How To Speak Up — When You Don’t Want To | From TED Business

Sarah Crawford-Bohl’s TEDx talk, republished on TED Business (episode surfaced on Think Fast Talk Smart, published 2026-04-30), focused on practical ways to “speak up when you don’t want to.” Framing silence as both a refuge and a barrier, she drew on her experience as a nurse and healthcare leader — and lessons from her late mother, an ICU nurse — to argue that avoiding difficult conversations is costly in fast-changing workplaces and dangerous in clinical settings. She introduced a compact decision aid: a moral compass (North = do the right thing; South = support; East = empathy; West = wonder) to help move from reactive freeze to intentional conversation. Sarah illustrated the compass with a concrete episode in which she was called out publicly over a communications piece; by owning authorship, inviting dialogue, and using curiosity and empathy, she and the physician discovered different perceptions (he circled 9 positives; she identified 18 problem references) and repaired the relationship. Host Modupe Akinola added a complementary tool for apologies — Adam Galinsky’s QORC (Quick, Open, Responsibility, Commit) — reinforcing the episode’s practical emphasis: small structures and timely behavior can turn awkward conflict into learning, better morale, and, in healthcare, safer patient care.