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 […]...
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 Burnout has many causes, most of them systemic and structural (such as organisational structures and job design), as well as broader societal pressures Excessive workload, chronic time pressure, relational conflict, lack of control, and sustained cognitive […]...
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 […]...
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 […]...
A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water “What are […]...
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2023 – the annual survey of The Psychological Safety Newsletter This is your chance to join thousands of voices, share your experiences, and inform the content of the next year of articles, resources, […]...
Understanding and Implementing the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) This week we’re having a look at the new NHS Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) Whilst this is clearly relevant to our UK healthcare readers, I believe that the […]...
Causes of Disaster at Chernobyl: The Absence of Psychological Safety (See below for the complete article) In 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in the Ukrainian SSR (the territory of modern Ukraine) suffered a catastrophic failure that directly killed […]...
What is “Safe to Fail” Recently, I failed a motorbike test This might sound like a mistake, but I fully expected to fail In the UK, you must pass multiple tests before you’re allowed out on the roads on a […]...
Psychological Safety Behaviours: The Big List (Updated Oct 2025) Psychological safety is a belief that the group is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999) There are many ways we can help to foster these environments, but it’s important to […]...
Psychological Safety and Belonging In recent years, the crucial role of psychological safety and a sense of belonging in the workplace has come to the forefront of organisational research and discourse These elements are not merely about comfort and inclusion; […]...
