John Boyd and The OODA Loop John Boyd’s OODA loops are more than just an esoteric strategic concept; they’ve earned a huge following online and around the world. In this article, I highlight key points about OODA loops along with a glimpse into […]
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Telling the boss bad news twice. Soon after I graduated from university with my degree in ecology, I got a job as an Experimentalist at Jealott’s Hill Research Station, Berkshire. I worked in a department called “Weed Science” (yes, it does […]
Team performance isn’t the only reason that we foster psychological safety. We also do it because we want people to feel fulfilled in their jobs, we don’t want people to leave a team because they don’t feel included, we want people to experience less unnecessary stress and have greater mental wellbeing, we want to foster greater diversity and inclusion. Ultimately, we foster psychological safety because it’s fundamentally the right thing to do.
Psychological Safety in 2023 Thanks so much for all your support, feedback, encouragement, ideas, insights and collaboration over 2023! It’s genuinely a privilege to be able to do this work, and I appreciate every single one of you. I recently […]
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 […]
Selection Pressure and Psychological Safety Why has it taken so long for some industries to recognise the importance of psychological safety, whilst others have been doing it for decades? One possible answer: selection pressure. Over the past few decades, the […]
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 […]
AKA: The Normalisation of Risk In previous articles we’ve differentiated error into three types: slips and lapses, mistakes, and violations. This time, we’re exploring a certain type of violation called the “normalisation of deviance”, a term coined by Diane Vaughan. […]
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 impacting how well your team can adapt to a changing environment.
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-cadence and […]
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 […]
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 correlate with greater […]
Measuring psychological safety? Here are some tips on choosing the right tool for the job. As awareness of the importance of psychological safety in the workplace increases, there is a corresponding increase in the number of psychometric tools, applications and […]
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 is not the goal Now, this might seem an odd thing to say for someone who makes a living by helping people understand and foster psychological safety, but it’s true. Psychological safety isn’t the goal; the goal is whatever your […]
Burnout and psychological safety Burnout has many causes, both systemic and individual, but we know that low psychological safety at work can make it far more likely. When we’re unable to ask for help or raise concerns about our workload, […]
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