The Case for Less Eye Contact We’ve made the case before that the mainstream advice about eye contact and psychological safety is highly western-centric and neurotypical, and lacks context and nuanc...
You may well have heard the phrase ‘psychological safety’ thrown around – perhaps referenced in a workshop title, mentioned as part of a training day or in an article someone forwarded you I...
Organisational substrate is the accumulated physical and non-physical matter that an organisation lives in and on: the power structures, tooling, incentives and punishments, memory and story that dete...
Crisis-Ready Teams I’m by no means a serial corporate dinner attendee, but I do feel I’ve sat through my fair share of after-dinner leadership talks The speakers are usually held up as shining exa...
Body Language and Non-Verbal Communication There’s a whole industry, and a lot of terrible advice, built on the promise that we can read people’s minds through their “body language&#...
A Critique of The Four Stages of Psychological Safety – a second edition We’ve written about the Four Stages of Psychological Safety before (way back in 2020 in fact), and that earlier pie...
The more elaborate and expensive our system for understanding something, the less we may actually understand it Ecologists face the same problem — you can't measure the health of an ecosystem direct...
These two pieces originally went out in the Psychological Safety Newsletter, the second (“I was wrong about the parachutes”) a couple of weeks after the first They have proven rather popul...
Seven principles for measuring people without mistaking them for data In theory at least, we measure psychological safety because we want more of it That, in fact, is often part of the problem The act...
The Strange Confidence of 360 Degree Feedback 360 degree feedback promises that it will offer truth in all directions It will illuminate blind spots, reveal the development areas people couldn’t...
Reading the air: high and low context communication in teams Picture the scene: you’re in a meeting with your new team You ask what you think is a reasonable question, and knowing glances are ex...
Who gets to decide if psychological safety matters Is scepticism about psychological safety a luxury position What the LinkedIn discourse reveals about who has positive or negative opinions on psychol...
Many organisations “hold people accountable” by imposing negative consequences for failure The organisations that actually handle failure best are the ones that make it safe to give an honest acco...
Qualitative Measurement of Psychological Safety What the survey can’t tell you A few months back, I was preparing for a workshop with a client, and they shared, anonymised, their staff engagement su...
The Field Guide: An interactive knowledge map We’re super excited to announce that The Field Guide is now generally available! For a long time now, we’ve been thinking about a way to...
Predictability and the “calculus of voice” We’ve previously covered the “calculus of voice”: the mechanism by which we decide whether to speak up, stay silent, soften what we were go...
The Calculus of Voice “Between stimulus and response, there is a space In that space is our power to choose our response In our response lies our growth and our freedom”Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist...
Contracting and recontracting A lot of relationship friction comes from faulty assumptions: two (or more) people each operating on their own mental model of what was agreed, who’s responsible fo...
The Vasa Disaster A few years ago, I was working for a client in Stockholm and in some free time, I visited the wreck of the Vasa, the world’s best-preserved 17th-century ship She’s housed in a mu...
The cases of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba and RaDonda Vaught Content note: this article discusses the deaths of patients, including a child Co-created and edited by Jade Garratt and Bea Poyton Dr Hadiza Bawa-...
The Futility of Utility If we want to make the argument for psychological safety in most organisations, we often need to speak the language of value There is genuinely strong evidence that psychologic...
A while ago I read a post in a parenting forum that struck me for a few reasons It was by a mum who had taken her daughter to the library, and had watched while her young daughter very politely [&hell...
Our wonderful Deisa Tremarias designed this sticker to reflect the various ideas of people such as Deming (“A bad system will beat a good person every time“) to help remind us that weR...
Why “Fake It Till You Make It” Doesn’t Work for Psychological Safety I remember early in a new job – one I was excited about and keen to make my mark in – I made a decisi...
The SANE Effect Spend any time on LinkedIn or other social media, and you may well come across posts and articles mentioning neuroscience or brain science, using neuro- as a prefix to invent terms lik...
Learning Teams Often, when we’re trying to improve how work gets done, we start with principles We agree what we believe in, or are working towards, at a high level, and then figure out how those id...
Tenerife, the power gradient, and the calculus of voice On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on a runway in the Canary Islands, and 583 people died It was the worst disaster in the history of ci...
STREAM: Status Rules Everything Around Me In the classic hip hop track CREAM, the great Wu-Tang tell us “Cash Rules Everything Around Me” Whilst it might sound like the song is glorifying money, i...
Growth Mindset When American psychologist Carol Dweck published her book “Mindset” in 2006 it made waves in the education world and beyond Drawing on her work developing mindset theory, it offered...
The Streetlight Effect Measuring the really important stuff is hard How do we measure inclusion, or safety, or happiness We can probably all agree that these things matter, but when it comes to measur...
