Psychological Safety: Drive, Dissent and Checklists

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses Drive, Dissent, and Checklists.

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We’re planning the next psychsafety meetup for September 20th, at 7pm UK time, and we’ve got an amazing speaker lined up to talk about neurodiversity, autism and psychological safety. Register here and add it to your calendar.

The Psychological Safety Action Pack has had a redesign! Version 2 now looks beautiful (v1 was, frankly, a bit ugly) as well as having a tonne of useful content about building, measuring and maintaining psychological safety in organisations. There may be typos and mistakes, because it’s a new revision, so if you happen to find any, please let me know and I’ll fix them for v2.1!

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 opinion


Last week we discussed the psychological safety dynamics in sales teams, and how leading by fear, and creating individually competitive environments doesn’t necessarily lead to greater performance, in fact it can lead to worse outcomes. Here’s a related video by Dan Pink, called “The surprising truth about what motivates us“. Hint: it’s not money. In reality, performance based incentives damage performance if the task involves any degree of cognitive effort.
 

Dan Pink wrote the excellent book “Drive” which is all about motivation and, well, drive. Dan came up with the trifecta of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose – and how a combination of these three elements enable high performance of people and teams. Autonomy endows the ability to make our own decisions about what we do and how we do it – aligning closely to the Deming-esque concept of trusting that the people closest to the work understand best how to do the work. Mastery is about skill – we all want to be good at what we do, and find great satisfaction in improving our ability – and as well as providing great satisfaction, mastery helps us do our best work towards the mission of our organisation. Purpose is potentially the most important aspect: as Dan shows with the example of open source software, many folks all over the world work for free, in their own time, purely because they’re working towards a higher goal and a well defined purpose.

Embedding the structures, practices and behaviours that facilitate autonomy, mastery and purpose align closely with psychological safety. We cannot have autonomy without the psychological safety in knowing that we won’t be punished for making decisions and mistakes. We cannot learn and become masters of our craft if we do not feel safe enough to ask for help. And without a strong purpose, we will be pulling in different directions, or uncertain about our place in the team, which damages psychological safety. “Drive” is dependent upon, and a mediator for, psychological safety.

I want to give a hat tip to Ruth Malan, who in a discussion about dissent and consensus, posted this excellent sketch.

We should be careful not to glorify dissent. No idea is perfect, and it’s easy to find ways to criticise something, an idea, a solution, or a perspective. But if we simply challenge every single idea that gets suggested, we run the very real risk of good ideas falling by the wayside, and pushing people into a state where they don’t want to suggest further ideas for fear of being overly-critiqued. I’d argue that sometimes, even if you think someone’s idea is flawed, if it’s low-risk, let it grow. You never know what it might grow into.

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

In this week’s Practice Masterclass, one of the participants highlighted the Abilene Paradox: when a group agrees to do something that nobody in the group actually wants to do. Everyone ends up doing something they think everyone else wanted, but nobody did. In a group where there is low psychological safety, and people don’t feel safe to speak up with disagreement, we may go along with what we believe to be the consensus of the group. We don’t want to dissent, we don’t want to be the outlier: the one who sticks their head above the parapet and disagrees with the group. However, it’s actually possible that everyone in the group may be feeling the same, and reticent to speak up. This is why we should be careful to avoid pinning events such as the VW emissions scandal on a single person – it’s possible that everyone thinks it’s a bad idea, but nobody feels psychologically safe to say so.

And very related to the VW emissions scandal, here’s a great podcast episode with Sheila Lord and Lisa Lloyd, who explore ISO 45003 (which addresses psychosocial health in the workplace) and how it impacts employee experience. They make a great point that many organisations try to “fix the people, not the problem” – and highlighting that if a customer has a concern or a problem, we don’t say “Well, that’s your problem, you must simply be more resilient.” But that’s what a lot of organisations say to their own people.

And here’s a great episode of the Red Hat Compiler Podcast, all about Big Mistakes. Featuring Ian Walker, Joanna Delaporte and Ann Marie Fred. I deeply feel some of the stories told here from my previous lives in infrastructure and system administration: “You can feel your soul leave your body when you watch those commands just run across the screen.” A great episode, and worth a listen. Talking about our big mistakes is a great way to build psychological safety in a group!

This is an interesting paper from Trygve J. Steiro, Ragnar Vennatrø, Johan Bergh, and Glenn-Egil Torgersen: On the Dynamics of Structure, Power, and Interaction: A Case Study from a Software Developing Company – they examined psychological safety and agile methodologies, and showed that mastery, meaning, and transparency are important mediators for success, and highlighted the importance of addressing power imbalances between software developers and Product Owners.

Things to do and try: 

I love this article from Theresa Eades about how she uses checklists in her role at Etsy. If you work in tech (and even if you don’t), this is definitely worth a read, and Theresa makes an excellent point about how her checklists have evolved over time, constantly improving through her experience and using them in real work contexts. 

I first read Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto when I was CIO at a live event and retail venue. My team’s work involved a great deal of safety-critical systems: when you fill a large room every night with over 10,000 screaming teenagers, and your systems go from zero concurrent users to tens of thousands in a few minutes, you need to have highly resilient and adaptable operations.

Gawande’s book catalysed a step change for me. It helped me realise that, particularly in high-pressure, safety-critical scenarios, checklists reduce the cognitive load for people responsible to solving a problem, and allow them to focus on the germane, high-value work instead of trying to remember key steps under pressure. They’re also a fundamental component of a psychologically safe, high-performing team.

We should never rely solely on someone’s expertise, no matter how experienced they are, particularly when it comes to safety-critical operations. No matter how expert you may be, well-designed check lists can improve outcomes (even for Gawande’s own surgical team). The best-known use of checklists may be airplane pilots, who don’t rely in innate skill alone if an emergency, such as an engine failure, occurs. Instead, they reach for the checklist:

Personally, I believe checklists are really powerful tools, for pilots, surgeons, software developers, parents… basically everyone. Not only do they help us manage difficult or safety-critical scenarios, but their very existence aids our psychological safety in a team. If the ownership pf the checklist resides with the team, we’re making an explicit statement that we know that people, even experts, can make mistakes, especially under pressure. Using a checklist mitigates those mistakes, and helps to take blame off the table. We five deeper into checklists in this issue: psychological safety and checklists.

This week’s poem:

The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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.