Can you see the cat?

This image is a meme from 1879 (yes, memes were a thing 140+ years ago!) used by the “Georgist” movement. Henry George was an economist who examined the apparent paradox of how the USA could be progressing economically and technologically whilst poverty and inequality were simultaneously increasing. Ultimately, his research concluded that scarcity of natural resources and uneven distribution of land ownership (alongside the enclosure of common land) was the fundamental cause of inequity in society. In his best-known book, “Progress and Poverty”, George argued that rent on land for private use contributed to persistent poverty in spite of technological progress, and caused economies to tend toward boom-and-bust cycles. As such, he proposed a “Land Value Tax” that would fund a Universal Basic Income, alongside the abolition of quotas, tariffs and other perceived barriers to trade. His acolytes included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman, Helen Keller and Martin Luther King Jr. The boardgame “Monopoly”, invented by Lizzie Magie (and originally called “The Landlord’s Game”) was intended to demonstrate George’s theories.

The Georgists used this meme “Can you see the cat?” to represent the idea that once you’ve understood the phenomenon of land inequity, you can’t unsee it. Once you’ve seen the cat and know where to look, you see it everytime you look at the picture. “Seeing the cat” became Georgist shorthand for the “aha!” moment when you finally understand some underlying phenomenon, and begin to spot it in every context, where previously you couldn’t quite join the dots – or didn’t even know they were there.

Since this is the psychological safety newsletter, you may be wondering where the connection to psychological safety is. For me, psychological safety is like “seeing the cat”: there is no realm of human interaction, from disasters to successes, personal relationships to politics, where psychological safety doesn’t play a role. Once you “see” psychological safety, you see it everywhere.

And if I can extend the metaphor of seeing the cat further still: it takes quite some time for most of us to see the cat in the meme (though some clever folks spot it straight away!). Similarly, it also takes study and effort to truly understand the depth of psychologically safe dynamics, antecedents and outcomes. 

When we finally “get” psychological safety we can’t un-see it. It applies across cultures, domains, industries and contexts. There is not a single human disaster (that I know of) that hasn’t had a lack of psychological safety somewhere in its chain of causal factors. I strongly suspect there is also no collaborative human success that wasn’t in some way enabled by the psychological safety of the people orchestrating it. Since the dawn of humanity when humans began to attempt to communicate with each other in fundamental and rudimentary ways, psychological safety became a thing. We just didn’t have a name for it until recently. Psychological safety is foundational to the quality, strength and effectiveness of human interactions, and it’s ubiquitous.

When did you first “see the cat” with psychological safety? Do you see it everywhere now?

Further reading

History of psychological safety
Psychological safety timeline
Benefits of Psychological Safety
Can a team be “too psychologically safe”?

Psychological Safety in Practice

The Return to Office debacle continues

Amazon has issued an RTO mandate that will ultimately mean that their workforce becomes rather less diverse. People who are parents (or are planning/ hoping to be), carers, live further from the office, are lower paid (so commuting costs a proportionately higher), have mobility issues or certain neurodiversities, will be disadvantaged by this mandate. It’s being reported that many Amazon employees are already looking for new roles, and I wouldn’t at all surprised that this is a “soft layoff” – intended to get people to leave without having to pay any severance. If that’s true, then it’s working, and as usual, it’s those who are least privileged who suffer most as a result.

Conversely, in the UK, the Labour government is about to release its “Employment Rights” Bill, which includes measures such as a right to disconnect outside working hours, a ban on zero-hours contracts and a right to allow workers to compress their contracted hours into fewer working days. Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, said employers “need to judge people on outcomes and not a culture of presenteeism“. 

Donna Ockenden and UK Maternity services

Donna Ockenden, the lead investigator into maternity care failures at Nottingham University Hospitals, criticised the Conservative government for being “asleep at the wheel” regarding maternity safety, saying they failed to implement crucial reforms after the report into failings at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust. 

She described the previous UK government as being “asleep at the wheel”, in relation to maternity safety and  says they “didn’t put the effort into” improving care in the sector. She supports the regulation of NHS managers, emphasising that current systems allow unsafe leaders to move between trusts without checks and accountability. 

Through our continued work with various maternity departments in different trusts across the UK, a core issue is a lack of psychological safety in those departments and particularly across management hierarchies and departmental boundaries. Systemic resource deficits and pressures within the NHS only make the problem worse. People are less likely to speak up about problems and concerns if they’re likely to create more work for themselves and others in an already overwhelmed system.

Fundamentally, you can’t legislate psychological safety into existence – and you certainly can’t encourage a culture of speaking up about concerns by increasing the consequences of failure. But even if large scale systemic change is a way off, we are confident we’re already having positive impact in the trusts we work with, empowering people to build psychological safety in their teams, little bit by little bit.

Resilience Engineering 101

Thanks to David Woods for starting this introductory series of videos on Resilience Engineering – a field that is intrinsically related to the concept of psychological safety. In this first one, Woods highlights how everything in resilience ties back to viability, and that viability is sought by both seeking opportunity and handling challenges.

Books on psychological safety

Over the past few years, there have been so many books published on psychological safety that, frankly, I’ve lost count! Here is our current list of 21 (so far) great books that are about, or highly relevant to, the field of psychological safety. This list was first published over three years ago, and continues to evolve as we discover books old and new to add to the list (in no particular order!). The most recent addition is the excellent Human and Organisational Potential, by Ivan Pupilidy and Crista Vesel.

We have various criteria that must be met for a book to be added to this list, including but not limited to: bringing something genuinely new to the field, addressing psychological safety in previously unaddressed contexts, being actionable and useful in practice, and fundamentally well-written and enjoyable.

Learn from your mistakes.

I absolutely love the nihilistic cartoons of Joan Cornella 🙂

This week’s poem:

Opening lines from The Mores, by John Clare.

Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough 
Though centurys wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow 
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey 
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene 
Nor fence of ownership crept in between 
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky 
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree 
Spread its faint shadow of immensity 
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds 
In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours 
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers 
Is faded all — a hope that blossomed free, 
And hath been once, no more shall be 
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave 
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave 
And memory’s pride ere want to wealth did bow 
Is both the shadow and the substance now.

John Clare (1793–1864) was an English poet, known as the “peasant poet,” who focused much of his poetry on rural life and the injustices of land inequality. Born into a poor farming family, Clare’s poetry vividly captured the impact of the Enclosure Acts, which privatised common land and destroyed communities and ways of life. He wrote passionately about the natural world and the loss of communal rights, giving voice to the working class and their struggles against industrialisation and land reform.