The worst part was not the outage

I once took leave and made sure nobody at work could reach me. Phone off, the lot. And of course that was the week something broke, badly enough that the business nearly stopped.

I was heading the Cloud and DevOps team, so the people left holding it would normally have called me. They couldn't. So they guessed. They added machines to carry the load, and more machines meant a bigger bill every month, some of it for capacity nobody actually needed. When I came back, the outage was not what I regretted. The guessing was. They were guessing because of me.

I went to my managers in person, said sorry once, explained what happened as plainly as I could, and put the same thing in an email. I expected the worst. What I got was people who were worried about me, a proper query because a real failure had happened, and then a long clean-up with the team.

The quiet calculation

So let me ask you something. The last time you got something wrong at work, what was the first thought? I'd bet it was some version of can I sort this before anyone notices?

Sometimes you can. Sometimes it really is a typo. However, that same instinct is exactly how a skill problem quietly becomes a trust problem.

Think about borrowing your uncle's car and scraping it on the gate. Tell him that evening, with pictures and a question about which mechanic, and the conversation is about the car. Park it with the scrape against the wall and let him find it next week, and the conversation is about you. Same scratch. Now he's asking what else you haven't told him.

Why people stay quiet anyway

The fear is real, and it deserves a straight answer. Fekadu Gelana and colleagues, studying health workers across Africa, found that fear of being punished was the most common reason people did not report problems. Some workplaces really do go looking for someone to blame.

But there's a second calculation most of us skip: what happens if I don't say it, and it surfaces later without me? Research by Peter Kim and his colleagues points the same way. When a lapse reads as a gap in skill, an apology rebuilds trust far better than denying it. When it reads as dishonesty, trust is much harder to win back. That study was about people accused of a lapse rather than people owning up to one, so I take it as a pointer, not proof.

And now there's a tool in the middle

A lot of what goes wrong at work today has ChatGPT or Gemini somewhere in it. The lawyers in the Mata v. Avianca case filed court citations that ChatGPT had invented, then defended them when they were challenged. The judge's line stays with me: had they come clean early, the record would look quite different. Not no consequences. A different record.

"The AI did it" won't carry you. If your name is on it, it's yours, and so is the choice of when to speak.

What I'd do now

Say something as soon as you have a credible concern. You don't need certainty first. Three sentences do it: what happened, what you've already done, what you need from them. Sorry once, then the fix, and stay until it's closed.

What those three sentences look like for your own situation, including the three questions that tell you whether it needs saying today, is here: https://dareomotosho.com/resources/field-kit

Sources: Health workers' fear of reporting · Apology vs denial after a trust violation · Mata v. Avianca ruling