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...
Employment Protections and Psychological Safety You may recall back in issue 121, we released a small survey on employment rights, protections and policies It was a preliminary, pilot study intended to see if there was anything worth investigating further in […]...
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 […]...
Statistical Process Control and Understanding Variation In a chat with a great client this week, we got talking about different approaches to measurement and metrics I introduced the concept of Statistical Process Control (SPC), so that’s what this week’s newsletter […]...
Psychological Safety: What it isn’t Psychological safety has become a hot topic recently, for good reason and hopefully this will result in better, safer, and more inclusive workplaces for everyone However, the rise in its popularity has led to a […]...
Burnout and psychological safety There are many causes of burnout, both systemic and individual, but we know that low psychological safety means we’re unlikely to be able to ask for help or raise concerns, which increases the likelihood of employee […]...
Employment Rights and Psychological Safety Thanks so much to newsletter reader Andrea Notch for pointing me at Mona Chalabi’s illustrations of statistical ideas and topics – while I was having a look at Mona’s work, this one on unionisation stood […]...
Psychological Safety vs Psychosocial Safety: Why the Distinction Matters In Australia, psychosocial safety is not just good practice: it is a legal requirement Since April 2022, changes to the Work Health and Safety (WHS) Regulations have required employers to identify […]...
Ok, maybe this something not to try This is the infamous CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual from 1944, declassified (I believe) in 2008 It includes such gems as: How many of these have you observed in your workplace ...
Local Rationality “People do reasonable things given their goals, knowledge, understanding of the situation and focus of attention at a particular moment” We do things that make sense to us at the time And a fundamental premise of psychological safety […]...
