A workplace can praise initiative while quietly punishing surprises.

What an organisation rewards is not what it says at the meeting; it is what happens to the person who tried. Initiative is easy to praise in the abstract and awkward in practice, because real initiative arrives unannounced and makes somebody’s week harder. So people learn from the reaction rather than the poster, and after a while they bring ideas only when the idea is already safe.

Watch what happens to the last person who did something unrequested where you work. That tells you the real rule. And if you are the one being surprised, notice your first response, because everyone else is reading it too.