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Birgitte Lange is the general secretary of Save the Children in Norway. At the beginning of her tenure, she spent time in Malawi to learn about the organisation’s activities there. She came back with new insights and understandings of the predicament for children in developing countries and ways her organisation contributes to improving their living conditions. During her stay, she worked closely with local employees and supporters. Once back from her trip, she held a presentation to employees in Norway about her experiences, impressions, and learning points for further efforts to help children living under precarious conditions. The presentation was well received, and she was happy to have been able to share important new insights and reflections with her closest colleagues in Oslo.

After the presentation, a member of her team approached her and wanted to talk. This colleague had noticed something of which Lange was most likely not aware. During the presentation, she had shown photos of colleagues in the African country. She had pointed to and used first names for all the white colleagues but did the same to a lesser degree with black colleagues. They had for the most part remained a nameless group of people. The colleague explained that this was a tendency also found in media coverage from African countries. White people were identified by name, whereas black people were presented as anonymous members of a group. The colleague thought Lange should be aware that she had followed this pattern in her presentation.

Lange was taken aback by this observation from the colleague. Discriminating between white and black colleagues in this manner had not been her intention. She is the head of an organisation where it is particularly important to treat everyone equally, and not based on skin colour. She was grateful to the colleague for pointing out her failure to name the black colleagues and for doing so face-to-face rather than in front of everyone during the presentation. Now she had a chance to reflect on her behaviour and its causes, as well as to develop a more inclusive perspective.

Lange has shared this example with her colleagues as part of an effort to build and maintain a strong communication climate in the organisation. She has highlighted that she encourages, appreciates, and values this sort of intervention in the organisation. She has exposed her vulnerability and dependency upon other people to speak up when they observe mishaps and blunders. By sharing the example, she also gives credit to the colleague who took the initiative to point out her discriminative behaviour. This is a powerful way for a top manager to signal to an organisation or group that everyone can make mistakes and we all depend on people around us to speak up and intervene. Studies show that an effective way to lower the threshold for voicing a concern is to neutralise hierarchies. When the top manager shares examples of her fallibility in this manner, others who are lower down in the hierarchy are more likely to do the same. Honest narratives from the top about their mistakes can serve to communicate that although formal hierarchies may be in place, when it comes to being fallible, vulnerable, and dependent upon each other, we are all on the same level.

What Lange experienced can be seen as another example of an invisible gorilla, as outlined in the previous chapter. She failed to notice a rather obvious and visible aspect of the way she talked about colleagues in Malawi. This aspect was in no way hidden from view, but Lange failed to notice it because she was focused on presenting her experiences during her trip. She suffered from inattentional blindness (Simons and Chabris 1999; Mack 2003; Kreitz et al. 2016), seeing only those aspects of the situation to which she deliberately and actively attended.

In my interview with Lange, she said that her failure to use names for the Black colleagues in Malawi was in her blind spot. That particular term is a key component in the Johari Window, a figure Luft and Ingham (1961) developed to stimulate self-awareness and examine social relations (Table 5.1).

Table 5.1 The Johari Window
Full size table

The Johari Window was initially designed to analyse personal relations. In the arena quadrant, we find the attitudes, values, motivations, and behaviours that are known to the individual and to others. The façade quadrant holds aspects of self that the individual decides to keep private and not share with others. The unknown quadrant is for those aspects that neither the individual nor other people are aware of, whereas in the blind spot we find everything that is unknown to the individual but known to one or more others.

Lange’s practice of naming only the White colleagues was in her blind spot, and the intervention from the colleague brought this fact about her behaviour into their common arena. By keeping the conversation private, the colleague wisely chose not to put the information into the wider arena available to everyone who participated in the meeting. Later, the general secretary decided to share the example with a wider audience within the organisation, and so placed it in the arena.

The original purpose of the Johari Window was to enhance self-awareness and explore our relations to other people. It can serve as a starting point for personal reflections about what other people might see and notice in your behaviour and attitudes as well as what you want them to know and believe about you. I have also found that it is useful to investigate group processes and the information that is known and unknown to participants in various kinds of projects. A project manager can be concerned that relevant information about progress and obstacles in a project is widely shared among participants. It should all be in the arena quadrant rather than distributed in other parts of the Johari Window. A project manager can also possess information that is unavailable to other project members and decide whether to keep it in the façade quadrant or place it in the arena.

A range of communication climate issues can be analysed in Johari Window terms. We have seen that the silence mystery can occur in situations where people choose to remain silent instead of speaking up about what they observe, know, or suspect to be the case. Looking back, it may seem that the obvious and reasonable thing to do was sound the alarm and make the others aware of the problem. Instead, someone decided not to move information from one quadrant to another, from the façade or the blind spot to the arena. A project member may be the only one to observe an obstacle to the successful completion of the project. The other team members might have a blind spot, and it is up to the project member to take the initiative to share knowledge and place the information they were missing into the arena quadrant. An initiative of this sort could save the project, but a project member might choose to say nothing. This is a typical silence mystery, which can best be solved by initially attending to its causes rather than blaming or criticizing a project member. Collins (2001) described an “autopsy without blame” as a crucial quality of investigations into the root causes of why things have gone wrong. It makes people more likely to share their observations and explain their behaviour than it would if the inquiry is seen as one where the aim is to find explanations rather than establish blame (Kvalnes 2017).

For a person who realises that a colleague or team member is unaware of an important aspect of what they are doing or about to do, a question of timing and context arises. You understand that the other has a serious blind spot issue and he or she would benefit from being made aware of it. When and how do you tell them? Lange’s colleague decided not to bring up the issue with others present and asked for a face-to-face meeting directly afterwards.

Others in similar situations can hesitate and postpone the conversation. The philosopher Anne Rose Røsbak Feragen told me about an employee in a financial institution who had misunderstood the form to fill in for client engagements. She was a newcomer to the organisation, and several of her colleagues were aware that she was filling in the form the wrong way. None of them took action to show the newcomer how to use the form correctly. Instead, they would take turns correcting her mistakes behind her back. The fact that she used the form incorrectly remained in her blind spot for nearly two years, and she found out about it by coincidence rather than through an intervention from a colleague. It is likely that she was irritated and puzzled by the lack of response from the people with whom she was working. Why had none of them taken the initiative to clarify the proper procedure with her? It is likely that some sort of bystander effect was part of the explanation. Many people knew, and they apparently shared evenly the responsibility for bringing information from the colleague’s blind spot into the arena quadrant. Each of them could assume that the personal responsibility for intervening was minimal, and so remained silent.

One lesson from this example is that if one has something important to say to a colleague in the shape of clarifying a misunderstanding and moving information out of the person’s blind spot, one should not postpone relaying it. A form of procrastination can take place here. The longer one delays the initiative, the harder it becomes to step forward and deliver the message. If your colleague has misunderstood and incorrectly performed a task for two years and you finally decide that enough is enough, then you need to convey two pieces of information to the colleague on this occasion. First, you must convey to the colleague that he or she is not performing the task correctly, and second, you must admit that you have known it for two years without telling them. The longer the wait, the more difficult it will be to explain and justify the delay. Blind spot procrastination is an avoidable phenomenon.

In their seminal work on human agency, Emirbayer and Mische (1998) described it as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, oriented towards the past, the present, and the future at any given moment. They described the way agency takes place in the flow of time. Routines and habits for agency in the present are established in the past and shape out orientation towards the future. This temporal perspective helps to understand why it is important to intervene early when one or more colleagues can be about to establish misguided habits. General Secretary Lange is grateful that her colleague took her aside to point out her discrimination between White and Black colleagues in her presentation, thereby disrupting a process that could otherwise have led to a questionable habit. The employee who had misunderstood the form used in the financial institution was not similarly fortunate with colleague intervention and developed a faulty routine.

The Johari Window can serve as a tool to do applied philosophy in the Socratic tradition. We can use it to explore our relations to other people and to investigate possible blind spots in our practices and ways of living. For my part, one encounter with another philosopher proved to be decisive for a redirection in my academic career. I was a PhD student at the University of Oslo, working on a dissertation in ethics. One of our visiting professions was Michael Bratman, who had worked extensively on agency and rationality. He saw human beings as planning animals and theorised about the ways our desires and intentions shape shared and individual agency (Bratman 1999, 2013). While he was in Oslo, he noticed how preoccupied I was with administrative work for the professors at the philosophy department. I had a talent for planning and organising academic events and kept receiving assignments to do so. It was enjoyable, and people appreciated and acknowledged my efforts. Using the terms from his theory of rationality and agency, Bratman expressed a concern that the administrative tasks took attention away from my studies and work on the dissertation. He encouraged me to identify my most important hopes and aspirations and to consider whether my current work habits were likely to realise them. With this intervention, he brought a serious blind spot issue to my attention. I was about to establish a routine where the exploration of my dissertation topic took second place to serving the professors. Bratman’s Socratic intervention made me rethink my priorities and put my studies back on track.

In this chapter, we have seen that the Johari Window can be helpful in analysing and understanding communication climate challenges at work. The figure was originally introduced to explore personal relations but can also serve to study knowledge sharing and information flow in organisational contexts. A project manager can wonder whether all the relevant information about the progress and status of the project is in the arena quadrant, or whether any project members have blind spots. It may also be that some important facts affecting the progress of the project are in the unknown quadrant, hidden to all project members. The Johari Window can serve as a tool to understand inattentional blindness and the invisible gorilla phenomena in organisations. It also helps to conceptualise the silence mystery and the outcomes that take place when individuals remain passive when witnessing events where their intervention can make a significant positive difference.