A few issues ago, we covered various kinds of retrospective – the practice of looking back and learning from work, as well as some of the conditions and requirements for effective retrospectives...
Psychological Safety at Work Lean and psychological safety Here’s a great analysis by Ben Hutchinson of a paper examining the relationship between Lean and psychological safety in construction p...
John Boyd and The OODA Loop John Boyd’s OODA loops are more than just an esoteric strategic concept; they’ve earned a huge following online and around the world In this article, ...
Telling the boss bad news twice Soon after I graduated from university with my degree in ecology, I got a job as an Experimentalist at Jealott’s Hill Research Station, Berkshire I worked in a d...
Team performance isn't the only reason that we foster psychological safety We also do it because we want people to feel fulfilled in their jobs, we don’t want people to leave a team because they don...
Crew Resource Management (CRM) and the Centrality of Psychological Safety CRM was developed in the 1970s and operationalised psychological safety in safety-critical, complex environments Crew Resource...
Psychological Safety in 2023 Thanks so much for all your support, feedback, encouragement, ideas, insights and collaboration over 2023! It’s genuinely a privilege to be able to do this work, and I a...
The Theory of Constraints (ToC) A long time ago, I read a book that profoundly changed the way I think about work That book was The Goal, written by Eli Goldratt in 1984, The story revolves around Ale...
Guest post by Nick Drage, Strategy Lead and Game Designer at Path Dependence Limited, co-author of “The Handbook of Cyber Wargames: Wargaming the 21st Century” At its most abstract level a wargame...
Selection Pressure and Psychological Safety Why has it taken so long for some industries to recognise the importance of psychological safety, whilst others have been doing it for decades One possible ...
The Adaptive Cycle This is a great paper for the ecological and complexity geeks, like me The adaptive cycle: More than a metaphor Thanks to Christina Bowen for sharing The adaptive c...
The Challenger Disaster: AKA The Normalisation of Risk In previous articles we’ve differentiated error into three types: slips and lapses, mistakes, and violations This time, we’re explori...
The Whitehall Studies and The Social Gradient of Health The relationship between formal or positional power (seniority & status) and psychological safety is strong In general, we know that people ...
The First Org Chart In 1855, Brigadier General Daniel McCallum, later to become a Civil War officer renowned for “strict precision and stern discipline” as well as for his innovative engineeri...
We cannot adequately respond to changes, incidents or threats if we’re operating at capacity And it applies to people, machines, computers, traffic and more - whether you’re running a factory floo...
Guest post by Navya Adhikarla, graduate student in the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke University (Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact “Look me in th...
15/5 Reports To manage teams in a way that fosters psychological safety requires clear communication and feedback channels Team members should have well-defined platforms to share achievements, voice ...
Stutters and Stammers I’ve written previously about my experience growing up with dyspraxia, which I was diagnosed with at an early age My dyspraxia made it difficult for me to pronounce an...
Deming’s 14 Points of Management I’m a Deming fan, and sad that I never got to meet him or attend any of his lectures W E Deming is possibly most well known for his “PDCA” (Plan-Do-Check-A...
Bad Management It’s important that we learn from our own mistakes and failures, and self-reflect in order to improve However, there’s also a lot we can learn from things others g...
Crew Resource Management In preparing for my conference talk this week, I was reading up further on the 1977 Tenerife disaster and the history of Crew Resource Management (CRM), and came across this ...
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...
A critique of Eldor, L, Hodor, M and Cappelli, P, 2023 The limits of psychological safety: Nonlinear relationships with performance Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 177, p104255 O...
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 ...
Executive Summary This pilot study explored the relationship between employment protections—in law and organisational policy—and psychological safety at work Drawing on 84 responses from participa...
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...
