Silence as a System Design Choice

Hi Readers,

Before we get into this week’s piece, I want to be direct.

I stand against ICE operations in Minneapolis and elsewhere. I fundamentally oppose the policies and systems of the current administration. The enforcement actions, the killings, the climate of fear being created in communities across the country—I oppose all of it.

This newsletter examines how work is structured and designed, and I do that work from a clear position: I believe organizations should be designed to support human dignity, not undermine it. When I write about silence as infrastructure, I’m not neutral about what that silence enables.

That said, this piece isn’t about what I think organizations should do. It’s about what silence is—as a design choice, as infrastructure, as a system that distributes costs unevenly. My goal is to make that structure visible, whether anyone meant to design it or not.

If you’re navigating this moment in a workplace that’s staying silent, if you’re carrying the cognitive load I describe in this piece, if you’re one of the people for whom silence doesn’t register as neutrality—I see that. Take care of yourselves. Find the people around you who understand what this costs. You’re not imagining it.

Stay safe,
Kristina

Eight weeks into federal immigration raids in Minneapolis, corporations in Minnesota finally said something. Kind of.1

By the time sixty Minnesota-based CEOs released their joint statement on January 25, 2026, ICE agents had been operating in the city for nearly two months. Two U.S. citizens had been killed by federal agents. Target employees had been detained during their shifts. Protests had shut down businesses. The state had sued the federal government.

The statement called for “an immediate de-escalation of tensions.”

It took two weeks to sand down the language enough for sixty companies to sign it. In the end, the statement never named the people who’d been killed. It never mentioned ICE. It didn’t call for ending or removing agents. Instead, it referenced “tensions”, as though the conflict had simply… occurred, like bad weather. Social media did not respond kindly: “milquetoast,” “hollow,” “meek.”

Additionally, CNBC surveyed 550 C-suite leaders days after the second killing; only thirty-four responded.

This is not neutrality. This is what organizational silence looks like in practice. Not “staying focused on the business.” A design choice about who has to navigate uncertainty and who doesn’t.

Silence is its own kind of infrastructure. It determines how information is shared, who must make sense of what’s happening when official channels remain quiet, and whose safety becomes a personal issue rather than an organizational responsibility.

So what happens when an organization does nothing and stays silent? The information vacuum doesn’t stay empty. Employees don’t stop needing to know whether their workplace is safe, whether their colleagues are protected, and whether leadership sees what’s happening. Over time, every past statement or omission becomes data, and employees turn into forensic analysts of leadership’s priorities.

None of this is new. The idea that workplaces should be apolitical spaces is, historically speaking, a recent and patchy design choice.

For most of American labor history, the workplace was an openly political arena: hours, wages, whether your kid could be sent down a mine, whether you got maimed on the job had any recourse. Strikes, sit-downs, picket lines, company guards, blocklists. This wasn’t called “bringing politics to work.” It was called the politics of work.2

What changed wasn’t that workplaces stopped being political. What changed is that certain kinds of power were institutionalized and therefore became invisible, while other kinds were marked as “political” and treated as suspect. Over time, certain features came to feel “natural” — hierarchies, management authority, employment‑at‑will—while others were cast as “Political Intrusions” —immigration enforcement, racism, transphobia and homophobia, safety concerns that touch policy.

It’s a choice about what counts as a legitimate workplace concern and what does not.

But how does this happen? Organizations inherit this framing, and it’s not examined. HR writes “no political discussions” policies. Leaders explain that they serve “diverse stakeholders,” so they can’t “take positions”. The stated logic is risk mitigation: speaking creates risks; silence creates safety.

That logic only holds if you define risk from a particular vantage point.

If you zoom in on Minnesota CEOs’ statement, the risk calculus becomes clear.

From a corporate governance perspective, the dangers are easy to list: alienating customers, inviting regulatory backlash, triggering boycotts, provoking retaliation from political actors, and spooking investors.3 Former Medtronic CEO Bill George told Fortune that CEOs today “are very afraid of being attacked, of retribution. The fear of Trump is great.” Asked about the Minnesota letter, he said, “You could say they were writing for the general public. In this case, they might have been writing for an audience of one.”

That explains the incentive structure. It doesn’t tell you much about the full distribution cost.

The employees detained at Target weren’t gaming out the reputational risk. They were being handcuffed at work. The workers who were afraid to show up weren’t worrying about shareholder value. They were wondering if federal agents would be waiting in the parking lot. The managers fielding “are we safe here?” questions weren’t primarily thinking about fiduciary duty. They were trying to figure out what to tell their teams with no guidance from above.

Those are also risks. They are just the risks organizational design usually accounts for. When an organization chooses silence, it is effectively deciding that the first category of risks (money, reputation, regulatory exposure) will get systematic protection, and the second category (safety, precarity, psychological strain) will be handled individually and informally.

That is a design choice masquerading as risk avoidance.

If you work in a place that stays silent in a crisis, you can probably feel the next part in your nervous system before you see it in a study.4

The cost of navigating organizational silence shows up as cognitive load. When organizations refuse to answer questions, people burn mental energy. Is leadership paying attention? Do they care? Are we safe here? Do I come in tomorrow? What happens if I speak up? What happens if I don’t?

This is workplace uncertainty, and research is clear: employees stuck in ambiguity report significantly higher stress, anxiety, and performance impairment. One recent study found that over 40% of workers report stress driven by fear and uncertainty, with a majority reporting productivity declines; those stressed by uncertainty saw much higher impairment than their peers. NAMI’s 2025 workplace mental health poll put political and social divisiveness near the top of the list of employee stressors.

But again, the cost isn’t evenly distributed.

In Minnesota, employees with no immigration exposure had more options. They could treat ICES’s presence as background noise, keep their heads down, and get through their shifts. Employees who are immigrants, who have immigrant family members, who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, visibly Muslim, or otherwise read as “targetable” by federal agents—they don’t get to opt out. Organizational silence means they’re left to navigate the situation mostly alone, reading whatever signals they can find, building information channels to trade information, and making daily risk calculations without official support.

For workers who are BIPOC, undocumented, queer, or trans, silence often registers differently—not as neutrality, but as a signal about whose safety is organizational infrastructure and whose is individual risk. For some people, silence registers as “staying out of it.” For others, it reads as abandonment.

When you view silence as infrastructure, a pattern emerges.

Many organizations say they’re neutral, but in practice, they mostly support the existing system. They treat politics as something employees bring into the workplace, rather than recognizing that politics is a part of how work is structured and organized in the first place. They treat certain issues as perennial and legitimate (profitability, shareholder value, operational continuity), and others as “too political” (safety, discrimination, whose neighborhoods get policed).

The pattern is old. Union organizing was “political.” OSHA regulations were “political.” Anti-discrimination law was “political”—until enough conflict and legislation turned it into a part of the baseline. At that point, they became “just how work is,” and the next round of worker demands got moved into the “too political” bucket. The concerns that threaten existing arrangements are marked as political.

When organizations opt to stay “out of politics,” they’re choosing which forms of power remain hidden and which get named. Silence isn’t neutral; it reliabley suports those who benefit from things staying as they are—even as people inside the organization keep making sense of events on their own.

When you start to view silence as a deliberate choice in design rather than just a neutral stance, the typical questions, like whether companies should take political positions, start to feel less relevant. Instead, new questions arise, such as:

• What resources are available for employees to manage uncertainty when outside events impact their work?

• Whose definition of “political” are we using, and whose safety or dignity gets excluded by that definition?

• When federal agents are operating in your stores and detaining your employees, what systems—if any—exist to make sure those employees aren’t left to manage risk alone?

• What structures support the managers standing in front of worried teams with nothing official to point to?

These are hypothetical. They’re design challenges organizations face, whether or not they acknowledge them. The key isn’t whether these questions will be addressed. It’s about whether we tackle them with well-thought-out systems or let employees create their own informal solutions when there aren’t any official ones in place.

The risk of silence, in that sense, is not only about public image, but about daily operations. When workplaces fail to prepare for uncertainty, employees will still find a way to deal with it—but it often ends up being more costly, less consistent, and done in silence. People will make sense of what’s happening one way or another. The key question is whether this burden is shared openly or left to those already facing the most challenges.

The workplace has never been apolitical. It has always been a site where power moves, where some people have more voice than others, and where conditions of work get contested or accepted. What changes over time is which forms of power we’re willing to name.

When an organization claims neutrality, it isn’t stepping outside politics.5 It’s treating the current arrangements as natural and treating a challenge to them as political. That’s a coherent stance. It’s not a neutral one.

The question isn’t whether workplaces are political. The question is whether organizations will admit that—and design infrastructure that reflects it—or keep pretending that silence is the same thing as staying out of it.

These pieces examine workplace politics from different vantage points—some treating it as an individual navigation strategy, others as structural power relations, and still others as a risk management problem. Together, they reveal how organizations frame what counts as "political" and whose concerns get legitimized in that framing.

Organizing.Work - “Workplace struggles are political” Challenges the socialist tendency to treat workplace organizing as technical union work separate from “real politics,” arguing instead that the daily struggle between workers and employers over control, wages, and conditions is itself a site of political power development—not just preparation for politics that happens elsewhere.

Harvard Business Review - “You Can’t Sit Out Office Politics” A personal account of learning that refusing to engage in office politics was itself a position, not neutrality—the workplace contains power dynamics whether you acknowledge them or not, and the question is whether you’ll navigate them consciously or pretend they don’t exist.

Gallup - “Talking Politics at Work: A Double-Edged Sword” Surveys show nearly half of U.S. workers discuss politics at work, with measurable effects: some report feeling included or closer to coworkers, while others report discomfort or unfair treatment, with employee engagement appearing to moderate whether these conversations land as connection or conflict.

Brightmine - “Workplace politics: key HR insights for 2025” HR guidance treating political discussions as a risk to be managed through civility policies and neutrality frameworks—an example of the approach this essay critiques, where “keeping politics out” becomes the official stance while employees navigate the reality.