Why “Speaking Up” Isn’t Good Enough

How culture shapes safety voice, and fostering an environment to overcome social risks.

Silence is scary.

Students who avoid eye contact and are hesitant to speak up can seem disengaged. As a field instructor, you are constantly searching for cues to help make safety decisions, like gauging a participant's comfort or understanding of important instructions. When it seems like you're working with a wall, it can feel like you're working without one of your five major senses.

During my first outdoor program in Korea, I was struck by how quiet the students were. Even more concerning, it was hard to tell if they truly understood our safety instructions or if anyone felt uncomfortable or unsafe. My group of eighth graders pushed through everything we asked them to do, whether wading through cold water or sleeping in the rain for the first time, without so much as a peep.

I was confused by this experience, and it left me feeling conflicted. After speaking with my Korean colleagues, I learned these quiet behaviors weren't signals of defiance or disengagement–they were signs of respect.

The strategies and techniques that felt natural for us as American instructors simply didn't work here. We had to rethink how we engaged students and find new ways to ensure their voices—and safety concerns—were truly heard.

Encouraging team members to “speak up” when they have concerns or feel unsafe is often widely seen as an essential part of "good" risk management.

Known as safety voice, this behavior—raising concerns to prevent harm—is credited with averting disasters in safety-critical fields like aviation, healthcare, and adventure programming. However, while safety voice is integral to safety management, it is culturally informed and influenced by organizational factors. 

Simply encouraging people to speak up isn’t enough. As I quickly learned in Korea, cultural competence is required to listen and respond to cues. Cultural norms surrounding authority, hierarchy, and communication significantly influence whether individuals feel comfortable voicing concerns—especially when those concerns challenge authority figures or disrupt the status quo.

This post explores the relationships between safety voice and safety listening, how cultural dynamics like power distance influence leaders’ abilities to foster an environment where concerns are heard and addressed, and strategies for integrating these insights into outdoor programs.

What Is Safety Voice?

Safety voice refers to the act of speaking up to prevent physical harm or mitigate hazardous situations, and it can entail immediate intervention or advocating for organizational change. (Bienefeld & Grote, 2012; Noort et al., 2016). It is thought to play a critical role in fostering safer environments, especially in situations that require quick decision-making and action.

According to researchers, safety voice is key to:

• Creating shared situational awareness (Driscoll, 2002).

• Enabling timely interventions to mitigate risks (Barton & Sutcliffe, 2009).

• Enhancing safety performance, particularly when junior team members voice their concerns (Kolbe et al., 2012).

It’s a unique concept in the academic literature because it centers around the perception of a safety problem and the perceived agreement that the problem requires action.

Speaking up to change a system or a process, or to call out a management decision involves immense social risk and moral obligation–sometimes even a legal one. Whether issues are addressed or ignored, bringing attention to some issues may even harm an organization.

The concept of safety voice is pertinent to many types of situations, even beyond the workplace. It applies in everyday life (remember the last time you were a passenger to a reckless driver?) and in some professional situations it is even legally protected (e.g., whistleblowing).

“See something say something” is a common mantra ingrained in our psyche, but there are many reasons why “saying something” is difficult. Understanding these influences and creating an environment conducive to speaking up requires looking beyond individual behavior. It requires an understanding of the cultural and structural factors that shape when and how people raise concerns.

How Culture Shapes Safety Voice

A key cultural dimension influencing safety voice is power distance. Power distance is the degree to which people in a culture accept and expect unequal power in relationships (Hofstede et al, 2010). In high-power-distance cultures, hierarchical structures are emphasized, and subordinates are less likely to question authority. Conversely, in low-power-distance cultures, relationships tend to be flatter, and individuals tend to feel more empowered to challenge authority and they expect to contribute to decision-making.

• High Power Distance Cultures: In countries like South Korea, China, and Russia, deference to authority figures is strongly emphasized. This can have significant effects on safety. For example, subordinates may avoid raising concerns or challenging decisions to “save face” of their superiors, even in critical situations. Numerous aviation accidents are attributed to high power distance among the flight crew, where co-pilots seemingly knew mistakes were being made but hesitated to confront or correct the captain (Helmreich & Merrit, 2017).

• Low Power Distance Cultures: Countries like the United States, Australia, and Northern Europe tend to emphasize equality in relationships. In these cultures, team members are more likely, and even expected, to challenge authority or provide feedback. Workers are also more likely to openly voice safety concerns or question protocols without fear of disrespecting leadership.

Aviation Insights on Power Distance

Crew Resource Management (CRM) was originally developed for the aviation industry to improve team coordination, communication, and decision-making. It has since gained attention in adventure programming as a model for staff training. To better understand safety voice and its role in preventing harm, researchers examined how it showed up in the immediate moments preceding disaster in 172 aviation accidents, and analyzed these results to assess CRM’s effectiveness over time (Noort et al., 2021).

The researchers found that CRM is more effective at promoting safety voice in low-power-distance cultures (e.g., Western countries) than in high-power-distance cultures, where cultural norms inherently discourage subordinates from questioning authority or raising concerns. For example, in some cases, it was repeatedly expressed but it failed to elicit action, while in others, it was overshadowed by other messages, like task-oriented communications, such as “keep your airspeed up.”

This suggests that while safety voice is present in all cultural contexts, its effectiveness relies heavily on how decision-makers receive and act upon it. To bridge this gap, training programs like CRM should have culturally sensitive designs. While these programs aim to encourage speaking up and promote listening, they should be underpinned by more than Western assumptions about hierarchy and communication alone, as these assumptions may not effectively translate across all cultural contexts.

Do More Than “Speak Up”

All schools and outdoor programs should strive to create an environment where it is easier to overcome the social risks of speaking up. However, creating this environment requires more thoughtful attention and design for inclusive and international contexts.

To create an environment that more readily enables safety voice:

• Review your risk management program and the extent to which it is underpinned by Western assumptions of hierarchy, authority, and communication norms. Examine the normal interactions between staff and participants and opportunities for safety voice and listening throughout all stages of programming.

• Embed safety listening as a core competency in staff training by practicing active listening techniques, conducting role-play scenarios, and regularly reviewing how leadership responds to safety concerns. Encourage multiple avenues for feedback beyond verbal reporting to accommodate different cultural communication styles.

• Establish value for participants’ safety perceptions and their subjective, personal experiences. Centralize this information as critical to the program’s goals and mission, and as a driver of your organization’s safety management work.

Encouraging safety voice is important, but simply “speaking up” isn’t enough to prevent disaster. Fostering an environment where concerns are truly heard and acted upon requires intentional effort and cultural sensitivity. Cultural dynamics and power structures shape how concerns are raised, heard, and addressed. By understanding power distance and integrating culturally responsive practices, programs can create safer and more culturally relevant outdoor experiences where people feel safe to speak up—and trust that their voices will lead to meaningful change.

Dive In

This series is intended to make cultural influences on risk management more tangible and actionable. To stay updated, subscribe to my newsletter for new posts. I send a short and sweet monthly newsletter to announce new posts and share other insights and musings on culture, climate resiliency, and safety science.

If you're looking for more hands-on support, I help organizations apply these insights in their unique contexts through staff training, coaching, and program review and improvement work. Reach out to chat about how we can work together.

References

Barton, M.A., Sutcliffe, K.M., 2009. Overcoming dysfunctional momentum: Organizational safety as a social achievement. Human Relations 62 (9), 1327–1356.

Bienefeld, N., Grote, G., 2012. Silence that may kill: When aircrew members don’t speak up and why. Aviation Psychol. Appl. Human Factors 2 (1), 1–10.

Helmreich, R. L., & Merritt, A. C. (2017). Culture at work in aviation and medicine: National, organizational and professional influences. Routledge.

Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G.J., Minkov, M., 2010. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Revised and Expanded, 3rd Ed. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.

Kolbe, M., Burtscher, M.J., Wacker, J., Grande, B., Nohynkova, R., Manser, T., Spahn, D. R., Grote, G., 2012. Speaking up is related to better team performance in simulated anesthesia inductions: An observational study. Anesth. Analg. 115 (5), 1099–1108.

Noort, M. C., Reader, T. W., Shorrock, S., & Kirwan, B. (2016). The relationship between national culture and safety culture: Implications for international safety culture assessments. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(3), 515–538. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12139

Noort, M. C., Reader, T. W., & Gillespie, A. (2019). Speaking up to prevent harm: A systematic review of the safety voice literature. Safety Science, 117, 375–387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2019.04.039

Noort, M. C., Reader, T. W., & Gillespie, A. (2021). Safety voice and safety listening during aviation accidents: Cockpit voice recordings reveal that speaking-up to power is not enough. Safety Science, 139, 1-12. doi:10.1016/j.ssci.2021.105260