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Organizations that respond swiftly to immediate dangers and risks, often find themselves unprepared for less obvious but equally dangerous threats says new Harvard Business Review research.
It suggests that ambiguous risks are far more common than obvious ones, but are also more likely to be ignored by employees and underestimated by leadership, putting workplace wellbeing and safety at significant risk.
While clear threats prompt decisive action, more ambiguous ones, subtle, inconsistent, and without precedent, rarely trigger the same urgency.
Employees may downplay early warning signs or assume leadership will respond, leading to delayed action and costly outcomes.
In one case, employees at a tech manufacturer failed to address early signs of product failure, believing them to be isolated. The team ignored concerns until the defect escalated into a major crisis, ultimately resulting in the loss of a key client.
Overlooking such signals is increasingly relevant to HR leaders, as employee silence in the face of uncertainty presents a direct threat to organizational safety and employee wellbeing.
The role of silence and cognitive overload
HBR data from more than 1,100 employees across multiple sectors reveals a clear (but perhaps obvious) trend, that as threats become less recognizable employees are significantly less likely to speak up.
In a controlled simulation involving a cosmetic company's product development team, ambiguous customer feedback about minor skin irritation reported during testing led employees to defer judgment to management rather than raising concerns themselves.
Employees managing competing tasks often gravitate toward those with more clarity and immediate payoff. In parallel, traditional hierarchical structures condition employees to assume that ambiguity is a problem for managers to solve.
Such over-reliance on leadership is dangerous because senior leaders may lack the frontline insights needed to spot early signs of system failures.
Meanwhile, employees closest to day-to-day processes often have the most valuable information. The result is a critical blind spot, where the very people best placed to identify issues hesitate to speak, inadvertently weakening organizational resilience.
Building a culture of employee vigilance
To reduce the risk of ambiguous threats going unreported, organizations need to foster a culture of continuous alertness and open communication, say the findings.
At an organizational level, firms like Toyota have built systems that encourage early intervention. Its Andon system empowers workers to stop production if something seems off, treating it as a shared responsibility rather than a disruption.
Leadership also plays a crucial part by training teams to recognise and address emerging risks. Netflix’s Chaos Engineering initiative deliberately introduces system faults to test readiness, teaching employees to respond to the unexpected.
At an individual level, meanwhile, companies like NVIDIA encourage a principle of “intellectual honesty,” where challenging leadership is not only accepted but expected.
Such openness helps create an environment where employees feel responsible for raising the alarm, even when it might seem like a minor concern.
By treating ambiguity as a constant and encouraging employee vigilance across all levels, they stand a better chance of identifying risks early and preventing minor issues from turning into major crises.
