The Polite Tut

The moment before the meeting moves on. AI-generated illustration.

Ed Sheeran does not use his professional platform for politics.

That is his stated position, and he restated it this week after Macklemore was removed from the remaining North American dates of his Loop Tour, having said ‘Free Palestine’ from the stage at MetLife Stadium. Sheeran wrote that his audience includes children, that his shows are not a political forum, and that he was ‘not complicit’. He said the decision had been taken by the promoters. Macklemore said Sheeran told him by phone that a stadium owner had rallied the other venues into an ultimatum.

Then there is the record. A ‘justice for Grenfell’ shirt on stage at Wembley in 2018. The Concert for Ukraine in 2022.

So the position is not quite that he stays out of politics.

It is that he has stayed out of this one.

I am not going to prescribe what Ed Sheeran should have done. I do not know him, I was not in the room, and there is no shortage of people willing to determine the correct behaviour of strangers.

What held my attention was the shape of it. A stated policy. A history of exceptions. A decision attributed to somebody else.

I spend a good deal of my working life looking at that shape inside organisations.

I had not expected to recognise it in myself a few days earlier.

One word

I had commented publicly on a LinkedIn post shared by a former colleague.

The post presented a technology partnership in a way that I thought left some material considerations outside the frame. The technical proposition and the benefits were both real. My concern was that the wider questions, including sovereignty, dependency and the alternatives available to organisations pursuing the same technical objective, had largely disappeared from the story.

So I said so, in public, under my own name.

A little later, a private message arrived.

‘Really?’

That was all it needed to say.

I knew what it meant, or at least what I took it to mean.

Did you really need to do that publicly?

And I found myself wondering the same thing.

The cheaper options

I could have left the post alone.

I could have thought, ‘I don't quite agree with that’, scrolled on and continued with my day. I could have sent a private message. I could have raised it with my wife over dinner, which is where a statistically significant proportion of my opinions probably belong.

None of those options would have cost me anything.

I have spent most of my career in and around large organisations, and there is a familiar choreography to disagreement in those places. Someone says something questionable in a meeting. A few people shift in their chairs. There may be a raised eyebrow across the table, or the briefest exchange of looks between two people who know each other well.

Then the meeting continues.

Later, in the corridor or on Teams or over coffee, everybody discovers that several other people had exactly the same concern.

We are very good at the private tut.

There are sensible reasons for some of this. Not every disagreement deserves escalation, and people need room to be wrong without every mistake becoming a public confrontation. Relationships and context both matter, as does knowing when to let something pass.

I have also sat through enough meetings with somebody who challenges every sentence to know that relentless contrarianism is not evidence of moral courage. Sometimes it is just exhausting.

Even so, I have become less comfortable with my own threshold for letting things go.

What I have been arguing about

Looking back through my public comments over the last couple of years, there is a pattern I did not consciously set out to create.

I have challenged arguments about extreme wealth concentration, because the tax contribution of individual wealthy people tells us something real while leaving the distribution of wealth itself almost entirely untouched.

I have challenged anti-net-zero arguments, because the answer changes considerably depending on whether the horizon under discussion is the next few years or the next few decades.

I have argued about photography and policing by going back to the published guidance, rather than accepting an increasingly heated conversation about what people assumed the law allowed.

I have questioned the value of spending extraordinary sums overcoming the substantial inconvenience of living on another planet while we degrade the rather useful one underneath us.

And I have repeatedly raised concerns about Palantir.

That one is worth stating plainly rather than gesturing at, since it recurs more than anything else on the list. My concern is not that the technology fails to work. By most accounts it works extremely well.

It is the concentration. One privately owned company now sits inside defence, intelligence, immigration enforcement and military targeting across several states. Its Maven system runs across every US combatant command, and its founders signed a partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defence in 2024 to support the war effort.

Its customers are generally entitled to buy what it sells. That is the part I find difficult rather than the part I dismiss.

At first glance those subjects have very little in common.

What connects them, for me, is the frame.

I become uncomfortable when a narrow measurement, a convenient timescale or a carefully chosen set of facts starts carrying more weight than it can bear.

A programme can be green while its economics remain questionable. A company can comply with every applicable rule while contributing to an outcome I find indefensible. A billionaire can pay an enormous amount of tax while the underlying concentration of wealth remains untouched.

An organisation can hold a perfectly respectable policy and behave quite differently the moment that policy is tested.

That last one is most of my working life. The gap between institutional architecture and lived behaviour is where I spend my time, which means paying as much attention to what happens after the commitment as to the commitment itself.

A policy with a list of exceptions is not really a policy. It is a disposition that has been applied whenever the cost was tolerable.

Apparently I have started applying that test outside work as well.

The part that was different

Those examples show a decent range of subjects. They have one other thing in common, which took me longer to notice.

Distance.

Wealth concentration is an argument with a category. Net zero is an argument about time horizons. The Mars money is an argument with an idea. Palantir is an argument about a company that will never know I exist.

None of those people were going to read what I wrote. None of them were ever going to sit opposite me. Nobody was going to be embarrassed in front of their own network because of something I said.

That makes the whole business considerably easier than it looks.

The LinkedIn post was different in exactly one respect.

I knew him.

That is what made it notable, and it is why the one-word message stayed with me. The subject was not unusually brave. The proximity was unfamiliar.

Everything I had said publicly before was addressed to strangers, institutions and abstractions. This was addressed, in front of an audience, to somebody whose good opinion I would have preferred to keep.

I am not sure my threshold had ever really been about the seriousness of the subject.

I suspect it had a great deal more to do with whether the person on the other end could see me.

The safety of private disagreement

There is a comfortable version of integrity in which we know privately where our lines are.

We know which companies we dislike. Which arguments we find weak. Which behaviours make us uncomfortable. Which compromises we would rather nobody asked us to examine too closely.

We may even be quite eloquent about them among friends.

That has limited effect on anything outside the room.

I grew up in South Africa and have lived in Britain for more than thirty years, so I am an imperfect judge of which parts of my behaviour belong to which country. Britain has certainly taught me the enormous expressive range available through a slightly raised eyebrow.

The polite tut can communicate outrage, disappointment, constitutional concern and the imminent collapse of civilisation without troubling anyone else at the table. It is wonderfully efficient, and it changes very little.

This is where I have started thinking about integrity differently.

I used to associate it mainly with conduct: the work I would accept, the promises I would keep, the things I would refuse to do, the standards I would apply when nobody was checking.

I still do.

Increasingly, though, I think there is something about visibility as well.

If I believe something matters enough to shape my private choices, there will be occasions when keeping that belief permanently private starts to look less like discretion and more like convenience.

I do not think anyone owes the world a public position on every war, company, political argument or injustice. I certainly do not hold one. There are subjects I understand poorly, situations where my information is incomplete, and plenty of occasions when other people are far better placed to speak. Sometimes I have nothing useful to add, which remains an underused reason for not posting on LinkedIn.

Silence can be judgement, discretion or recognition that I have nothing useful to add. Sometimes, though, it is simply convenient.

I am becoming more interested in telling the difference in myself.

What silence costs

There is a small psychological trick available whenever responsibility is distributed.

Someone else owns the decision.

Someone else signed the contract.

The supplier made that choice.

The board approved it.

The regulator allows it.

The market rewards it.

The promoters decided.

Each of those statements can be entirely accurate.

The difficulty starts when factual distance becomes moral insulation.

I have watched serious problems survive inside organisations for surprisingly long periods, because responsibility was spread widely enough that nobody felt individually responsible for changing the outcome. Everybody could describe the concern. Nobody quite owned the moment when description needed to become intervention.

No villain was required.

Just enough reasonable people concluding that today was probably not the day to make a fuss.

Large ethical failures are easy to condemn afterwards. The smaller accommodations that precede them are much harder to notice while we are making them.

You accept the wording, because changing it will delay approval. You let the weak assumption stand, because challenging it reopens the business case. You take the work, and decide that the uncomfortable part belongs to another team.

None of these makes somebody unethical. Life would be impossible if every compromise carried that weight.

But accumulation matters.

Organisations build culture through repeated small decisions about what gets challenged and what gets waved through. I suspect people do much the same thing.

Drawing the line where people can see it

I am not trying to manufacture an obligation for other people to speak. I would be suspicious of myself if I finished here demanding that everyone become louder, particularly when public discourse is not obviously short of volume.

I am trying to understand a change in my own behaviour.

I seem to be more willing to put my name next to a position when I think something consequential has been left out of the discussion, and rather less willing to make an exception because the person concerned is somebody I like.

Sometimes I will get that wrong. I may misread the evidence, or weight one consequence too heavily against another. Somebody may reply with information that changes my mind. If I am going to hold positions in public, being correctable in public comes with it.

There is also a commercial consequence.

Some views will make some people less inclined to work with me. That cannot be dismissed as somebody else's intolerance. If I choose to make a position visible, I also choose to make it available to anyone deciding whether they want me in their organisation, on their programme or around their board table.

I think I am comfortable with that, though I notice I am saying so from a fairly comfortable position.

My work is largely concerned with governance, organisational behaviour, accountability and the distance between what institutions say and what they actually do. It would be a peculiar form of professional neutrality to spend my days examining other people's gaps between stated values and lived behaviour while keeping my own carefully unavailable for inspection.

Sheeran's situation is his, and I do not need to borrow it to reach a verdict about the choices he should make. What I took from it was the uncomfortable reminder that declining to enter a decision does not remove you from it, and that a neutrality with exceptions is not neutrality. It is a set of judgements about which costs are bearable.

Restraint is often wise, and silence is often appropriate. Sometimes, though, we know perfectly well what we think, can see why it matters, and stay quiet because everyone in the room will be more comfortable if we do.

I have done a great deal of that.

I am less sure I want to keep doing it.

Perhaps integrity is not usually lost in dramatic acts of betrayal. Perhaps it is more often worn away by small accommodations, each defensible on its own: the concern we leave until later, the uncomfortable question we decide not to ask, the public argument we privately know is incomplete.

A raised eyebrow. A private complaint. The polite tut.

Then the meeting moves on.

I work with organisations navigating this shift, fractionally, as an adviser, or as a trusted collaborator. See how I work →