Under a new agenda, people feel they must keep praising it in public and disparaging the old ways, because silence is read as disloyalty and costs promotions and assignments.
An example
Three months into a payroll software company's pivot to AI features, the review form gained a new dimension: "cultural alignment with the new direction." At each all-hands, the vice presidents opened by describing how the old roadmap had held the company back. An internal channel called ai-first carried several posts a day, and managers mentioned in staff meetings who had posted. A principal engineer who owned the payroll tax engine, the module every customer depended on, kept shipping and posted nothing. In calibration his manager's peers described him as "not yet on the journey," and his promotion to distinguished engineer was deferred. Word of the calibration comment got around. By the next quarter the channel's volume had doubled, and two senior engineers who had questioned the pivot's timeline in design reviews stopped raising it.
Why it works
Visible signalers are treated as culture carriers and get the best assignments. Once enough colleagues are signaling, joining costs nothing, and the early signalers have already paid. Running down the past strips legitimacy from anything built on prior practice, so quiet competence with older methods reads as unreformed allegiance. Silence itself becomes the signal, and those who do not perform are passed over. Opting out openly is itself visible and can be punished. Leadership needs control of the forums where signaling can be counted, promotions visibly tied to it, and a previous leadership already discredited.
The thinking behind it
A. Michael Spence Spence's Job Market Signaling (1973) shows that when an employer cannot observe productivity, a costly action can communicate it, provided the action costs more for those it should screen out. Public enthusiasm for a new agenda works as a signal of loyalty because withholding it is visible and costly. Leadership comes to read the signal in place of results, which is why decoupling career rewards from displays is the structural fix.
Mark Granovetter Granovetter's Threshold Models of Collective Behavior (1978) holds that each person joins a collective behavior once enough others have, so the outcome depends on the distribution of thresholds. Each new public signaler lowers the bar for the next, and joining soon costs nothing. A group that declines together raises the visible count of non-signalers and can stop the cascade.
Solomon E. Asch Asch's Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments (1951) found that a single partner who gave the correct answer sharply reduced conformity to a unanimous wrong majority. In a signaling culture, one senior, secure person who stays quiet and suffers nothing plays that partner's role for everyone watching, which is why such a person can break the pattern.
Warning signs
Praise for the new agenda escalates at each all-hands, town hall, or chat thread, and people remark on who stayed silent. Review forms gain an alignment or attitude criterion. Every deck opens by criticizing the old way of working. Calibration comments describe outlook more than output. People who built the old systems stop mentioning them. Skeptics raise concerns only in private.
How to defend yourself
Individual options are narrow, so look for collective ones.
- Find peers who share your view and decline to perform together. A group absorbs the cost that would mark one person.
- Ask a senior, secure colleague to decline openly. One respected person who stays quiet and goes unpunished shows that silence is survivable, and the cascade often breaks.
- Talk about the new agenda only in concrete terms of your own work: what you shipped, what it does.
- Ask in writing how the alignment criterion is defined and measured, and press for outcome measures.
- Save review comments that refer to attitude instead of work.
How a leader shuts it down
Remove alignment criteria that cannot be tied to outcomes, and separate career rewards from public enthusiasm. Anonymize parts of review and feedback processes, and protect channels where dissent can be raised without cost. Senior leaders can show that silence and questions are acceptable by thanking people for them. Ask what you are losing when the people who know the old systems stop talking.