Resilience Engineering Today we’re diving into the field of Resilience Engineering This subject ticks a lot of my interest boxes: from complexity and sociotechnicality to psychological safety and le...
1- Artefacts These describe any overt, visible, describable aspects of the organisation Think things like branding and logos, office design, dress code, policies and tools Things that you can see 2-...
Work as Imagined vs Work as Done In last week’s newsletter about human error, we looked at why and how people make mistakes One of the categories of error we explored was ...
Human Error We’ve covered failures before, but this week we’re focusing on errors Failures can be preventable, complex, or “intelligent” – such as those resultin...
Agile It seems like the word “Agile” gets thrown about a lot Sometimes it refers to a more flexible approach to working hours and locations, sometimes it refers to Scrum practice...
Lean Coffee and Agenda-less Meetings Welcome back and Happy New Year! I hope 2023 has started well for you and you’re excited for the year ahead Next week, we have some big announcements to...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses the top seven issues of 2022 Find out which ones were most popular below, a...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses how not to be Brent (Static work vs Generative work), plus great resources ...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses artificial intelligence and psychological safety Psychological safety and safety...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses the way in which aiming for zero defects can actually result in more defects, no...
Tuckman’s Model We’ve recently covered team size, Dunbars number, and the effect that team sizes has on performance and psychological safety In this issue, we’re going to t...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses some things to think about before measuring psychological safety Measu...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses failure archetypes, human factors, more Elon Musk, stinky fish and more Hum...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses dealing with learning from incidents, plus Elon Musk, share of voice, and Extrem...
Safety Guardrails, Mechanisms and Culture In working with psychological safety, we often touch on “real” or physical safety and how the two are related By “real” safety, I mean...
Can a team be too psychologically safe A question I get asked in many (maybe even most) workshops is “Can a team be too psychologically safe” Or sometimes framed, “What’s the impact o...
As much as Dunbar's limits on group sizes might seem to be common sense, and reflected in many real world examples, Dunbar's theories on group size boundaries have been deconstructed and shown to po...
Westrum’s Cultural Typologies Dr Ron Westrum wrote in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal in 2004 about The Three Typologies of Organisational Culture He was looking at ...
Team Charters In a previous newsletter, we discussed “personal readmes” or “user manuals” (and if you found them useful, you probably want to check out this issue’s sponsor, C...
Stopping The Line Being able to “stop the line” to prevent an issue getting worse, stop a defect passing downstream, suggest an idea for improvement when it can endow maximum benefit, or a...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are awesome This week discusses Dr Richard Cook, clarity, and climbing, and is the first newsletter issue to be ...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses 1-1 meetings, diversity, experiments, scrum masters and design principles 1-1 Me...
Non-Violent Communication Last week, in talking about the Yamas and Niyamas from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, I mentioned Non-Violent Communication (NVC), and I thought it’d be good ...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses Yogic Philosophy, “avoidable” mistakes, and more Yogic Philosophy: A...
Psychological safety, power, and Mary Parker Follett Power dynamics are closely intertwined with psychological safety We’ve highlighted power types and addressing power gradients in other p...
Safety I & Safety II (Also known as Safety 1 and 2) For anyone familiar with the concepts of Resilience Engineering, you may have heard of the work of Erik Hollnagel, who states that “resili...
Personal User Manuals (aka “Personal README” or “Manual of Me”) What is a “Personal User Manual” One of our favourite practices for building psychological safety is...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses Inspiration (and mountain biking), more emissions scandals, speaking up, bullying at wor...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses Drive, Dissent, and Checklists If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please ...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses sales teams, game theory and the Agile Prime Directive If you enjoy reading this...