When Canaries Stop Singing

Happy Thursday,

For much of the 20th century, coal miners took canaries underground with them. Not for company. Canaries were more sensitive to carbon monoxide than humans, so they could show signs of distress while the miners themselves still felt fine. The canary wasn’t the problem. It was simply experiencing the effects first. And I wonder how often we get this backwards in organisations, particularly when leading through change and uncertainty. So let’s dig in.

🧠 LEARN something.

Organisations have canaries too. Sometimes they’re obvious: that one manager who is resistant to change, the high performer who becomes unusually quiet, the person who keeps raising concerns or the employee who pushes back on change. But often they’re much more subtle and appear as group behaviours. People stop volunteering. Discretionary effort drops. There’s an increase in sick leave, escalations or mistakes. Fewer people turn up to social events or training. Someone who used to challenge things becomes quiet. None of these things proves there’s a problem. But that’s the point of an early warning signal. These are the signals leaders need to be vigilant for when leading through change, uncertainty or periods of high pressure. An outlier can be a problem, but an outlier can also be a signal. Perhaps they’re closer to something you can’t see, or more sensitive to parts of the system that you’re not.

Perhaps the signal leaders should worry about most is when the canaries stop singing. Researchers call this organisational silence, when people withhold concerns, ideas or information about potential problems because speaking up feels pointless or unsafe. The absence of noise isn’t necessarily the absence of a problem. A noisy organisation isn’t necessarily unhealthy, and a quiet organisation isn’t necessarily healthy. That’s what makes silence so easy to misread as compliance, buy-in or acceptance. Sometimes people have simply decided there’s no point saying anything. When coal miners notice the canary stop singing, become agitated, fall off its perch or collapse, they didn’t blame the canary for its lack of “adaptability to change”. Instead, they stopped and noticed what was happening in their coal mine.

🤔 REFLECT on an idea.

Defining reality means paying attention to what’s happening beneath the obvious signs, not just what the dashboard tells you. Sometimes the people reacting first, or suddenly going quiet, are telling you something about the organisation that you haven’t seen yet. The more senior you are, the more important this becomes.

😊 SMILE a little.

If your canary keeps falling off its perch, sending it on a resilience workshop probably isn’t the first move. 😂

✅ DO IT to get results.

Who are your organisation’s canaries, and what signals might they be giving you right now? Look for something you’ve been treating as an isolated people problem and ask a different question: “What might this be telling me about the system or the environment?” Don’t automatically assume there is a bigger problem, but don’t automatically assume there isn’t either. Before you try to fix the canary, take a look around the coal mine. The last thing you want to do is deal with the canary, only to discover the canary was never the problem.

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Kia pai tō wiki

Kenny Bhosale

CEO & Founder, The Bridge Leaders