is an excellent and detailed writeup. Under nearly all of them sits the same thing the human-factors investigators surfaced at Tenerife, decades before psychological safety became a recognised term outside of a narrow field of academia.
References
Bienefeld, N. and Grote, G. (2014) ‘Shared leadership in multiteam systems: How cockpit and cabin crews lead each other to safety’, Human Factors, 56(2), pp. 270–286.
Fischer, U. and Orasanu, J. (1999) ‘Cultural diversity and crew communication’. Paper presented at the 50th International Astronautical Congress, Amsterdam, October 1999.
Milanovich, D.M., Driskell, J.E., Stout, R.J. and Salas, E. (1998) ‘Status and cockpit dynamics: A review and empirical study’, Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 2(3), pp. 155–167.
Morrison, E.W. and Milliken, F.J. (2000) ‘Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world’, Academy of Management Review, 25(4), pp. 706–725.
Perkins, K., Ghosh, S., Vera, J., Aragon, C. and Hyland, A. (2022) ‘The persistence of safety silence: How flight deck microcultures influence the efficacy of crew resource management’, International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace, 9(3).
Weick, K.E. (1990) ‘The vulnerable system: an analysis of the Tenerife air disaster’, Journal of Management, 16(3), pp. 571–593.
Weller, J., Boyd, M. and Cumin, D. (2014) ‘Teams, tribes and patient safety: Overcoming barriers to effective teamwork in healthcare’, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 90(1061), pp. 149–154.
A few years ago, I was working for a client in Stockholm and in some free time, I visited the wreck of the Vasa, the world’s best-preserved 17th-century ship. She’s housed in a museum built specifically around her – enormous and (mostly) intact, after spending nearly 350 years under the sea. I’d known the Vasa’s story for a while and had even used it in workshops, but standing next to the thing itself is different. I found myself looking up at this huge beast of a construction, wondering how many people who were involved in building it knew that it would sink.
Understanding why the Vasa sank also gets to something important about how organisations fail.
The Vasa and the King
On 10 August 1628, the Vasa set sail from Stockholm harbour on her maiden voyage as the newest and most expensive ship in the Royal Swedish Navy. Commissioned by King Gustavus Adolphus, she was laden with ornate carvings, towering masts and 64 bronze cannons; one of the most formidable displays of naval power in Europe, and a deliberate statement of Swedish ambition. The crowds who had gathered to watch her depart included plenty of foreign ambassadors; in effect, spies of Sweden’s allies and enemies, there to report back on the launch.
What they witnessed was not what anyone had planned. After sailing roughly 1,300 metres, and still within sight of the king’s palace, a gust of wind caught her sails and she heeled sharply to port. Water rushed in through the many open gunports. Within minutes, the Vasa had sunk to the bottom of the harbour with between 30 and 50 lives lost out of a crew of around 150. The wind that sank her was later estimated at about 8 knots, which is not by any means a strong wind. Subsequent calculations suggest she might even have gone over in a breeze of just 4 knots.
The captain, who survived, was thrown into jail the following morning and a formal inquiry was convened.
Scope Creep and Production Pressure
The Vasa’s instability wasn’t a single mistake. It was the accumulated result of years of changing requirements, “scope creep“, poor coordination, production pressure, and crucially, an organisation in which bad news could not travel upwards.
The ship had started life as something quite different. In January 1625, the King had contracted for four ships: two smaller vessels with keels of around 108 feet, and two larger ones at 135 feet (the keel is the structural backbone running along the bottom of a ship’s hull, from bow to stern, like a spine). Then, in the autumn of that year, the Swedish navy lost ten ships in a storm, and the king ordered the smaller ships to be built first, on an accelerated schedule. The Vasa’s keel was laid in early 1626 as a relatively modest vessel.
What followed was scope creep in its extreme. The king learned that Denmark was building a large warship with two enclosed gun decks (something no Swedish shipbuilder had so far attempted) and ordered the Vasa enlarged to match. The 111-foot keel already in the ground was physically extended: a fourth scarf joint was added, where a traditional ship would have three. The hull was widened, but only in the upper sections, because the keel was already fixed. No formal specifications were drawn up for any of these changes. The lead shipwright, Henrik Hybertsson, who had never built a two-gun-deck ship, appears to have scaled up his original plans by proportion and instinct rather than calculation, partly because, in 1628, there were no known methods for calculating a ship’s centre of gravity or stability characteristics. You found out how a ship sailed by sailing it.
Hybertsson fell seriously ill in 1626 and died in 1627, leaving his assistant Hein Jacobsson to complete the project. At the time of Hybertsson’s death, around 400 people across five different teams were working on the ship with apparently little coordination between them. The armament specification changed repeatedly: the final configuration crammed 24-pound guns onto an upper deck that had been built for lighter 12-pound guns, pushing the centre of gravity higher still. The ornate oak carvings the king had ordered, hundreds of them, added yet more weight above the waterline. You can still see these carvings all over the ship today.
There was also a detail that came to light only after the ship was raised in 1961: the construction teams had used four different rulers, two calibrated in Swedish feet (twelve inches) and two in Amsterdam feet (eleven inches). The resulting asymmetry made the ship heavier to port than to starboard. It is, in a way, a perfect metaphor for the whole project: four groups of people, working on the same ship, without any shared and agreed standard.
The Stability Test
What makes the Vasa story extra impactful is that the failure wasn’t hidden. Shortly before the maiden voyage, a stability test was conducted in front of Admiral Fleming and the ship’s captain. Thirty men ran back and forth across the upper deck. After just three traversals, the test was stopped because the ship was rocking so violently that those present feared she would capsize on the spot.
However, there was no good solution available. The hold had no room for additional ballast; the shallow keel, a consequence of extending the original 111-foot design, had required extra bracing timbers that filled the space. In any case, had more ballast somehow been added, it would have pushed the lower gunports below the waterline. The ship was, structurally, beyond rescue at the point of launch. When we think of sunk cost or plan continuation bias, this example should loom large.
And yet, the launch went ahead. The shipwright and the shipbuilder, it later emerged, had not been present at the stability test and were never told about the results. The boatswain, Matsson, who had raised concerns about the ship’s ballast, was told by Admiral Fleming: “the shipbuilder has built ships before and you should not be worried.” Matsson’s response, recorded in the subsequent inquiry, was: “God grant that the ship will stand upright on her keel.”
Fleming, for his part, had reportedly lamented after the failed test: “If only the King were here.” It’s a small window into the bind these men were in. The king had ordered the Vasa ready by 25 July; the maiden voyage on 10 August was already more than two weeks late. Failure to launch meant facing the king’s displeasure. Was it better to face the certainty of the King’s wrath, or the potential risk of the ship capsizing?
The King’s Power Gradient
The Vasa Museum’s own account of the inquest notes that “it was rarely a good idea to disappoint the king.” That’s an understatement, but it points at something real. When we talk about authority gradients in organisations, we’re often talking about the positional power distance between a frontline worker and a senior manager, for example. The gradient between the people building the Vasa and King Gustav was of a categorically different order. Speaking up against a steep power gradient in a modern workplace is uncomfortable and often carries real risk. Kings were appointed by God. Speaking up against a king, in 1628, was unthinkable.
And yet the dynamic is recognisable. To quote Lars Axelsson, “a problem that stays with whoever discovers it is a problem that remains unknown.” The Vasa’s problems were known – to the boatswain, to the men who ran the stability test, almost certainly to Jacobsson, who had always suspected the Vasa was too narrow. What those problems lacked was a path upward. Every layer of the hierarchy had more reasons to ignore or dismiss the concern rather than pass it on, so the information that could have prevented the disaster never reached anyone with the power and the will to act on it.
The formal inquiry in September 1628 found no one to blame, partly because blame was genuinely difficult to assign: the king had approved all plans and armaments, the shipwright was dead, the admiral had conducted a stability test and still let the ship sail; and partly because the structure of the organisation had distributed responsibility so thoroughly that no single decision looked, in isolation, like the fatal one. That, too, is a pattern worth recognising.
VASA SYNDROME: The organisational pattern in which power gradients, production pressure, and the absence of psychological safety prevent the people doing the work from challenging unrealistic demands, so latent flaws go uncorrected until disaster occurs.
Kessler et al, 2004
Vasa Syndrome:
1: Lack of external learning capability 2: Goal confusion 3: Obsession with speed 4: Feedback system failure 5: Communication barriers 6: Poor organisational memory 7: Top-management meddling
After The Disaster
There is a coda to the story that I find almost as interesting as the disaster itself. Hein Jacobsson – the man who completed the Vasa after Hybertsson’s death – had suspected, even before she was launched, that her proportions were wrong. When he was commissioned to build her sister ship, Äpplet, in 1629, he built her a metre wider. Äpplet went on to serve in the Swedish navy for around 30 years.
The lesson there is not that the builders couldn’t learn. They clearly could, and did. The lesson is what it took to make that learning happen: a catastrophic, public, entirely avoidable disaster, witnessed by thousands. Jacobsson already knew what needed to change. He simply hadn’t felt able to say so with sufficient authority until the failure was so large and so visible that a change of approach was essential. That’s a high price for an organisation to pay for a lesson its own people already knew.
The Vasa Organisational Pattern
When I was in the museum in Stockholm, what struck me most wasn’t the scale of the ship, though she is vast (somewhat bigger than the narrowboats I used to live on!). It was how incredibly grand and unseaworthy she looked, with rows and rows of gundecks, crammed together, apparently very close to the waterline. It looks like a demonstration ship – one designed to satisfy an ego rather than to perform. People had to build it and sign off on it. And the people closest to the work, the ones who could see the issues most clearly, were the ones least able to say anything about them.
That is the pattern we see repeated all too often in organisations, in workplaces where the distance between the people at the sharp end and the blunt end is large, and where the cost of carrying bad news upward feels higher than the cost of absorbing it quietly. Projects and programmes become “greenwashed”, so everything looks on track for the leadership who are monitoring, whilst those at the sharp end are crucially aware of multiple real and potential failures. Psychological safety is the structural condition that allows that knowledge to move vertically, and problems to be surfaced before they become disasters.
There were many component causes of the Vasa’s demise: changing designs, the mixed measurement systems, the too-heavy guns, the impossible timeline, but ultimately the Vasa sank because the people who knew it would sink didn’t feel able to say so to the people who could have done something about it.
(Written in collaboration by Tom Geraghty, Bea Poyton and Jade Garratt)
References:
Axelsson, L. (2006) ‘Structure for management of weak and diffuse signals’, in Hollnagel, E., Woods, D.D. and Leveson, N. (eds.) Resilience engineering: concepts and precepts. Aldershot: Ashgate, ch. 10.
Fairley, R.E. (n.d.) Why the Vasa sank: 10 lessons learned. Oregon Graduate Institute. [Unpublished manuscript.]
Hollnagel, E., Woods, D.D. and Leveson, N. (eds.) (2006) Resilience engineering: concepts and precepts. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Kessler, E.H., Bierly, P.E. and Gopalakrishnan, S. (2004) ‘Vasa syndrome: insights from a 17th-century new-product disaster’, IEEE Engineering Management Review, 32(1), pp. 38–48. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/EMR.2004.25008
Why “Fake It Till You Make It” Doesn’t Work for Psychological Safety
I remember early in a new job – one I was excited about and keen to make my mark in – I made a decision to be honest with my new team. I was out of my depth – I’d been asked to design workshops I didn’t have the expertise for, and my worry around messing them up was keeping me awake at night. Rather than bluff my way through it, I admitted I was struggling and asked for help.
The response in the team meeting was tumbleweed; no one spoke initially, then something closer to disdain emerged. What do you mean you don’t know enough? I understood pretty quickly that this wasn’t the kind of team where you did that.
I’d been brave. It hadn’t helped.
Every time we consider speaking up – raising a concern, asking a question, admitting a mistake or sharing an idea – we’re running a quick mental risk assessment, which is often part instinct, part experience and part reading the room. What’s the benefit of saying something? What’s the risk? And when the perceived cost outweighs the potential gain, we tend to stay quiet.
But it’s worth remembering that our calculation isn’t always accurate. Sometimes the risk we’re imagining isn’t real. We hold back on asking what feels like an obvious question, convinced others will think us foolish, only to find, when someone else eventually raises it, that the whole room was wondering the same thing. Or we agonise over telling our manager about a mistake, then discover they’re glad we did. Now they can help us fix it, and work with us on changing the context to make sure it doesn’t happen again. When the imagined risk turns out to be worse than the real one, speaking up rewards us, and often the whole team.
This is where the “fake it till you make it” idea of psychological safety gets its appeal. The thinking goes: if we all just lean into it a little more, act a little braver, we’ll start to build the habit of openness, and safety will follow. There’s a certain attractive logic to it.
But it actually only holds in one specific circumstance: when the risks were never real in the first place. Unfortunately, only too often the risks are entirely real.
We might find we ask the question and our teammates, as we may have feared, snigger, or we admit the mistake and our manager angrily kicks off. If speaking up does carry real consequences, then encouraging people to push through their hesitation doesn’t build psychological safety. It just confirms that their instincts were right to be cautious, and ultimately makes the environment less safe, not more.
This is why anyone working to improve team culture – whether you’re a leader, coach, HR professional, or a facilitator designing a workshop – should be cautious about programmes focused on making people braver. Encouraging people to take interpersonal risks before the environment is genuinely safe is a bit like encouraging someone to abseil off a cliff before you’ve checked the ropes. The amount of courage isn’t the problem. The conditions are.
So where does that leave the “fake it till you make it” idea? Is there any truth in it at all?
Actually, yes – but with an important caveat about who’s doing the “faking”. If we find ourselves in a position of power in an organisation or team, we may also find ourselves in the fortunate position where the interpersonal consequences for us of speaking candidly are relatively low.
Let’s say you’re a senior leader, a manager, or simply someone with significant standing in your team or organisation; you have the credibility and the protection that comes with your position. In that context, you going first (maybe with small, tentative first steps) is valuable. That might look like being the first to ask a basic question in a meeting, narrating your own uncertainty when making a decision, or owning a mistake openly, instead of glossing over it. These acts of modelling actively shift what feels permissible for others, demonstrating that honesty is welcome here.
That’s quite different from imploring people with less power or security to do the same. For them, the risks are real and the protection is thinner. Asking them to be braver without first ensuring the environment is genuinely safe is likely to be exposing rather than empowering.
The real work of psychological safety isn’t about adjusting people’s mindsets or building their courage. It’s about creating conditions where speaking up is genuinely low-risk: where questions are welcomed, mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, and different perspectives are consistently valued rather than punished.
Once those conditions exist, most people don’t need much encouragement to speak up – though it’s worth remembering that speaking up doesn’t look the same for everyone. For some people, voicing a thought in a fast-moving meeting, with no think time and a table full of louder voices, isn’t really an option – not because they lack courage, but because that particular format doesn’t work for them. A team lead who pauses to say “let’s take a minute to think about this quietly first”, or who follows up after a meeting with “I know we haven’t captured everything – please share your thoughts by email”, is creating the conditions for more voices to be heard. The brave thing becomes the normal thing, once we stop assuming that speaking up only counts if it happens out loud, in the room, in the moment.
Until then, instead of focusing on bravery, it’s worth asking what we’re doing to make it safer.
In the classic hip hop track C.R.E.A.M., the great Wu-Tang tell us “Cash Rules Everything Around Me”. Whilst it might sound like the song is glorifying money, it’s actually a commentary on how economic forces shape our life choices and opportunities.
In organisations however, we don’t tend to chase cash itself (but money flows matter significantly), because most of us are on salaries or wages that don’t directly connect to the things that we achieve day to day. And whilst we may strive for pay rises and bonuses, a lot of the time we do, however, chase status.
Even if we’re very happy in our current role and have no desire to climb the corporate ladder, status still matters. By “status” here, I don’t just mean formal rank, title, level or grade, but the informal economy of esteem, credibility, reputation and connection that exists within every organisation, including, and often especially in, so-called “flat” or holacratic organisations. Much of the time, it’s this, our informal status within the organisation – who we know, our reputation, popularity and what colleagues and peers think of us – and our fear of losing it that shapes how we behave. Of course, status is not a single thing, and the same person may be relatively high-status in one interaction and low-status in the next.
Status is also a relatively transferable commodity between organisations, and influences not just our jobs, but our entire careers. What we’re known for, who can vouch for us, and how our past success is interpreted tend to follow us from job to job. They influence future opportunities and constrain the risks we’re willing to take. In that sense, our comparative status doesn’t just shape how we behave at work today, but the choices we make across an entire career.
And status isn’t just another form of power – though it certainly shapes it; status is relational and relative, much like the power gradient, and quietly but powerfully shapes behaviour. In organisational theory and economic sociology, status is treated as a signal that we use when quality or competence is hard to demonstrate and evaluate (which is the case for most real work in the real world). It’s why “looking busy” and “busywork” – sending lots of emails and having lots of meetings, is such a seductive trap – a “dangerous attractor” – because it’s often a lot easier to look busy, important and visible than it is to actually demonstrate high quality outcomes in knowledge work. What establishes status?
We can think of status in organisations being established via a number of factors:
Position – such as job title, grade, rank, level in the org hierarchy.
Performance – consistent and demonstrated expertise, track record of success.
Proximity – who we’re connected to, our perceived access to power.
Prestige – our recognition in the org, possession of symbolic and informal roles.
Visibility of activity – the performance of work and “busyness” as a status signal
When weak signals of value exist, systems amplify signals of presence instead.
Number 5, visibility of activity, is the quiet and persistent drain on organisational effectiveness. A core problem in organisations is that most valuable, impactful work (and especially “glue” activities that help others have an impact) can be difficult to observe and hard to evaluate. So instead of focusing on actual value, contribution and impact we might be tempted to prioritise busyness, visibility and motion. Which makes appearing busy a locally rational status strategy.
ST.R.E.A.M. get the status
Dollar, dollar bill, y’all
We can use STREAM as a reflective lens on our organisations by asking questions like:
“What gets recognised here?”
“Whose work stays invisible?”
“What stories do we tell about success?”
Organisational networks are status engines
One of the primary functions of an organisational network is to establish and consolidate status for those within it. “Merit-based” pay, Stack ranking systems, and promotion tournaments all act as status amplifiers. This is also one of the main mechanisms through which inequality reproduces itself over time: as Cecilia Ridgeway states, status concentrates where networks concentrate. But if demonstrating real genuine impact through our work is difficult, how do we otherwise gain status through this busywork?
There are a few ways to build status when “impact” (which is also often ill-defined and ambiguous) is difficult or impossible to demonstrate.
1: Attending and arranging lots of meetings. This signals our centrality and importance to others within the organisation. If we’re in meetings with higher-status people, we’re also “borrowing” status from them by association.
2: Sending lots of emails and messages. This signals presence, activity, influence and importance. And the common pattern of CC’ing widely isn’t just about self-protection or forcing action by copying in someone’s manager – it also marks the importance of the issue, implies authority, and most importantly, raises visibility. Copying in someone of a higher status can also signal our proximity to power. CC’ing is often less about information flow, and more about status positioning.
3: Being “always on”. Sending emails and messages late at night or at weekends signals our indispensability – “If I wasn’t here, this would all fall apart” – reinforcing a sense of personal importance within the system.
None of these behaviours are inherently “bad”. The point is that they’re often driven less by what the work actually requires, and more by the ongoing negotiation of status.
The inherent scarcity of status
Status is, by its nature, scarce in organisations, and scarcity invites competition. Unlike money, we generally can’t make the “status pie” larger – it is inherently relational and zero-sum it exists through comparison to others. When our real contribution or impact is ambiguous, slow to show up or difficult to demonstrate, competition shifts away from outcomes and towards appearances. Busywork is usually not plain old laziness or inefficiency (although it can be at times); more often it’s status-seeking under uncertainty and scarcity.
“Positional goods are scarce by nature because their value depends on their relative standing.” — Hirsch, 1976
From an organisational perspective, as Alvesson and Spicer describe in “A stupidity‐based theory of organizations”, this dynamic drives a number of antipatterns to effectiveness – administrative and communication overload, meeting inflation, slower decision making, risk aversion, over-documentation, and ultimately, productivity theatre. Essentially, organisations often optimise for what can be seen, rather than what actually works.
We can’t get away from the need to build and consolidate status – it’s how almost the entire work system is designed, from our first job to our entire lifetime careers. But we can change the environment in which status-seeking plays out. We canchange the substrate in which these behaviours emerge, making alternatives to busywork easier and more effective.
One lever is to make the connection between work and impact clearer and more direct. For many people, particularly in knowledge work, impact is diffuse, delayed or hard to see. The clearer the line between the work we do and the positive impact it has, the less likely we are to engage in performative work.
A second lever is to provide other meaningful routes to status that don’t rely on performative busyness or “impact theatre”. This could include establishing and recognising Communities of Practice, encouraging interesting side projects, or valuing impact beyond the organisation itself, such as work in the local community or with charities. Those lower in the power gradient often pay a higher status tax for mistakes. This also means that, as a leader or someone with higher status, it’s possible to “share” some of that status to those who need it, through sponsorship and advocacy.
A third, and arguably the most critical level is to reduce the status penalties associated with learning, dissent and error. In high-STREAM organisations, people may not primarily fear being wrong, but they certainly fear being lowered in status. If asking for help, admitting mistakes, or surfacing problems damages our reputation, then no amount of exhortation about “speaking up” will work.
STREAM is a pattern, not a pathology
It’s a description of the conditions under which certain behaviours become increasingly rational. STREAM behaves differently across domains, but the pattern seems robust: where work is hard to evaluate, status substitutes for evidence. In healthcare for example, the stakes are often immediate, and authority gradients concentrate status risk at handovers and interfaces. In another domain such as academia, status stakes are highly reputational and career-defining, and output, visibility and prestige can become proxies for quality.
It’s important to be careful here: status is not a lever that leaders can simply pull, nor a variable that can be directly tuned. In complex social systems, status emerges through interaction, narrative, and relationships, not policy or proclamation.
What certainly helps is actively reshaping the status economy by publicly rewarding learning and candour, not just impact and success, and ensuring that status does not accrue solely to visibility, but to those who enable others to perform.
Psychological safety, in this sense, is more than a group norm, it’s a property of the status economy of the organisation. In the vast majority of organisations, Status Rules Everything Around Me.
References and further reading:
Alvesson, M. and Spicer, A., 2012. A stupidity‐based theory of organizations. Journal of management studies, 49(7), pp.1194-1220.
Anderson, C. and Kilduff, G.J., 2009. The pursuit of status in social groups. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(5), pp.295-298.
Frank, R.H., 1985. Choosing the right pond: Human behavior and the quest for status. Oxford University Press.
Nembhard, I.M. and Edmondson, A.C., 2006. Making it safe: The effects of leader inclusiveness and professional status on psychological safety and improvement efforts in health care teams. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, 27(7), pp.941-966.
Podolny, J.M., 1993. A status-based model of market competition. American journal of sociology, 98(4), pp.829-872.
Ridgeway, C.L., 2014. Why status matters for inequality. American sociological review, 79(1), pp.1-16.
Ridgeway, C.L. and Markus, H.R., 2022. The significance of status: What it is and how it shapes inequality. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 8(7), pp.1-25.
One of the most persistent patterns in organisational change and dynamics is the search for a shortcut: the belief that if we can just find the right lever to pull, the right activity or artefact, we can bypass the slow, ecological and evolutionary work of building safety and performance. It begins, however, with the best of intentions.
Imagine that you’re at a company all-hands event, a new-hire orientation, or a leadership away day. The facilitator invites everyone to “get real” with one another. Perhaps you’re asked to share your biggest failure, the hardest challenge you’ve ever faced, or a personal trauma. Maybe even the last time you cried. Around the table, everyone dutifully takes turns to offer up (or very likely, fabricate) something raw and vulnerable.
This is forced vulnerability: when disclosure is less an act of choice and more of an obligation.
The allure of these exercises is compelling. They’re intended to accelerate trust, foster psychological safety, and build teams that are more cohesive and authentic. They often borrow their legitimacy from popular leadership books: Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team places “absence of trust” as the foundational dysfunction, and his recommended antidote (and anecdote) is called a “trust” exercise, where team members are asked to share weaknesses, mistakes, or childhood experiences as a way to short-circuit the long, slow process of genuine trust-building.
It’s an appealing shortcut. After all, if Brené Brown is right that “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity”, then why not engineer it directly?
Forced vulnerability flips causality
The problem is that this flips causality. Psychological safety enables disclosure, not the other way around. When people feel respected, fairly treated, and safe, they may choose to share more openly. But when they are pushed or compelled to expose personal details about themselves in a room full of colleagues, superiors, or strangers, it’s not intimacy that emerges. More often, it’s discomfort, resentment, and a hollow, anxiety-filled sense of performative vulnerability. Trying to engineer forced vulnerability as an input to psychological safety is like planting fully grown trees in a desert and expecting a rich, mature forest: instead, you end up with dead trees.
Conditions precede outcomes.Trust, respect, familiarity and interpersonal predictability are necessary preconditions for voluntary disclosure. When we try to reverse that order, we get coercion. Coercion doesn’t create safety; instead it does the opposite – it results in performative honesty: a surface appearance of openness that masks deeper anxiety, and very possibly, harm.
Many of us have been in these situations. Perhaps you felt, in the moment, that it didn’t sit right. Perhaps you convinced yourself you were the problem: that you were too guarded, too afraid, and “bad at being vulnerable.” But in reality that unease that you felt was probably a healthy signal that something was off. The recognition that authentic connection can’t be manufactured on demand.
In fact, forced vulnerability is not only ineffective: it can be incredibly harmful. It exploits power gradients, disproportionately burdens marginalised and under-represented folks, risks retraumatisation, and undermines genuine psychological safety. It promises trust but often leaves people feeling more vulnerable than before.
So why do organisations keep doing it? And if we want to build stronger, safer, more connected teams, what should we do instead?
Why Organisations Use Forced Vulnerability
Forced vulnerability survives for the same reasons as many management fads. It offers a simple solution to a complex problem. In complexity terms, this is an attempt to “seed” an attractor without first creating the requisite conditions. Unsurprisingly, the system responds with shallow compliance and, for many, harm. There are several reasons why these sort of practices persist:
The shortcut myth. Leaders want results. Asking people to share their “biggest mistake” or “deepest fear” seems like a quick way to build intimacy. It’s a simple (but wrong) answer to the complex question of “How do we quickly get people to work together effectively?”
The Lencioni effect.The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has been enormously influential. The idea that teams should “get vulnerable” to overcome dysfunction has spread widely, often without nuance. Exercises where colleagues reveal traumatic childhood experiences or personal failures are recommended in too many corporate training programmes.
Misreading of vulnerability. Brené Brown’s insights have been simplified and repackaged. What often gets lost is her crucial emphasis on boundaries and consent. Vulnerability is not oversharing, nor is it a performative exercise.
Performance pressure. Facilitators and consultants sometimes feel they need to create an emotional “high” to justify the value of a workshop. Vulnerability exercises provide a moment of drama, but that doesn’t mean they actually build trust.
The Risks and Harms
While often well-intentioned, forced vulnerability carries significant risks:
Power Gradients
Power dynamics affect everything in organisations – in a system with asymmetric power (all organisations are, to varying degrees, uneven distributions of power), no invitation is neutral. When a senior leader, manager, or facilitator participates in or facilitates a vulnerability exercise, many people may feel unable to opt out. Even if the invitation is framed as voluntary, the implicit expectation is clear: if you want to be included, you’ll do it too.
Some, such as folks in higher status roles, also have the privilege of choosing what kind of “weakness” to disclose. Typically, this results in safe, flattering admissions such as “I care too much about the details”, or they might share an example from many years ago of a mistake they made that has no bearing on how their performance will be judged now, while more junior staff may feel compelled to disclose something more recent, genuinely risky or painful.
Disclosure costs more to some than others.
Inequity and Marginalisation
Disclosure doesn’t carry the same risk for everyone. For some, sharing a personal story may be mildly uncomfortable. For others, it may mean outing their gender identity, disclosing a disability, or recounting a traumatic experience. As Boettcher et al. (2024) showed in Forced Vulnerability: A Dangerous Approach, forced vulnerability places disproportionate burdens on people from marginalised groups.
Inclusion initiatives can unintentionally replicate this problem. Instructing people to share their pronouns may seem like positive modelling, but for someone not ready to disclose their identity, it can feel coercive. Share your own, but don’t force others to do the same. Similarly, asking people to “bring their whole self to work” sounds supportive, but it can pressure people into revealing aspects of themselves they may wish to keep private. It’s ok to have a work self and a home self (and a friend self, and the self you show to your grandmother – we all have multiple identities). The people for whom disclosure is most dangerous are often those whose voices most need to be heard.
Trauma and Mental Health
For people with a history of trauma, coerced disclosure can be retraumatising. Psychotherapy practice warns against conflating vulnerability with healing: without skilled support and proper boundaries, disclosure can reinforce maladaptive coping strategies such as people-pleasing or co-dependence.
Facilitators in corporate settings are rarely trained to handle the psychological consequences of unplanned disclosures. What happens if someone shares a history of serious abuse, grief, criminal behaviour, or terminal illness? Few corporate facilitators are actually equipped to respond responsibly in those moments.
The Myths of Forced Vulnerability
Boettcher et al. also identified three common myths used to justify disclosure activities:
“Challenge by choice.” Participants are usually told they can opt out. In reality, social and career pressures make opting out risky or impossible.
“What is said here stays here.” This is noble and well meaning, but ultimately unrealistic. Information leaks, even unintentionally.
“We’re family.” This is plainly manipulative framing (even if it’s unintentional). Not everyone experiences family as safe, and workplaces are not families (families don’t make people redundant).
Psychological safety is the belief that we can take interpersonal risks in a group: asking a question, admitting a mistake, challenging a decision. It is about voice, fairness, dissent, respect, and inclusion. Coercing people into emotional disclosure fundamentally undermines those dynamics. By flipping causality (demanding vulnerability in order to build trust), we’re inadvertently making people feel less safe, not more.
“We establish trust first; then the sharing follows — not the other way around.”
Even when used appropriately and voluntarily, self-disclosure should be used sparingly. And if forced vulnerability is harmful, what can we do instead?
Model voluntary vulnerability. Set the tone by admitting fallibility, sharing mistakes, and asking for help; but always without expecting reciprocation. Vulnerability is an invitation, never a demand.
Start with low-stakes risks. Encourage behaviours that build safety and confidence iteratively: asking questions, raising ideas, acknowledging small errors. These are safer and actually far more relevant to work contexts than deep and personal traumas.
Make participation opt-in. Ensure people can decline without penalty. Respect and encourage people to have boundaries. The choice to share or stay silent must be genuinely free, and avoid exercises that put people on the spot.
Focus on system change rather than theatrics. The organisational substrate of psychological safety is cultivated over time through repeated, consistent demonstrations of positive behaviours and inclusive, power-sharing practices, not manufactured in a single artificial moment.
We can’t force a flower to bloom by pulling its petals open, and we can’t manufacture intimacy or accelerate psychological safety by demanding vulnerability. At best, we build a performative facade of psychological safety theatre, and at worst, we cause genuine and lasting harm.
Vulnerability only matters when it is voluntary: when it is chosen, bounded, and authentic, vulnerability can strengthen relationships and deepen trust. But when it is compelled, it corrodes the psychological safety it claims to build. So we shouldn’t script moments of disclosure, but instead create the conditions in which people may choose to share if, when, and how they wish.
Further Reading:
Boettcher, M. L., Filling, M., Powers, M., & McKenzie, R. (2024). Forced Vulnerability: A Dangerous Approach. About Campus, 29(2), 54-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/10864822241238161
We’re excited to share something brand new: the Psychological Safety Trainer Toolkit!
This incredible digital resource has already had a fantastic reception from our Train the Trainer course graduates and our Psych Safety community – and now we’re opening it up to newsletter readers too!
The Trainer Toolkit is designed to make it easier for you to deliver impactful, practical psychological safety sessions, whether you’re working with your own team or with clients.
Inside, you’ll find:
11 exclusive training videos, walking you through the key ideas and practices
Guidance on marketing psychological safety training to colleagues or clients
Advice on tailoring sessions to different contexts and audiences
Principles of good design and facilitation to support your delivery
Templates, fresh ideas and practical resources to use with teams
A ready-made slide deck to support your sessions
It also comes with a commercial licence, so you can use it both in-house and externally.
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