Psych Safety Book List 2025

Psych Safety Book List 2025

You know we love a good book, and we love sharing them even more, and this year we’ve been treated to some brilliant recommendations from members of the Psych Safety community. Thank you for keeping our reading piles delightfully unruly! This isn’t an inventory of everything we’ve read this year, but it is a (typically eclectic!) selection of six titles that have stretched our thinking, taught us something new or simply moved us.

And if you’re still hunting for a last minute Christmas gift, perhaps these might spark some inspiration!

1. The Essential Mary Parker Follett – Ideas We Need Today. Edited by François Héon, Albie Davis, Jennifer Jones-Patulli and Sébastien Damart. 
   

We’ve been Follett fans for years, and her thinking still feels startlingly fresh, even though it’s now a century old. Her ideas were largely overlooked (or at least, not properly attributed to her) for much of the twentieth century, perhaps because she was so far ahead of her time, perhaps she was a woman writing boldly about power, leadership and collaboration. In our workshops we’ve often recommended Dynamic Administration – a brilliant but undeniably somewhat hefty tome. This collection, though, is a far more inviting way into her work: it’s a digestible collection of her key ideas and concepts, edited in a way which foregrounds and spotlights some of her most profound thinking. 

“As long as we think of difference as that which divides us, we shall dislike it; when we think of it as that which unites us, we shall cherish it.”

2. The 5 Principles of Human Performance by Todd Conklin. 

Another new(ish!) staple on our Psych Safety course recommended reading (particularly our HOP online workshop). This is one of those deceptively simple books, where everything in it seems so sensible, reasonable and wise that it should be common practice. Conklin lays out a way of seeing systems and people that is as refreshing as it is insightful. And whilst Conklin himself would deny that there’s anything “brand new” in this book, it remains an excellent and very readable aggregation of HOP principles and practice.

“People will only tell you what you make it safe to tell you.”

Todd also has a new book out, “The Stability Trap”, but we haven’t had a chance to read it yet! Let us know what you think if you’ve read it already.

3. Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. 

Sometimes it takes really good fiction to take us out of ourselves and see the world a little differently – and in quite an extreme, yet beautifully understated way, that’s exactly what Orbital does. It’s a novel that reorganises your sense of scale, as the astronauts share their most mesmerising, sublime perspective on the earth moving through space, alongside the mundane, repetitive details of human life.

“Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once…. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.”

4. Complexity: A Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell. 
   

Whilst this was published in 2008, it remains an excellent, very readable, fascinating introduction to complexity. It’s a fab book for all of us frustrated by reductive, mechanistic and simplistic approaches to complex problems. Melanie Mitchell makes complexity science accessible without sanding off its intellectual edge, it includes explorations on Turing and Gödel, to Darwin (and Matthew), and Crick & Watson (with a rather unfortunate exclusion of Rosalind Franklin). Measuring complexity gets a good look in, and it helped me realise that I’m rather firmly in the hierarchy and near-decomposability school of thought (and if that sounds obscure, read the book and decide what camp you’re in!).

It’s a book that will leave you seeing patterns, connections and systems everywhere,  and realising just how naïve our tidy explanations and predictions of the world can be.

“As in all adaptive systems, maintaining a correct balance between these two modes of exploring is essential. Indeed, the optimal balance shifts over time. Early explorations, based on little or no information, are largely random and unfocused. As information is obtained and acted on, exploration gradually becomes more deterministic and focused in response to what has been perceived by the system. In short, the system both explores to obtain information and exploits that information to successfully adapt.”

5. The Lost Rainforests of Britain, by Guy Shrubsole. 

We love exploring ecological ideas, and this book uncovers a part of Britain’s landscape that most people don’t know existed: vast temperate rainforests, not thousands of years ago, but in some cases only hundreds. Shrubsole traces how policy, greed, ownership and a desire to control nature have shaped our land – but he also shows how much can still be restored. It’s eye-opening, frustrating and also fundamentally, inspirationally, hopeful.

“It’s hard to completely kill a rainforest: phoenix trees rise from the ashes, seed banks spring back into life. Yet wait too long to restore a felled woodland carpeted with conifers and even its buried seeds will give up the ghost.”

6. Seeing Like A State, by James C. Scott. 

This was a recommendation from community member Paul Tevis during our November round of Psych Safety workshops, and it’s phenomenal. Scott explores power, planning and the limits of what can be “seen” from above, including how top-down authoritarian plans often fail spectacularly and how much is missed when we try to reduce complex lived realities to simple metrics and predictable rules. 

“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”

We hope this little collection brings you the same enjoyment, challenge and “ohhh, that’s interesting…” moments that it brought us.