The Organisational Fabric of Psychological Safety (AKA psychological safety is more than just a team phenomenon) By Tom Geraghty When we talk about psychological safety, the definition we usually use ...
All Feedback Is Subjective By Jade Garratt … And Why That Matters for Psychological Safety “No person in the world is so privileged as to have access to a ‘ground truth’ against which ...
Psychological Safety and Micromanagement By Jade Garratt Those who have followed our work at Psych Safety for a while will know that we believe exploring not just what to do – the behaviours and...
Rewetting Organisations by Tom Geraghty Allowing the system to self-organise by improving the substrate: creating the underlying conditions for change When I was studying ecology at university, one of...
The Spectrum of Participation by Jade Garratt Engagement and participation are terms we often throw around to mean “getting people’s take on issues that affect them” But not all participation is...
Psychological Safety in Practice Team Learning in the Field: An Organizing Framework and Avenues for Future Research This excellent paper from Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey affirms ...
All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Useful By Tom Geraghty This is one of my favourite, and most often used, aphorisms It’s attributed to George Box, a British statistician, from a 1976 paper on Scie...
By Jade Garratt In our experience, the most effective lever for increasing psychological safety within a team is flattening the power gradient – the gap between those with the most power and tho...
Efficiency vs Resilience By Tom Geraghty Standardisation is often used as a way to increase organisational efficiency and scalability Through reducing variation, we can standardise our tools, tra...
The Speaking up Myth By Jade Garratt In the world of psychological safety, we focus a lot, maybe even too much, on the speaking up side of the equation How do we make sure people speak up with their i...
“what you love,” “what the world needs,” “what you can be paid for,” and “what you are good at”, the idea being that the intersection of all of these is where we find Ikigai ...
Addressing Power through “Flattening” Organisations Steep power gradients are one of the most significant factors that contribute to reducing psychological safety These steep differentials in perc...
Work doesn’t have to suck By Jade Garratt The start of a new year seems like a good time to reflect on how work feels, and how we feel about work For too many of us, going to work isn’t [&hell...
Sometimes I Muck Up After lots of you asked for “Safe For Work” versions of our “Sometimes I Fck Up” stickers, we’ve created these “Sometimes I Muck Up...
By Jade Garratt How do you feel when you hear the words “You have a body“ And how do you feel when you hear it in a work context You might find it confusing – a kind of “wel...
Blametropism By Tom Geraghty, edited by Jade Garratt It’s a common fallacy that psychological safety means having a “blameless” culture Just like so many misconceptions around psychological safe...
Typologies of Power In a few previous newsletters, we’ve gotten into power dynamics, power gradients, “power over” vs “power for” and “power to” (see Mary Parker Follett) Steep power gra...
The 2024 Psych Safety Book List In case you’ve managed to avoid the onslaught of marketing emails from companies trying to sell you every conceivable product, it’s Black Friday today! Instead...
We’ve been rather busy this week, in the midst of this round of psychological safety online workshops, including fundamentals, practices, leadership, measurement, advanced, and workshop design a...
Psychological Safety Doesn’t Mean Feeling Comfortable By Jade Garratt There are many misconceptions about psychological safety One is that if we “achieve” psychological safety, it means that...
The Chatham House Rule By Jade Garratt We always begin our workshops with a social contract These are important because they make sure at the very beginning, that we’re on the same page in terms of ...
A team is only as safe as the least safe person When measuring the psychological safety in a team, we often are asked which measurement should be considered the “group measurement,” given that dif...
The Andon Cord It’s been a busy week with workshops and talks, so this week we’re revisiting the Andon Cord Probably my favourite real-world psychological safety practice, the Andon Cord i...
Being Approachable By Jade Garratt Most of us would probably like to think of ourselves as approachable at work We might have bad moments, or bad days, but we will likely think that on the whole, we a...
The Fundamental Attribution Error We address the Fundamental Attribution Error in most of our workshops, particularly our Feedback ones, because it’s such a common bias and it causes so many problem...
The Definition Of Psychological Safety Psychological safety is defined as the belief, in a group, that we are safe to take interpersonal risks It’s the belief that we are able to speak up with ideas...
The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety I recently tried to work out how many people have attended one or more of our workshops on psychological safety, including our workshops for teams and org...
Can you see the cat This image is a meme from 1879 (yes, memes were a thing 140+ years ago!) used by the “Georgist” movement Henry George was an economist who examined the apparent paradox of how ...
It’s no good having a great culture if you’ve gone out of business Psychological safety is the foundational factor in ensuring teams and organisations are as high performing as possible It...
