Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses how speaking up sounds different for everyone, and psychological safety looks different to everyone. We also have learning from incidents, post-mortems, inclusion and diversity.

If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people who may appreciate it! To view this newsletter and previous issues online, head to psychsafety.com

The psychological safety online meetup is back! This time on the 9th of June at 7pm UK time. We have a fantastic speaker lined up – Kimberly Young-McLear PhD, who is going to present about diversity in the field of psychological safety, psychological violence and how to be an active ally.

We’re also giving away a copy of Ruchika Tulshyan’s “Inclusion on Purpose” to one lucky attendee 🙂

This newsletter is sponsored by Conflux.

Conflux is the leading business consultancy worldwide helping organisations to navigate fast flow in software. We help organisations to adopt and sustain proven, modern practices for delivering software rapidly and safely.

Many organisations today are stuck using ways of working from a bygone age. In this article, Sophie Weston, Principal at Conflux, takes a look at why knowledge work needs a new approach in which psychological safety is a key ingredient.

Psychological Safety, Neurodiversity & Dyspraxia.

Note: This section this time has proven a little self-indulgent – apologies, some of this came to me whilst I was driving and I pulled over and wrote this below. I hope you get something from it, but feel free to skip to the “Psychological Safety at Work” section if you prefer.

I was diagnosed with dyspraxia at an early age, had trouble with coordination and talking, and had speech therapy until I was seven years old. The last word I really had trouble with was “hammer”. I can say hammer pretty well now, but there are still some words I stumble over. I find “bureaucracy” both difficult to say and spell 😀 

Around the age of 14, like many other adolescent boys, I also developed a stutter/stammer. I found this devastating. To not have confidence in my own voice, after only a few years of getting over earlier speech problems, was horrible. To a degree, I retreated back into myself and spoke a lot less often, but learned coping mechanisms and methods to reduce the stammer, like starting a sentence with soft consonants (such as starting to talk by saying “So…”, and going to secret singing lessons at school – nobody stutters when they sing. (The lessons were secret because it was a rough school, and being outed as going to singing lessons would have risked both humiliation and playground violence!)

Years on, I feel that these experiences have given me a deep appreciation for what it’s like to not be able to speak up for any reason, personally I might not have been able to physically say the thing, or work out how to articulate it, or worry that I’ll start to talk but stutter and stammer. That aggregated experience means it took me a long, long time to feel confident enough to speak in groups, let alone do any public speaking. I didn’t feel safe that my voice would do what I intended it to do, and I didn’t feel safe that I wouldn’t be humiliated for how I spoke.

Since then, I’ve become more confident over time, stutter much more rarely now, and for over many years now, forced myself to engage in public speaking (which, despite finding it intensely intimidating, I actually really enjoy), chairing meetings and even recording videos of me speaking and putting them online.

However, those bad experiences still happen occasionally. Over the past few years, thankfully quite rarely, I’ve been told to “get to the point” when trying to articulate myself or stuttering slightly, “be less English” when finding my words, or simply spoken over whilst getting my words in order.

This might be a little reductive or psychoanalytical, but I wonder if this is really why the concept of psychological safety in speaking up connects with me at such a fundamental level.

So I’m interested in looking at psychological safety, voice, neurodiversity, and other differences in communication – such as being deaf and signing instead of speaking, cognitive differences that make it harder for people to articulate what they’re trying to say, people who are mute for any reason and use automated speech tools, or simply cultural differences that mean some of us feel less able to speak up because of the style in which we communicate. Other communication preferences include, for example, the space and time to tic, to speak softly or loudly, or to write down what they want to say instead of vocalising it.

I feel that the field of psychological safety is maybe not dominated by, but certainly leans towards, a somewhat Westernised, English-speaking, neuro-typical approach. We may assume that psychological safety manifests in the same way for everyone. In reality, for some, it might mean the patience and time to pause before speaking, taking more time to say what we’re trying to say, and the space to stutter and stammer without consequences if it happens. To someone else, that might look like a non-psychologically safe space because of how we’re communicating, when it’s in fact the opposite.

We should be careful not to turn a certain western and neuro-typical framing of psychological safety into the *ideal* of what psychological safety should be for everyone.

Thanks for reading! As always, I’m interested in your perspectives and insights.

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

Episode 9 of the Google Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) podcast is all about Postmortems, with Ayelet Sachto. Really worth a listen (or a read, as they also provide a transcript), as Ayelet describes how they focus on fostering psychological safety to get to the root causes of incidents, because the causes exist, whether we discuss them or not – we must make sure that we have the environment to bring those issues out into the open.

Staying on incidents (and specifically, learning from them), here’s a fantastic article from John Allspaw about learning from incidents: the messy details. John talks in depth about how creating conditions for people to genuinely and effectively learn from the incidents they experience is difficult to do, never mind sustain over time, and how to create those conditions where people can both discover new information and share what they know. I love John’s focus on storytelling, and adding to the richness of the story with dialogue, even pictures – make it a story worth reading, not just filing away. 
(Plus kudos to John for including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as an example!)

Thanks to Tim van Dijck for the heads up on this one – Shell have published their Approach to Safety, which focusses heavily on psychological safety and making it safe to speak up. As Tim pointed out, these strategies can be implemented top-down, or bottom-up, or a combination of the two, and this seems at first read to be rather top-down, so it’ll be interesting to see how successful this is. 

“When leadership participates in the training, they demonstrate and model their commitment to a safe and bias-free environment. When leaders and those with positional power in an organization validate the experiences of others and intervene in a public way, it sets the tone for behavior expectations. If the boss doesn’t allow microaggressions, offensive jokes or slights, others will call that behavior out as well.” This is a great piece in Fortune by Anita Hill about how leaders must engage fully and empower bystanders to prevent sexual harassment at work.

Here’s an excellent piece with Ruchika Tulshyan (of the great book “Inclusion on Purpose“, which we’re giving away a copy of at the psychological safety meetup on the 9th!) – about inclusion and innovative leadership. “They’re worried not just about “What if I get something wrong?” but also “There have been so many times where I had good intentions, and I got called out, so I don’t want to engage.” What’s missing is self-awareness.“

Here’s a piece from the CEO Health + Safety Leadership Network about workplace mental health and inclusion with a lens on generational differences, highlighting the risks of accidentally pitting “one generation against another, and we open ourselves up to the possibility of planning and decision-making based on generational myths, misinformation, and pejorative stereotypes.“

““We say to employees that everything you say or don’t say, everything you do or don’t do, has the potential to raise people up or knock them down and we’d like to agree that, in this workplace, we will choose to do and say things that will raise people up,” she says.” This is a nice article from the Globe and Mail featuring Heather Haslam from ADP, about psychological safety in the workplace.

“Diversity training is sanctioned racism.”
This article by Joseph Santana highlights the Enemies of DEI and humanisation, and links to a very good episode of the ERG PowerTalk podcast, featuring Ervin (Earl) Cobb. It really highlights the divisions that can be surfaced when we being to discuss DEI efforts, primarily (I believe) because those folks with existing privilege haven’t yet acknowledged it and are fearful of “losing out” as a result of DEI programmes and efforts. 

Stop Telling Employees to Be Resilient.
Thanks to Lizz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy for this excellent piece about creating systems for support and dialogue over telling employees to “be more resilient” or providing individualistic measures to simply help people cope with toxic environments and over-burdened work systems. There are some great pieces of advice in here, well worth a read!

Things to do and try:

This is an addition to a retrospective practice, from funretrospectives.com, but isn’t just limited to retros – The Safety Check: a fast and effective way to verify how safe people feel participating in the retrospective, and asks people to anonymously describe their level of safety:

* 5: No problem, I’ll talk about anything.
* 4: I’ll talk about almost anything; a few things might be hard.
* 3: I’ll talk about some things, but others will be hard to say.
* 2: I’m not going to say much; I’ll let others bring up issues.
* 1: I’m not going to talk at all, I don’t feel safe.

This week’s poem:

Look Well to This Day, by Kalidasa

Look to this day:
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement
Are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

Mission statement

The mission of this newsletter is to make the world of work a better, safer, more inclusive and equitable place. We work towards this by sharing, as widely as possible, new research and opinion, case studies, news, practices and methods related to psychological safety. 

This includes topics such as inclusion, human factors, facilitation, safety critical environments, systems thinking, leadership and management, diversity and equity, mental health, organisational dynamics, culture, ethics, and more. 

A core goal is to amplify the voices of minoritised groups and those who are less represented in this field. This includes (but is not limited to) voices of people of colour, neurodiverse people, LGBTQ+ people, women in leadership and tech, and more.

Another goal is to share insights and best practices across different domains: for example, so that those of us in tech may learn from healthcare, and those of us in education can learn from aviation.

I believe knowledge is worthless unless it’s accessible. A key principle of this newsletter is to only share content that everyone can access. This excludes content behind paywalls, research papers that are not open-access, and proprietary tools that don’t open source their algorithms (preventing us from observing how systems make decisions about us). There may be some exceptions to this principle in practice, for example, where authors are able to share original texts of papers.

Whilst this statement will evolve this over time, the core principles of equity, amplification, and progressive & humanistic leadership shouldn’t change.