The Silence Tax: New Book by Mark Graban

A new book by Mark Graban. Coming early 2027.

The A3s look good. The kaizen board is full. The huddle starts at 8:45 every morning. Six months later, the same problem is back.

When something goes wrong in an organization, somebody usually knew. Not always, but usually. They saw the workaround that had become permanent. They knew the timeline wouldn’t hold. They watched the near miss happen twice before it happened for real. The post-mortem rarely spends much time on why nobody said anything, partly because the people who went quiet don’t tend to show up for post-mortems.

That’s the silence tax: what an organization pays for everything its people saw, doubted, or knew and decided not to say. The problem that went unreported. The plan somebody disagreed with and nodded through anyway. The idea that stayed in a notebook.

What the silence tax costs

It shows up in problems that travel further than they should before anyone catches them. In mistakes that repeat because nobody reported the first one. In experienced people who quietly stopped contributing, and nobody noticed when.

Some of it lands in columns you already track: safety, quality, delivery, cost. The near miss nobody mentioned was the warning. The defect that wasn’t flagged at the source gets found by a customer. The delay that was visible in week two gets escalated in week nine, when orders are already late and you’re paying to expedite.

Add what you already spent on the improvement program: the training, the software, the belts, the consultants, a year or more of everyone’s time.

The rest never shows up in a report. You can walk a plant or a hospital and not see what isn’t there.

Your tools are fine

In 2007, a BBC reporter compared two assembly plants. At Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, workers pulled the andon cord about 2,000 times a week. At a Ford truck plant, they pulled it twice.

Ford knew what the cord required. The company had spent a couple of years learning from Georgetown, and the plan for the truck plant included Toyota-style team leaders with no production task of their own, free to respond the moment someone pulled. That role was cut to reduce cost. The team leaders had a price tag. Not having them didn’t.

A team leader at a General Motors plant told me recently: “When you pull the andon cord, it turns into an intimidating stare from the bigwigs.”

The cords were the same. What differed was what happened after someone pulled one. The same test applies to the huddle, the A3, the incident report, and the strategy deployment review. Each runs on a quiet assumption: when someone sees a problem, they’ll say so. That assumption can go untested for years, because the tools look properly implemented either way. A few levels up, it looks like project status that stays green while everyone in the room knows the work is in trouble.

We can’t train our way out of a trust deficit.

Fear is rarely alone

Speak up and something bad happens to you: that’s fear. Speak up and nothing happens: that’s futility. Either way, you’re less likely to speak up again.

Fear is the reason everyone pictures: the angry boss, the person who got written up for raising a concern. It’s real, and it doesn’t require yelling. Ethan Burris found that managers gave lower performance ratings to employees who challenged how things were done than to employees who spoke in support of current practice.

Futility is the reason that gets a fraction of the attention. In nearly every hospital I’ve worked with, somebody has said some version of: “I’m not afraid to report issues. It’s just that nothing happens.”

In 55 keynotes and workshops over three years, 1,052 people have answered one question: what keeps you from speaking up here? Fear, futility, both, or neither. About one in five chose neither. Of everyone who answered, about seven in ten named futility, alone or alongside fear. Fewer than four in ten named fear. One in ten named fear alone.

These are workshop audiences, not a representative sample, so hold the exact percentages loosely. The pattern has held across manufacturing, healthcare, government, and software, in five countries. It also matches what James Detert, Ethan Burris, and David Harrison found in a national survey: the most common reason people held back wasn’t fear of retribution. It was that raising the problem would waste their time.

Fear and futility are different problems. They need different responses. Most speak-up campaigns, hotlines, and psychological safety trainings are built for fear. Making it safe to speak up doesn’t make it worth speaking up.

Four things leaders do

The book is built around four behaviors: model, encourage, enable, reward. Go first. Ask for what you want to hear. Give people a way to act on what they raise. Respond so the next time is more likely.

These behaviors reinforce one another; they are not steps to complete in order. An invitation to speak up from a leader who hasn’t gone first sounds like a slogan. From a leader people have learned to be careful around, it can feel like a trap.

I started with two behaviors, borrowed from Timothy Clark: model the risky act, and reward it when someone else takes the risk. I added encourage after watching leaders do both and still hear less than they expected, mostly about small things. They hadn’t asked for the harder stuff. I added enable after watching leaders model, encourage, and respond sincerely while standing in front of a problem the organization had no way to act on. What people learned from that was futility anyway. The list grew one behavior at a time, each time I watched leaders do the rest well and still get silence.

Reward here doesn’t mean cash or pizza parties. Not being punished is the minimum. It means what happens after someone raises something: whether they get help, whether anything changes, and whether they ever hear about it.

Modeling and encouraging are within almost any leader’s control. Enabling takes time, money, and decision rights that not every reader has. Where that’s true, that chapter doubles as a list of what to ask your senior leaders for.

What’s in the book

Part One: What Isn’t Being Said

Chapter 1: Your Tools Are Fine
Chapter 2: What Psychological Safety Is and Isn’t
Chapter 3: Fear Is Rarely Alone
Part One Diagnostic: Where Does Your Organization Stand?

Part Two: What Leaders Do Differently

Chapter 4: Model the Behavior First
Chapter 5: Encourage Others to Speak
Chapter 6: Enable People to Improve
Chapter 7: Reward by Responding

Part Three: How You’ll Know, and Where to Begin

Chapter 8: Measure Without Fooling Yourself
Chapter 9: Start This Week
Epilogue: What Outlasts You
Appendix: Choosing One Behavior

The first three chapters examine why tools depend on candor, what makes speaking up feel risky, and why removing fear can still leave people quiet. Chapters 4–7 focus on four connected leadership behaviors: model, encourage, enable, and reward. Chapters 8–9 explain how to interpret the evidence and test a change this week. The epilogue examines what helps these practices survive a change in leadership; the appendix helps you choose one behavior to practice. Throughout, “Silence Tax Strategies” offer specific actions for meetings, daily work, follow-up, and providing time and help. The notes identify the sources behind the examples.

A few of the stories:

The GM plant superintendent who told us to “beat down on them… until they do exactly what they’re told,” and a few months later complained that nobody around there took any initiative
A Lean Six Sigma program that certified about 500 Green Belts and counted something like 504 completed projects
A hospital lab suggestion box nobody could find the key to. Inside, when they did: gum wrappers and a latex glove
The hourly worker who called Alcoa’s CEO at home at 11 p.m. about a conveyor that had been broken for three days, and what was fixed by 4 a.m.
A health system that timed its own response to 34 patient harm events (an average of 58 days to an approved action plan, more than nine months to close one) and what changed when leaders had to show up on the unit in person
A hospital near Toyota City where incident reports rose from under 2,000 a year to nearly 11,000, and why the professor pointing at that chart was smiling

It draws on research from Amy Edmondson, Timothy Clark, and Ethan Burris, a 2025 study of 330 plants in 15 countries, and conversations with executives, Lean coaches, nurses, engineers, and production workers, including Steve Spear, John Toussaint, Rich Sheridan, and Eric Dickson.

Who it’s for

Lean and continuous improvement leaders. Operations and quality executives. Healthcare leaders who ran the training and still can’t get problems to surface. Internal improvement practitioners who understand psychological safety and can’t get executives to take it seriously. Anyone who has looked at a well-run improvement system and wondered why the good ideas stopped coming.

It assumes some familiarity with Lean, but the leadership behaviors apply whether your organization calls its approach Lean, continuous improvement, Operational Excellence, or Lean Six Sigma. You do not need to have read Amy Edmondson or my previous books.

How it differs from The Mistakes That Make Us

The Mistakes That Make Us explores how leaders build cultures of learning and innovation. The Silence Tax focuses on the everyday leadership behaviors that help people raise concerns, disagreements, and ideas, and get help acting on them. You do not need to read one before the other.

Bring this to your organization

Most of what’s in this book started in rooms full of leaders who were already doing the work and couldn’t figure out why the problems weren’t surfacing.

I deliver it as a keynote, a half-day or full-day workshop for leadership teams, and a facilitated session built around your own data, starting with the same fear-or-futility question I ask every audience. Healthcare, manufacturing, and anywhere else people have stopped bothering to speak up.

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About the author

Mark Graban is the author of three Shingo Publication Award recipients: Lean Hospitals, Healthcare Kaizen, and The Mistakes That Make Us. He hosts the Lean Blog Interviews and My Favorite Mistake podcasts. He started his career as an industrial engineer at a General Motors engine plant in Livonia, Michigan, which is where Chapter 1 begins.