The Psychological Safety Field Book

A Psychological Safety Field Book is on the way

Amy Edmondson has a new book coming. The Fearless Organization Field Book: A Guide for Creating Psychological Safety at Work (Wiley) is listed for publication next year, and beyond the title, we know very little about it. I’ve pre-ordered it anyway, and this piece is about why, and about what I will be looking for when it arrives.

Some context for anyone newer to this territory. Edmondson is not one voice among many in psychological safety: she is the researcher whose 1999 study of hospital teams turned the construct into a measurable, validated property of teams, and whose work since has anchored practically every serious study in the field. Our own timeline of the concept is, in significant part, a timeline of some of Amy’s career. When we map the academic terrain in the Field Guide, her papers sit at the centre of it.

The gap the book steps into

For twenty-five years there has been a curious division between research and practice in psychological safety. In the space between the two of those, an industry grew.

Some of that industry is thoughtful. A lot of it is absolutely not. Psychological safety has been flattened into surveys that promise a single score, leadership checklists, and numerous dashboards and diagnostics. The research says psychological safety is an emergent property of a group, whilst the industry often sells it as a product that a leader can install.

Edmondson has spent years gently (and sometimes not so gently) pushing back on this: correcting the “be nice” misreading, insisting that safety is not comfort, pointing out that a climate cannot be mandated into existence. 

So a field book is needed, because the practical layer (as opposed to the research layer) is where most people actually meet psychological safety. 

A few hopes for the Field Book

Practical guidance about psychological safety is legitimately hard to write, and we say that as people who have spent six years attempting it.

I hope it resists the leader-as-hero framing. Most practical material makes psychological safety something leaders do to teams. The evidence is more interesting: safety is built, tested and repaired by everyone in the room, and leaders are not solely responsible for it, even though they carry disproportionate weight. 

I hope it treats measurement with respect for what measurement can and cannot do. There is a well-worn path from “how do we know it’s working?” to a dashboard that makes things worse: scores gamed, surveys mistaken for the thing itself, a living property of a group reduced to a metric. 

I hope it addresses power. Power gradients are the single most important thing to address with respect to psychological safety, and often the most difficult, because people in power rarely want to dismantle the power structures that they’re standing on.

I hope it’s honest about what tools cannot do. The best practical writing is honest about its own reach: an exercise can open a conversation, and cannot substitute for the hundred small responses that follow it. Our experience is that practices help when they are held lightly and calcify when they are followed as scripts. 

When the Field Book Arrives

I’ve pre-ordered the book, and when it arrives, I’ll review it properly and connect the whole thing into the wider terrain so you can see where it sits.

In the meantime, our own practical material is here, our reading list is here, and the research underneath all of it is mapped in the Field Guide, where Edmondson’s work already occupies the high ground.