How can employees question practices without halting the decision-making process? Steve Doswell walks the line

 “Bovine or bolshie – which is better…?"

How bolshie do you need to be? For some, accepting what they’re asked to do without demur may lead to a life of tranquillity. Others may view that as a cop-out, an abdication of responsibility to call it as they see it. The reality is probably that we need to make a judgement call in every situation.

In an earlier life as an in-house magazine editor, I was pleased to gather some robust opinions about the glass ceiling from a prominent corporate figure. Shortly before publication, that same prominent corporate figure secured a senior position and no longer wished to be associated with the opinions entrusted to the magazine. This was awkward, to say the least - the magazine had been printed but not yet distributed. Suffice it to say that the PCF avoided embarrassment and I kept my job – but print costs overshot the budget that year.

I’d bet that everyone reading this can probably think of cases of their own where ‘not rocking the boat’ has been a useful corporate survival skill, or at least a tempting option. Sometimes playing it safe helps us avoid succumbing to the mythical ton of hot bricks. At other times a failure to challenge, to speak up or otherwise assert one’s view can lead to a much heavier Henny Penny skyfall scenario.

The FT’s Andrew Hill says people in organisations should pause to question flawed assumptions and established working practices. He says a failure to do that fuelled the financial meltdown and various corporate disasters and, earlier, pumped up the dotcom bubble from desirable boom to inevitable bust. He warns against ‘the perilously bovine state into which many large organisations sink,’ when employees fail to exercise their will to challenge.

The consequences can be tragic. Consider a fatal rail crash where it was found that a poorly placed signal had been noted, pondered and documented in a succession of committee meetings, none of which had prompted anyone to take the decisive step of actually getting the signal moved.

Incidentally, IoIC’s Foundation Diploma includes effective meeting practice as a core skill. Meetings are a communication tool. They not only waste time if used incorrectly, but as the case above demonstrates, the downside can be much worse.

On the other hand, organisations have to rely on a certain general acquiescence for much of the time or they would cease to function. Rather like a theatre audience which suspends its disbelief in order to let its imagination fill in the blanks, so workforces need to put their critical faculty on a setting somewhere below the maximum.

I’m not advocating that we should all shut up and not challenge anything we think is wrong. That kind of individual blinkered acceptance is not only bad for the soul but too often also leads to some of the collective ethical failures that have afflicted many national – and global – institutions recently. But the other extreme would be a kind of corporate hell in which what Andrew Hill might call ‘dysfunctional smarties’ question everything at all times, making decision-making impossible.

Some national or corporate cultures are more tolerant of dissent than others. Seen from across the English Channel, the British look distinctly bolshie. A former client was the last native member of a French management team of a business taken over by a new UK parent. He bemoaned what he saw as a British tendency to argue the toss after the coin has been spun. It’s fine to argue a case but once the decision has been taken, he said, it’s time simply to get on with it.

Too much dissent and work grinds to a halt, too little and all kinds of corporate sins can be committed. How bovine, how bolshie? That is the question.

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication You can find him on Twitter @stevedoswell