The more I work in teams, the more I notice how many of our dynamics have little to do with making good products. A surprising amount of energy goes into human stuff instead: patching up bruised egos, avoiding friction and generally making work feel less bothersome for everyone. Sometimes that's intentional. Often it isn't.

I'm not writing this from above the problem. Over my career I've watched decisions go sideways while keeping quiet, because I didn't want to be seen as conflictive, arrogant or tedious. And I'm not above taking things personally either. I've had my fair share of hurt from receiving feedback, or from disagreeing with the direction of a project. It happens to all of us, and it doesn't only happen in small companies.

The multi-billion dollar version

If you're like me, you've wondered why Apple, one of the most design-obsessed companies on the planet, took so long to deliver a good AI experience.

According to reporting by The Information, summarized by MacRumors in April 2025, when ChatGPT launched in late 2022, parts of Apple's AI leadership didn't respond with much urgency. Employees were reportedly told that chatbots like ChatGPT didn't add much value for users.

We've all been wrong. Few of us get to be wrong at that scale. And to be fair, nobody could know in advance how much cultural impact that public release would have, how fast the technology would improve or how big the market would get.

But there are ways to try to find out.

That's the thing. Finding out is hard. It's bothersome, it creates tension, and it surfaces conflicting opinions about what the next priority should be. From the outside, it looks like that process didn't happen, or happened too quietly. I can't know what went on inside those rooms. What I do know is what it feels like to be one of the people who decides speaking up isn't worth it.

A tangent: why the apple, anyway?While writing this I fell into a rabbit hole about the "forbidden apple". The Hebrew text of Genesis never says apple. It uses pri, a generic word for fruit. The apple seems to have come later, helped along by a Latin pun: malum means both "apple" and "evil", and the Latin Bible calls it the tree of knowledge of good and evil, boni et mali. Painters did the rest. As for Apple's logo, its designer Rob Janoff has said the bite was there for scale, so the apple wouldn't read as a cherry. Languages are weird, and so are logos.

The architecture of silence

My first instinct is that the core problem is the fear of being wrong. Being wrong feels like it undermines our credibility and our authority, and it invites rejection from our peers. So we protect ourselves in two directions.

The person with the idea stays quiet, because being wrong in public is embarrassing.

The person with the power digs in, because changing course looks like admitting a mistake.

Researchers have names for both sides. Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken described "organizational silence" in 2000: the pattern where employees collectively hold back what they know about problems, because the organization has taught them that speaking up is risky or pointless. Amy Edmondson's work on "psychological safety" looks at the other side: teams do better at learning when people believe they won't be punished or humiliated for raising concerns, questions or mistakes.

Design teams are especially exposed to this. Our work is visible, subjective and personal. A critique of a layout can easily feel like a critique of the person who made it. And design decisions often involve people with very different kinds of authority (product, engineering, leadership, clients), which makes it even easier for everyone to assume someone else will raise the problem.

What ego actually costs

Ego rarely shows up as a dramatic tantrum. In design teams it looks more like this:

• A concept gets defended past the point where the research stopped supporting it.
• A junior designer sees a usability problem and decides it's "not their place" to mention it.
• A critique session turns into a presentation, because nobody wants to be the first to question the lead's work.
• A team keeps polishing a direction everyone privately doubts, because changing it would mean someone was wrong.

None of these are disasters on their own. Together they add up to slower learning, weaker products and a team that stops bringing its best ideas to the table. The cost isn't the one mistake. It's all the corrections that never happen.

Making it cheaper to be wrong

We can't remove ego from people, and we shouldn't try. Caring about our work is part of what makes it good. What we can do is lower the price of being wrong, so that speaking up stops being an act of courage and becomes a normal part of the process.

Separate the idea from the person. Talk about "this version" and "the current direction," not "your design." It sounds small, but it gives everyone room to let go of an idea without losing face.

Leaders go first. When the most senior person in the room says "I think I got this wrong," it signals that being wrong is survivable. If they never do, nobody else will either.

Ask for disagreement explicitly. "Any thoughts?" invites silence. "What's the strongest argument against this direction?" invites an answer. Rotating a devil's advocate role makes disagreement part of someone's job, so it isn't personal.

Run a pre-mortem. Before committing to a direction, ask the team to assume it has already failed and list the reasons why. Psychologist Gary Klein popularized this exercise because it makes raising doubts the task, instead of a disruption.

Decide how you'll find out. Before a debate turns into a battle of opinions, agree on what evidence would change your mind: a test, a prototype, a conversation with users. Then the question stops being who's right and becomes what you'll learn.

Keep a decision log. Write down what you decided, why, and what you assumed. When an assumption turns out wrong, the log shows that the decision made sense with what you knew then. That makes revisiting it far less personal.

A question to take back to your team

None of this requires a reorganization. It requires a few people deciding that the product matters more than being right in the room.

So here's the question I keep asking myself, and one worth asking your team: what's something you've noticed in the last month and decided not to say? And what would have to change for you to say it next time?