Coaching and Psychological Safety: listening, trust and letting go of control By Jade Garratt When I first trained as a coach, I realised there were two things I wasn’t very good at: I meant w...
Emergence, substrate, succession, indicator species & ecotones I started my career in ecology, as an experimentalist working in a research station’s wonderfully named “Weed Science” departme...
Are you at the Sharp End or the Blunt End Most people who’ve been to school (and many who haven’t!) have strong opinions about education Understandably so – education speaks to how we raise ...
Forced Vulnerability One of the most persistent patterns in organisational change and dynamics is the search for a shortcut: the belief that if we can just find the right lever to pull, the right acti...
In part one we explored the benefits and risks in naming psychological safety In part two, we explored power and diversity In part three we dived into dissent, non-determinism, and...
Part 3: The Safety to Dissent In part one we discussed the power and danger in naming psychological safety In part two, we explored power and diversity This week we’re continuing our series of ...
Part 2: Different people, different safety Continuing our reflections on the last five years In part one, we explored the name psychological safety itself, and here in part two, we get into diversity,...
Part 1: The Power and Peril of Naming Over the past five years of our work in psychological safety, it has transformed from a little-known term, understood and explicitly practised by only a small gro...
Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety There really is some bad advice and research around in respect to psychological safety, in particular how it relates to aspects of neurodiversity...
Psychological Safety Is Necessary But Not Sufficient We sometimes hear “But psychological safety isn’t enough!”, and well… Obviously It’s rather like saying that having a fully f...
The Amagasaki Derailment In our workshops and training, we often use real-world stories as a way to explore the dynamics of both failure and success Stories are a powerful tool to help us reflect on o...
Psychological Safety Books for Children In 2020, we shared a collection of the best books about psychological safety As new books were published (and there have been a lot of them about psycholo...
By Jade Garratt It will probably come as no great surprise to those of us who work with the concept of psychological safety that one of the earliest references to the term in academic and psychologica...
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2025 – the largest global survey on psychological safety ever! Psychological safety is the core ingredient behind high-performing, innovative,...
Barriers to Psychological Safety There are many team-level, organisation-level and broader barriers to speaking up, including (most significantly) steep power gradients, cultural norms (organisational...
How you respond matters “Everything you do is important to your organization People are watching you The people in your organization determine how to move forward after both successful work and how ...
Practices that Foster Psychological Safety There are many behaviours that (depending on the context) can help to foster psychological safety, over 170 of which are listed in our big list of psychologi...
Feedback in the workplace In our “Delivering Effective Feedback” workshops, we explore participants’ experiences of feedback, and we find, of all the feedback they’ve received so far in their ...
Job Security and Psychological Safety In a lot of “What Psychological Safety Is Not” articles, we often come across statements like “psychological safety is not job security” And that’s true...
Psychological Safety Research Pulse Last week, we asked “Typically, how familiar are people in your workplace with the concept of psychological safety” 121 people responded, and the distribu...
How We Think About Learning at Psych Safety At Psych Safety, we care deeply about how learning happens Not just what people take away from a session, but how it feels to be there – what kind of ...
Why do We Foster Psychological Safety By Tom Geraghty and Jade Garratt It’s easy, when considering why we should work on psychological safety, to go straight to the organisational benefits: improved...
Cultural Diversity and Cockpit Communication Here’s a classic paper from 1999 – Cultural diversity and crew communication, by Fischer and Orasanu They examined how cultural background, ran...
By Jade Garratt Which of these do you think might damage psychological safety in a team The answer, of course, is that all of them can Sometimes it’s individual behaviours that cause harm to the psy...
Why Just Culture Isn’t Sticking by Tom Geraghty What Do We Mean by “Just” Culture The concept of a “Just Culture” was first developed in James Reason’s 1997 book Managing the Risks of ...
By Jade Garratt Have you ever found yourself reacting to something a colleague said as if you were a child being told off by their parents, even though you’re both adults and peers Or ever said some...
Comfort vs Need by Tom Geraghty What do we do when the things that help some people in the team feel psychologically safer don’t work for everyone Perhaps one person says they need time away from th...
“Sociological” Safety By Tom Geraghty The term psychological safety has been in use since Carl Rogers’ work in the 1950s and was applied to organisational contexts by Schein and Bennis (...
Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) During my ecology degree, whilst studying ecosystem and habitat change, I learned about Self-Organised Criticality (SOC), and I was fascinated by how it explained the ...
by Jade Garratt At Psych Safety, our focus has always been on psychological safety in the workplace – helping teams and organisations become more inclusive, equitable, and high-performing throug...
