[commandlinefan]

> people are very conflict averse and will avoid giving that sort of feedback

I'm not (that) conflict averse - I'm perfectly happy to suggest, when asked, that we could deliver better results faster if we could spend some time fixing some non-customer facing problems, had better tools, and had a testing environment that was closer to the production environment. I have no trouble saying those things, but I've never seen any action taken on any of them.

[justin_oaks]

Indeed. The learned helplessness comes in after you try make improvements over and over again, and still no action is taken. You assume, usually correctly, that you're helpless to effect change so you give up.

The main driver of learned helplessness is those who refuse to listen to feedback or act on feedback.