The Meeting That Never Happens

Picture a meeting where someone knows exactly why the project will fail.

They see the flaw, understand the consequences, stay silent.

You've been in that meeting.

Google spent millions studying 180 teams to understand why. They assumed the best teams had the best people—the rockstars, the A-players.

Then the data destroyed their assumptions.

Team composition barely mattered. The difference? Something they called psychological safety—whether people felt safe to speak up.

Now let's roll back further to January 1986.

Here's what's haunting: Morton Thiokol engineers sat in a room the night before Challenger. They knew the O-rings would fail in cold weather.

They had the data.

But here's the calculation that actually happened: Speaking up meant challenging NASA, risking your career, becoming "that guy." The upside? Maybe they listen. Maybe.

The engineers did speak up. Management overruled them. The next morning, seven people died.

In that culture, silence was economically rational for the individual…

While creating collective catastrophe.

What if speaking up was systematically cheaper than staying quiet?

What if the economics were reversed?

Tomorrow: Watch how a $50,000 problem becomes a $3 billion disaster.

This is Part 1 of 5 in "The Silence Tax"