Once upon a time a ‘difficult conversation’ was about:

managing underperformance
giving difficult or personal feedback, or
holding boundaries against higher authority

Nowadays, a difficult conversation has taken on a new quality. It’s more about any conversation that feels uncomfortable or unsafe in the conversational corporate context. I now call these conversations Dangerous Dialogue.

I say Dangerous because this is how the brain is encoding the conversation.

Unsafe, risky… dangerous. Not just ‘difficult,’ but dangerous.

And this is where the new definition kicks in…

What is dangerous?

The definition of what is dangerous to the brain is far broader than that of a ‘regular’ difficult conversation, as described above. It’s about how unsafe the conversation feels to the person’s career and personal brand in front of others, not just the relationship between two people.

And it has expanded to encompass seemingly simple, mundane conversations. The ones leaders can easily overlook as being difficult for people, especially if they don’t struggle with them themselves.

Case in point: The Harvard Business Review just published an article called Building a Culture Where Employees Feel Free to Speak Up (https://hbr.org/2023/08/building-a-culture-where-employees-feel-free-to-speak-up).

In it, they refer to their latest global survey research on the top 20 most vulnerable workplace behaviours. From a data set of almost 50,000 data points across 834 organisations, the top 6 most vulnerable workplace behaviours were all to do with speaking up. Yep. That’s dangerous dialogue, right there.

Here are the top six behaviours, in order from the most vulnerable:

Giving an incorrect answer
Making a mistake
Expressing your emotions
Expressing disagreement
Pointing out a mistake
Challenging the way things are done

Pretty sobering, right?

If speaking up about a mistake, sharing an emotion, or simply offering a different perspective feels dangerous, then we’ve got a culture problem, not a people problem.

This is why leaders need to rethink what “difficult conversations” really mean today.

It’s no longer just about performance management or tough feedback - it’s about the everyday moments where people edit themselves, swallow their ideas, or decide silence feels safer than speech.

Just because you feel comfortable speaking up doesn’t mean others do. Power, authority and rank dynamics change the whole equation. The higher up you sit, the harder it can be to see how your presence changes the room.

So, the question isn’t, “Why aren’t they speaking up?”
It’s, “What am I doing to make it feel safe enough to try?”

Because when leaders deliberately create space for voice, (inviting quieter contributions, appreciating ideas, and validating courage) people start to test the waters. And when they do, everything changes: ideas flow, trust builds, and performance follows.

This is what I call shifting from Dangerous Dialogue to Daring Dialogue. Daring to speak up. Daring to speak your truth. Daring to hold the line.

The challenge is real. But the opportunity is even greater: to build cultures where every voice counts, and where silence no longer costs us innovation, trust, and human connection.

“Are you ready for the ride?”