“It’s no good having a great culture if you’ve gone out of business.”
“A team is only as safe as the least safe person.”
“If we want people to speak up, we must both reduce the cost and increase the benefit of speaking up.”
“Speaking up doesn’t necessarily mean verbally. We may speak up in writing, using sign language, drawing a picture or simply by pointing a finger.”
“There is no such thing as a zero-risk interaction.”
“The inner belief of psychological safety arises from past and present outer conditions.”
“We all have the potential to damage psychological safety for those around us – and as a result, we all have a responsibility to help foster it.”
“For those who grew up with less financial security, the voice calculus tilts toward greater caution.”
“Power gradients are invisible to those at the top and unavoidable to those at the bottom.”
“All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Harmful.”
“Safety is as much about social dynamics as physical risks.”
“Telling people to ‘try harder’ or ‘pay more attention’ ignores the system that made the mistake possible.”
“Fix the system, not the person.”
“Power isn’t just formal hierarchy. It’s also how popular we are, how much expertise we hold, and the characteristics we possess.”
“You can’t train your way out of a system that punishes people for doing the right thing.”
“People in power are unlikely to dismantle the power structures that got them there.”
“In most organisations, if we can’t measure what matters, we measure what we can, and pretend it matters.”
“If your processes only work when no one makes a mistake, you don’t have a process, you have fragile hope.”
“You can be a great manager of things without leadership skills, but you can’t be a great leader of people without good management skills.”
“High performance doesn’t come from pressure. It comes from safety, expertise, and clarity about what matters.”
“…maybe we should consider ourselves ecologists; stewards of thriving, ever-changing environments.”
“A big failure doesn’t require a big cause; it requires a loaded system.”
“Every time we blame an individual, we lose a chance to understand the system.”
“Learning is hard when the price of honesty is high.”
“We are always operating within varying degrees of complexity. The job isn’t to force things into order, it’s to make some sense of the mess.”
“We should consider whether we’re blaming because it’ll make us feel better, or whether it’s actually a constructive thing to do.”