Selection Pressure and Psychological Safety

Selection Pressure and Psychological Safety

Why has it taken so long for some industries to recognise the importance of psychological safety, whilst others have been doing it for decades? One possible answer: selection pressure.

Over the past few decades, the idea of psychological safety (and analogous terms) has emerged as crucial to our understanding of how teams perform. However, to understand better why it is adopted more quickly in some contexts than others, I think we can draw on the ecological concept of selection pressure. 

Selection pressure refers to the way factors such as disease, environmental change or predation affect a population, resulting in the death of some individuals and the survival of others. The ones that survive, reproduce, replicating the characteristics that enabled them to survive or thrive under that selection pressure. This results in useful characteristics persisting, and characteristics that hinder survival (or reproduction) evolving out. Ultimately it can result in speciation: the evolution of a new species.

Photo by Mr Xerty on Unsplash

If we apply this model to organisations, we can think of different sectors as habitats within the larger ecosystem of organisations around the world. Each sector will have different selection pressures (such as competition) which also change over time, shaping how organisations emerge, adapt, and survive, thrive or die off.

We know that organisations with environments of higher psychological safety are better positioned to avoid and mitigate failures, disasters and accidents. They are also better positioned to innovate more rapidly than those with lower levels of psychological safety. But why do some organisations adopt the principles of psychological safety quickly, while others lag behind? One reason could be the intensity of the selection pressures they are subject to. 

Industries like aviation and healthcare, where the stakes of failure are life and death, have a heightened sense of these pressures. This urgency has fostered environments where psychological safety is not just beneficial but essential. The stark reality in these sectors is that without psychological safety, the cost is irrevocably high, be it in human lives or catastrophic failures. As Katie Driver put it, in industries such as aviation and healthcare, “the links between action and impact are shorter, clearer and the impact of a psychologically unsafe environment are (tragically) obvious.”

Let’s consider aviation first. After disasters including the Tenerife accident in 1977, the sector saw a paradigm shift with NASA’s introduction of Cockpit (later “Crew”) Resource Management (CRM). CRM evolved and spread around the world to become arguably the most successful safety programme ever. It focuses significantly (though not exclusively) on the creation of environments where everyone, no matter their rank or status, can speak up with ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes. Brian Fogarty pointed out that the Tenerife disaster was a kind of epiphany for the aviation industry – the fact that most (if not all) aviation disasters had a key causal link of faulty communication could no longer be ignored. 

In healthcare, the evolution followed a similar but distinct path. The cultural changes analogous to psychological safety were taking place in healthcare during the 1980s and 1990s, but the first fully developed theory of a “Just Culture” was in James Reason’s 1997 book, “Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents”. In a Just Culture, the focus post-incident is on “What went wrong?” rather than “Who is to blame?”, necessitating a psychologically safe environment where open discussion and honesty are paramount. A Just Culture balances accountability and learning – “honest” errors are treated as learning opportunities, leading to training and coaching, while wilful misconduct can result in more serious consequences.

Contrast this with manufacturing and technology. In these industries, the selection pressures are different but they are still influential. Despite the fact that in the motor industry, the stakes are less likely to be life or death, The Toyota Production System (TPS) pioneered integrating psychologically safe practices such as The Andon Cord and the concept of Poka Yoke. We might imagine that competition was the selection pressure in this case, but competition is present in all industries, and anyway, if that was the case, why didn’t the same ideas emerge in the US motor industry? In fact, the more powerful selection pressure here was scarcity: Japan, and Toyota, was the birthplace of Lean; following World War II, Japan’s manufacturing infrastructure was virtually destroyed, and Japan had lost much of its workforce. With limited resources, financial means, and political clout, Japan faced a great challenge to compete wtith the US motor industry. Arguably though, this drove them to focus on what they could control – quality improvement, flow of value, and understanding the psychology of work (assisted by W E Deming), which laid the foundations of psychological safety, and “driving out fear”.

In technology, psychological safety has only gained momentum more recently, despite its early foundations in works like Gerald Weinberg’s 1971 book “The Psychology of Computer Programming.” Weinberg defined programming as “a social activity” and he emphasised the importance of creating an environment in which engineers could admit mistakes and ask for help. His ideas didn’t gain as much momentum as they probably should have done at the time. Tom DeMarco also describes the “signs of a jelled team” that include elements of psychological safety in his 1987 book “Peopleware”. It’s only in more recent years, with the growing adoption of the Agile Manifesto (defined in 2001) that emphasise “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and ideas such as DevOps, that focus on the dynamics between people as much as the technology they use, that psychological safety has been more widely embraced. In Gene Kim’s 2019 book “The Unicorn Project”, he explicitly calls out psychological safety as one of “The Five Ideals of DevOps”. 

Its adoption was perhaps slowed by the less catastrophic nature of failure; Clement Pickering described it this way – “In technology it’s all a bit more nebulous, in most cases at least. So the cost of a failure to speak up might be seen as missed ideas or lost profit, rather than the more tangible links in other industries.”  Hannah Scurfield-Grace also highlighted that industries such as aviation (and others) require expertise in ergonomics and human factors – fields that already embrace psychological safety practices – whilst technology has not, at least until recently. Whilst the technology industry is very competitive, it’s also very successful (seven of the top ten most valuable companies in the world are tech firms), and tech failure is usually felt less viscerally than in other domains, which potentially reduced the selection pressure to “evolve” the adoption of psychological safety universally. 

And some industries, such as much of high-street retail, are yet to significantly acknowledge psychological safety at all. Typically, retail workers may be on zero-hours contracts with low pay, and may be treated as ephemeral, even disposable. Many (though not all) retail organisations have a long way to go in establishing strong foundations in which people can thrive and feel psychologically safe. Perhaps psychological safety selection pressure is lacking in these cases: business tends to be low-risk, a high turnover of staff is accepted as business-as-usual, and employees rarely have the autonomy to make decisions or innovate, so there’s little perceived benefit in encouraging employees to suggest new ideas. At the front line, conformity may be rewarded over innovation. 

Of course, this is a very generalised perspective. There are teams and organisations that work in technology and retail that have embraced the ideas and practices of psychological safety for decades, and the converse applies to parts of healthcare and aviation too – awareness of psychological safety is certainly still not universal, in any industry or field. However, it seems clear that the recognition and adoption of psychological safety are influenced by the immediacy and clarity of the consequences of failure. In sectors where the link between action and impact is clear, immediate, and serious, the adoption of psychological safety practices has been more rapid. This is less so in fields where the repercussions are subtler, more distant, or more nebulous. Put simply, some organisations, by dint of success or lower consequence of failure, are able to afford silence, whilst others do not possess that luxury.

Reflecting on our roles and the environments we navigate, we should ask ourselves: What selection pressures are we facing, or even creating? How do these pressures shape our approach to psychological safety? How do we make a strong case for psychological safety in environments where the consequences of silence are less obvious?

As we continue to understand and value the role of psychological safety in organisational success, its adoption becomes increasingly critical, not just in high-stakes environments but in all domains where collective learning and well-being of teams drive progress and resilience. The challenge lies in recognising and responding to the unique selection pressures within our industries and organisations. Just as species adapt to changing environments and selection pressures, so must organisations and even entire industries; and those that don’t, die out.

Thanks to all the folks in our community, and on Mastodon, Twitter and LinkedIn for your contributions to this article. And many thanks to Jade Garratt for the rather heavy lifting of turning my rambling thoughts into a coherent piece!

Related Articles:

The Adaptive Cycle and Self-Organised Criticality
The Andon Cord
Complexity
Ecotones and The Edge Effect
Deming’s 14 Points
Agile
CRM and Aviation

Psychological Safety at Work

This is a brilliant piece by “Space Industrialist” Chris Lewicki, about his potential $500M failure whilst testing the Mars Rover, Spirit. Thanks to Balasz Szakmary for sharing this in the psychological safety community.

Spirit Mars rover under construction. A yellow Fluke digital multimeter (bottom left), and its essential place in line with spacecraft telemetry (January 2003) – Chris Lewicki

In some of our workshops, we discuss big failures and how low psychological safety plays a role in them, and one of the examples that often comes up is the Covid pandemic response. In this article in the Independent, Matt Hancock accuses Dominic Cummings of creating a “culture of fear” and an atmosphere in which blame was assigned rather than allowing people to “spend all of their effort solving the problems”. 

Thanks to everyone who contributed to our collaborative Miro board on fields and domains related to psychological safety. Based off that, I’ve created a visualisation that draws together related themes, centreing on psychological safety (click for high res). As always, it’s a work in progress, and feedback / suggestions are welcome!

Psychological Safety and Related Books

It’s getting close to the end of the year, so I thought I’d share a few of the best books that I’ve read and re-read this year. Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson; Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson; Oops! Why Things Go Wrong by Niall Downey; Wiring the Winning Organisation by Gene Kim and Steve Spear; Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows; The Health Gap by Michael Marmot; Rebel Bodies by Sarah Graham; The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge; Boyd, by Robert Coram; The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan; The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande; Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom; Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen; Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. 

There are so many leadership and management books available, and I think it’s also really important to broaden our horizons and draw ideas from a wide range of fields including safety, public health, ecology and others, as well as important to read a diverse range of authors too. I thought it might be useful to include this list now, in case anyone is hunting for Christmas present ideas for loved ones or yourselves!


This is another great article by Andrew Hill in the FT, featuring Amy Edmondson’s new book “The Right Kind of Wrong“, and touching on complex & intelligent failures, the Andon Cord, and this excellent point from Amy that is also a core principle of our own work: “failure can also be seen as a privilege”, and ethnic minorities, women and other under-represented groups often “lack the luxury of failing unobtrusively”. On the subject of privilege, Hill also subtly notes that “Musk does not merit a mention in Edmondson’s book” 🙂 I like that Hill also mentions the slide towards dysfunction that some of these once-generative organisations appear to be suffering, and I wonder if that comes back to the idea of selection pressure – where progressive pressure is felt less keenly, do organisations tend to drift back towards dysfunction?

I’m also going to admit here that it’s taken me this long to realise that the UK and US versions of Amy’s book have different subtitles, and it’s not that Amy wrote two very similar books :facepalm:

Stephen Shedletzky’s great book “Speak Up Culture” is also out now, and it really is packed with great stories and tips, written in an entertaining and practical way, for leaders in fostering a environment where people feel safe to speak up. 

 

Steven Spear was kind enough to share the below diagram with me, which is from his and Gene’s excellent book “Wiring the Winning Organisation”, which just came out. In this, you can see many of the topics we address in this newsletter and in our management workshops. Worth a read, it’s an incredibly rich resource for practitioners across multiple fields.

This week’s poem:

if you were born with
the weakness to fall
you were born with
the strength to rise

rupi kaur

From Milk and Honey