Google’s Project Aristotle

How psychological safety captured the world’s attention

Project Aristotle was a project undertaken by Google to understand what makes teams successful. The project aimed to identify patterns and behaviours within teams that led to high performance. Starting in 2012, Google spent two years studying 250 attributes of their 180 teams. Initially, they thought that the recipe for a successful team would be a combination of high performers, an experienced manager and unlimited free resources. Later, they would find out they were wrong.

Julia Rozovsky, the leader of Project Aristotle, was already interested in the way people worked. During her previous studies at the Yale School of Management. Rozovsky had two contrasting experiences with study groups, finding that both were composed of bright and friendly people, yet as a team, one group quickly became fraught. Although she couldn’t understand the reasoning at the time, it was through her work with Project Aristotle that things started to make sense.

Rozovsky and her Project Aristotle team had already identified four key factors that created a successful team; dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact, but they know there was a component missing. Then, she and her team found Amy Edmondson’s paper on Psychological Safety and this quickly filled the gap. They found that of the 180 teams, those with a strong sense of psychological safety fostered an environment where members felt comfortable expressing their thoughts and ideas openly, leading to more productive discussions and innovative solutions.

Project Aristotle and Psychological Safety

The team behind Project Aristotle had initially guessed that successful teams primarily required a structured hierarchy of intelligent minds. Instead, guided by Edmondson’s 1999 paper, they found that teams with an environment focused around value and respect were more successful. Team members most needed to feel they could speak up, sharing ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or humiliation. These findings challenged conventional beliefs about team composition and management styles. For Rozovsky, it also made a lot of sense in the context of her earlier experiences at university – she could better understand why one group was far more productive, happy and ultimately successful than the others; it was to do with their group norms and the resultant degree of psychological safety experienced by those in the group.

Learning from Project Aristotle

To implement their findings, Google aimed to create more psychologically safe environments by encouraging open communication, empathy and understanding. Their results had shown them that “even the extremely smart, high-powered employees at Google needed a psychologically safe work environment to contribute the talents they had to offer.” Rather than focusing on who the team was made up of, Google redirected their resources into making sure the 5 key factors were met and implemented.

One tangible output of their research was Google’s creation of a ‘team effectiveness discussion guide’. The guide focused on the 5 key factors for a successful team, helping organisations to identify areas where they might want to improve and explaining how they could start. If you want to dive deeper into how to build psychological safety, here’s our top ten ways to foster psychological safety in the workplace.

Another notable example from the project involved a manager named Matt Sakaguchi. Matt had become interested in Project Aristotle due to challenges with team cohesion in his previous role. He wanted to take proactive steps to improve his new team by engaging with the project. Rozovsky gave Matt a survey to assess his team’s norms, which showed almost every team member was dissatisfied. To address the issues, Matt organised an off-site meeting, and as part of that meeting, he shared with his team that he had stage 4 cancer. This act of genuine vulnerability and honesty helped to model open and honest communication within the team, and improve psychological safety. From this place, the team were able to discuss the survey results and they agreed to adopt new norms centred on the type of communication that Matt had just introduced to them.

Once Project Aristotle was published in 2014, Google created an extremely useful page that described their findings and research, re:Work with Google. However, as of 2023, this webpage redirects to the Japanese version. Thankfully, if you are interested, there is another way to access this through the wayback machine.

Psychological Safety in the Spotlight

It was in fact a New York Times article about Project Aristotle that propelled Amy Edmondson’s research on Psychological Safety into the limelight, and her 2018 book ‘The Fearless Organisation’ has inspired transformations in organisations across the world. Project Aristotle helped provide and publicise the real-world relevance of the concept, encouraging people to see that it could now be applied to improve teams and performance in the business world, and was far more than something to only be studied academically.

Taking Psychological Safety Further

You can use the Psychological Safety Action Pack and associated playbooks to understand, measure, build and maintain psychological safety in your teams and organisations. It’s designed for managers, team members, leaders, and people in training and people functions. Originally released in 2020, it’s been road tested by over 3000 practitioners all over the world. Download it now.

Psychological Safety Training and Workshops

If you’re interested in learning more, you could enrol on one of our psychological safety online workshops, or get our team to come to your organisation for some in-person training.

Bibliography & Interesting Reads:

A New York Times articles published in 2016 about the story of Project Aristotle: ‘What Google Learned from its quest to build the perfect team’

Re:Work, 2019 version, Google’s webpage about Project Aristotle via the Wayback Machine:

Google’s ‘team effectiveness discussion guide’:

Amy Edmondsons 1999 paper: ‘Psychological Safety and Learning Behaviour in Work Teams’