Guardrails and Failure

Safety Guardrails, Mechanisms and Culture.

In working with psychological safety, we often touch on “real” or physical safety and how the two are related. By “real” safety, I mean not only safety from the risk of injurious accidents but also all risks of *things going wrong*. This includes everything from compromised patient safety to product defects and system outages. All these risks are unintended consequences of work: indeed, much of the time, the “safest” thing for a worker to do (the thing that incurs least risk of failure) is nothing at all. But of course, doing nothing is rarely a good long term strategy for success.

I often refer to Paul O’Neill at Alcoa in my workshops, about his laser-focus on worker safety at Alcoa, and how that led to a cultural shift towards far greater psychological safety across the organisation.

We need people to actually *do* work, despite the risk of failure, which is never zero. One way to do that is to accept a certain amount of failure, or redefine failure completely as a learning opportunity. However, not everything is “safe to fail” – for example, it isn’t safe to fail when failure would result in worker injuries or the collapse of large scale, safety critical, or business critical technological systems. In these cases, we need to implement tooling, systems, and mechanisms that prevent failure, or mitigate the impact of failure should it occur. We should remember though, as we discussed in the Safety I and Safety II issue, mechanisms to prevent accidents are necessary, but not sufficient, for high performance.
 

I’ve recently read the excellent Investments Unlimited book about security and compliance in technology. Investments Unlimited is a novel that describes the technological tooling and processes (i.e. guardrails) that work to both reduce the risk of failure and enable the fast flow of value. Definitely worth a read if you’re into DevOps, infosec and software development. Even though the book focusses primarily on the practical tools and technologies required for what some people call “DevSecOps”, and rarely mentions culture, it struck me that the tooling and equipment itself are catalysts of safety cultures.

Culture is essentially the manifestation of what we do, how we do it, and how we communicate. Tools and equipment influence how we work, and how we think about work too. Guardrails that make it safer to work, either through reduced risk of injury or reduced risk of failing, not only protect us from actual risk but send a strong cultural signal to people. That signal is something along the lines of:

“We recognise that humans are fallible. We acknowledge there are risks involved in work, and we want to protect you from them. If you do the right thing, and failure occurs, we will not hold you responsible.” 

(In fact, I’d love to see more teams adopt this as part of their team principles)
 

There are various types of safety “guardrails”

• Physical – such as the yellow railing in the image above
• Technological – such unit tests and security scans in software teams
• Procedural – such as checklists
• Behavioural – such as a social contract or team charter

The thinking behind these is that if you adhere to the guardrails, and failure still occurs, it is the system that failed, not you. And this is important – psychological safety is strongly linked to cultures that consider failure to be a system problem rather than a person problem.

A correlation I observe frequently is that teams who put effort in to building effective mechanisms to prevent and mitigate failure tend to also demonstrate strong safety cultures – that is, they look for systemic causes of failure rather than blaming people for mistakes. I theorise that this improved psychological safety is in large part because of the critical conversations and practices that are required in order to put those safety measures into place. In order to create the guardrails, they have to have conversations about failures – what might go wrong. 

Psychological safety is a prerequisite for physical safety. I believe if you were measuring psychological safety alongside real world safety (through for instance the number of accidents, or failures), you’d find that psychological safety metrics are a leading indicator of real-world safety (the lagging metric).

Back to guardrails. Whatever your guardrails look like – from yellow barriers to a team charter – they reinforce the belief that failure is a system problem, not a people problem. They signal that whilst humans are part of the sociotechnical system, people (and “human error”) will not be held to blame for failures.

Psychological Safety 101

I love this piece on psychological safety from the fantastic Elizabeth Ayer. The essence of this piece is on the micro-behaviours – the subtle, less overt, “small things” that anyone on a team, but particularly those in management and leadership roles do when people speak up to raise concerns, challenge ideas or suggest alternatives. As Elizabeth points out, sometimes managers blatantly and overtly shut people down when they speak up, but at least because it’s overt, we can address and try to adjust that behaviour. What can be more insidious and difficult to address, partly because we are often unaware that we are doing them, are micro-behaviours, such as sighing when we hear bad news, changing the subject, or neglecting to thank someone for contributing.

Practices to address these include sitting with and examining your own biases, practising listening, seeking out the voices of those who are marginalised, and inspecting your own reactions.  Elizabeth also suggests three useful tips to foster greater psychological safety:

Tip 1 Take it seriously and be grateful when someone says something they find uncomfortable to you.

Tip 2 Take the small things as seriously as the big things (almost).

Tip 3 Make spaces that are as comfortable as possible for voicing meaningful dissent.


Here’s a fab podcast episode of Why Would Anyone, with Amy Edmondson. I particularly like the points made about different national cultures, and the emphasis on how we deal with failure.

This is a decent piece about psychological safety that highlights HROs (High Reliability Organisations) and looking for the “weak signals” of failure. This takes skill and expertise as well as psychological safety to speak up when your spidey sense is tingling.

Here’s a piece from Tim Clarke and Alistair Aitchison about some leaders who are afraid of psychological safety. I like this point: psychological safety “…redistributes influence. For leaders who feed on title and status, it threatens their positional power.“

Roberto Ferraro was inspired by my recent piece on Team Charters to write and draw this, shared on LinkedIn. I love it! We all make mistaks. 

Garry Browne is a psychological safety evangelist, and Head of Learning and Development at Nestle. He’s studying an MSc in Coaching & Behavioural Change, and researching inclusive leadership as a predictor of psychological safety for his dissertation. He’s looking for people to share their experiences of inclusive leadership in this 5-10 minute survey, so if you have a little time, it would be much appreciated! 

Finally (well done for making it this far by the way, I appreciate this week is a big one!), here’s a fantastic piece by Gareth Lock about psychological safety in diving debriefs. They use a DEBrIEF model based upon work by Robert Teschner and Amy Edmondson, and Gareth describes eloquently how modelling vulnerability, admitting mistakes, and demonstrating learning from mistakes, as a leader, is so powerful in debriefing situations. The rest of the site is worth a dig around, there’s some great stuff here, whether you’re a diver or not.

Things to do and try:

Accessible Social by Alexa Heinrich is a fantastic resource for any content creator – whether you’re creating internal corporate communications, building websites or writing a blog. It’s a free resource hub for anyone who wants to learn how to make their content inclusive and accessible for people with disabilities. There is so much useful and insightful information here, from how to best make use of emojis, to Alt text writing tips. There’s even a downloadable (or buyable) beginners guide to creating inclusive social media content.