by admin | Apr 28, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
Not everything that is said is equally heard.
In many leadership conversations, listening is treated as a personal skill.
Be present. Don’t interrupt. Show that you’re engaged.
All of that matters.
But it doesn’t capture what’s actually happening in most workplace interactions.
Because listening is not just about attention. It’s about interpretation. It’s about power. And it’s about what the environment is able to hold.
Two people can say similar things in the same meeting and be received very differently.
One is seen as thoughtful. The other as disruptive.
One is heard as raising a valid concern. The other as overreacting.
One shifts the direction of the conversation. The other is acknowledged and then the conversation moves on.
The difference is rarely just what was said.
It’s how it was heard.
And how something is heard is shaped by more than intent.
It is shaped by:
- who is speaking
- how much credibility they are assumed to have
- how their tone is interpreted
- what risk they carry in naming something
- and whether the environment is structured to hold what they are bringing forward
Listening, in that sense, is not neutral.
It reflects the same patterns of power, identity and perception that show up everywhere else in our systems.
In the Work
In a recent consultation, a staff member raised a concern about how a decision was being implemented.
They were careful in how they said it. Measured. Specific. Grounded in the impact they were seeing.
The response was immediate.
“I think we just need to stay focused on solutions here.”
The conversation moved on.
No one interrupted. No one dismissed them explicitly.
But nothing shifted.
A few minutes later, someone else raised a similar point.
This time, it landed differently.
“That’s a really important consideration.”
The group paused. The idea was explored. The conversation changed direction.
The content wasn’t fundamentally different.
But the reception was.
And that difference matters.
Because people notice these patterns.
They learn, over time: • what gets traction • what gets softened • what gets redirected • and what gets ignored
And they adjust.
Not always consciously.
But consistently.
Some speak more strategically. Some filter more carefully. Some stop raising certain kinds of concerns altogether.
Not because they don’t see them. But because they’ve learned how those concerns are likely to be received.
What This Requires of Leadership
This is where listening becomes a leadership practice, not just a personal skill.
Because as a leader, you are not only listening. You are shaping what is heard.
Through:
what you respond to
what you follow up on
what you let pass
and how you interpret what is being said
Listening, in that sense, is one of the primary ways leaders contain, or fail to contain, tension.
When something is named, there is a moment.
Before it is resolved. Before it is acted on.
A moment where it either:
expands into something that can be understood
or collapses into something that is redirected or minimized
That moment is not neutral.
It is shaped by how it is received.
And that reception determines what happens next.
If concerns are quickly reframed, people learn to self-edit.
If impact is acknowledged but not engaged, people learn that naming something doesn’t change anything.
If tension is rushed toward resolution, people learn that complexity won’t be held.
Over time, this shapes not just conversations—but culture.
The Shift
We often ask: How do we get people to speak up?
But a more precise question might be:
What happens when they do?
Because people are always assessing that.
Not in a formal way.
But in the moment.
Is this something that will be heard? Is it worth the risk? Will anything shift?
If the answer is no, often enough, people don’t become less perceptive.
They become less visible.
A Small Practice
The next time someone raises something that feels slightly off, uncomfortable, or disruptive, pause.
Before responding, ask yourself:
What am I hearing and what might I be missing? What is the function of what’s being said? Is this something to solve, or something to understand?
And most importantly:
What would it look like to hold this for a moment longer before moving it forward?
Because listening is not just about making space for people to speak.
It’s about what you do with what emerges when they do.
-sd
by admin | Apr 17, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
It starts as something small something that doesn’t quite hold.
A comment. A decision moving too quickly. A moment that feels off.
And then comes the quieter moment: the decision not to say something.
We call what happens later conflict.
But what I see, over and over again, is something different.
We don’t have a conflict problem. We have a containment problem.
Because most conflict doesn’t begin out loud.
It begins in the moments where something is noticed but not named.
Not because it isn’t important. But because the conditions don’t feel right.
So it gets held.
Internally. Relationally. Quietly.
Until it doesn’t.
By the time something is called conflict, it’s carrying more than the original issue.
More interpretation. More emotion. More consequence.
And at that point, the response often shifts quickly to resolution.
How do we fix this? How do we move forward? How do we get back to alignment?
But not all conflict is asking to be resolved.
Some of it is asking to be understood. Or named. Or held – without being rushed into agreement.
And when we move too quickly to resolution, we often collapse the very thing that needed space.
Difference. Tension. Perspective.
In the Work
I was in a meeting recently where a decision was moving forward.
The conversation was smooth. Aligned. Efficient.
And there was a moment, brief, almost imperceptible where something didn’t quite hold.
An assumption embedded in the decision that hadn’t been tested.
I saw it.
And I could feel the calculation in real time: Do I name this? Do I let it go? Is this the right moment or does it disrupt what’s already moving?
That moment is where most of the work actually is.
Because if it isn’t named there, it doesn’t disappear.
It moves.
Into side conversations. Into hesitation. Into misalignment that shows up later as something harder to hold.
In that moment, I paused the conversation.
Not to challenge the decision. But to create space for what hadn’t yet been said.
To slow it down just enough for the assumption to be named and explored.
Nothing escalated.
There was no conflict to resolve.
But the conversation changed.
What This Requires of Leadership
This is what I mean by containment.
Not control. Capacity.
The capacity to:
- hold tension early, before it escalates
- distinguish between discomfort and harm
- stay with difference without forcing resolution
- and create conditions where something can be named without becoming rupture
Because conflict carries data.
About where things are unclear. Where assumptions are misaligned. Where power is uneven. Where something isn’t working the way we think it is.
But that data is only accessible if the environment can hold it.
Without that, people adapt.
Some speak and absorb the impact. Some stay silent and absorb it internally.
And we call that professionalism.
But from where I sit, that’s not a communication issue.
That’s a design failure.
Leadership isn’t just about encouraging people to speak.
It’s about creating conditions where what is spoken can be held.
The Shift
If we can’t hold it early, we’ll be forced to manage it later.
And by then, it’s no longer just about the issue. It’s about everything that wasn’t named along the way.
So the question isn’t: How do we handle conflict better?
It’s: What are we actually able to hold when it shows up?
Because if the environment can’t hold tension, people don’t become less perceptive.
They become less visible.
-sd
by admin | Apr 10, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
Autistic leadership exposes a tension most workplaces don’t know how to hold.
Being wired for clarity, directness, and literal interpretation in environments that rely on performance, tact, and unspoken rules.
Where how something is said often matters more than what is being said.
And where honesty, especially when it surfaces gaps or inconsistencies, is experienced not as contribution, but as disruption.
I learned this early in my career.
Not as theory, but as consequence.
There are moments from early in my career I understand differently now. At the time, they were framed as communication problems.
- I was told I was “too intense.”
- That I asked questions in ways that made my colleagues look bad.
- That I should be more careful about raising concerns in group settings.
- That I focused too much on my own interests when I brought forward equity considerations.
In one case, a colleague stopped engaging with me entirely after I questioned their data methods in a team discussion.
In another, I was explicitly asked to stop asking questions during Q&A periods.
What I learned from those moments was not subtle.
Honesty, in its raw form, was not welcome.
More precisely: honesty that disrupted the flow of a room, surfaced gaps in thinking, or introduced questions people weren’t prepared to sit with, was often experienced as harm.
Not just uncomfortable.
But rude. Disrespectful. Undermining.
And the impact of that was real, irrespective of intent.
I saw people withdraw.
Shut down.
Disengage entirely.
So I learned something else alongside it. That if I wanted to stay in relationship,
in rooms, in roles, I would need to modulate.
To soften. To anticipate how my words might land before I spoke them.
And at times, to stay silent.
That adaptation worked. It kept me connected. It kept me credible.
It helped me navigate environments that weren’t designed for how I think or communicate.
But it also came with a cost.
Because what I was being asked to adjust was not just how I communicated, but what I was willing to name.
That tension hasn’t gone away.
Because both things are true:
- Honesty can land as harm.
- And silence has a cost.
What has changed is how I understand my role as a leader within that tension.
I no longer see the answer as choosing one over the other.
I see it as discernment and design.
That doesn’t mean everything needs to be said in every moment.
Part of what I’ve had to learn is discernment.
Not as a form of self-silencing, but as a way of asking:
- What is needed here?
- What is the purpose of naming this?
- What conditions are required for it to be heard?
Because not all observations serve the same function.
Some are clarifying.
Some are evaluative.
Some are disruptive in ways that open something necessary.
Without that distinction, honesty becomes untethered from purpose.
Design, for me, is what comes next.
Not to contain the person speaking, but to hold the purpose of what needs to be said.
What I’ve learned is this: feedback without context becomes exposure. And exposure, especially in public or unstructured environments, can feel like threat.
So the question becomes: how do we create conditions where clarity doesn’t have to fight for space, and doesn’t land as rupture when it arrives?
For me, that has meant being much more intentional about containers for feedback.
Not removing honesty, but giving it structure.
- Being explicit about when we are evaluating, and when we are appreciating.
- Making space for critique that is expected, held, and contextualized.
- Separating moments of inquiry from moments of presentation.
Because without structure, honesty gets misread as intent rather than information.
So that questions don’t feel like interruption, and observations don’t feel like exposure.
I’ve also had to learn things that don’t come naturally to me.
I don’t default to small talk.
I don’t intuit idioms or indirect communication.
And I need to be honest about that.
So I’ve had to build a more conscious relationship with how I enter conversations,
how I signal intent, how I create enough relational ground for clarity to land.
And beyond feedback, there is dialogue.
Which I’ve come to understand differently as well.
For me, dialogue is not just about speaking or being understood.
It is about listening, hearing, and holding.
Holding perspectives that don’t align with my own.
Holding the impact of what I’ve said, even when my intent was different.
Holding the tension that emerges without needing to resolve it immediately.
If honesty without structure can feel like harm, then dialogue without holding can feel like fragmentation.
So this, too, becomes part of the work.
Not just designing for clarity in what is said, but building capacity to stay present with what is heard.
None of this is about diluting honesty. It’s about recognizing that how something is received is shaped by the environment it enters.
And when the environment is ambiguous, unstructured, or socially coded, clarity can easily be misread as harm.
This is where autism has reshaped my leadership.
Not by removing tension, but by making it visible.
And by pushing me to design in ways that hold both: clarity and relationship without requiring one to disappear for the other to exist.
What would change if we stopped asking individuals to manage the impact of our systems, and started designing systems that can hold truth without breaking?
-sd
by admin | Apr 3, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
There’s a lot of conversation right now about AI.
How to use it. How to regulate it. How to keep up.
In many organizations, the focus has been on building AI literacy:
- Understanding the tools.
- Learning the language.
- Developing guidelines for use.
All of that matters.
This isn’t an argument against AI.
It’s an argument for a different kind of critical awareness.
Because the question isn’t just how we use these tools. It’s how we understand the systems they are part of.
Shifting the Frame
From an equity perspective, AI literacy isn’t just about functionality.
It opens questions about power.
- Who designs these systems.
- Whose data is used to train them.
- Whose knowledge is prioritized.
- And whose interests are advanced.
AI systems are not neutral.
They are shaped by the same social, political, and institutional dynamics we see everywhere else.
Why the Idea of Neutrality Holds
There’s a strong pull to believe that AI can be neutral.
That with better data, better models, and better safeguards, we can remove bias.
That belief reflects something deeper in how we understand systems.
We often think of bias as:
- individual
- intentional
- correctable
So it makes sense to assume that if we fix the inputs, we can fix the outcomes.
But much of what AI learns from is not just data. It’s history. And history is structured by inequality.
Which means bias is not simply an error in the system. It is part of the system.
This is where AI mirrors a broader gap in how we understand bias itself.
If we see bias only as something individuals hold, we miss how it is embedded in:
- institutions
- policies
- decision-making patterns
- and what gets recognized as legitimate knowledge
AI doesn’t introduce these dynamics. It reveals and, in some cases, amplifies them.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Inside the work, this is where the conversation starts to shift.
In a recent consultation, I was asked to think about how EDI factors into how we approach AI literacy. And what became clear very quickly is that these dynamics aren’t abstract. They show up in very real, very immediate ways.
- In academic contexts, generative AI is often framed through academic integrity. But for multilingual students, AI tools can function as a form of linguistic access. The same use of a tool might be interpreted as misconduct in one case and as support in another. Without an equity lens, we risk applying policies in ways that overlook differences in access, language, and participation.
- In workplace contexts, AI tools are often used to increase efficiency in hiring or performance evaluation. But if those systems are trained on historical data that reflect existing patterns of exclusion, they can quietly reproduce those same patterns. What appears as a neutral, data-informed decision can carry forward deeply non-neutral outcomes.
- In knowledge production, generative AI can flatten voice. It often draws more heavily from dominant language patterns and widely available sources. Over time, this can narrow how ideas are expressed and which forms of knowledge are reinforced. For those already underrepresented, this is not just about style. It’s about visibility.
What EDI Asks Us to Consider
The more we’ve been working to “teach AI,” the more it’s become clear that the tools are only one part of the conversation.
An EDI lens doesn’t just add considerations. It changes the questions.
Because once you start looking through that lens, the scope widens.
Not as an add-on. But as a more complete picture.
EDI asks us to consider:
- Who benefits from these systems, and who is burdened by them? Not just in immediate use, but in how impacts are distributed across different communities.
- What histories the data carries. Whose knowledge has been included, excluded, or extracted, and what it means to build systems on top of that.
- How decisions are being shaped. Not only by what AI produces, but by how much authority we give it and in which contexts.
- What kinds of labour are being displaced, reshaped, or made more precarious. And for whom those shifts carry the most risk.
- What environmental and resource costs are made invisible. And how those costs are unevenly experienced across regions and populations.
- And critically: Who is accountable when harm occurs. Not in theory, but in practice.
These are not separate from AI literacy. They are part of it.
Because without this awareness, we risk narrowing the conversation to how to use the tool rather than how the tool participates in larger systems.
The Institutional Question
AI is often framed as a tool individuals use.
But in practice, it is something institutions adopt, integrate, and normalize.
Which means responsibility cannot sit only with individual users.
The questions become:
- How are decisions about AI being made?
- What values are shaping those decisions?
- And how are impacts being assessed over time?
AI is not just a technological shift.
It is a shift in how decisions are made, how knowledge is produced, and how systems operate.
Approaching it with awareness is not about slowing progress.
It’s about ensuring that what we build, and how we use it, aligns with the values we say we hold.
Because without that awareness, we don’t just risk using AI poorly.
We risk embedding existing inequities into new systems, at scale.
-sd
by admin | Mar 31, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
There’s a growing narrative that EDI training doesn’t work.
I hear it often:
“It’s performative.”
“It doesn’t change anything.”
“People attend and then go back to doing the same things.”
In some cases, that critique is warranted.
But I don’t think it’s telling us what we think it is.
Because the problem is not learning.
And it’s not training.
The problem is what we expect training to do on its own.
In the 20 years I have spent designing and facilitating EDI-centred learning across different environments, I’ve seen learning land in very different ways.
Not because the content was fundamentally different. But because the conditions around the learning were.
Most EDI training is asked to do too much – in isolation.
We ask a workshop, a course, or a learning series to shift deeply held beliefs, build new skills, change behaviour, reshape culture, and produce measurable outcomes. Often within a few hours.
We ask training to do what organizations are unwilling to design for.
And when that doesn’t happen, we conclude: “Training doesn’t work.”
But that’s not a failure of learning.
It’s a failure of design.
In most areas of organizational life, we don’t treat training as a standalone solution.
We don’t expect someone to become a strong manager after one workshop.
Or a confident driver after one lesson.
Or physically stronger after a single workout.
In most areas, we understand that training is part of a system.
Training is paired with practice, embedded in process, and reinforced over time.
EDI is one of the few areas where we compress all of that into a single intervention—and then question its effectiveness.
At its best, learning creates shared language, awareness of patterns, recognition of bias and inequity, and initial shifts in perspective.
These are not small things. They are necessary conditions for change.
But they are not sufficient on their own.
Learning opens the door. It does not walk people through it.
The gap isn’t in the learning itself.
It’s in what happens next.
In many organizations, there is little structured opportunity to practice new skills, or to integrate learning into decision-making processes, or to apply what was learned.
So people return to environments where existing norms remain unchanged, risk remains uneven, and new behaviours are unsupported.
Under those conditions, it’s not surprising that learning doesn’t translate into action.
I’ve also seen the opposite.
In one context, we shifted from delivering a single training session on equitable hiring to designing a more scaffolded approach. The initial learning still focused on awareness — bias, systemic barriers, and how inequities show up in hiring processes.
But we didn’t stop there.
We introduced structured evaluation criteria and scoring tools, guided panel deliberation practices, concrete prompts to interrupt bias in real time, and expectations for how decisions would be documented and reviewed.
Leaders weren’t just asked to understand bias.
They were supported in practicing how to interrupt it inside actual hiring decisions.
Ongoing peer support through a community of practice provided further opportunity to build skills and confidence in a collegial setting.
Over time, the conversations in hiring panels changed.
Not perfectly.
But noticeably.
Language became more specific. Some decisions were more clearly tied to criteria.
There was greater consistency in how candidates were evaluated.
The learning didn’t create the change on its own. It made different decisions possible.
There’s another layer that often gets missed.
Awareness does not automatically translate into skill.
Understanding bias is not the same as interrupting it in a heated discussion, navigating it in a performance conversation, or responding when harm is named.
Those are practices.
And practices require rehearsal, feedback, iteration, and time.
Without that, learning stays conceptual.
Even with skill, change doesn’t sustain without accountability.
Not punitive accountability.
Structural accountability.
Where expectations are clear, processes support equitable decisions, leaders are responsible for how they act under pressure, and outcomes are examined over time.
Especially in moments where speed, risk, and scrutiny are high.
Without this, organizations rely on individual motivation.
And motivation is not a system.
So when we say:
“EDI training doesn’t work”
What we may actually be seeing is learning without scaffolding, skill-building without practice, pivots without capacity-building.
Training, on its own, was never designed to carry that weight.
This is not a critique of training. It’s a call to design beyond it.
I don’t think we need less EDI learning. I think we need to stop asking it to do work the system isn’t designed to support.
Because training doesn’t fail in a vacuum.
It fails when it’s expected to compensate for systems that remain unchanged.
When learning, skill-building, and accountability are aligned, change becomes possible.
Not immediate.
Not simple.
But real.
The question isn’t whether training works.
It’s whether we’ve built anything around it that allows it to.
-sd
