For many years I’ve been researching into and writing about how truth gets manufactured in workplaces, and whose truth gets privileged.
Within the mainstream world of leadership and organizational studies, I’ve worked closely with Professor Megan Reitz, exploring how truth gets spoken to power, how inconvenient (activist) voices get silenced, and what it takes to step away from the comforting familiarity of wilful busyness. Our work in these areas can be found in the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review and in interviews with Brene Brown and Evan Davis – as well as in numerous other publications, research reports and podcast/TED talks.
Our most recent book is ‘Speak Out, Listen Up – How to have conversations that matter’ (FT Publishing, 2024).
More provocative work can be found in my writing with Dr Mark Cole, where we take silence to be an active choice, often an act of resistance, by employees who otherwise find themselves compelled to speak only in ways others decide they should. This contrasts with the widespread assumption that silence is simply passivity and can be ignored (See ‘The Great Unheard: understanding voice and silence in organisations’, Routledge, 2023).
In other think pieces, to be found at www.radicalod.org, we reframe modern leadership practice as a return to an age of dependent feudalism – played out in a variety of forms of enlightened and unenlightened autocracy, wherever whoever has the gold sets the rules.
Underpinning these world views is my long-term engagement with the Ashridge Doctorate and Masters in Organisational Change (see ‘The Change Doctors: reimagining organisational practice’, Eds Kathleen King & John Higgins, Libri, 2013). This draws on social-constructionist and relational perspectives, which repositions inter-dependency as the foundational reality of working life, over the still dominant ideology of sovereign individuality.
It also informs my approach to research and inquiry, which takes seriously what is often hiding in plain sight, such as contradictions between what is espoused and what is practised in organisational life, or which demonstrate the self-interest behind what are presented as ‘objective’ truths about human beings and their organising principles.
