I’ve sat in dozens of board meetings and executive sessions, and I’ve noticed something disturbing: the more we optimize for psychological safety, the less truth actually gets spoken.
Here’s the data point that should alarm every CEO: 70% of people who believe they have something valuable to say in a meeting choose not to say it. They stay silent.
We’ve created environments where everyone feels safe to speak—and yet, nobody does. This is the meeting paradox, and it’s costing companies their competitive edge.
This mirrors what JP Pawliw recently shared at an NACD session, where he offered thought-provoking insights on how meetings really work. His perspective stayed with me because what happens in our meetings says far more about our culture than we often realize.
Meetings are the mirror of an organization’s culture. You only need to sit in one to see whether a company is driven by fear, by complacency, by burnout—or by productive tension.
Why does this silence happen? It often comes down to two behavioral patterns we see everywhere. On one end, there are the avoiders—those who prefer not to rock the boat, not to contradict, not to risk being labeled “difficult.” On the other, there are the disrupters—those who talk too much, create noise, but don’t necessarily move the group toward better decisions. Both extremes hurt the quality of outcomes: silence keeps valuable insights hidden, and noise overwhelms the room.
The problem becomes most critical in what Pawliw calls the Last 8%. His insight is that in most conversations, 92% of what gets said is easy—polite, comfortable, predictable. But the final 8% is the hard part: the truth people hold back, the feedback that stings, the dissenting view, the uncomfortable question. That’s the part most people avoid—and yet it’s exactly the part teams need to hear to make the best decisions.
Here’s what I’ve learned as a leader: if you want the Last 8% to surface, you cannot open with your position. The moment a leader declares their view upfront—especially if done with conviction or authority—the meeting is over. What follows is theater, not decision-making.
You can make the final call. That’s your job. But making the call and imposing your thinking from minute one are two different things. The best leaders I know ask questions, listen actively, and only reveal their hand after the room has spoken. This isn’t about being weak or indecisive—it’s about being strategic enough to access the collective intelligence you’ve hired.
This isn’t random—it’s cultural. The way people behave in meetings reflects the type of culture a company cultivates. One helpful framework describes four kinds of organizational cultures:
- Fear-Based: people walk on eggshells, afraid that speaking up will bring consequences.
- Family: everything is “nice” but difficult conversations and decisions are avoided.
- Transactional: obsessed with short-term results, tolerating poor behaviors, fueling anxiety and burnout.
- Last 8% Culture: the ideal—high standards and high care at the same time, where trust, feedback, intelligent risk-taking, and accountability drive real progress.
The challenge is that many leaders misinterpret confrontation. They see tension as something negative to be minimized. But the absence of confrontation doesn’t create peace—it creates indifference.
I like to remind myself of a phrase I once heard: “A company without tension is a company where indifference reigns.” And it’s true. Productive tension is not chaos or hostility; it’s the force that pushes people to question assumptions, to raise the bar, to speak when it matters most.
Andy Grove put it perfectly: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
But here’s what Grove didn’t say explicitly: that improvement only happens if leaders create the conditions for hard truths to surface. Crisis reveals whether your culture rewards courage or punishes it. And that culture is built or destroyed in moments like the Last 8%—when it’s easier to stay quiet than to speak up, and when leaders either invite dissent or shut it down with their own certainty.
So how can we make meetings more effective? It’s not about talking more, it’s about talking better and at the right time. Some practical ways include:
- Name the Last 8%. Say it explicitly: “We’ve covered the easy part—what’s the tough 8% we’re not saying?” Protect space for the uncomfortable truths that usually stay hidden.
- Invite the avoiders. Call on people by name and role: “Maria, you’ve launched three products like this—what risk are we underestimating?” This is uncomfortable because you’re putting someone on the spot, but it’s more honest than pretending silence equals agreement.
- Balance participation. Track who speaks and who doesn’t. If the same three people have dominated the conversation, explicitly pause and say: “We haven’t heard from half the room. Before we decide, I need to hear from [names].” Yes, this slows things down. That’s the point.
- Normalize tension. When someone disagrees or challenges an assumption, acknowledge it publicly: “That’s exactly the kind of pushback we need right now.” Make dissent visible and valued, not just tolerated. If your team sees disagreement punished even once, they’ll remember it forever.
- Kill the meeting if nobody disagrees. If you finish a major decision and there’s only consensus, stop. Either you haven’t asked the right questions, or your team doesn’t trust you enough to speak the Last 8%. Both problems are worth solving before you commit resources. Reconvene when you’ve earned real debate, not performative agreement.
The next time you’re in a meeting, notice who speaks, who stays silent, and whether the group is willing to voice the Last 8%—the part that actually matters.
I’ve learned that directors who build enduring companies aren’t the ones who avoid tension—they’re the ones who architect it intentionally. The next time you’re in a critical meeting and nobody disagrees with you, don’t celebrate it. Worry about it. Because either you hired wrong, or you’ve created an environment where truth is too expensive to speak.
The Last 8% isn’t a facilitation trick. It’s a leadership philosophy: the best decisions require someone to be uncomfortable at the most uncomfortable moment. And if you’re the leader, your job isn’t to make everyone feel heard—it’s to make sure that uncomfortable truth has more power than hierarchy.
Because the difference between companies that survive and companies that transform often comes down to whether someone had the courage to speak up when it mattered most—and whether you created the conditions that made that courage possible.
Alan Bukrinsky 