Many organisations “hold people accountable” by imposing negative consequences for failure. The organisations that actually handle failure best are the ones that make it safe to give an honest account – they foster account-ability. They are not the same thing. They are, in fact, complete opposites.
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Qualitative Measurement of Psychological Safety What the survey can’t tell you A few months back, I was preparing for a workshop with a client, and they shared, anonymised, their staff engagement survey data. We both sat on our respective screens, […]
The Psych Safety Knowledge Map We’re super excited to announce that explore.psychsafety.com is now generally available! For a long time now, we’ve been thinking about a way to make our nearly 300 psychsafety.com articles more easily accessible and searchable in an […]
Predictability and the “calculus of voice” We’ve previously covered the “calculus of voice”: the mechanism by which we decide whether to speak up, stay silent, soften what we were going to say, or say something else entirely. This mental risk […]
The Calculus of Voice “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor In the gap between […]
Contracting and recontracting A lot of relationship friction comes from faulty assumptions: two (or more) people each operating on their own mental model of what was agreed, who’s responsible for what, and what counts as acceptable, without ever actually comparing […]
The Vasa Disaster A few years ago, I was working for a client in Stockholm and in some free time, I visited the wreck of the Vasa, the world’s best-preserved 17th-century ship. She’s housed in a museum built specifically around […]
The cases of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba and RaDonda Vaught Content note: this article discusses the deaths of patients, including a child. Co-created and edited by Jade Garratt and Bea Poyton. Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba is a British paediatrician. RaDonda Vaught is […]
The Futility of Utility If we want to make the argument for psychological safety in most organisations, we often need to speak the language of value. There is genuinely strong evidence that psychological safety is associated with better team performance, […]
A while ago I read a post in a parenting forum that struck me for a few reasons. It was by a mum who had taken her daughter to the library, and had watched while her young daughter very politely […]
Our wonderful Deisa Tremarias designed this sticker to reflect the various ideas of people such as Deming (“A bad system will beat a good person every time“) to help remind us that we’re all part of a system that influences our […]
Why “Fake It Till You Make It” Doesn’t Work for Psychological Safety I remember early in a new job – one I was excited about and keen to make my mark in – I made a decision to be honest […]
The SANE Effect Spend any time on LinkedIn or other social media, and you may well come across posts and articles mentioning neuroscience or brain science, using neuro- as a prefix to invent terms like “neuroleadership”, or including images of […]
Learning Teams Often, when we’re trying to improve how work gets done, we start with principles. We agree what we believe in, or are working towards, at a high level, and then figure out how those ideas translate into day-to-day […]
ST.R.E.A.M: Status Rules Everything Around Me In the classic hip hop track C.R.E.A.M., the great Wu-Tang tell us “Cash Rules Everything Around Me”. Whilst it might sound like the song is glorifying money, it’s actually a commentary on how economic […]
Growth Mindset When American psychologist Carol Dweck published her book “Mindset” in 2006 it made waves in the education world and beyond. Drawing on her work developing mindset theory, it offered a shift in perspective: instead of assuming that someone’s […]
The Streetlight Effect Measuring the really important stuff is hard. How do we measure inclusion, or safety, or happiness? We can probably all agree that these things matter, but when it comes to measuring them, where do we start? In […]
The problem with the “Fist to Five” for psychological safety. Often, with good intent, we find facilitators and teams adopting a practice called “Fist of Five”, where, at the start of a meeting or workshop, participants are asked to hold […]
The trope of “psychological bravery” crops up a lot. But what does it mean? Typically, “psychological bravery” is an attempt to reframe: instead of focusing on creating psychologically safe environments, we should simply encourage individuals to be braver. In other […]
Psych Safety Book List 2025 You know we love a good book, and we love sharing them even more, and this year we’ve been treated to some brilliant recommendations from members of the Psych Safety community. Thank you for keeping our […]
Plan Continuation Bias, or “Get-There-Itis” I got pretty sick this week. I was wiped out with a nasty bout of tonsillitis – high temperature, exhausted and felt awful. The doctor put me on strong antibiotics, painkillers, and told me, in […]
Whistleblowing and Psychological Safety: Not the Same Thing By Jade Garratt When we explain our work to people who’ve never heard of psychological safety, they sometimes say, “Oh, like whistleblowing?” It’s an understandable mix-up – both involve speaking up about things […]
How comparatively well-off we feel as children affects our later appetite for interpersonal risk taking in the workplace. Authors: Tom Geraghty & Jade Garratt, Psychsafety.com In our work and experience with teams and organisations all over the world, we always suspected […]
Vertical and horizontal psychological safety Psychological safety means feeling safe (note: not necessarily comfortable) to take interpersonal risks. To foster it, we need to consider the dynamics of both the transmission and reception of information – whether that’s an idea, […]
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