Psychological Safety 68: Science!

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses science and experimentation, the Toyota Production System, and meetings.

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.com

Our 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!

The last Psychological Safety Practice Masterclass virtual workshop on Monday 27th June went so well that I’ve scheduled another for 25th July. Register here – there are different pricing options for unwaged, self-funded, and organisation-funded participants.

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.

This week, I’ve been in workshops with my fantastic colleagues at Red Hat Open Innovation Labs. We were diving into practices and skills such as event storming, empathy mapping, and value slicing. We also built stuff out of lego to practice Test-Driven Development. Today, we carried out a Lean Coffee session, and we discussed how to encourage an experimental approach to work, that enables people to learn from work, continuously improve, and take intelligent risks. As you’ll probably suspect, this is one of my favourite subjects!

The first proper job title I ever had was “Experimentalist”, in a department called Weed Science. It remains the best job title I’ve had and I still consider myself an experimentalist to this day 🙂 I also sincerely believe that a culture of experimentation – framing and designing work as experiments instead of plain old execution, and learning from “failure” are not only effective ways to foster psychological safety, but also pave the path for success of teams and organisations. Everything is an Experiment.

Similar to many aspects of psychological safety, the scientific method is somewhat counter-intuitive, because we’re trying to prove ourselves wrong instead of right.

Francis Bacon is generally accredited with coming up with the method around 1605, though it was really the accumulation of a number of philosophical and technological advancements such as work by Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, the invention of the printing press, and a growing popularity of the study of “natural philosophy” that resulted in what we now call the scientific method. Bacon suggested that we should use existing evidence and our own knowledge to come up with a hypothesis, and then attempt to prove it wrong using an experiment. We try to prove it wrong because it’s much easier than trying to prove it right – we only need one result to prove something wrong, but we usually require infinite results to prove that something is true. 

I’m a big fan of the Toyota Production System (TPS), and how, in large part through the influence of W E Deming, Taiichi Ohno’s TPS addresses flow and quality through managing variation, but also considers human psychology from a systemic perspective. The TPS works on the premise that we cannot simply tell people what to and how to do it: we must create scaffolds of work, provide incentives, guardrails and safety nets, and trust that the people closest to the work know best how to execute the work. The Andon Cord is one of the best known elements of the TPS, for good reason, but the scientific method is also fundamentally ingrained into the system: “We found that, for outsiders, the key is to understand that the Toyota Production System creates a community of scientists. Whenever Toyota defines a specification, it is establishing sets of hypotheses that can then be tested. In other words, it is following the scientific method.” – From Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System by Steven Spear and H. Kent Bowen.

By applying the scientific method, the TPS provide for continuous improvement, since no change is made without a corresponding way to measure its success. It also means that decision making can be devolved away from “management”, towards the people actually doing the work – it moves authority to where the knowledge is, rather than trying to move the knowledge to where the authority is. Maybe most importantly, it means that fear of failure is reduced (see Deming’s pt 8) for employees who are making decisions. It’s acceptable (indeed, it’s a good result) if an experiment is shown to be unsuccessful (i.e. it didn’t show the result we were hoping for) – since we’ve gained valuable data. If we only ever carry out experiments that we’re sure will succeed, we’re not trying hard enough.

I was honoured to be asked to join this super fun podcast episode with Allessandria Polizzi – we talked about psychological safety in the UK, but mostly dived deep into areas such as the definition of psychological safety, how we should be cautious when we come across efforts to redefine what psychological safety is, and why it’s important to respect the decades of hard work and research that have already gone into the field.

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:
This is an excellent Master’s thesis paper by Fride Thorsdatter Vaagland, about Psychological safety in a knowledge intensive company. They researched the factors affecting psychological safety and interpersonal dynamics when the organisation environment is highly data driven. These points really jumped out at me: “Findings show that when the daily work is characterized by facts, numbers and calculations, facilitating meetings about the work environment becomes even more important because it differs so much from the daily way of talking.” And “There are indications that system barriers such as invoicing rate and time pressure work against employees who want to share knowledge and contribute to psychological safety.” I sometimes worry that meeting “good practices” are indistinguishable from cargo cult behaviours. We’re regularly told we must have an agenda, action items, minutes and all the other proper meeting accoutrements – but I rarely see proof of these practices actually genuinely being effective. I’ve been in more meetings than I can count where we’ve had all the “right” ingredients, but the meeting hasn’t turned out to be a valuable way for people to spend their time. That’s not to say agendas and minutes etc aren’t useful, just that these meeting practices don’t guarantee success.

This great article by Matt Schellhas really gets into why simply having an agenda and action items doesn’t make a meeting successful. Having a defined topic, having the right people in the room, the right number of people, a really good chair (or facilitator, or “referee”), and as much psychological safety as you can foster: these are the true ingredients for meeting success.

 Back in 2016, Charles Duhigg created this short video about Psychological Safety and Saturday Night Live, and how, despite John Belushi setting a room on fire and writers off in their own worlds, the SNL team were able to come together and consistently produce one of the most successful and longest running shows of all time. Charles refers back to Google’s Project Aristotle and shows how psychological safety is the foundation for high performing teams, whether they’re in a multinational tech firm, or creating a live TV show.

Thanks to Nancy Lhoest-Squicciarini for sharing and Amy Edmondson for signposting.

This is a fantastic piece by Adriana Villela about her experience as an engineering manager, and how she learned about psychological safety the hard way. 

Things to do and try: If you’re considering running experiments, or reframing work as experiments, take a look at the Experiment Canvas Miroverse Template by Chris Stone. I really like how Chris makes the scientific method accessible in this template, and highlights the core parts of an experiment, including the hypothesis, the scientists, the subjects, method, results, measures, and more. 

This week’s poem:

I Keep Six Honest Serving Men, by Rudyard Kipling

I keep six honest serving-men
  (They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
  And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
  I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
  I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five,
  For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
  For they are hungry men.
But different folk have different views;
  I know a person small
She keeps ten million serving-men,
  Who get no rest at all!
She sends em abroad on her own affairs,
  From the second she opens her eyes
One million Hows, Two million Wheres,
  And seven million Whys!


Thanks to Ian Ames (@IanAmes) for the poem suggestion!

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.