Psychological Safety, Everest and Mountaineering

Everest, and psychological safety in the mountains

Thanks so much to a client of mine, the excellent Paul Verrico at Eversheds Sutherland, I was lucky enough to attend the 70th anniversary of the first Everest ascent, at the Royal Geographical Society in London this week. Peter Hillary (Edmund’s son) and Jamling Tenzing (Tenzing Norgay’s son) reflected on their fathers’ remarkable achievement, and other speakers discussed the impact of that first ascent in 1953, what Everest is like today and how it inspires people to “climb their own Everests”. Ever since I was very young, I’ve been enthralled by mountains and mountaineering. I read Heinrich Harrer’s “The White Spider” about the first attempts to ascend the Eiger’s North Face, and devoured Joe Simpson’s mountaineering books, as well as Herzog’s account of climbing Annapurna, Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air”, describing the Everest disaster in May 1996 (and Anatoli Boukreev’s response, The Climb) as well as many others. 

Sunrise in the Annapurna

Most of my life has been spent enjoying time in the mountains, whether mountain biking, camping, or hiking in Snowdonia or the Highlands of Scotland. I’ve trekked in the Himalayas, and mountain biked up and down the highest pass in Europe, Pico del Veleta at 3,396 metres (though I broke my collarbone on the way down!). Back in 2011, I organised a group of us to mountain bike Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the UK. That was hard: at one point we had to use our bikes and each other as anchors in a 45-degree snowfield in order to climb up. Some of the strongest bonds and highest sense of performance in teams that I’ve ever experienced have been in the mountains. 

And reflecting on the talks from Stephen Venables, Kenton Cool and Hari Budha Magar at the 70th anniversary event, it’s clear that the need for a strong, capable, and psychologically safe team echoes throughout all of these stories of mountaineering; in the mountains, if team members don’t feel safe to highlight concerns, ask for help, or suggest ideas, it can lead to disaster. After all, as Ed Hillary said to his son Peter, “posthumous success is overrated.” 

Jamling Tenzing speaking at the RGS 70th anniversary of the first Everest ascent.

Paul Verrico and Sarah Valentine of Eversheds Sutherland set out in these two articles (part one, and part two) their ROPE safety theory that uses mountaineering stories of both success and disaster (including the 1996 Everest disaster) to illustrate the need for Rest, Observation, Planning and Empowerment. In many safety contexts, factors such as fatigue, accumulated stress and family pressure are often ignored. An ascent of Mount Everest is a useful analogy for safety professionals in giving a context to directors and managers to explain this phenomenon – check out this video of Paul and Sarah taking us through the ROPE theory.

In addition to our well-established “Teams and People” Practice Playbook, we now have Technology and Education Playbooks available to download. 

Psychological safety at work:

This is a great article in HBS “Working Knowledge”, summarising a paper by Amy Edmondson and Derrick Bransby, analysing and synthesising the research on psychological safety over the past couple of decades or so. The article is good, but diving into the paper is better 🙂 The paper identifies four dominant themes relating to psychological safety: getting things done, learning behaviours, improving the work experience, and leadership. I love this image from the paper – a graphical co-word network of terms in contemporary psychological safety literature, and I already use it as a learning resource in workshops.

The paper also highlights some key directions and needs in terms of future research into psychological safety:

• Specific practices to employ in organisations and teams (note to self: I need to invite some researchers to our “Practice Masterclass” workshops!)
• Longitudinal research (research over a period of time, rather than a snapshot in time) – to help us understand how psychological safety changes, erodes and is rebuilt over time in organisations.
• Cultural and demographic differences. This is a massive area, and one that we deal with a lot in our workshops. A majority share of the existing literature is based on US, or at least Western, cultures and organisations. Research on multi-cultural teams, race and gender, and demographic differences in respect to levels of and antecedents to psychological safety is needed.
• Types of work: we know that safety-critical environments and knowledge work outcomes benefit significantly in environments of high psychological safety, but less is known about other forms of work.
• Fluid, remote, and short-lived teams. The pandemic changed the way we work, and research hasn’t necessarily been able to keep pace with how teams have become more fluid, dispersed, and remote.
• Conversational dynamics and microdynamics (I often refer to these aspects as micro-behaviours) – how behaviours such as normalising uncertainty and discussing goals over methods can foster psychological safety.

The paper is generously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. So newsletter readers can access a copy here: Psychological Safety Comes of Age: Observed Themes in an Established Literature if you want to read it in more detail.

Another exciting announcement is this new Fearless Organisation Book Club Guide, co-created by Magdalena Björkman, Viktor Cessan and myself. Take a look, download a copy, use it in workshops, or use it for self study. And let us know if you spot any errors or improvements!

Check out this great talk by Taylor Poindexter, Engineering Manager at Spotify: Infusing Psychological Safety into your Teams, from RenderATL 2022. I love the phrase “build gratitude into the fabric of the team”

Here’s a great read from Julian Stodd: Subversive social communities to drive organisational change.  “Communities can subvert process and do so in an inclusive and dynamic way. That’s the reality of change in the Social Age, and you may as well be part of it, because it happens anyway, whether sanctioned or not.“

This week’s poem:

How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors, by Brian Bilston

It’s not rocket surgery.
First, get all your ducks on the same page.
After all, you can’t make an omelette
without breaking stride.

Be sure to watch what you write
with a fine-tuned comb.
Check and re-check until the cows turn blue.
It’s as easy as falling off a piece of cake.

Don’t worry about opening up
a whole hill of beans:
you can always burn that bridge when you come to it,
if you follow where I’m coming from.

Concentrate! Keep your door closed
and your enemies closer.
Finally, don’t take the moral high horse:
if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it.