The problem with the “Fist of 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 […]
In The Workplace
The trope of “psychological bravery” still crops up frequently. But what does it mean? Typically, it’s a reframe: instead of focusing on creating psychologically safe environments, we should encourage individuals to be braver. In other words, instead of us doing […]
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 […]
Safety and the Myth of Self-Reliance There are many myths that we Americans embrace, and the myth of triumphant self-reliance isin the top five. Let’s list our heroes: lone tycoons, solo cops, misunderstood dreamers, lone and desperateparents; each is resourceful, […]
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, […]
Individual Resilience, or “Grit” You won’t find many articles on psychsafety.com about individual resilience. Organisational resilience, certainly, but rarely the individual kind. We tend not to find it an especially useful, or often fair, way to frame things. This sometimes […]
Coaching and Psychological Safety: listening, trust and letting go of control By Jade Garratt When I first trained as a coach, I realised there were two things I wasn’t very good at: I meant well, but I was uncomfortable with […]
Emergence, substrate, succession, indicator species & ecotones. I started my career in ecology, as an experimentalist working in a research station’s wonderfully named “Weed Science” department – a title that sounds more like a kooky 80s film than a scientific […]
Are you at the Sharp End or the Blunt End? Most people who’ve been to school (and many who haven’t!) have strong opinions about education. Understandably so – education speaks to how we raise our children, what we value as […]
Part 2: Different people, different safety Continuing our reflections on the last five years. In part one, we explored the name psychological safety itself, and here in part two, we get into diversity, myths, the proliferation of bad advice, and […]
It’s here! The Psychological Safety Trainer Toolkit has officially launched. We’re incredibly excited to share this with you. Based on five years of delivering psychological safety training, workshops and consultancy, we’ve created the most complete resource available for anyone who […]
Part 1: The Power and Peril of Naming Over the past five years of our work in psychological safety, it has transformed from a little-known term, understood and explicitly practised by only a small group of researchers and practitioners, to […]
Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety There really is some bad advice and research around in respect to psychological safety, in particular how it relates to aspects of neurodiversity and culture. In this piece, we’re going to dive […]
Psychological Safety Is Necessary But Not Sufficient. We sometimes hear “But psychological safety isn’t enough!”, and well… Obviously. It’s rather like saying that having a fully functioning car isn’t enough to make a road trip – and of course it […]
Every year we hold Psych Safety Days and other events for our wonderful community to come together, share insights, learn new practices and examine emergent research and evidence. We’re currently putting together ideas for Psych Safety Day (or Week!) 2026, […]
There isn’t a “one-size-fits-all”, cookie-cutter, road map approach to psychological safety. There are some foundational practices and principles, but the experience of psychological safety, and how it manifests, is different for everyone. Our background, culture, neurodiversities, abilities, needs and preferences […]
By Jade Garratt It will probably come as no great surprise to those of us who work with the concept of psychological safety that one of the earliest references to the term in academic and psychological literature comes from Carl […]
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2025 – the largest global survey on psychological safety ever! Psychological safety is the core ingredient behind high-performing, innovative, and happy teams. It shapes whether we feel safe speaking up, sharing ideas, […]
Barriers to Psychological Safety Executive Summary This research explores the experiential barriers to speaking up at work: not just structural or cultural factors, but the lived fears and beliefs that inhibit voice and learning. Drawing on responses from 138 participants, […]
How you respond matters. “Everything you do is important to your organization. People are watching you. The people in your organization determine how to move forward after both successful work and how to recover after failure by watching how you […]
Executive Summary This study examined which practices most effectively foster psychological safety in teams and organisations. While behaviours such as listening and empathy underpin interpersonal safety, practices (structured, named activities like retrospectives or social contracts) create the scaffolds and shared […]
Executive Summary This study explored how feedback in the workplace affects both performance and psychological safety. While feedback is intended to drive growth and improvement, its delivery often has mixed results. Based on responses from 61 participants, the findings show […]
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