--- id: 8 title: "Don't hide behind anonymous 'people'" status: current date: 2026-06-12 authors: - "Theo Zourzouvillys" tags: [culture, leadership, communication, ic] references: - id: psychological-safety title: "Amy Edmondson — Psychological Safety" url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_safety abstract: "Amy Edmondson's concept: a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — that you can raise a concern, admit a mistake, ask a question, or disagree without fear of punishment or humiliation. Teams that have it surface problems early; teams that lack it drive dissent underground, where it resurfaces as 'a few people are worried'." summary: "Never invoke unnamed 'people' to carry weight — 'a few people are concerned', 'some think'. It launders one view as phantom consensus and makes the listener argue a crowd they can't see. Name them and bring them in, or own it. If they can't speak up, fix the culture." supersedes: null superseded_by: null aliases: [] --- ## TL;DR Don't invoke vague, unnamed **"people"** to give your point weight: *"I've heard from a few people that…"*, *"a couple of people have told me they're concerned about…"*, *"some folks think…"*. It's a corrosive habit. It launders one person's opinion (often just your own) into a phantom consensus, and it asks whoever you're talking to to argue against a crowd they can't see, can't question, and can't answer. Either **be concrete — name the people, and ideally bring them into the conversation so they speak for themselves — or don't invoke them at all** and make the argument as your own view. And if the real reason it's coming to someone secondhand is that those people don't feel **safe** raising it directly, that's a culture problem to fix at the root — not something to launder through anonymous relay. Doing the relay *perpetuates* the unsafety. Don't. ## Context "A few people have mentioned…" feels harmless, even considerate — you're surfacing something, right? But look at what it actually does in the room: - **It's unfalsifiable and unanswerable.** The person you're talking to can't engage with it. They can't ask the "people" what they meant, weigh how many there really are, learn whether it's a serious objection or an offhand remark, or respond to them directly. You've put them in front of an invisible jury and asked them to defend themselves. - **It borrows authority it hasn't earned.** "Some people think X" sounds like consensus. Very often it's *one* person — sometimes literally just the speaker, using "people" to avoid owning the view — or one casual comment inflated into a movement. The vagueness is doing persuasive work that the actual support can't. - **It can be a soft threat.** "People aren't happy with this" carries an implied warning — discontent, consequences — with nobody accountable for it and nothing the recipient can actually address. - **It quietly poisons trust.** The person walks away wondering who's been talking about them, and how many. That's the opposite of the safety you want, and you created it. The tell is that the construction *removes agency from everyone*: the unnamed people don't get to make their own case (and might not even hold the view as stated — secondhand relay distorts), and the listener can't respond to anyone real. A conversation that should be between people becomes a person arguing with a fog. ## Recommendation **Name it and bring them in, or own it yourself — and never weaponise an anonymous crowd.** - **Speak for yourself.** If it's your view, say *"I think X,"* not *"people think X."* Own your opinion; it's stronger for being yours, and it's something the other person can actually engage with. - **If you're genuinely carrying someone else's view, name them — and ideally don't carry it at all.** The best move is to get the person who holds the concern into the conversation so they speak for themselves. If they truly can't be there, represent it explicitly as *theirs*, named, ideally with their okay — *"Priya raised that the migration risks X; I said I'd flag it"* — not as ambient "people." - **When someone does it to you, it's fair to ask.** *"Who specifically, and can we get them in the room?"* is a reasonable, non-hostile question. If the answer is "I'd rather not say," the conversation is now about *why*, which is the more important conversation. - **Treat "they didn't feel safe raising it" as the actual problem.** If people are routing concerns to you instead of saying them directly, the fix isn't to become their anonymous megaphone — it's to ask *why they didn't feel able to*, and to work on the [psychological safety](ref:psychological-safety) that lets them. Laundering their concern anonymously confirms their fear that direct disagreement isn't safe here. You perpetuate exactly the thing you should be fixing. - **Build the culture where people speak for themselves.** Respond well to dissent, don't shoot the messenger, separate the idea from the person, and credit people for raising hard things. The goal is a team where "a few people are worried" never needs to be said because those people just *say it*, as themselves. **The legitimate exception.** This is about the casual, weaponisable "a few people" in ordinary working discussion. It is **not** an argument against genuine anonymity where there's a real power asymmetry or risk: reporting misconduct, whistleblowing, anonymous surveys, a skip-level passing up aggregated feedback through a channel built for it. Those are deliberate, accountable mechanisms that exist to protect people. The difference is night and day from dropping "people are saying" into a debate to win it: one protects the vulnerable, the other borrows a phantom crowd to avoid owning a position. ## Consequences **Easier:** - Conversations are between real people who can actually engage, so disagreements get resolved instead of fogged. - You can't accidentally inflate one offhand comment into "the team thinks," so decisions rest on real, weighable input. - Trust holds: nobody is left wondering who's talking about them behind an anonymous "people." - The habit surfaces culture problems (people not feeling safe to speak) instead of hiding them. **Harder:** - Owning your view, by name, is more exposed than hiding behind a crowd — which is precisely why the crowd is tempting, and why dropping it takes a little courage. - Bringing the actual person into the room is more effort than relaying for them, and sometimes they'd rather you didn't — which forces the real conversation about why. - Calling it out when someone does it to you takes some nerve, and has to be done without making them defensive. ## References - [psychological safety](ref:psychological-safety) — the team property that makes people raise concerns as themselves, so they never need a secondhand "people" to carry them. - Amy Edmondson, *The Fearless Organization*; the broad norm of "speak for yourself, and name names" in healthy review and feedback cultures. ## Changelog - **2026-06-12**: First published as a Field Note.