Counterfactuals If, like me, you grew up during the Friends era, you might remember the scene where Ross is upset because he has to tell Rachel that Emily insists they can’t be friends Ross: “...
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 w...
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” departme...
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 ...
Forced Vulnerability One of the most persistent patterns in organisational change and dynamics is the search for a shortcut: the belief that if we can just find the right lever to pull, the right acti...
In part one we explored the benefits and risks in naming psychological safety In part two, we explored power and diversity In part three we dived into dissent, non-determinism, and...
Part 3: The Safety to Dissent In part one we discussed the power and danger in naming psychological safety In part two, we explored power and diversity This week we’re continuing our series of ...
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,...
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 gro...
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...
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 f...
The Amagasaki Derailment In our workshops and training, we often use real-world stories as a way to explore the dynamics of both failure and success Stories are a powerful tool to help us reflect on o...
Psychological Safety Books for Children In 2020, we shared a collection of the best books about psychological safety As new books were published (and there have been a lot of them about psycholo...
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 psychologica...
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,...
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 tha...
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 ...
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 safe...
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...
Executive Summary This study examined the relationship between job security and psychological safety, challenging the common assertion that “psychological safety is not job security” While the two...
Executive Summary In this Research Pulse, 121 respondents were asked how familiar people in their workplace are with the concept of psychological safety The results show a broadly “middle-ground” ...
How We Think About Learning at Psych Safety At Psych Safety, we care deeply about how learning happens Not just what people take away from a session, but how it feels to be there – what kind of ...
Executive Summary This study explored why people foster psychological safety, examining whether motivations are primarily moral, relational, or performance-driven While psychological safety is often d...
Cultural Diversity and Cockpit Communication Here’s a classic paper from 1999 – Cultural diversity and crew communication, by Fischer and Orasanu They examined how cultural background, ran...
By Jade Garratt Which of these do you think might damage psychological safety in a team The answer, of course, is that all of them can Sometimes it’s individual behaviours that cause harm to the psy...
Why Just Culture Isn’t Sticking by Tom Geraghty What Do We Mean by “Just” Culture The concept of a “Just Culture” was first developed in James Reason’s 1997 book Managing the Risks of ...
By Jade Garratt Have you ever found yourself reacting to something a colleague said as if you were a child being told off by their parents, even though you’re both adults and peers Or ever said some...
Comfort vs Need by Tom Geraghty What do we do when the things that help some people in the team feel psychologically safer don’t work for everyone Perhaps one person says they need time away from th...
“Sociological” Safety By Tom Geraghty The term psychological safety has been in use since Carl Rogers’ work in the 1950s and was applied to organisational contexts by Schein and Bennis (...
Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) During my ecology degree, whilst studying ecosystem and habitat change, I learned about Self-Organised Criticality (SOC), and I was fascinated by how it explained the ...
