The Andon Cord: Stopping The Line Being able to “stop the line” to prevent an issue getting worse, stop a defect passing downstream, suggest an idea for improvement when it can endow maximum benefit, or ask for help in the […]
Psychological Safety In The Workplace
Whether organisations like to admit it or not, toxic work culture is still a major problem. A study from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that any workplace, which holds some form of toxicity and hostility, will likely see […]
“You should know that already.” “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” “Who’s to blame for this?” “We cannot get this wrong.” “There will be zero mistakes on this project.” *eye roll* “Don’t be so negative.” “You don’t need to […]
Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions The 6 Cultural Dimensions is a framework in cross-cultural psychology developed by Geert Hofstede. It elucidates the influence of a society’s culture on its members’ values and behaviors using a structure derived from factor analysis. This theory […]
Last June, Psych Safety Day made its US debut in New York City, with Brooklyn as our home base and a gorgeous cafe in Greenpoint as a warm, LGBTQ‑friendly meeting spot. Despite the sweltering heat and stifling humidity, practitioners and researchers […]
The Mythical Man Month Thanks to Amy Edmondson for the signpost to this tweet from George Orosz, who describes the damage that can be done when managers don’t trust in their team, or don’t understand the difference between “I’m updating you” and “I’m asking […]
Psychological Safety 101: the fundamentals In the constant change of modern workplaces, the concept of psychological safety has emerged as a key concept for fostering innovative, resilient, and highly effective teams. This foundational element of team dynamics, first brought into […]
As a leader, or a member of a team, you’re probably pretty good at creating a psychologically safe environment where performance is high and people can flourish. Providing clarity of expectations, goals, team behaviours, and exhibiting generative leadership practices may […]
Why do you want to foster greater psychological safety in your organisation? To improve employee retention? To increase productivity? Reduce risk? Improve innovation? Or simply because it’s the right thing to do for people? I often talk about the business […]
I’ve had managers who said this to me in the past, and I’ve said it myself. It seems, on the face of it, to be a wise suggestion. Ask your people to think about solutions to the problems they encounter […]
Psychological Safety in Education Resource Bank In our weekly psychological safety newsletter, we regularly share links to resources and articles about psychological safety in schools, universities and academic institutions. This page is a resource bank with an evolving collection of […]
Psychological safety plays a key role in healthcare and clinical teams, and indeed is the domain in which some of the foundational research by Dr Amy Edmondson was conducted. Here is a selection of excellent resources, studies and examples of psychological safety in healthcare and medicine.
Digital Transformation originally referred to the transition of an organisation towards delivering its products and services via digital or technological means, from a traditional physical or analogue delivery system. For example, Netflix transitioning from posting DVDs to your house, to […]
How often do you find yourself anxious and afraid to start something in case you fail, in case you’re not doing it “right”, or in case it doesn’t have the result you expect? Psychological safety makes it safe to fail, […]
Silence in a meeting can be a warning sign of very low psychological safety, but that’s not always, or even usually, the case. We all have our own, very different, preferences for how we speak up, contribute and communicate, especially […]
Psychological safety is an emergent phenomenon: a property and state of a group that is felt (differently) by members of the group. For this reason, it’s a difficult (but worthwhile) concept to study, and many efforts have been made to […]
The Four Stages of Psychological Safety fails in practice “The Four Stages of Psychological Safety is a model that was popular for a few years, and has since fallen out of favour. Timothy R Clark in his book “The Four […]
The Psychological Safety Quadrant Exercise This is a really powerful (and fun!) exercise that helps participants learn and understand psychological safety, as well as an opportunity to qualitatively measure psychological safety, and can be carried out remotely or in-person. We’ve […]
I get asked a lot if I can help out with presentation content for internal training, talks or similar, so here is a slide deck for a psychological safety presentation that I’ve delivered a number of times and you’re welcome […]
Meetings, whether in-person or virtual (or the worst kind – a hybrid of the two, where some attendees are together in a room, and the others are remote), are a fact of life for many of us. In fact, many […]
Inclusion is at the core of psychological safety, and must be defined as a central team value. Any individual behaviours or beliefs that don’t align with the principle of inclusion must be addressed.
Trust is Not the Same as Psychological Safety Trust and psychological safety are often confused with each other. While they are closely related (trust is certainly foundational to psychological safety) they are not the same thing. Understanding the distinction between […]
Creating psychological safety at work, in your team or in your organisation may seem like a very daunting task, and it can be hard to know where to start. Here are ten things you can do right now that will […]
The Psychological Safety Book Club Updated November 2025. We love nothing more than reading fantastic books that help us to understand (and explain) concepts around psychological safety even better. The list below includes many of our current favourite books about […]
Updated June 2024 The switch to remote and virtual teams Cast your mind back to 2019, before the Covid 19 pandemic. Remote working was still relatively rare, with the vast majority of workers travelling to physical locations and office spaces […]
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