In 1980, Chris Argyris published a short article called ‘Making the Undiscussable and its Undiscussability Discussable’. Argyris wrote broadly and for decades about organizational behavior and its consequences, but this is the article with the catchy title and the fun terminology so it’s the one people remember. Let’s start there.
(Access the article via JSTOR or archive.org.)
Undiscussables 1980
Argyris wrote that as individuals enter organizations they bring
a set of values, action strategies, and skills that lead them to respond automatically to threatening issues by ‘easing in,’ ‘appropriately covering,’ or by ‘being civilized.’
Any way you wish to describe the actions, they add up to making threatening issues undiscussable and then to making their undiscussability undiscussable. The organization may not be the culprit; it may be the victim of the individuals who work within it. However, once the victim, the organization may collude to maintain and reinforce the problem.
The article uses undiscussability to diagnose mismatches between various learning strategies available—what Argyris called single-loop vs. double-loop learning—and their (mis)application to various problems that arise. This is valuable and good, but it feels incomplete.
Undiscussables 2025
At 45 years’ remove from the paper, there has been a change:
- Back in 1980, Argyris approached undiscussables as emergent, unwanted behaviors that a wise organization could route around in order to achieve shared understanding and clarity of purpose.
- In 2025, individuals bring their own perspectives on undiscussability into an organization, per Argyris. But the typical organization has also established its own set(s) of undiscussables. To what end?—as a means of control.
This is not solely a result of the present political circumstance. Although authoritarianism trickles down in a way that most things do not, what we’ve seen in the last year in the workplace is a change in degree, not in kind.
The widening circle of undiscussability has consequences.
- The further up someone is in the org chart, the more fabricated (as in: filtered, or ‘eased in’ to acceptability) the information they receive. This huge disconnect helps nobody, as Argyris discussed in the 1980 paper.
- Conversely, lower on the org chart, a simply outrageously tremendous amount of labor goes into producing these limited, acceptable, discussable messages.
- Things go worse than they otherwise might. Opportunities and ideas are constrained. Failures take longer and cost more. People are excluded.
- And you aren’t meant to talk about any of it. It’s all undiscussable.
Courage & kindness
I bring all this up because I want you to have courage. I want you to know that if you’re feeling this pressure, you’re not alone. I don’t suggest you stand up and shout out the organization’s undiscussables. But maybe write them down somewhere, on a 100% offline piece of paper, and think about how their mere, invisible, undiscussed presence benefits the organization.
Returning at last to Argyris’ formulation of undiscussables as ‘threatening issues’: what are they afraid of?—what are they threatening you with?—and what kindness or stout-heartedness might you extend today, tomorrow, and again the day after, to others feeling the same sense of enclosure?