Discomfort Is Leverage

Quiet does not equal agreement.

A few weeks ago I asked a question here: is this resolved, or is it only quiet? I'm picking that thread back up, because people take silence for agreement, and that is not the case.

1. What quiet tells you

It is easier to stay quiet about the things you disagree with, because disagreement has a cost. When a leader asks whether we all agree and hears nothing, it is easy to conclude we're good. What gets forgotten is how expensive disagreement is, especially when the person making the statement has power.

And the cost is not the same for everyone. It depends on each person's role, their social capital, and the decision-making power they have.

Sometimes it is not about power at all. It is a facilitation skill. People feel uncomfortable with silence, so instead of holding it a bit longer, or asking someone whose voice they have not heard yet, they fill it.

And sometimes it is the conditions. If you ask the hard question on a Friday at 4:45, and everybody knows an honest answer means nobody gets to go home at five, you are not going to get the honest answer.

So it is not that quiet can't be trusted. It can't be assumed to mean anything, as long as it is expensive to disagree. That is what I mean by safety. It lowers the stakes, so that there is no consequence for the person who says the different thing, the hard thing, the uncomfortable thing.

The question underneath all of it is this: what are the conditions that allow whatever truth needs to emerge, to emerge?

2. Where the discomfort goes

When a hard truth does get said, the discomfort does not disappear. It goes somewhere.

Discomfort can be projected, and that is what turns it into a weapon. Projected, it moves the focal point of the conversation, changes its topic, and stalls a decision that was already hard to make. It can marshal a room's social capital, energy and resources toward soothing the people projecting it.

The loudest discomfort in a room is not always the most felt. Quite frankly, the people projecting that much discomfort are often the ones who most need to hear what was said. They are uncomfortable because a truth was revealed that requires a change of them. Often that change lands as a mark on their identity, and they feel personally attacked. And there is no way to give constructive feedback if anyone's identity is on the line.

Soothing people away from discomfort structurally undermines accountability, because the comfort goes to the person the truth was asking to change, and the cost lands on everyone else, often starting with whoever said it. The room spends its time and energy making someone feel better instead of dealing with what was said, so nobody has to own it. And the discomfort was the leverage. It was the pressure to change. Soothe it away, and the room loses the leverage it needs to sustain any change. Everything that was on the table gets wiped away.

That is what quiet looks like when nothing was resolved. The room calms down. What was said gets buried. And the next time, the room is quieter.

3. How a room gets quiet

I can laugh about it now, but I learned this from the side of the room that paid for it.

Early in my career I sat through a lot of trainings about power and privilege. Whenever an obvious truth got named, and its impact got named, almost on cue the whole room's attention turned to soothing whoever was upset by it. There was no tending to what I, and others living with discomfort, needed in that moment. Instead, the only role for me in those rooms was assumed to be teaching other people, when I was a staff member there too, who needed my own development. It put an emotional labor on me that took a lot out of me.

What people projected onto me in those rooms was never about me. It was about them. I see that mechanism in every room where a hard conversation needs to happen. A projection has nothing to do with its subject, usually nobody in the room is aware of it, and it still has a lot of power to block the truth. It is how discomfort gets moved off the truth and onto a person, and the cheapest thing that person can do is go quiet.

The end result: It did not lead to change. It did not lead to insight. It was extractive. All it did was drain me, and let a person skirt authentic accountability. And the people closest to the issue, the ones who most needed to stay in the space and be developed further, were depleted and pushed to disengage, or to choose another path. That is how a room goes quiet. The quiet was never agreement. It was a design consequence: the room was set up to protect whoever was most uncomfortable, and it did.

After living that so many times, I understood that discomfort was not what harmed anyone in those rooms. The refusal to be with it was, because every objective on the table got wiped away, and our time, energy, resources and money were wasted.

Discomfort is not harm.

4. A different design

If the quiet is a design consequence, a room can be designed another way. Discomfort is not harm is where I start.

The rule protects the person who is uncomfortable too, the one who in another room might have taken over the conversation. It lets them know: you are not going to die. This is okay. We predicted this would be hard. It also tells them the discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign we are focused on the exact truth we need to reach the root cause, because comfort is what created the situation we are trying to solve.

The rule reminds me of my own responsibility, too. As an outsider, I hold a privilege most people in the room do not: saying the hard thing costs me less. That is the power of being a consultant, and it comes with the responsibility to hold the conversation for the people in the room, and to design a space where the projections do not own the narrative.

Holding the conversation means holding the people in it. When someone is struggling, it matters to validate that and reestablish safety. I want to do it in a way that does not derail the conversation, diminish the truth, or lose sight of why we are there. Nobody is there for that. That is the line between caring for someone and soothing them away from the truth.

5. When people refuse outright

Not all quiet is the same. Everything above is about quiet that hides disagreement, where the work is to design a room that lowers the stakes of saying it. Sometimes quiet is something else: people who have already decided not to do the thing, and have an out. They refuse outright, or they quietly stop doing it.

That calls for a different approach, and it is not one I would use everywhere. Here is what it looked like.

This past year I coached a leadership team that had brought in a new way of working. Most of their teams were at different stages of adopting it. One team had barely started. Nearly everyone on it was refusing, and they could: the change had not been required across the whole system yet, so they could go over their leader's head and complain to a body with more authority. They had an out.

Their leader was spending the start of every meeting giving people time to do the preparation they had been asked to do beforehand. I told her to stop. You change the expectation by making it uncomfortable to show up unprepared, and you do that by not changing your agenda. Keep it for the people who are prepared.

That is where discomfort is not harm came in, except in that room I put it as discomfort is leverage.

The counterintuitive move: stop spending your energy trying to make grown adults with free will do something they have chosen not to do. Pour it into the people who are choosing to show up, build their capacity, and watch the culture shift.

That is what we focused on that year. On each of the other teams, one person went all in. They did work their leaders could not do: they made it socially safe to try, and their peers slowly followed. By the end of the year the whole department had changed, except the holdouts on that first team. For them, opting out had gone from something they felt entitled to do to something socially uncomfortable.

It was a beautiful transformation in what discomfort looked like. The stakes came down for everyone willing to try, and the discomfort sat with the choice not to.

6. What it cost the leaders

I invited those leaders to sit in the discomfort of a choice: to focus on the people opting in to the change, and to release their energy and focus from the people who had chosen not to do it.

That cost something. It meant letting go of a way of managing they knew well: pressing people to do what they were supposed to do, and measuring how well they were leading by the people who had chosen not to.

This is not a case for expecting less. It is about reading the conditions. When a change is optional for the people you lead, in practice if not on paper, and a body with more authority than you will back them when they opt out, the usual accountability measures stop working as a change strategy. Pressing harder spends your energy and shows everyone that opting out works.

What you can still influence is the culture: the culture around the change, and the culture around resisting it. Before people understand how a change can help them, resistance can carry adversarial energy, because the added work feels like an oppression that gets in the way of what they would prefer to do.

What those leaders had to name and own is that a person with power who opts out has an impact, and they could not override it from where they sat. What was in their control was what everyone else got access to, through the people who were willing, and a culture where opting out eventually stopped being possible. It required a different orientation to what counts as success.

7. The choice

When a room's discomfort becomes untenable, and people start to disengage or project to cope with it, I bring it back to the vision, and to the outcomes that do not match what we said we would do. Then we have a choice to make. We can keep doing things the way they are, or we can endure the discomfort of change.

Either way there is discomfort: the discomfort of having outcomes we don't want, or the discomfort of changing how we do things, how we relate to each other, and how we understand our roles.

We can choose.

— Sable

First published in The Sovereign Brief on LinkedIn, September 29, 2026.