The Evolving Leader

'The Power of No' with Dr Sunita Sah

• Sunita Sah • Season 8 • Episode 8

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In this episode of The Evolving Leader, hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are joined by Dr. Sunita Sah, a physician turned organisational psychologist and Professor of Management at Cornell University. Together they explore the power of saying “no” in a world that rewards compliance. Drawing from her acclaimed book “Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes”, Dr Sah reveals how our upbringing, institutions, and social pressures teach us to equate being “good” with being obedient, and how that conditioning can silence our values. She introduces the concept of “insinuation anxiety,” the discomfort of implying distrust when we disagree, and shares how to build the courage and skill to act in alignment with what truly matters.

For senior leaders, this conversation reframes defiance as an essential leadership practice, not rebellion, but integrity in action. Sah explains the five stages of defiance, the cost of compliance, and why organisations that cultivate psychological safety and intellectual humility outperform those that suppress challenge. It’s a thought-provoking guide to leading with authenticity, courage, and moral clarity in complex systems where it’s often easier to say yes.


Further materials from Sunita Sah:

“Defy: The Power of No in a Worlds That Demands Yes”, (Blink Publishing, February 2025)

“The science of defiance: A psychology researcher explains why people comply – and how to resist”, (The Conversations, September 2025)

“America thinks it’s a country of free thinkers. But we’re actually compliant”, (Los Angeles Times, February 2025)

 “How to Say No and Mean It”, (Psychology Today, January 2025)

 


 Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)

The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)


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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Jean Gomes:

From our earliest years, we are constantly defined by the expectations of others, starting with our parents and teachers, our friends and then colleagues. So saying no can be supremely difficult. Defy by Samantha Shah unpacks the art of refusal, shifting our assumptions from it being an angry or passive aggressive act to being the means to gracefully align our intentions and behaviour. Tune in to an important conversation on the evolving leader.

Scott Allender:

Hi folks. Welcome to the evolving leader, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender, and with me, as always, is leadership expert Jean Gomes, and we are excited about the conversation we are about to embark on, and I think you will be too, because it's a topic that we all have varying degrees of experience with. From our earliest moments as young people, we are influenced about many things, but one of them is, how is our experience of being able to say no? What is our permission to say no? Some, you know, many of us feel that we have to be assertive or withdrawing, or some of us end up being passive aggressive with our nose. There's a whole array of experiences we have, and today we're going to unpack that, and we're going to do it with an expert in the space. We're joined today by Dr Sunita Sara who is as a physician turned Organisational Psychologist and Professor of Management at organisation Cornell University, SC Johnson College of Business. She's a leading scholar on influence, advice and compliance, and her research investigates why people follow or resist guidance, especially under conflicts of interest, and how transparency, professionalism and culture and norms shape our judgement. Her debut book defy the power of no in a world that demands yes has quickly garnered considerable critical acclaim, and we are delighted to welcome her to the show to explore this work. Dr Sah, welcome to the evolving leader.

Sunita Sah:

It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me,

Scott Allender:

of course. So let's jump in. Can you set some context for your work? What was the what was the route, what was the journey that led you to explore this topic.

Sunita Sah:

Well, I've been fascinated by what that single powerful word defy means for a very long time. As a child, I was known for being an obedient daughter and a student, I asked my dad at one point, what does my name Sunita mean? And he said, My My name, Sunita in Sanskrit means good, and so I mostly lived up to that. I did what I was told. I did what was expected, went to school on time, did all my homework, I even had my hair cut the way my parents wanted me to. And that is a lot of the interpretation that we get from being good. It's like, what does it mean? Does it mean to fit in, to obey, to be polite, to not question authority. And many people, not just me, many people have that socialisation when they're young, not just from parents, but from teachers and the community, to be good, and they start equating being good with being compliant and being bad with being defiant, and then that becomes really difficult for us to defy when we get older. So having been brought up with this master class almost in compliance, and certainly, my first career as a physician was due to expectations, I really wanted to delve in and look at why people go along with bad advice. And so it first of all started off in the in medicine, where my first career was, but it expanded out to finance the criminal justice system, and then any kind of interpersonal relationship, really looking at the powerful forces that keep us compliant and silent. And we might think it's a good thing, but what I found in my own research and other research that I delved into is that it can cause serious problems if we are always so good, if we're always so compliant. And that really got me thinking, is it sometimes bad to be so good? What do we actually sacrifice by being so compliant?

Jean Gomes:

Sunita, welcome to the show. You write that Defiance is not just saying no to something that feels wrong, but saying yes to the world you want to create. So if every listener pause right now to choose one norm to defy or one thing that they wanted to create, what would that be that you'd hope they'd pick? And why? Well, I think the first part of the work is really thinking about, who am I and what are my values? Because this is something that we forget a lot on a daily basis. We think that we are high integrity, honesty, benevolence, compassion. We think we live by these values.

Sunita Sah:

Yes, and yet, what I find is, in my research, over and over again, what people believe their values to be is quite different from how they actually behave. And so how do we decrease that gap? Is really about connecting with your values, and then about being able to put your values into action, because we so often freeze in certain situations, it's not that we completely forget our values, we just don't know how to enact them, and so we need the skill set. So in terms of pausing, I think pausing is really great, but it's really recognising what are my values. Like a lot of people don't think about their values unless they're explicitly asked to think about them and why this is so important is that if you think about your values and you write them down, the research shows that you're more likely to act in alignment with them. So just writing them down and saying why they're important to you is a really good exercise, and then clarifying your values as well, has shown that we have a lower stress response, lower cortisol levels. So it's really great in numerous ways to know what our values are, and that is the first step really identifying who am I and what do I stand for, because once we know that, then we can think about, how do I get the skill set to defy How do I get the skill set to say no in certain situations that go against my values? Just dig into that for a tiny bit longer, because when you know you described a set of values that you grew up with that have been kind of viewed and viewed from your parents as what could look like, and therefore there's values in in that. How does one kind of ensure that these are my actual values rather than the ones that I've espoused? Because I've just almost on autopilot, thought this what I should be saying about myself. Yeah, that's a great question. So when I talk about sort of the obedience I had, or compliance that I had, I wouldn't really name it a value, it was like a default compliance to put your full trust in other people and want to live up to their expectations or please other people. So in actual fact, that really comes from not knowing what our values are and what we want is following what other people expect of us. And if you my definition of compliance is really it's something you either slide into automatically. It's a default response, but it comes from something external, some external for force, you know, an order, a suggestion, or even society's expectations. That is compliance is not what I call consent. Consent is fundamentally different, but our values is something when I ask my executive students to think about their values and write them down, it is something that we develop often in childhood or young adulthood, like we have an encounter or something that's really important to us, and then we realise, oh, integrity is really important to me, or living my life in this particular way is something I want to live up to, and I haven't been doing that. In fact, let me tell you about a little exercise that I give my students. I basically ask them to rate themselves on their level of honesty relative to other people in the class. So if they think they are the least honest person in the room, then they should rate themselves at zero. If they think they're the most honest person in the room, it should be 100 but if it's they're about average, it should be 50. And you can probably guess the results I get year on. Yeah, everybody's honest. Everybody's honest. Everybody's saying like 8590 95 right? Which is impossible, because half the class needs to be above 50, and half the class below. But hardly anyone says 50, and nobody is going below 50. So we rate ourselves, and we value honesty a lot, right? It's very important to us to have this character trait of displaying honesty and integrity. And yet, when it comes to it on a day to day basis, when we see injustice or we see something that requires us to do something that would mean that we're acting in alignment with that value, we fail to do it, and that's not because we've forgotten our moral compass. It's because we've been so trained to be compliant and silent, we forget to speak up. So for example, One survey found that nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses, do feel too uncomfortable to speak up when they see a colleague or a physician making an error, and that could be a life and death situation. But in many situations, we don't speak up when we see something is wrong, even when we know it's wrong. And in my research, I've found that giving people really obviously bad advice, they go. Along with it, so we're much more compliant than we think we are.

Scott Allender:

I really like this distinction between compliance and consent. I think that's super helpful. I've got so many questions, and I want to dig more into the medical, medical example you just gave, and as a important illustration of why defiance can be so valuable. And what I'm hearing you say in this is there's a lot of extrinsic sort of pressure around creating values that help us navigate the stories in which we live. Right? So if you've got a high value

Sunita Sah:

family around certain demonstrating a certain goodness or compliance with certain behaviours, you're going to adapt that strategy because it's going to help you survive. Help you survive your childhood and navigate that world. It doesn't mean it's your natural, inborn sense of how you want to be. I'm curious what else you found, because as you're talking I'm thinking, I can think of people like you who are probably super compliant and just wanted to like, avoid friction, but I can think of other people I grew up with who were particularly rebellious, right? They didn't. They had no problem saying no. Almost felt like they would defy for the sake of defiance. Did your research kind of cover the sort of vast majority and sort of different spectrum of how people show up to this? I'd be curious to see what you Yes, it did absolutely. So yes, we do have a range in different relationships with both compliance and defiance. And so coming back to what is that distinction between compliance and consent? Because it's often conflated, but it's actually fundamentally different. If we take informed consent in medicine, it's really great to have that framework and apply it to other decisions that we make in our lives. So to have sort of consent, or what I call your true Yes, you need five elements. So first of all, you need capacity, so that you're not under the influence of drugs or alcohol, you're not too sick. Then you need information. You need knowledge. So you need to be given good information about the decision that you're going to make. But it's not enough just to have that information. The third element is understanding, a thorough grasp of the risks, the benefits and the alternatives. So if you have the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding, the fourth element is the freedom to say no, because if you don't have the freedom to say no, then it's merely compliance. It's not consent. If those four elements are present, then the fifth element is your authorization, which is a deeply considered verbalization of your true consent, which should be in alignment with your values. So if you want to say yes, that's your true, yes, if you want to say no, that's your true No, and that's defiance. So defiance also requires the same five elements that consent requires, so they're two sides of the same coin, and really understanding that is important when we think about different acts that we might call defiance, which might be defiance, or it might just be what I call false defiance. So if you think about teenagers, for example, and my son went through a stage where he would do the exact opposite of anything I asked him to do. Now some people might think that's defiant, and I can understand why they would term that defiance, but if you think about my definition of what is a true No, if he is doing the exact opposite of what I am asking, he is listening very intently to what I want and then doing the opposite. So it's actually externally imposed. It's not coming from any true values or thoughtful process. It's just opposition to what I want. And so yes, you might have that opposition. But is that the type of defiance I'm talking about? And here now, once we've clarified what compliance and consent is, what a true yes and a true no is, it's really interesting to think about, what about that word defiance? Now, if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary. They define defiance as to challenge the power of someone else openly and boldly. But I don't usually disagree with the Oxford English Dictionary, you know, having grown up in the UK, but in this case, I do think that this definition is too narrow and it doesn't honour the agency that we have, because sometimes we need to defy to stay in alignment with our values. And my definition of Defiance is to defy is simply to act in alignment with your values when there is pressure to do otherwise. So we transform this aspect of defiance from this almost negative connotation that it seems to have to a positive force, even pro social in society, and know that we need to do this. One of the reasons why I really wanted to to redefine defiances in this way was medicine. Was. First degree, but the third year of medical school, I went to do an intercalated degree in psychology, and that's when I first came across the infamous Milgram Stanley experiment. So the obedience to authority, where he had participants come in and think they were taking part in an experiment on learning, but it was actually to sort of look at their obedience levels and whether they would give harmful electric shocks or what they thought were harmful electric shocks to another person in a different room. And a lot of them did. A lot of them, they had to read out word pairs to this other person that they thought was another participant who was actually an actor. There was no actual electric shocks being given, but every time the actor got the word pair wrong, they had to go up from 15 volts in 15 volt increments all the way up to 450 volts, which was labelled as x, x, x, severe shock danger, and two thirds of participants did go up all the way to 450, volts. And Milgram called them the obedience subjects, and the ones that said, No, I'm going to stop the defiant subjects. So now we immediately see why defiance can be positive, because we don't want to be so obedient and compliant to people if they're asking us to do something that's harmful, harmful to ourselves or harmful to other people, we might not think that we're going to be in that situation, or if that we were in that situation, we'd find it easy to say no. But in many of the experiments that I've run and other studies that I've run that have been far more ethical than this one, we see high levels of compliance that people their private preferences are very different from their public behaviour. So how do we get those two things to align?

Jean Gomes:

I'm fascinated by this set of ideas in the context of organisations, build accountability, Sinclair to prevent people, leaders, particularly, from having to deal with difficult conversations. So you're in the queue at the airline and you're told your flight's cancelled or you're bumped off and you can't complain. There's no one to complain to. You can't go up, you can't go down. It's an accountability sink. It's an algorithm that prevents you and you know, increasingly organisations just use this to scale their organisations, to prevent them from having to deal with, with with with moral and interpersonal challenges. How does defiance in that context going to work? Defiance in terms of the stranded passengers complaining, either the stranded passenger or actually the employee who's thinking, No, I this is wrong. You know, I'm doing something wrong on behalf of the company, because the system is telling me to do something that's wrong, which is what exactly to lie, to not meet the customer's needs to

Sunita Sah:

to deny accountability for something right now? Yeah, so I mean this. I like the example, but this happens more, like in many more places where you might get asked to lie or not give the whole truth about something. And then this comes down to, what, where am I working? What? What happens when my boss asks me to do something unethical? Because, you know, it could start off with something small, but then it could go to something really quite large, and you could find yourself complicit in something that really doesn't sit well with you. And in these situations, we have to think about like again, who am I? What are my values? What do I stand for? And the whistleblowers that I've interviewed, which is one extreme end of defiance, they suffer many costs from that, right? So I don't want to say defiance doesn't have costs. It definitely has costs, but the reason that whistleblowers do this mostly is that they are very much connected with their values and responsibility, and they want to see that the organisation that they're working for lives up to those values. So instead of being like these problem makers, or for being defiant, I find that the whistleblowers are actually very much in alignment with their values, and they really want the organisations, institutions, sometimes the ones that they love and really believe in, live up to what they should be living up to. And when they see harm being done to themselves or to other people, they take the responsibility they don't dissipate it to someone else, and just say I was following orders or other things that Milgram found with the two thirds of of participants that went up to the most severe shock levels in. Is that if we can take that responsibility both as leaders and employee employees, then that's going to change the environment, and we need to make an assessment as to whether Defiance is going to be safe and whether it's going to be effective. They're the two questions that I find that people asking organisations when they're considering whether to speak up or not, whether to defy or not, is it safe for me to do so, and if I do so, will it be effective? And what we find is that, you know, if it's not safe, of course, right? You're going to hesitate. If there's financial consequences, you're going to lose a job, you're going to lose a relationship, if there's even physical safety in certain situations, you want to think about safety along all those different measures. And then also, I've spoken up many times before, but nothing ever changes. I hear that a lot that you want your leaders to make it safe for people to speak up and then also take action when once they speak up that way, you're going to create not just a psychologically safe environment, but also an effective environment in terms of improving things. If you say your values are customer service, to put the customer first, transparency, honesty, then you want to live up to those values. You

Jean Gomes:

you talk about five stages of defiance. Can you just walk us through those? Because they're kind of like a personal change operating system for people. Be really interesting, just to get your sense of how you came up with that and how it works.

Sunita Sah:

Yeah, absolutely. So these five stages I've found are really useful to think about, especially when you're learning how to defy because many people experience them. Not everybody experiences every stage, and you can go back and forth or skip levels, but it's a really useful framework that you can probably even see in yourself, and also train yourself to get from one stage to the other if you find it difficult to defy. So the first stage, which I think many people are familiar with, is the tension that we feel when we think this is the right thing to do, or we want to say something, but there's this expectation to do something else. So it's that tension that arises in that situation, and it can manifest in people in different ways. So some people might feel like some unease in their stomach. Other people might feel a dry mouth, a constricted throat, a headache, you know, some people might sweat or stutter. There's many different ways to feel that tension. And in fact, in milgram's experiments, many of the participants displayed signs of tensions, of this nervous laughter, this questioning, this stuttering, like they weren't just happy to go and deliver harmful electric shocks. They were really trying to say no, they just didn't know how. So first of all, that aspect of tension in stage one is important that you don't try to push it away like you know, dismiss it, say it's not worth our anxiety. It's not worth our doubt. Stage two is actually acknowledging that to ourselves and examining it. Why do I feel this tension? Is this, Emma? Is this a situation in which I might need to defy so once we've explicitly acknowledged that to ourselves, then stage three is expressing that to someone else, so vocalising it to another person. Now this is a really critical stage, because there's a number of things that goes on here and in this stage. Once you get to stage three, the research shows, again, you're more likely to get to the end stage five. And that act of defiance, and this is simply telling someone I'm not comfortable with this. Or can you clarify this? Or have you considered this? They're very small scripts that you can use that something that's more natural for you. So you're not saying yes straight away. You're just saying, I'm not sure. I'm not comfortable. Tell me more. What does this mean? What about doing this instead? So it's really asking questions and clarification, because if you can get clarification on something, it raises the volume on the situation. I love this script of what do you mean by that? Because it really gets people to have to articulate what they mean, and that can help clarify, and even if they don't change their mind, the other person, other people have heard it, and they're more likely to think twice when you're in the same room, or the other people that are present are in the same room, so just getting out there in the environment this raise, you've already changed the water in which everyone is swimming, so you can still be in a subservient position in stage three, you know, you're merely asking for clarification. Stage four is when you say you can't do it. Is your threat a. Non compliance that, no, I can't do this. And sticking with that is important, if people try to pressure you to go back to some of the previous stages. So it's just saying, No, I'm sorry that doesn't sit right with me. I don't think that's the right way to go, or it's just simply not right for me. And if you can stick with that, then the next stage is your act of defiance. And what's really fascinating about that stage is that if you can get to that stage, that tension that you had in stage one, it just melts away. It dissipates. And so here is one of the positive aspects about defiance that people seem to neglect. We always think about the costs of defiance, but not about the costs of compliance, because often the cost of compliance is that tension that you try to get rid of. It doesn't go away. It usually stays with you. If this is an important decision, especially if it's something that might cause you harm or you really don't want to do, you feel resentful about it in workplaces that if you're going along with things that you think are unethical. It takes its toll. You know, emotionally, even physically. You know the chronic inflammation, burnout, stress, anxiety, all of those things we need to think about the cost of compliance as well as defiance. But if you can get to stage five and you act in alignment with your values, that tension dissipates. You feel more yourself, more authentic, there's more honesty, there's more joy in that you've managed to do what you would really want to do. You've managed to align your private preferences with your public behaviour.

Scott Allender:

You also talk about this idea of insinuation anxiety, so people accepting advice that they privately doubt.

Sunita Sah:

What habits can we adopt? What What strategies can we adopt be? You know, in addition to our inventory of our values and the cost of compliance and the cost of defiance, what else can we do to sort of address this and take this head on? Yeah, so insinuation anxiety, you can just explain a little bit about what exactly that is. So it's a distinct type of anxiety that we feel when we start being concerned that our non compliance with somebody else's wishes is going to be interpreted as a signal of distrust, or insinuate that that person cannot be trusted, is incompetent, is plain wrong, is sexist or racist. We find it very difficult to insinuate or give somebody else a negative evaluation of themselves. So there's many distinct types of anxiety. So for example, like the physiological response of anxiety is the same, but if we think about performance anxiety, for example, or social anxiety, people are worried about how other people are going to evaluate them, and so they feel anxiety. For that reason, insinuation anxiety is kind of the reverse. You're worried about sending a negative signal to someone else, a negative evaluation to someone else, and this can happen in quite small stake situation. So I don't know about you, but like, imagine being at the hairdressers, if you were me with longer hair. If you're at the hairdressers, and they're saying, trust me with this new cut, and they're cutting, cutting, and you're thinking, stop, stop, stop, but you find it very difficult to say so, and you hate the cut, and you just say thank you, and if you like me, you probably tip them and walk out and then feel awful afterwards, you know. So that's how I wound up bald. I may have a full head of hair, but I just didn't have the guts to say anything. So it would have been helpful for you to know about insinuation anxiety, and this comes up in these small state situations and but also in bigger state situations. It could be the reasons why nurses find it difficult to tell physicians that they've made a mistake. It could be why co pilots don't tell pilots that they're making an error, because we have this act of deference, or this reluctance to imply that somebody could be doing something wrong. So we feel this anxiety every time we need to insinuate something negative to someone else, and that is actually quite a powerful force, I found in my research that keeps us from speaking up. It pressures us to go along with other people when we'd rather not. That feels true to me. But also, I guess I have a question,

Scott Allender:

do you think that that's more of a driving influence in those situations where the co pilot doesn't speak up, or is it more probably a safety issue? Perhaps around speaking up could cost me my job if I challenge his authority. Or is it both? And

Sunita Sah:

it could be both, right as so in that those situations where the co pilot, and there's been some research shown on this and Korean Airlines, where there is a large amount of deference given to pilots and. In these situations, we can see that this resistance to tell someone that they are wrong if they're a superior is quite powerful. And I think in those situations, it's not so much the consequences, because this is life and death for all of us, you know. So we are really thinking about just this signal of telling someone who you think should have your best interests at heart. As a patient, speaking to a doctor telling them, oh, I don't think that's the right thing for me. Sometimes very, very difficult to do so. And so that insinuation anxiety, you know, is something that can be extremely powerful, that keeps us from even, even when there's no consequences for defying, even when it's with a total stranger. We can feel insinuation, anxiety.

Jean Gomes:

So defiance doesn't operate in a vacuum. You it's usually to Well, usually to power, usually to somebody in a higher authority, more expertise or so on. How do you how do you deal with that? How do you respond to defiance? Well, what have you learned about that? Yeah, so

Sunita Sah:

we've covered like two things for why people actively resist defiance, and that's the pressure to go along with other people, including some of those psychological concepts, such as insinuation anxiety we've covered, like this misunderstanding of what Defiance is, what compliance and consent actually are. And then the third reason why people don't defy is that once they want to or they decide to defy, they don't actually know how. They don't have that skill set in the situation. And here it's about building up the ability and the confidence to defy, and that comes with practice, because we've been so trained for compliance in our childhood and maybe young adulthood, we need to train ourselves for defiance if we haven't had that training before. And so what does that mean? So in a lot of situations, defiance, when you think about big moments of defiance, like Rosa Parks saying no on the bus, it's preceded by hundreds of moments of compliance, you know there were many times that Rosa Parks complied with segregation laws. In this situation, she might have asked herself those two questions, is it safe and is it effective? It wasn't actually safe for her to defy in that situation, she received lots of death threats. Afterwards, she lost her job. She was unemployed for 10 years. There was lots of stress and anxiety that came from that defiance. But for her, the questions were, really, is it safe enough? Will it be effective enough? And some people feel so connected with their values that it becomes very important for them to define that situation. So that becomes a personal decision, a personal cost benefit analysis, if you like, of when you're going to defy or not, but to be able to defy, you do need to practice for defiance, and many of the situations where Defiance is required is probably situations in which we've complied before, so we can predict them. Oh, I know my boss is going to ask me to do this unethical thing, because they've asked me many times in the past, and we can think about, what is it I would have liked to have done. What is it I would have I would have liked to have said so we can anticipate it, we can visualise it, then we can script it and role play and practice for it. Why? Because that's the only way we're going to change our neural pathways if we've been socialised to comply and almost wired to comply. We need to change those neural pathways by practising for defiance and getting our mouths used to hearing defiant words and our ears used to hearing defiant words coming from ourselves. And we need to do this long before the moment of crisis, because we can't expect to be in a situation and suddenly become defiant if we haven't before. So that practice is really essential. And in fact, there's a wonderful quote that's often attributed to Bruce Lee, but was actually a Greek poet that said, under distress, we don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to our level of training. And that is why I say Defiance is a practice. It's not a personality, and a lot of us think, you know, that's a defiant person, I'm a compliant person, but it's not a personality, it's a practice. It's the skill set that we can choose to use or not we can be compliant one day and defiant the next day.

Jean Gomes:

So I have a member of my team who defies me in his practice and so on because I've asked him to do something that is unreasonable or unethical and so on. What advice would you give to. Leaders to not react immediately out of habit or anger or, you know, you know, feeling humiliated or whatever. What? What do leaders need to do to be able to embrace people in their organisations with good motives trying to do this.

Sunita Sah:

So for leaders, when we think about, what do we actually want from our employees? Right? If we want a healthy workplace with less anxiety, stress, burnout, turnover, we want creativity a lot of the time, and we want innovation. And if you if everybody is complying and saying yes, then you're going to lose that. You know, you actually want people to come up with new ideas. That's how a workplace survives, an organisation survives. And so you want to cultivate a place where people feel safe to speak up without severe consequences. You know, they're not going to be penalised for speaking up. That's what we call psychologically safe, and that you will act on their suggestions. Because if you have that type of workplace, you're going to get more innovation, more creativity, and you're going to get a more loyal workforce, actually, that is less likely to leave because they can express themselves, and they can say that here, this might be a better way, you know. And we say our mission is this, or we say our values are this, but if we go along down this line that's not representing our values,

Sara Deschamps:

welcome back to the evolving leader podcast, as always, if you enjoy what you hear, then please share the podcast across your network and also leave us a rating and a review. Now let's get back to the conversation.

Scott Allender:

Your work shows that mandatory conflict of interest disclosures can backfire by increasing compliance with biassed advice. Can you give us some examples and talk maybe about some guardrails to be thinking about in this space?

Sunita Sah:

Yes, this aspect is where I discovered the psychological process of insinuation anxiety. So you can imagine a situation where you go to see your physician, and the physician recommends that you enter a clinical trial, and then they disclose the receipt of a referral fee if you enter the trial. Now they have to disclose that. Like, it's required a disclosure to tell like, if you enter a patient to a clinical trial and you receive money for doing so, you must disclose that to the patient. We all think that's great. We want transparency. We want to know what's going on. If our advisor has a conflict of interest, we want to know about it. But what I see happen in these situations is that people are more likely to comply. Why? Because prior to the disclosure, there could have been a range of reasons for rejecting the clinical trial. It's still really hard to reject your doctor, but you could have said, I don't like those particular side effects, or I don't want to take it's too risky for me. I'd rather take it the standard drug that I've had in the past. There could be a range of reasons, but now that the doctor has disclosed this conflict of interest, there's another reason that becomes very salient between you and the doctor, the patient and the doctor, and that's you don't trust the doctor is giving you good advice because they have this conflict of interest, and you don't want to insinuate that the doctor is biassed. And so what I've found in my studies is that people will say that they trust the advice less with this conflict of interest disclosure, which is arguably the intended purpose of the disclosure. There's some uncertainty as to the quality of advice, but at the same time, they feel more insinuation anxiety. They feel more pressure to comply, and then they can end up complying more with advice that they trust less. So in that way, transparency in this situation actually backfires the conflict of interest disclosure backfires like that's not the intended purpose of the disclosure. And there's certain situations where we can implement disclosure that is better for the patient, which is before they go to see the physician, before they've made the choice of the physician, and in private, in writing, not directly in front of them, where the signal of rejecting the doctor's advice is far greater.

Jean Gomes:

What do you think in terms of the shift to a world where more things are happening, interactions are automated, and we have co intelligence and so on? Where does defiance fit into a world where it's difficult sometimes to to know who you're talking to and what the motives for various acts are. I think we want to again come back to who am I? What are my values? And then what type of situation is this? You know?

Sunita Sah:

Know, yes, you need to look at the source and their level of expertise. And if it's something that's automated, we might want to think twice before thinking, oh, you know, that's what chat GPT advised me to we might want to think twice and ask, like, what would be the alternative here? Do we really have a thorough knowledge and understanding. Because again, if we go back to those five elements that we need for both consent and defiance, that knowledge and understanding is very important, and especially with the amount of misinformation that we have here,

Jean Gomes:

it's really important to understand that and look at the source of the information. Yeah, because I think, you know, one of the things I really love in your work is that often when people talk in this space, there's, there's a lot of conflating feelings with facts. So the people are acting in define. They're defying something that they they don't really understand, they don't really understand themselves, but they they're defying something that that feels a loss of control or or something like that, rather than acting on true values and an outcome that they can envisage. And I'm interested in, you know, some of the wider research you've done in the political sphere about how you think society needs to evolve this, because this is a significant form of maturation of a human being to be able to do this, both in terms of self awareness and self understanding, because and an accountability to act upon being informed, rather than just react through an emotional perspective and feel that that Defiance is, you know, is warranted. Yeah, so here the this aspect of having intellectual humility is really important, so knowing that there's limits to our level of knowledge, and then being open to what else could be true in this situation. And when I teach critical thinking to my students, we go through a very rigorous process, because

Sunita Sah:

the first thing is, is really knowing yourself right? What are my personal biases? And there's ways to get to these. I assign a really great case that people have very different, conflicting views on, and then I ask them, Why? Why is it that you dislike this thing so much? And really getting to know yourself is how you get that wisdom and really thinking, Well, what if I'm wrong in this situation, especially if you love like, if you hone in on this is right and this is wrong straight away, or this is the best solution for this? It's like, you know, you need to stand back and really look at the context. And if you can analyse, like, everything that's happening in the context, then you can determine what is the problem here, what is the problem we're trying to solve? What are the root causes? And then what is the best solution, but always going back to counteract like, especially if you're in love with a solution that you think is the right way to go is to ask, What? What if this wasn't true? You know, what if I thought what I think is not true? What if something else was true? Or who is going to hate this? Why is this risky? What think about the worst case scenarios in that situation, rather than just having a sense of, I'm completely right, just that aspect of intellectual humility is, I think, something that's really important for leaders to develop, especially in today's world.

Jean Gomes:

And do you see, you know, because there's been some pretty interesting research published in the last few months around the falling levels of conscientiousness in younger generations and the origins of which are, you know, there's many things that are at work there, but what you're talking about is the opposite of that. You know you have to be highly conscientious to defy you. Need to know who you are, what you really believe, the intellectual humility to not trust your feelings as facts, to recognise that you might have partial sight of what's going on, that you haven't looked at it from other people's perspectives and so on. What do you see, both positive and negative, in terms of, you know, our hope for future generations be able to do this. What are you seeing? Yeah, so, I mean, I take, I teach a range of students, and,

Sunita Sah:

like, most of them are curious. I mean, they're a self selected group, right? So they're going into further education, but most of them are curious, and they just need, like, sometimes an extra push to think about things that they've never thought about before. So providing that type of environment, I think, is really important. So why? You know, I think this comes back to a larger societal problem is, why do we have this drop in conscientiousness, and can we determine. And what might make people more curious and in some ways, like learning from our mistakes and errors might be one of them. But again, you still need to have, like the conscientiousness, but also openness, you know, to realising that we might not be right all the time. I think this is a really tricky one to think about, because even as a junior doctor, I remember when one of my first patients came in that I was seeing and had been taught in a particular way, right? You take a history, and then you do an examination, then you come up with a list of differential diagnoses, everything you could it could be. Then you, you know, request various procedures or investigations that might distil that down, only if it would change clinical practice. And I had just finished talking to a patient. I hadn't even started examining her, and the first thing she said to me was, what's wrong with me, doctor? And I said, exactly what was on my mind, I don't know yet. I haven't examined you. And the look on her face, she did not want to see that there was some uncertainty. And so I realised, okay, then do doctors need to express more confidence? Or should they not right? Because they these are situations where we want our doctors to be well calibrated, so confident when they know that this is right, but Express uncertainty when they're not sure. And what I realised is, I'm not going to communicate my uncertainty immediately to a patient, but at least I am aware that we have a list of different things that could be and then talk to the patient once we've narrowed those things down. So it's a very difficult question to think about. How can we increase conscientiousness? There are ways to increase intellectual humility, which I think is a start, and that could be from having people document known unknowns. So what do I know that I don't know that has been shown to actually increase intellectual humility, and I'm actually right at the beginnings of a project where we're looking at ways and interventions to increase intellectual humility, like this is a fairly new concept in the psychological literature over the just the last few years, and so we do need to do a lot more research in this, but I think that's really promising. Way forward is to to look at those interventions, because if it's as simple as documenting known unknowns, or if there's other simple interventions, I think this could have a great, great impact, not just on workplaces, but on society as well. Stay with the society piece a bit longer. Do you think the lack of intellectual humility is a considerable factor in what's sort of happening on the world stage right now? I'm thinking more divisiveness, more you know, people are so assured of their particular position,

Scott Allender:

the erosion of political norms I'm seeing, you know, we talked a lot about the importance of evaluating our own values and coming back to those and anchoring around those. But I'm seeing, watching people's values change considerably, or at least, you know, reportedly change as more extremism is happening in the world.

Sunita Sah:

That's a lot to unpack with a few minutes we have left, but I'd love to get your thoughts on kind of what you're seeing, what's happening, what's the what's the opportunity in this? Yes, intellectual humility is certainly one aspect of that, but also it's people tend to have a sense of hopelessness at times where they're not acting because they think it doesn't matter anymore, or like there's not a lot I can do. And I think that sense of feeling like there's nothing much I can do is really preventing change, because I really do think it starts with small acts so we can assess our own personal risk in sub defying and some people will have more risk than others, and the people that have less personal risk are the ones that can actually do something. Not everybody can march, protest or speak up when they really want to, but I do think it starts off with the individual person taking responsibility and thinking about what is possible, and that is what I hope my work will do. Like one of the things that I hoped with the book as well is that it gives people the skill set to be able to defy when they want to, and know that small acts can make a big difference. So we don't need to be loud or aggressive or violent or have a certain type of personality. We just need that mindset shift about what defiance actually is. It's a positive trait, and it's acting in alignment with our values, and we can all do it in our own unique way, with far less angst than we used to have. And it's just finding out those ways, because what I don't want is people that really do want to defy and.

Jean Gomes:

Speak up and do something, but not knowing how to do it. And I want to make defiance accessible, because it is available and it's necessary for all of us to know this. I think that's a brilliant summary of your work. And I guess the last thing I'd love to get a sense of, if it's front of mind, is an act of defiance that you've seen personally that's inspired you.

Sunita Sah:

Yes, well, I have, like, a very personal story of defiance, which was when I was young, and my mother was like the most obedient, compliant person that I know. She did all the cooking, the cleaning, the grocery shopping, everything for everyone else. And she was always putting everybody else's needs above their own. So I saw her as extremely compliant, subservient and looking after other people. And then one day, we were walking back from the grocery store. I was about seven or eight in West Yorkshire in England, and we were dragging our rickety shopping cart behind us. It's like looks like wheeled luggage, two little wheels, and we were dragging that behind us. And it was a long walk back home, and we decided to take a shortcut through what we call a snickert in West Yorkshire. And I was always told never to go through the Snicket by yourself, but we were together. We were tired, we decided to go through it, and so we entered the alleyway, and that's when we saw them. So there was a group of teenage boys. They blocked our path, and one of them yelled out, go back home. And the others laughed. Now my reaction was instant in that situation. I grabbed my mom's arm and I did everything that I'd been taught to do was like, you know, say nothing, avoid conflict, keep the peace, and I just wanted to manoeuvre as fast as possible past the boys. But my mom, who always kept her head down and was quite compliant, she did something different that day that really stunned me. So she was wearing her blue, green sari. She had her hair in a single, neat, long plait at the back, and I thought she would just walk with me, but she didn't move. And she turned to the boys, and she looked them directly in the eyes, and she said, What do you mean? It wasn't loud, or she wasn't shouting, but it was unmistakably defiant. And my heart started racing at this point. I grabbed her arm even tighter, and I whispered to her, come on, Ma. And then she said no to me, and she shook off my arm, and she put the shopping cart upright. She put one hand on her hip. She's She's quite petite, four foot 10, but somehow she just seemed taller in that situation. And she turned back to the boys again, and she said again, what do you mean? And the boys just started looking at each other and didn't say anything. So my mom said, Ah, big, clever boys, yeah, big, strong, tough boys, right? And again, they didn't say anything, and one of them just looked at the other, and then they said, let's go. And they just dispersed. My mom grabbed the shopping cart, and she walked really fast through that snicker. And I stood there thinking what just happened. And you know, that showed me so many things that day, because it showed me that defiance isn't a personality, it's a practice. And I had seen my mom come home many times muttering, and I thought she was kind of annoyed about the shopping cart, but it must have been that she'd seen those boys, or, you know, people like those boys, before, and in that situation, she decided to do something different. When I talk about defiance being transformative for ourselves, and it really is. It also affects the people around us. So it has this ripple effect, because that moment stayed with me for so many years, and it really affected how I think about defiance. And so what I hope is that if we can model defiance, if we can parent for it, that one of these days, one of the teens in that alleyway will speak up and say,

Scott Allender:

let them pass, or this is not right, so my immigrant mother doesn't have to carry it all alone. So that's the type of society that I hope for and that I hope that this work will make accessible to everyone. Wow, a powerful story. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. Thank you for for your time and your insights. It's beautiful, beautiful stuff, and so important for the times that we're living in. And we wish you well and folks, before you do anything else today, stop right now and order your copy of defy the power of no in a world that demands Yes. Now, don't defy me. I really want you to stop and order this right now. It's very important, and until next time, remember the world is evolving. Are you?

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Jean Gomes

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Scott Allender

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