The symptom
Consider an organisation where a divisional director maintains a genuine, explicitly stated open-door policy. Her calendar has space for it; she has never reacted badly to anyone who has used it. Almost nobody outside her direct reports uses it anyway.
The obvious conclusion is cultural distance — that people feel intimidated by seniority, or that middle managers are quietly discouraging their teams from going around them. Both are plausible and both would justify the same response: more visible reassurance, more communication about the policy’s genuineness. Neither, on its own, explains why the two people who did test the channel came away describing the experience as uncomfortable, despite the director behaving exactly as the policy promised.
What leaders usually conclude
That conclusion treats the open door as a communications problem: people don’t believe it’s real, so the fix is to convince them harder. It is a natural place to land, because it locates the issue in perception rather than in the organisation’s actual structure — which is a more comfortable place for a leader to look first.
What the evidence suggests
A closer look complicates it. Two people who did use the open door directly found that their own line managers were asked about the matter shortly afterwards — a reasonable, unremarkable step from the director’s point of view, aimed at getting context. Both later described the experience as awkward. Nobody was reprimanded. Nothing formally changed. But something about what happened after they used the channel made a second use of it feel like a worse idea than the first.
This is consistent with what Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard Business School, based on a field study of 51 manufacturing work teams, found about psychological safety: team psychological safety predicted learning behaviour — speaking up, raising concerns, surfacing problems — while team efficacy did not, once safety was accounted for. Her finding was specifically that safety, not confidence or capability, is what determines whether people bring information upward. An open door is an invitation. Whether people accept it depends on what they believe happens to them afterward, not on how genuine the invitation is.
There is also a structural dimension the informal-channel framing misses. Larry Greiner’s account of organisational growth describes practices as belonging to a particular phase — mechanisms that work well when an organisation is small enough for a leader’s direct relationships to substitute for formal structure, and that quietly stop working as that same organisation scales past the point where those relationships can reach everyone. An open-door policy is exactly this kind of mechanism: built for a structure where the director’s personal attention could function as an escalation route, and never redesigned as the organisation around it grew past the size where that was realistic.
Put the two findings together and the pattern becomes sharper. An open-door policy was, in its original conception, a solution — a deliberate answer to the problem of information not reaching leadership. Greiner’s framing predicts that solutions like this have a shelf life tied to scale, not because they were designed badly, but because the assumptions behind them — that the number of people needing to use the channel stays small enough for personal follow-up to feel routine rather than notable — quietly stop holding. Edmondson’s research explains what happens once that assumption breaks: personal follow-up, however reasonable in intent, becomes visible in a way it wasn’t at smaller scale, and visibility itself is enough to change the safety calculation for the next person deciding whether to use the door.
Competing explanations
None of this rules out the simpler explanation entirely. Some organisations do have real cultural distance, and some middle managers genuinely do discourage direct escalation. What the evidence adds is a third possibility that is easy to miss precisely because it requires no bad intent from anyone: the invitation is real, the consequence of accepting it is mildly uncomfortable, and people are rationally responding to the consequence rather than doubting the invitation. Distinguishing between these explanations matters, because they point toward different features of the organisation being the thing worth examining — culture in one case, safety in another, structural design in a third.
A leader assessing which explanation fits a given situation has to look past the policy itself and toward what specifically happens after someone uses it — not what is intended to happen, but what has actually happened the last several times. Cultural-distance explanations tend to produce consistent, near-total avoidance from the start. Safety-consequence explanations tend to produce a more specific pattern: initial use, followed by a drop-off concentrated among people who had a particular kind of follow-up experience, while people who never used the channel report no strong feelings about it either way. The two patterns look similar in aggregate and different once individual histories are examined, which is part of why the distinction is easy to overlook without deliberately looking for it.
Looking for your own sector? The Other Sectors page points to the closest match.
Questions worth considering
- What actually happens, in practical terms, to someone after they use an open channel — not what is supposed to happen?
- Was this mechanism designed for the organisation as it exists today, or inherited from an earlier and smaller version of it?
- If nobody could name a real consequence, would the channel be used more?
This perspective is part of Leadership.
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