The Empty Chair

There is something compelling about an empty chair.

Place one at a table where an important decision is being made and the question almost asks itself: Who isn't here?

It is a good question.

I am just no longer convinced it is enough.

Schools have become increasingly deliberate about whose voices are represented in their decision making. Student voice matters. Teacher voice matters. Parent and community perspectives matter. We survey, consult, establish working groups, invite representatives and create opportunities for people to contribute.

All of this can be important.

But there is a difference between giving somebody a chair and creating the conditions in which what they know can genuinely enter the thinking.

A student can be invited into a meeting about student experience. On paper, student voice is present. But place that student in the principal's office, surround them with adults, ask what they really think and something more complicated happens.

Students are very good at reading adults.

They can work out what kind of answer the room is ready for. They can be thoughtful, articulate and completely sincere while still giving a safer version of what they might have said somewhere else.

Teachers do this too.

The loudest voice in a meeting is not necessarily carrying the most useful knowledge. The quietest person is not necessarily carrying the least. A staff survey can gather hundreds of responses. A 360 degree review can gather feedback from every direction. Yet if an uncomfortable pattern appears and the person receiving it immediately explains why that pattern is wrong, unfair or attributable to particular people, everybody technically had a voice.

Research into employee voice and silence helps explain some of this. Elizabeth Morrison distinguishes voice from the mere existence of mechanisms through which people can provide input. Voice involves people actually communicating ideas, concerns, problems or opinions intended to contribute to improvement or change. Her later review also shows just how much organisational conditions affect decisions about whether speaking is safe or worthwhile.

That matters because inviting someone to speak solves only one part of the problem.

There is another question on the receiving side.

What happens when the knowledge arrives?

It does not have to be agreed with. Listening seriously does not require a leader to surrender a decision or follow every suggestion. Sometimes people will be heard properly and a different decision will still be made.

But there has to be the possibility of being affected by what we hear.

If I ask what you think only after deciding what your answer is allowed to change, I have given you an opportunity to speak. I am less sure I have given your knowledge anywhere to go.

The stakes become particularly clear when organisations are making decisions concerning knowledge, culture or communities they do not themselves represent.

Consider an Australian school that has worked seriously over time to strengthen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures, perspectives and connections to Country within its life and learning. The commitment may be genuine. The work may be increasingly embedded rather than ceremonial or occasional.

And yet even such a school can find itself making a decision about that work without Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, families or community knowledge informing the conversation.

There is something uncomfortable in the contradiction.

The obvious response is to notice the empty chair and make sure an Indigenous person occupies one next time. But that risks reducing a much more important issue to representation. Genuine engagement requires more than somebody being present. Australian guidance around engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples emphasises genuine consultation and participation, and recognises the critical decision making role of Traditional Owners in matters concerning them and Country.

The question, then, is not simply whether somebody from a particular group was in the room.

It is whether the knowledge necessary for the decision was able to shape it.

And some of the most extraordinary organisational knowledge I have encountered has belonged to people whose job titles would rarely place them around a strategic table.

Think about the grounds and maintenance staff in a school.

They move through an organisation differently from almost everybody else. They are in spaces others rarely enter. They encounter students, teachers, leaders and families across formal and informal moments. They see what happens before something begins and what remains after everybody else has left. They know which systems work beautifully and which only appear to work because somebody quietly fixes them every second Tuesday.

They notice things.

That does not mean the groundskeeper should suddenly be invited to every executive leadership meeting. Nor does it make their perspective somehow more truthful than everyone else's.

The same is true throughout an organisation.

Students see things teachers cannot. Teachers see things leaders cannot. Leaders see patterns an individual classroom cannot. Parents encounter the organisation from another edge altogether. New staff notice things that long standing members stopped seeing years ago.

Perhaps the more important question is whether an organisation has developed ways for different knowledge to travel.

Sometimes that will require bringing somebody into the room. Sometimes it will require a conversation long before the meeting. Sometimes student work itself may carry knowledge into a discussion about learning. Sometimes it will mean creating ways for people to contribute without placing them in a room where hierarchy changes what they feel able to say.

And sometimes it may mean noticing who repeatedly chooses not to participate and becoming curious about why.

Because absence can be information too.

Someone may be silent because they have nothing to add. They may also be silent because experience has taught them that adding it is unlikely to matter. Research on psychological safety has long shown the importance of the perceived interpersonal consequences of taking risks such as speaking up, asking questions or acknowledging concerns.

Which brings us back to the chair.

Someone can be missing from a meeting and still profoundly influence the decision because their knowledge has genuinely travelled into the room.

Someone else can sit at the table, speak, be thanked for their contribution and leave without anything they knew ever affecting the thinking.

The most important empty chair may be occupied.

That possibility changes the question.

Not simply:

Who isn't here?

But:

What are we currently unable to know because of who we are, where we sit and the conditions through which this conversation is happening?

And perhaps one more:

Whose knowledge could change that?

Different positions make different things visible. Different experiences make different things knowable. The work is not to assemble a perfect collection of people around every table. That is neither possible nor necessarily useful.

It is to build organisations in which important knowledge can move.

Across roles. Across hierarchy. Across experience. Into rooms its holder may never enter. And, when the person carrying it is sitting right in front of us, across the surprisingly small distance between being invited to speak and being capable of changing what happens next.

Because the knowledge missing from a decision does not always belong to someone who was absent.

Sometimes they were sitting there all along.