Alexei Navalny | Project Management | Speaking up | Inconvenient Truths

The Courage to Speak Up

Leadership lessons from the life of a political dissident

Lies are the silent killers of projects.

When I say ‘lies’, I mean a wide range of behaviours, from hiding inconvenient truths to outright deception, with the fear of speaking up being a significant problem in any project. Issues arise:

• when projects are initiated based on inaccurate business cases;
• when decisions are made with incorrect or incomplete information;
• when risks are ignored until they become major problems;
• when projects are reported as ‘green’ despite obvious dangers.

Despite recognizing these issues, people might choose not to speak up for various reasons:

• hierarchical barriers that inhibit open communication;
• the fear of one’s ideas being rejected or ignored, potentially leading to social exclusion;
• anxiety about speaking up, coupled with fear of judgment;
• doubting one’s own abilities, fearing being labelled as an impostor;
• negative experiences from previous attempts to speak up.

Regardless of our opinions on the political aspects involved, we should be inspired by and respect the bravery required to speak up, especially when the stakes are much higher than anything we might face in a project.

RIP Alexei Navalny

Image by Evgeny Feldman, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons