Once You Stop Speaking Up, You've Checked Out of Corporate

How Bad Decision Rooms Create Burnout, Groupthink, and Costly Mistakes

Week 3 of The Trust Tax Investigation

What happens when the people who see the problem stop saying anything about it?

They're still in the meeting.

They're still doing their jobs.

They may still be delivering.

But somewhere along the way, they learned that their perspective wasn't wanted, wasn't heard, or wasn't worth the effort it took to keep offering it.

As Kylee Ingram says in this episode:

"Once you stop speaking up, that's kind of when it's all over. You've checked out." 

And that should matter to every leader.

This week on The Trust Tax Investigation, we're asking what role organizations play in creating the conditions where burnout grows.

Kylee brings us directly into one place where that can happen:

The decision room.

Who gets invited?

Who gets heard?

Whose information counts?

Who speaks first?

And whose perspective disappears before the decision ever gets made?

Kylee's work in decision science shows why the loudest or most senior person in the room isn't necessarily the person with the perspective the organization needs.

When organizations repeatedly rely on familiar voices and familiar ways of thinking, they don't just risk leaving people out.

They risk groupthink, blind spots, poorer decisions, reduced innovation, and disengagement. 

And there's another cost.

When people are overloaded, Kylee explains, they tend to fall back on what's familiar and simple. That can further limit creativity and decision quality. 

That's where this conversation becomes part of The Trust Tax Investigation.

Because burnout isn't simply about how much work someone has.

It's also about what happens when people repeatedly spend energy navigating systems that make it harder to do good work.

In this episode, you'll discover:

•  Why the loudest or most senior person can unintentionally dominate a decision. 
•  How social, information, and capacity biases affect organizational decisions. 
•  Why cognitive diversity matters—not just demographic diversity. 
•  What happens to creativity and decision-making when people become overloaded. 
•  Why leaders should consider speaking last, rather than first. 
•  How better-designed decision rooms can increase buy-in across an organization. 
•  Why someone can physically remain in the room while psychologically checking out. 
•  The simple question every leader can ask before the next important decision: Who's missing? 

The Trust Tax Investigation

Week 3 has widened our lens.

Burnout isn't simply an individual problem.

It's created through an interaction between people and the environments in which they're trying to succeed.

Sometimes the Trust Tax looks like doing more than your share.

Sometimes it looks like responsibility continually finding the same capable person.

And sometimes it looks like sitting in a room with something valuable to contribute—and eventually deciding it isn't worth speaking.

That costs the individual.

And it costs the organization.

Because when people stop contributing what they see, know, question, or understand, organizations aren't getting the full value of the people they've hired.

Kylee's message offers another possibility:

Don't just ask people to speak up. Design better rooms for them to speak into.

Rewrite Your Story

There's also a personal story underneath this conversation.

Maybe yours sounds like:

"I'm not senior enough to say anything."

"They've already made up their minds."

"It's easier if I just keep quiet."

"Speaking up isn't worth it anymore."

Those stories don't appear out of nowhere. Sometimes they're learned from the environments we've been working in.

But they don't have to define how we lead next.

That's why The Trust Tax Investigation and Rewrite Your Story belong together.

The investigation helps us recognize the patterns shaping how we work and lead.

Start Your Own Trust Tax™ Investigation

See the pattern. Listen for the story. Decide what you want to carry forward.

🔎 Take the free Trust Tax™ Assessment
Discover the responsibility and leadership patterns most likely to contribute to burnout before burnout becomes the whole story. About 7 minutes, with immediate personalized results.
https://unceilingzone.com/start-trust-tax-assesssment

🎟️ Join us for Rewrite Your Story — October 15
A leadership workshop + live comedy show at Walsh College in Troy, Michigan with Natalie H. Luke, Ph.D. and Merit Kahn.
https://rewriteyourstoryevent.com

Connect with Kylee Ingram

Kylee is the founder of Wizer, where she applies decision science to help organizations intentionally design better decision-making environments.

Kylee also mentions a free decision profile during our conversation that can help you understand the perspective you naturally bring into a decision room. 

🌐 Wizer / Decision Profile: https://www.wizer.business/

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyleeingram/

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 1:01

Welcome back to Unsealing You. I'm Dr. Natalie Luke, and this is the Trust Tax Investigation. A special five-week series exploring why so many capable, caring, high-performing people end up burned out. Over the last two weeks, we've uncovered two important pieces of the puzzle. In week one, we discovered that burnout rarely begins with a collapse. It begins way earlier. When success quietly becomes heavier than it used to be. Different careers, different lives, yet Danielle Griffin, Zoe Thompson, and Sandra Wood all described the same turning point. The moment success stopped feeling sustainable. Then, in week two, we asked a different question. How did we get here? Hannah Kerman, Dr. Melanie Gray, and Angela Couric helped us understand that burnout isn't usually caused by one overwhelming event. It develops through small adaptations, meeting everyone's expectations before your own, living in constant high alert, and tying your identity to achievement and responsibility. This week, the investigation takes another turn. Because if these patterns develop inside people, what role do organizations play in reinforcing them? Most organizations don't intend to create burnout. Most leaders genuinely care about their people. So why do the same patterns keep showing up? Why do the most capable people keep becoming the answer to every problem? And why does responsibility keep flowing to the same individuals? And why does success so often come with an invisible cost? This week we explore those questions through three remarkable conversations. Because if we want to reduce burnout, we have to understand not only the people inside the system, but the system itself.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

But also they'll defer to seniority or, you know, the leadership. And the leadership should actually speak last to get the most out of a room. And I guess coming from TV, the the huge frustration as a producer is who are these commissioning editors picking, you know, what goes to television? It's it can be a bit mind-boggling. So that was when I got into I did an interactive piece called Crowd TV and really dove into the concept of wisdom of crowds. So that was my solution to my frustration.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Can you tell me, you know, I I don't know, I I see a television show all the time, but I don't know what happens in the back end, like what is a contributing editor versus uh all of that. So just so I can get a really good picture.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

Yeah. So as a producer, you're you're the one, you get your team together, director, everything, and you put it all together about how you would make this TV show, and you go off, you think, well, that would be great on Netflix, or that would be great on ABC, whatever it is. And you go off and in a US, you often have a an agent, you go off and you say, Right, let's go to these rooms and see if we can sell it. And then you meet up with these heads of TV or commissioning editors, they're called. They commissioned the TV show for them. And, you know, in Australia in particular, there's very few of them. You know, they're these big gatekeepers, and it can be very frustrating as to how they're making those decisions. And so I think that was the first time. But, you know, you go into any corporate environment and you can see the way, you know, decisions are being made in organizations. The first with uh what we're working on now, Wiser, the first uh company we work with was the Sydney Children's Hospital Foundation, and we tripled the amount of pediatric research funding that year. And and that was just, you know, a process of sometimes getting leadership out of its own way to open up who was involved or whose whose projects were put forward. Because I think once you're a leader, you think I've got to make these decisions, and you start putting arbitrary boundaries in place. Well, they're gonna be this and they're gonna do this. And and that's not, you know, necessarily the way to find, in this case, you know, the best research projects on pediatric health.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Okay. So before you had the science, what did you think organizations were actually optimizing for when they built their decision rooms or the rooms that they're making decision? And what were they leaving off the table? Like what could they have used if they had made a better decision room?

SPEAKER_00 7:00

I think that they don't, they there's a lot of lack of understanding as to what creates the best decision room. So it's gut gut instinct, and that can go, you know, the the leadership goes, I like that guy, or I like this, I like that, I'll get these, these people are smart, that will do. And it doesn't kind of work like that because we all have biases and our cognitive diversity likes ourselves. Like we like, we like likes, so we bring them in. And you know, the other day I was chatting to a university client and I was talking to the head of DEI, which I know is a you know a troubled, a troubled topic in the US at the moment, but he was kind of saying they bring in um, you know, he designs the room, they design the rooms, the DEI team, and they've got, you know, the what they consider a a broad spectrum of people, which is what they have done. But he goes, then we can't move. We're not moving. And I was like, yeah, I I I suspect what you're missing are you know these process-oriented people that start to pick things up and move forward. So even with the best of intentions, A, you've got one end of the spectrum where it's like, I'm right, and I'm just gonna pick the room, I know what's going on. The other end of the spectrum is trying to do the right thing, but still there's no science there. And then you also hear of, you know, people hiring the big, you know, the big consultants to bring in frameworks, which are cumbersome and you've got to teach everybody. And I don't, I haven't heard of anybody ever tell me in years I've been working in decision science, gosh, I love that framework. Like I have not heard of a single one in my time. And you know, when you're you're building something, people tell you how yeah, their uncle built it, and you've, you know, they've seen it all before. In this case, no one says that to me. They're not like, I love that framework that you know McKenzie put in for us. It just doesn't happen. I see.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

So one of the things that you say is that women go missing from decision rooms. And so let's just be before we answer the complete question, let's talk about what a decision room is. And uh going back to the original question, you say that women go missing from decision rooms, not because of mindsets, but because of structure. What is happening structurally and why have organizations been so slow to see it?

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Yeah, well, we know we know that women don't hold as many leadership positions, so that's an easy tick of the box there. Um when you talk to women that are in the room, if they're silent, that's another way they've left that even if they're in the room, they've left the decision room. So there's all these different factors working. But if I if we look at it structurally, what's happening? Because I think if we made this company to make better decisions, what what I actually think we're doing is addressing the biases that occur. And I think this is where it plays into gender and other things, because a lot of these rooms can be homogenous. They're they look the same, they feel the same, they're coming to quick decisions because there's a lot of sameness in them. So there's three main biases which we can talk about if you want social information and capacity. And so social bias is really, you know, you can imagine who gets listened to and who doesn't. And this is where those voices dominate. So you've got, you know, loudness, status, and the others get sidelined. So, you know, that kind of happens. And that that part of the equation leads to groupthink. And then you've got information bias, what information is valued and what is ignored. And teams will overweight what confirms their views. And this goes back to where we're at as society. You know, we've got these conflict entrepreneurs, we've got modern systems that are designed to polarize rather than integrate. And so you've got all these social platforms we're on during our social lives, and we're used to being pulled apart. And then when we are pulled apart, we're in these rooms that feel really good to us because everyone's agreeing with us and they're like, yes, I love I'm loving this for myself. But it's it's actually it's actually kind of an algorithm that is playing into our human insecurities. So that that information bias and that societal bias that you get from those things, you can't bring into a company. You don't want that in your company. You can't run your you can't run your organization the way Facebook runs, you know, in in in that social sense. And so you've got that information bias, and teams will overweight the data that confirms their views, and it creates blind spots and poor evidence use. And then the final one is capacity bias. So how much complexity can people handle? And when they're overloaded, they go to what is familiar and what's, you know, simple for them. And that is the part that limits creativity and the quality of outcomes. And Dr. Juliet Burke's research, which we use a lot of, she she ran a department at Deloitte and you know, spoke about decision, you know, styles. She found that if you get the right room with the right leader, because leadership's important in this equation, you reduce your decision errors by 30% and increase innovation by 20%. And she worked with 450 organizations. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Yeah, so that that kind of points to the need to make sure that you're diversifying. And I see companies like trying to move quickly. And so there's uh one aspect of homogenization, and then I also see leaders feeling like, well, from an image perspective, I kind of feel like, you know, I don't know, it's more like an ego, I would say. Yes. That kind of gets in the way. Yeah, definitely. So you've said that women tend to lead towards cognitive strengths that most organizations need. And they also need collaboration, risk awareness, and evidence-based thinking. What happens to quality decisions when those strengths don't make it to the room?

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Well, that's that's when you've got sameness. So decisions will happen really like quickly. And they did this study with juries too, you know. If you have a homogenized bunch of juries, they go really quickly. You put, you know, somebody different in the room. And it's not just that that brings a different perspective, people check themselves and they make better decisions themselves because they're not there. But if we look at the factors you need for a good decision room, uh based, you know, based on the research, is there's a cognitive diversity layer, which I'll come back to, which is that bit you were just talking about. There's experience. So if you have an engineering decision, you need engineers. You can't be like NASA that pulls the engineers out of the room because they're telling you something that's very inconvenient. And then you well, and then you've got the you've got the top layer of that outward-facing diversity. And the main three factors of that are age, gender, and ethnicity. And so you want, you know, you want to mix that, mix that up a little bit so you're not homogenized. And then the the bit that Juliet Bur and Scott Page, who's at Michigan University, he also found cognitive diversity and its role in decision making. He's a mathematician. So the two of them are kind of finding out these things at the same time. And then we're also accepting, you know, the wisdom of crowds. We're better together, we're born to, I think as a as a species, we're supposed to be, you know, collaborative. We we built fires together, we, you know, we protected one another, we've done all these things that have led to where we are today, good and bad. So if I come back to what cognitive profiling is, is you know, Juliet found there are a number of ways people come at decisions. So you can have somebody that achiever, we call them their outcomes-oriented, you've got a collaborator that isn't a people person. They're just looking for different, those different perspectives. They'll go and mine those perspectives. You've got an analyzer that's evidence-driven, you've got a deliverer that is good on you know, process of putting things into place. You've got an explorer and you've got that's looking for new ideas and a guardian, they're going risk and governance and can do that long-term thinking and a visionary, that big picture. Now, in the research, they also found, Juliet found, that 75% of Western CEOs are either achievers or uh explorers. And then what happens is they like to pick one another.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

The trust tax investigation has been revealing something important. Burnout isn't simply an individual problem. It isn't just about resilience or time management or learning to say no. The people we've spoken to have shown us that burnout grows through the interaction between people and the environments they work in. This week's guests each shine a light on different parts of that environment. How work gets distributed, how responsibility quietly accumulates, how leadership behaviors shape the culture, and how organizations can unintentionally reward the very patterns that eventually leave their best people caring more than they should and encouraging them. If organizations help create these patterns, organizations can change them.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Let's get back to the conversation. And by the time you get to middle management, you have a lot of this and you've lost your, you've lost that diversity of cognitive diversity down the bottom. So we call it cognitive drift that starts to happen. So these people are sort of selecting one another and unaware of what they're eroding because you want it all. It's not like a personality profile where people are, oh, I don't want that kind of person. You want them all when you're making a decision. And you want to understand who's who. And it's not like they've tried it, it's not like Edward De Bono, where you go, oh, I'm gonna think this way. You know, you can't you can try and think that way, or you could ask AI to think that way, but the same thing happens. You can't, you can't interrogate for a long time. So you can't, you know, I know, I know now that I've studied this for a long time, is I'm not very process-oriented, and I I can't stay in that space for very long. Like, and I love it now. Like, I understand that's my best match for me moving forward. I love I love process-oriented people because it takes the burden off me having to think that way, especially as an entrepreneur. You need process everywhere. So it's, you know, you once you start to learn about yourself, and you know, on our website we have our decision profiles free. So the first thing you can go do is learn about yourself. And it's evidence-based. This is really strong evidence. It's not personality profile that was made by the guy that wrote one Wonder Woman or anything. I love that story, but you know, this is this is really, you know, it's really evidence-based stuff.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Well, I I really appreciate uh what you just said about all the different types of people that are in the room. And I think about times when I've led projects and launches, and there's inevitably for me, I'm someone who loves to cross the finish line. Well, yeah, I love to finish the project. I love to, I love getting it started, and I love that finish line, and I will race to that finish line as quickly as possible. And then I have there's people that are in the group that are they love to make sure it's right. And they usually have to grab me from the back of the shirt, come back here. We're not ready to cross that line. Or that finish line where you haven't finished is not the finish. Yeah, we have to move it out if we want to be successful. I hate that. But I've learned that if I don't have that person in the room, when we finish that finish line, the project sucks. The outcome is not what it should be. So I so for that reason I appreciate you listing all the people that should be in the room to make sure we have a good outcome.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

Yes. And I think you know, then we get pushback from people uh that'll say, oh, all this takes longer. Whereas Juliet's done the experiment. You can set up a room for an hour and you can design the room and then just get let let stuff be status quo as usual. See what outcomes you get. This group always wins, the one where you've designed them. There's no, you know, there's no outliers that are like, oh well, sometimes. No, this group wins. They just they just have better outcomes or better better decision at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

There you go. That's important. So here is my next question. Okay, here's what I keep thinking about as I listen to you, and the same cognitive strengths that make someone invaluable in a decision room, the risks, awareness, system thinking, and there's so many more because there's different people, the relationship uh intelligence, those are the exact same strengths that sometimes get routed to do invisible work. The person who sees everything becomes the person who has to carry everything. Does the research show that as a pattern? Is that something that you've seen in the research at all?

SPEAKER_00 22:37

I'm not a hundred percent. So it so we're talking about like there's a certain type of person, they have to do everything because everybody else is like, I'm I'm just the visionary, I'm out of here. That kind of that kind of thing. Yeah, and I think I think once you, you know, we talk about uh the decision intelligence, a lot of the you know, when people are talking about it, they're talking about AI, and we're not, we're talking about your people. And and what we start to see happening, and this is where our research is going now, is that the company, once you understand who needs to be in the room and why they're there, you develop a language together too, because different people can hear different things when you say strategy or you say targets or you say this. Like people start to have this decision language and intelligence that starts to go on and understanding different people's roles, because you make make the decision here, but you then need to have that person there can't do it all. You need to have, you know, the flow-on effect of of who's doing what and be clear about that. I think that that that design of the room provides clarity. The other thing that it does is it provides if people down here haven't been in the room, but there's a likeness to who they are up there, you get more buy-in because they can see themselves in that decision. So you get more buy-in from the whole organization when you're designing decision rooms correctly. And then I guess it's a process of are you going to keep that, you know, you've got to understand that that's a group of people that can take this forward together rather than just allotting it to one, you know, one human. And that becomes a, you know, that becomes another part of the process, doesn't it? And how you've designed your organization.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And s sort of going back to something else that you said, you we were talking about juries that you know, juries where you have diverse people, you make better decisions. I was fortunate enough and blessed enough to be on a jury. Recently within the last six months, and it was a very interesting experience. We did have a very diverse group with people different nationalities. So it was a county jury and radically different experiences with the police, with the type of case that we had. And I was just kind of shocked at how openly we argued over our positions. And the other thing is that the judge and the lawyers that were arguing the case on both sides were pretty clear-cut about what we could consider within the case and what we couldn't. Going back to the diversity, of course, we had women and men, different nationalities, different occupations, like an IT person, a school teacher, that sort of thing. And it was amazing to see how our different talents came into the room. So, like my job was to push back, I felt like when someone started to say, Oh, we're going to consider this evidence, and they'd start to list it, list the evidence. I'm like, that is not the definition of the evidence that we are supposed to include. And I'd open up the book, would you like me to read? And the rest of the room was like, Yes, please read it. And then the school teacher got up on the board and literally diagrammed sentences so that we can clearly understand what it was that we were deciding on. It was pretty interesting. How did you feel about the decision in the end?

SPEAKER_00 26:36

Great. Yeah. Because it went my way. How do you think the ones that didn't it didn't go their way felt?

SPEAKER_01 26:45

They felt good too. Yes. And I would say that the reason why it went good is because everybody stated what their decision was and why they were deciding the way they they had decided. And then rather than pushing that person, like there was an engineer in the room, and we had video. And so one of the things that we did was we would go back to the video, and the person would say, I'm deciding this because look at how much space there is in this video. And then the engineer is like, No, no, no, that camera is this type of a camera, and it's enlarging the space. In fact, that space is more narrow. And they took that into consideration. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

So we were pretty good about making sure, and there is this one job. That was expertise in the room at that point. You know what I mean? When you start to think about the three different layers, you're like, oh yeah, right, that was expertise. That was the cognitive style, the analytical style is here. And you start to really think about what you might be missing. It sounds unreal.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

It was a phenomenal. And then there was like one person that really had to talk it out. Yeah. They couldn't really think it through without talking it out. And I'm the type of person that would butt into and cut them off. And he was good about shushing me and saying, let her, let her talk it out. Let her talk it out. And that made a big big difference, I think, in the decision. There were some people that were holdouts, and so like at the end, um the judge has you concur or not concur. And I would a piece of me wanted to hold my breath when that one juror, but she was like, I agree. So it was it was a good experience. So anybody who has to go for jury duty, there's a piece of you that's gonna dread it, but I have to tell you, it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

Yes, yes. Well, it's you know one of the cruxes of our society, isn't it? You know, it's something we'll probably need to contribute to at some point. And to hold somebody's fate in your hands is you know, it's a huge it's something that's huge. I know when my my friend did her first trial and she was a criminal lawyer and he went to jail, even though she thought he was a vile human and deserved it, it was I watched it weighed heavily on her that she'd sense somebody, you know, losing their liberty. So it's a it's a big it's a big thing as a as a human to take away someone someone else's independence or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

So Yes, for sure. It and I know that weighed on people as they were going through the process.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

So Well, where this is where we ended up, everybody.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

But it's a good story. It's it's yeah, it is it is think about how decisions are made and really being able to speak up because your voice is important as those it you know, the different types of decision and what kind of a person you are, what you're bringing to the picture. So if a leader is listening right now and she's nodding and she recognizes the room that you're describing, that decision room, what's the one thing she can do before the next important decision gets made to change who is in the room?

SPEAKER_00 30:21

Yeah, I think it's all about design. Take a look at it and take a moment to ask who's missing, what perspective is missing, and where you might be defaulting to familiarity. Um and that small pause is often enough to change the room. I mean, we do have the science live for you if you want, you know, if you want to go to our site and do your decision profile. Most of our clients start by profile mapping, so they'll map out their org or the decision rooms of their organization, and you can kind of see what's missing. Most of the time we see in groups or teams only two types, two or three types at the most are in there. So they're really skewed. But you just need to pull people across. And then we have, you know, if you are going to make a decision, we can it can help you. You can type in what it is, and then when you get to who's in the room, it'll tell you whether you've got a good panel or a we make it very easy. It also recommends other people. So you can just click, you could say, I'm missing an analyzer, it'll tell you who might be an analyzer in your organization. Just add them to the room. You don't need to restructure, just you know, bring some people across, or you know, just check, just check who you've got in the room. So uh this program allows us to do that.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

So, what do you want the person who just heard this conversation to know, not just do to know before they walk into their next room where a decision is being made.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

Well, I think if you you're if you're a leader, know that I don't think good leadership is making the captain's call. I think it is about designing the right room and you'll have a better culture for it. And if you are the person in the room, just take a look around and know that, you know, you might be unique in what you're bringing to the room, understand who you are and what you're bringing, and yeah, speak up because once you stop speaking up, that's kind of when it's all over, like you've checked out at that point.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

Very great. Thank you so much for joining us on Unsealing You. I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right. This week, the trust tax investigation widened the lens. We asked something bigger. What role do organizations play in creating the conditions where burnout grows? Our guests reminded us that burnout isn't only about individual choices. It's also shaped by the way work is designed, how responsibility is shared, how leaders respond under pressure, and whether organizations develop people or quietly depend on the same people to carry more. Understanding that changes the conversation because burnout isn't solved by asking people to become more resilient. It's reduced when leaders create environments where responsibility is shared, trust grows, and success doesn't depend on a handful of exhausted people. Next week, we bring the investigation to its final chapter. We've uncovered why it happened, we've examined how organizations reinforce it. Now comes the most important question of all. What do we do differently? How do individuals rewrite the stories they've been living? How do leaders create healthier teams? And how do organizations reduce the trust tax before burnout becomes the whole story? That's where we're headed next. Until then, pay attention this week, not just to the people who seemed overwhelmed. Notice the work that always finds the same people. Notice the responsibilities that quietly grow. And then notice the leaders who develop others versus those who simply carry more on themselves. Because the trust tax is rarely hidden once you know what you're looking for. I'll see you on the next Unsealing You episode.