Psychological Safety 64: Rules

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses “rules”, autism, pushback, leaky buckets, cargo-culting, and more.

If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people who may appreciate it! To view this newsletter and previous issues online, head to psychsafety.comOur next meetup is likely to be September (date tbc), and we’ve got an amazing speaker lined up to talk about neurodiversity, autism and psychological safety. More details to follow!

Exciting news!Psychsafety.co.uk has a new website! Thanks to the awesome folks – Elliott, Jade and Ollie at Contrast in Nottingham, UK, for doing such an amazing job with design, copy, & navigation, and helping me turn ideas into reality. Head over and check it out! 

And there’s more! The next Psychological Safety Practice Masterclass virtual workshop is on the 27th June. You can sign up on the new training page here. There are limited spaces left, and just one left at the lowest price, so if you’d like to come along, book on now! 

This newsletter is sponsored by Conflux.

Conflux is the leading business consultancy worldwide helping organisations to navigate fast flow in software. We help organisations to adopt and sustain proven, modern practices for delivering software rapidly and safely.

Many organisations today are stuck using ways of working from a bygone age. In this article, Sophie Weston, Principal at Conflux, takes a look at why knowledge work needs a new approach in which psychological safety is a key ingredient.

Psychological safety news and opinion

In John le Carre’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy“, he introduces the concept of “Moscow Rules”. These rules refer to a situation where you must treat the space as enemy territory, trust no-one, consider yourself being observed constantly, and blend in. Spy mythology suggests they were developed by the CIA during the Cold War, but never written down (though it’s entirely possible that they’re purely fictional!). What I find interesting about them is that they also describe our typical approach in highly psychologically unsafe environments: a suite of defence mechanisms to protect us from interpersonal consequences. 

And that made me think about the other sets of “rules” we sometimes adopt in order to create artificially psychologically safe spaces, such as The Chatham House Rule (you can repeat what was said, but not who said it), or Vegas Rules (whatever is said must be kept private, as well as the identities of the speakers). Of course, these are handy principles particularly when discussing sensitive, confidential or strategic topics, but they can also be a useful tool, or a shortcut, to contribute towards psychological safety in a group. We may employ these tools when we don’t yet “know” the group – e.g. a meeting between people who don’t know each other. In this situation, we need to explicitly define the rules of engagement – whilst in long-lived groups who know each other well, we have less need to do so.

Note: apparently “vegas rules” were simply the result of a very successful ad campaign by R&R partners.

Continuing the theme of “rules of engagement”, I was talking to a friend this week about psychological safety and practices, and how psychological safety is (we’ve covered this before) in danger of becoming an amorphous term (like “agile”) that loses much of its meaning. Alongside that, there’s a danger that some of the practices become cargo-culted: where we do them, but we lose sight of *why* we’re doing them. The practices become simply performative.

We spoke about social contracts, which I believe to be one of the most powerful ways to underpin psychological safety in teams… But (and this is a big but) only if we actually pay attention, only if we’re honest, only if we adhere to the contract and hold each other accountable, and only if we refrain from generic platitudes that can be interpreted in any way that a team member wishes.

For social contracts to have an impact, they must be meaningful – they must be constructive, honest, unambiguous, and, frankly, probably difficult and challenging. The takeaway? If a social contract isn’t forcing you to reflect and modify some of your approaches and behaviours, it probably needs more work.
 

“When that environment is not safe, the first thing that goes is that ability for social connection and interaction.” This is a fantastic video by Paul at Aspergers from the Inside, about the link between autism, trauma and psychological safety.
 

This is insightful, from Pete Thomond, CEO of Clever Together. I was only talking to someone this week about how some of the most vocal people pushing back on psychological safety are those who most need to modify their behaviour in order to facilitate it.
 

Here’s a really interesting episode from the Whoop podcast about sleep, physiology and psychological safety, with Dr. Amy Edmondson, Dr. Jemma King from the University of Queensland in Australia, and researcher Nadia Fox.
 

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

I love this sketchnote by Linda Saukko-Rauta from a psychological safety webinar that the Nordic Business Forum ran with Amy Edmondson. I like this point from Amy that recognising you have a problem (in an organisation) is the first step to change: “Once you recognize that you could be at risk because people will have a hard time offering ideas, raising a concern, asking questions, you are halfway there in trying to reverse the situation.”

Here’s a great podcast episode from Beyond Leadership at Cleveland Clinic Global Executive Education, “Stand Up and Listen Up: Creating Psychological Safety” with Dr. Leslie Jurecko, Chief Safety and Quality Officer. Some good points about the power of ambassadors for those working to catalyse change through leadership.

Figure adapted from Purdy et al. Taking simulation out of its “safe container”—exploring the bidirectional impacts of psychological safety and simulation in an emergency department.
(Thanks to Colette Laws-Chapman for the photo of Eve on stage at the Society for Simulation in Europe (SESAM) conference)
Continuing in healthcare, this is excellent, from Eve Purdy (who’s a newsletter reader too!) – Eve discusses “The Leaky Educational Container”, reflecting on research by Jenny Rudolph, and how psychological safety lessons from simulations can be applied to other types of group learning. I like the takeaway that facilitators’ efforts to build psychological safety in learning contexts “leak” out of that space and become adopted outside – filtering slowly into the rest of the organisation.

Things to do and try: Thanks to Rob England for this. There is always an immediate dip in capability when we change anything about a system or a practice. We (and particularly many folks in management roles) often expect immediate improvements in capability rather than a dip, but it takes time for people to learn and adapt – we have to go backward before we can go forward. There are two key takeaways from this:

1. We should try to make that dip as short and as shallow as possible, by making changes smaller and more frequent, rather than large sweeping changes that cause larger dips.
2. We must not be afraid to persist and be patient when it looks like efforts to improve are impacting capability and delivery. There’s a temptation to think “That change failed, we must go back to the old way, or find another way.” because we’re expecting improvements too quickly. 

This week’s poem:

Moonlight, Summer Moonlight by Emily Jane Brontë
(Published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in order to evade contemporary prejudice against women writers.)

’Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.

And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.  

Mission statement

The mission of this newsletter is to make the world of work a better, safer, more inclusive and equitable place. We work towards this by sharing, as widely as possible, new research and opinion, case studies, news, practices and methods related to psychological safety. 

This includes topics such as inclusion, human factors, facilitation, safety critical environments, systems thinking, leadership and management, diversity and equity, mental health, organisational dynamics, culture, ethics, and more. 

A core goal is to amplify the voices of minoritised groups and those who are less represented in this field. This includes (but is not limited to) voices of people of colour, neurodiverse people, LGBTQ+ people, women in leadership and tech, and more.

Another goal is to share insights and best practices across different domains: for example, so that those of us in tech may learn from healthcare, and those of us in education can learn from aviation.

I believe knowledge is worthless unless it’s accessible. A key principle of this newsletter is to only share content that everyone can access. This excludes content behind paywalls, research papers that are not open-access, and proprietary tools that don’t open source their algorithms (preventing us from observing how systems make decisions about us). There may be some exceptions to this principle in practice, for example, where authors are able to share original texts of papers.

Whilst this statement will evolve this over time, the core principles of equity, amplification, and progressive & humanistic leadership shouldn’t change.