The Organizational Silence of 26 Years Ago Is Today's Unmade Decision

In 2000, Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken named the disease: Organizational Silence. Employees see the problems. They stay quiet. Not because they don't care, but because the system taught them that speaking up is expensive and useless.

26 years later, I can tell you where all that silence went.

It did not disappear. It settled into queues. Every unspoken concern became an Unmade Decision: the credit limit nobody challenged, the dispute nobody escalated, the process everyone quietly worked around. The queue is where organizations store their unmade decisions.

And silence compounds like interest.

First it costs you the Truth.
Then it costs you the Decision.
Then it costs you the Cash.

The EU Payment Observatory measured the workaround: companies spend almost 10 hours every week chasing money they already earned. In the Commission's new SME survey, 31% of European businesses say late payments threaten their survival.

Morrison and Milliken diagnosed why organizations don't hear. I spent 20+ years Inside what they never heard: the queue.

The question I ask every CFO: who in your company knows exactly why customers do not pay, and when were they last in the Room?

Sources: Morrison & Milliken, Organizational Silence, Academy of Management Review, 2000 · EU Payment Observatory, Annual Report 2025