The Field Guide: An interactive knowledge map

We’re super excited to announce that The Field Guide is now generally available! 

For a long time now, we’ve been thinking about a way to make our nearly 300 psychsafety.com articles more easily accessible and searchable in an organic way. Rather than go to the typical search bar and type in a keyword, we wanted a way that folks could actually explore concepts such as power, voice, and organisational ecological thinking without knowing exactly what they wanted to find before they did so. 

This is that tool. Head to explore.psychsafety.com and you’ll find a visual map of all our articles, plus a few from our partner websites. You can filter by theme and author, search by keyword, find connecting articles and topics, and head over to read the article from the map itself.

The line thickness indicates strength of connection, whilst the size of a node indicates how connected it is. And the colours represent the themes involved in that piece. Dotted lines around a node indicate that it’s a “hub” article. 

If you’re feeling lucky, just click “Surprise me” on the top bar, and you’ll explore a random node and its connections.

At the bottom of all our articles, you’ll also find a panel that will take you to the The Field Guide and explore its relationships with other nodes in the network.

And if you’re interested in the published academic literature, we’ve got your back too! 

If you click on “Papers” at the top, you’ll be presented with a different map showing the core influential papers in the multi-disciplinary field of psychological safety. It includes foundational papers, primary research, meta-analyses, and more.

Then click on a paper, and you’ll not only see its connections to other papers, but the panel will give you a summary of the piece, a Harvard-style citation, related psychsafety.com articles, and more. Plus you’ll find a link to the actual paper, together with an indication of whether the paper is accessible or behind a journal paywall.

Inbound links work to themes, (e.g. https://explore.psychsafety.com/?node=calculus), so you can also share a node link, theme, or author (e.g. Amy Edmondson) with other people.

Explore.psychsafety.com is still in beta, and we’re always ironing out bugs, adding new features, and building up the papers database, so if you find a bug, would like to suggest a feature or another paper to be added, let us know! We also have an open source version available on GitHub (using classic films as data) so that you can create your own Knowledge Maps. 

This video walks you through the functionality of the map, including exploring, searching, and providing feedback too.

Or, if you’d rather be shown around: follow a trail.

Free exploration is lovely when you want to wander, but sometimes you’d rather have a route. So we’ve added Reading Trails: curated, step-by-step walks through the map, each one following a single idea from its beginnings to somewhere worth arriving. Click 🗺 Trails on the top bar and pick one. Hiking boots optional.

Each trail is a sequence of waypoints (the key articles or papers on that theme), and you move through them one at a time, reading as you go. Along the way you’ll spot the occasional detour: an optional signpost off to a related piece, there if you want it and easy to skip if you don’t. Your progress is saved, so you can wander off, close the tab, and rejoin the trail where you left it. Reach the last waypoint and you’ve made the summit.

Three trails are open to everyone right now:

• A History of Psychological Safety: the scholarly lineage of the idea, from Rogers and Schein through Kahn and Edmondson to the measured, meta-analysed field it is today.
• Safety & Learning from Disasters: from a Swedish warship that sank in 1628 to the modern science of catastrophe, and how the study of disaster moved from blaming components to understanding systems.
• Measuring Psychological Safety: how to measure the thing without mistaking the measurement for the thing.

Sign in and a couple more open up, including a walk through gender, status and voice, and a long, technical descent into complexity science. And because a trail is just a link, you can share one the way you’d share a node or a theme: send a colleague explore.psychsafety.com/?trail=history-of-ps-papers and they’ll start exactly where you meant them to. More trails are on the way.

Enjoy!