The Theory of Constraints (ToC) A long time ago, I read a book that profoundly changed the way I think about work That book was The Goal, written by Eli Goldratt in 1984, The story revolves around Alex Rogo, a […]...
Guest post by Nick Drage, Strategy Lead and Game Designer at Path Dependence Limited, co-author of “The Handbook of Cyber Wargames: Wargaming the 21st Century” At its most abstract level a wargame is a “representation of conflict or competition in […]...
Learning From Work In the spirit of looking back and learning, I thought it’d be nice to dive into a few different practices of learning from the work we do In this issue, we’re going to have a look at […]...
The Adaptive Cycle This is a great paper for the ecological and complexity geeks, like me The adaptive cycle: More than a metaphor Thanks to Christina Bowen for sharing The adaptive cycle is a conceptual framework used to understand the dynamics […]...
Tool: Foster psychological safety We realised recently that the Google Project Aristotle page for their guide on team effectiveness and building psychological safety was 404’ing, so for anyone looking for it, we went over to the Way Back Machine and […]...
The Whitehall Studies and The Social Gradient of Health The relationship between seniority/status and psychological safety is strong In general, we know that people holding more senior and higher status roles often feel safer speaking up in groups, and those […]...
The First Org Chart In 1855, Brigadier General Daniel McCallum, later to become a Civil War officer renowned for “strict precision and stern discipline” as well as for his innovative engineering, created the world’s first organisational chart This chart was […]...
We cannot adequately respond to changes, incidents or threats if we’re operating at capacity And it applies to people, machines, computers, traffic and more - whether you’re running a factory floor, a busy kitchen, a software development team, or a hospital ER, percentage utilisation is impactin...
Guest post by Navya Adhikarla, graduate student in the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke University (Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact “Look me in the eye and tell me you are not lying,” […]...
15/5 Reports To manage teams in a way that fosters psychological safety requires clear communication and feedback channels Team members should have well-defined platforms to share achievements, voice concerns, and seek assistance Ideally, these feedback mechanisms will be consistent, high-caden...
Stutters and Stammers I’ve written previously about my experience growing up with dyspraxia, which I was diagnosed with at an early age My dyspraxia made it difficult for me to pronounce and articulate certain sounds (called phonemes), and meant that I […]...
Deming’s 14 Points of Management I’m a Deming fan, and sad that I never got to meet him or attend any of his lectures W E Deming is possibly most well known for his “PDCA” (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, which is actually […]...
Bad Management It’s important that we learn from our own mistakes and failures, and self-reflect in order to improve However, there’s also a lot we can learn from things others get wrong That, after all, is partly why psychological safety is such […]...
Crew Resource Management In preparing for my conference talk this week, I was reading up further on the 1977 Tenerife disaster and the history of Crew Resource Management (CRM), and came across this excellent paper: The Evolution of Crew Resource Management Training […]...
Verbally Speaking Up at Work Speaking with a client this week, we surfaced an interesting organisational antipattern to psychological safety Sometimes, within an organisation, there exists an unwritten rule: voice your concerns, but only do it verbally in a call or meeting where [&hel...
A critique of Eldor, L, Hodor, M and Cappelli, P, 2023 The limits of psychological safety: Nonlinear relationships with performance Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 177, p104255 Occasionally, the slightly absurd notion emerges that teams could have “too much” [&helli...
Reason's theory holds that most accidents can be traced to one or more of four levels of failure: Organisational influences, Unsafe supervision, Preconditions for unsafe acts, and The unsafe acts themselves...
Executive Summary This pilot study explored the relationship between employment protections—in law and organisational policy—and psychological safety at work Drawing on 84 responses from participants across multiple countries, the research sought to understand whether stronger employment rights ...
Normal Accidents Charles Perrow is regarded as a pivotal figure in the theory of why and how things fail He served as a sociology professor at Yale and Stanford and was primarily focused on the influence of large organisations on […]...
Psychological Safety in Teaching The way incidents are managed in a system extends far beyond the individuals directly involved, impacting everyone within that system This is illustrated in this recent case of a dedicated teacher whose punishment for a mistake highlights […]...
