The increase in awareness and popularity of psychological safety

I thought it would be interesting to look at the frequency of the search term “psychological safety” over time, and map certain events onto that. If you head to Google Trends, you can search for almost any term and how often it’s been searched for since 2004, mapped by region too. You can waste A LOT of time having fun with this, finding interesting trends and correlations, such as this one correlating the search terms “Oculus Rift” and “Backstreet Boys”.

Here, I’ve plotted “psychological safety” over time, and annotated the chart with some key events and publications that I feel are relevant (at least relevant to me – hence why I’ve put a couple of my talks on there, the launch of psychsafety.com, and others). If you click here or on the image below, you’ll find a high res version of the chart.

Thanks to a few more suggestions from the community, I’ve added various events above the x-axis that have significant relevance for psychological safety, and below the x-axis I’ve added other societal and cultural events that serve in part to put this timeline into context, and may have some tangential connection to the increase in recognition and popularity of psychological safety in the workplace. These include things like the #MeToo movement, the increasing polarisation of western politics, the existential threat of climate change, the 737 MAX crashes that highlight cultural challenges at Boeing, and Covid-19 of course.

(Note: the y-axis is relative. The figure of 100 simply represents the maximum, which happens to be now, because the trajectory is still upwards!)

There are some interesting points that we can see from this, notably the distinct dip each year around December when many people take leave, and maybe the most clear correlation is the peak directly after the publication of the NYT article about Google’s Project Aristotle.

I’m sure you’ll have some ideas of your own, and I’d love to see your adapted and modified versions!

Many thanks to Benedict Steele, Hari Haralembiev, Terry Brown, Brian Hunter Young, Andy Ayim, Balazs Szakmary, Matt Ballantine, Christoffer Ericsson, Himanshu Swaroop, Becky Thomas, Samantha Sieverling, Nic Menkhoff, and others for the great suggestions and insight.

Further Links:

Google’s Project Aristotle
History of Psychological Safety
Psychological Safety Community

Psychological Safety Online Workshops

You can still book your place on our online workshops! Book on one, some, or all six and save 10% Book here.

Psychsafety.com courses all now come with Credly Badges! After the course, you’ll receive an email to claim your badge, which you can use to evidence your CPD and share on your LinkedIn profile.

Note: in addition to affordability based pricing, we offer one free scholarship place on every workshop we deliver. Preference is given to people in lower-income countries and from disadvantaged or under-represented groups. 

Psychological Safety in Practice

Psychological Safety in Incident Response

This is a great piece by Mandi Walls at PagerDuty on The role of psychological safety in incident response. A psychologically safe environment is demonstrated as a key factor in improving not just incident response, but also the overall effectiveness and resilience of teams, especially in distributed and complex operational contexts.

Learning from excellence in healthcare 

This is a great thematic analysis of staff-reported excellence in healthcare from two acute NHS trusts. Five overarching, interdependent themes were identified, including that appreciation
and gratitude helped to foster a psychologically safe, generative culture, and a positive work ethic benefit patient experiences, staff productivity and morale. An interesting point is that staff appreciated personalised patient care that deviates from the norm but results in a positive outcome – “positive deviance” in contrast with negative deviance that is often described by “normalisation of deviance” in organisations. Of course, it’s often hard to tell the difference except in hindsight! 

Drift

I enjoyed this episode of Punk Rock Safety with Ben Goodheart, Ron Gannt and Dave Provan where they (mostly) describe the idea of drift away from the norm (just as above in the deviation in healthcare, and in particular the idea of intentionality behind the deviance that creates system-level drift. This is one aspect of the difference between positive (or practical) and negative deviance.

Boeing

Allegedly, Boeing retaliated against engineers overseeing design work on behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration – after the FAA backed the engineers about how the work should be performed, Boeing gave both men negative performance reviews, which impacted their pay raises and promotion prospects. This is certainly one way to destroy psychological safety and prevent a speak up culture!

Psychological Safety in Manufacturing

Thanks to Lisa Ryan for inviting me to speak about psychological safety in manufacturing teams! We discussed what psychological safety is, and its relevance to both quality and safety in manufacturing contexts. 

Four Dimensions of Psychological Safety

Jonathan Smart shared this neat infographic representing Amy Edmondson’s “four dimensions” of psychological safety from the concept of Dynamic Teaming. 

This week’s poem:

If I can stop one heart from breaking, by Emily Dickinson

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Thanks to Nathalie Delaney for the poem suggestion