Verbally Speaking Up at Work Speaking with a client this week, we surfaced an interesting organisational antipattern to psychological safety Sometimes, within an organisation, there exists a...
Reason's theory holds that most accidents can be traced to one or more of four levels of failure: Organisational influences, Unsafe supervision, Preconditions for unsafe acts, and The unsafe acts ...
Employment Protections and Psychological Safety You may recall back in issue 121, we released a small survey on employment rights, protections and policies It was a preliminary, pilot study intended t...
Measuring psychological safety Here are some tips on choosing the right tool for the job As awareness of the importance of psychological safety in the workplace increases, there is a corresponding inc...
Normal Accidents Charles Perrow is regarded as a pivotal figure in the theory of why and how things fail He served as a sociology professor at Yale and Stanford and was primarily focused on the influe...
Psychological Safety in Teaching The way incidents are managed in a system extends far beyond the individuals directly involved, impacting everyone within that system This is illustrated in this recen...
Statistical Process Control and Understanding Variation In a chat with a great client this week, we got talking about different approaches to measurement and metrics I introduced the concept of Statis...
Psychological Safety is not the goal Now, this might seem an odd thing to say for someone who makes a living by helping people understand and foster psychological safety, but it’s true...
Burnout and psychological safety There are many causes of burnout, both systemic and individual, but we know that low psychological safety means we’re unlikely to be able to ask for help or raise co...
Employment Rights and Psychological Safety Thanks so much to newsletter reader Andrea Notch for pointing me at Mona Chalabi’s illustrations of statistical ideas and topics – while I was ha...
Data Visualisation In the psychsafetycom measurement workshop we cover a lot: research ethics, quantitative/qualitative approaches, longitudinal vs cross-sectional studies, formulating resea...
Local Rationality “People do reasonable things given their goals, knowledge, understanding of the situation and focus of attention at a particular moment” A fundamental premise of psycholo...
Psychological safety and Buddhist Philosophy We’re in Barcelona this week for workshops and meetings, and we decided to visit La Sagrada Familia again It’s an incredible building, and although con...
A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water “What are [...
Understanding and Implementing the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) This week we’re having a look at the new NHS Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) Whilst this is c...
Causes of Disaster at Chernobyl: The Absence of Psychological Safety (See below for the complete article) In 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in the Ukrainian SSR (the territory of modern Uk...
Everest, and psychological safety in the mountains Thanks so much to a client of mine, the excellent Paul Verrico at Eversheds Sutherland, I was lucky enough to attend the 70th anniversary of the...
If we think about how we can apply sociotechnical theory in practice, we realise that organisational change or technological change will fail if we focus on one component (social or technical) in isol...
High Performing Teams & Psychological Safety at Work: Psychological safety is the foundation for team performance, whether we’re oriented towards consistent quality, innovation, adaptation, ...
What is “Safe to Fail” Recently, I failed a motorbike test This might sound like a mistake, but I fully expected to fail In the UK, you must pass multiple tests before you’re allowed...
Psychological Safety Behaviours: The Big List (updated March 2025) Psychological safety is a belief that the group is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999) There are many ways we can he...
https://youtube/QhwHGfws1-c Or Leadership vs Management Leadership and management are not the same thing But they’re not mutually exclusive either In order to be a truly effective leader, we must al...
Psychological Safety: Speaking Up at Work Imagine an objectively psychologically safe workplace environment People are praised, rewarded, and incentivised to speak up with ideas, questions, conce...
Bullying at work If you’re in the UK, or even if not, you may have heard the news on Friday that Dominic Raab resigned from his post as Deputy Prime Minister as a result of multiple ac...
The recent resignation of Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister of Great Britain, has put the issue of psychological safety in the workplace under the spotlight Mr Raab resigned following an investi...
Checklists I read Atul Gawande’s “Better” some time around 2008 and absolutely loved it, so when he published “The Checklist Manifesto” in 2009, I grabbed a copy immediately The Ch...
Welcome to the Psychological Safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You’re amazing This week is a short-form issue and has content on anonymous feedback, layoffs, “woke”, ...
Psychological Safety, Aviation Disasters and Crew Resource Management This week I’ve been reading “Confronting Mistakes” by Jan Hagen This is a fantastic book, focusing on the human...
Welcome to the Psychological Safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You’re amazing Having tried switching to a biweekly pattern, I’m now experimenting with alternating short-form and...
