Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses Inspiration (and mountain biking), more emissions scandals, speaking up, bullying at work, autonomy, work agreements, and measuring psychological safety in Japanese.

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Mountain biking, psychological safety, and belief

Please indulge me for a few minutes:

Champery, Switzerland, September 4th, 2011. Danny Hart is the second-to-last man on the mountain, and about to ride the race of his career. Every year in downhill mountain biking, the World Cup Series runs, where racers earn points for results and at the end of the year, someone wins the cup. But to be DH World Champion, you have to win just one race, the World Champs. You have one chance, one run, to lay it all on the track and be the fastest down the mountain. 
 

In 2011, 20 year-old Danny Hart from North Yorkshire in the UK was ranked #2 in the world. At the world champs, ranking decides your run time – so the #1 ranked rider rides last (in this case, that was Aaron Gwin). This makes for exciting racing, but the advantage gained by seeing the other riders’ times is often outweighed by the state of the track after all those previous runs. To make it worse for this race, the conditions started off well – damp ground but sunny and clear – but during the race, a huge rainstorm came in. Typically, rain can add at least 25% to times, because the visibility is worse, your goggles fog up, the mud makes it much harder to maintain traction, and the mud sticks to your bike, adding weight and slowing you down. Combine this with the damage to the track caused by other riders, and the people who went down first had a massive advantage. Danny, growing up in the UK, was used to a bit of gloop but these conditions were atrocious. By the time of Danny’s run, the fastest riders were 10-30 seconds behind the times set at the start of the race when the sun was out, many of them simply crashing out, and it was not looking at all promising for the young Yorkshire lad.

Danny however, was clearly going all in for the win. Take a few minutes to watch this video of his race run, with commentary by Rob Warner and Nigel Page (apologies for Rob’s language – he got a bit excited!). Danny won with a time of 3 minutes and 11 seconds, nearly 12 seconds faster than the second place rider. Not only that, but he did it with style, throwing in a huge whip on the final jump into the arena. Aaron Gwin crashed on his run, but was still down on Danny’s time before the crash.
 

I genuinely find this inspirational. All the odds were against Danny in this run, and it was the only run he was going to get. Sometimes, if I need a lift, or a bit of a kick, I’ll watch this video to remind me that even when everything seems to be against you, you can still succeed – indeed, maybe those tough conditions are exactly what you need in order to succeed. Various events this week have felt like the world was trying to push me to breaking point, but when everything seems to be against you, sometimes that can be the biggest win of your life.

I’ve also played this video, and told this story, to every team I’ve led. Partly because I love it, partly because it might inspire them too, but also because I use it to have a wider discussion about challenges and difficulties both in and outside of work. It helps me set the scene for an open discussion about convening as a team, and we talk about our hopes and fears, and how we can all help each other to overcome obstacles to realise our goals. This, I believe, is one effective way to foster psychological safety in a team. And it also means I get to watch mountain bike videos at work.

(For any UK readers – the 2023 World Champs has been confirmed for Fort William, Scotland – and Fort Bill is iconic. One of the toughest courses in the world – winning times of less than 5 minutes. My best time down was just over 12 minutes!)


I also want to say – I’ve had some wonderful messages of support this week from various newsletter readers, connections on LinkedIn, and more. I can’t express my gratitude enough. You’re all amazing. 


And I just had to share this wonderful design from The Weird and Wild on Instagram:

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

Thanks to Amy Edmondson for signposting to this. With concerning echoes of the VW emissions scandal, arguably this could be even worse. Japanese truckmaker Hino, a major affiliate of Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp, faked emissions data for ten years longer than previously indicated. It’s suggested that lack of psychological safety and fear that they would not be able to meet strict targets led engine-developing teams to feel so pressured that they falsified test results. The investigative committee blamed the issue on an environment where engineers did not feel able to challenge superiors. 

This is worrying too: a magistrate judge in a Northern California district court, ruled that Glassdoor must reveal the identities of people who criticised a company called Zuru (a New Zealand–based billion-dollar toy company) on the site, with reviews calling it a “burnout factory” with a “toxic” culture and “incompetent” leaders. Zuru said it plans to file a defamation lawsuit in New Zealand against whoever posted these on Glassdoor once their identities are revealed. The case was decided on New Zealand law so it’s unlikely that this would affect anyone outside that jurisdiction, but it’s still cause for concern for anyone speaking up about toxic workplaces.

This report finding, that UK workplace bullying claims have risen 44% year-on-year as people have switched to home-working, reflects (anecdotally) what I’ve seen in the workplace. The article doesn’t suggest why, though it does highlight “leaving colleagues out of remote meetings, gossiping on messaging apps, and making cutting remarks on video calls” as some of the mechanisms. My (untested and purely conjectural!) theory is that through longer periods of only communicating via video calls and messaging, some people may begin to lose some of their empathy for colleagues, and slip into less considerate behaviours. Someone described this to me recently as some bosses beginning to see their staff as NPCs (non-playing characters, as in a video game), rather than real people. I think that’s an extreme version, but it may contain a grain of truth.
 

I like this piece by Kate Arms at Psychological Safety At Scale – Motivation: “Autonomy” May Not Mean What You Think it Means. Kate makes the excellent point that complete autonomy is a myth – complete freedom can only mean chaos: we’re all dependent upon other teams, other people, and we can only operate within certain (often tight) constraints. In practice, autonomy is more about freedom to be creative with solutions, freedom to make informed decisions about priorities, and the freedom to make best use of the unique skills and experience of the team members. Indeed, constraints can be enabling – we struggle to be creative when presented with a blank canvas, but when restricted by interesting constraints (such as you only have a black canvas and white chalk), our creativity and problem-solving kicks in. Similarly with psychological safety – complete autonomy can create great anxiety, but constraints, boundaries and expectations can help us improve our own sense of predictability of the environment, which helps to nurture psychological safety.

 

Here’s a neat paper where the authors have translated popular organisation culture scales into Japanese: Developing and validating Japanese versions of Psychological Safety Scale, Knowledge Sharing Scale, and Expressed Humility Scale. When I talk to folks who are interested in measuring psychological safety, we often come up against native language barriers – because not only do the surveys need to be translated, but we need to be sure that the statements are valid and reliable in that language, and mean the same thing in respect to the culture of that language. This is a non-trivial undertaking, especially in a culture and language as far removed from the Western, English-speaking cultures as Japanese is.
 

I was also lucky enough to be in touch with Miyako Kurokawa, living in Tokyo, Japan, who worked with me to translate a psychological safety survey into Japanese. You can find the spreadsheet here, complete with annotations and notes against some of the translations. I hope it’s useful, and I’m sincerely appreciative of Miyako-san’s effort that they put into this. An interesting point – Miyako-san highlights that Japanese people tend not to choose extreme scales, whether positive or negative, and tend to answer in the middle. So in this case, they have suggested being cautious and using the 5 point scale without “strongly” or “extremely” on it.


This episode of the Blameless podcast “Resilience in Action” features Kurt Andersen and John Allspaw, and I really like John’s point “As has been said before, Murphy’s law is wrong. What could go wrong, frankly, almost never does. We just don’t notice those.” Give it a listen, if only to find out what “nothing burgers” are!

Things to do and try:

This is a fantastic article by Christiaan Verwijs at The Liberators on formulating work agreements for your teams. I’m a massive fan of work agreements, social contracts, team charters – anything that helps a team articulate and understand how interactions function both inside the team and how communication spans the boundaries of the team.

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais use the concept of “Team APIs” – an API is a well defined interface for a software system that responds in predictable and consistent ways – so creating one for your team is a powerful way of improving flow and communication between teams. In Christiaan’s article, he describes how high performing teams actually communicate *less* – because teams “tend to develop stronger team cognition when they work together for a longer period of time (De Church & Mesmer-Magnus, 2010). This makes sense; the more you work with the same people, the more likely you are to anticipate their needs and yours. Work agreements, a team manifesto, or a team contract can help you fast-track some of that understanding by talking openly and specifically about how you will work together.”
 

This week’s poem:

La Chenille by Guillaume Apollinaire

La Chenille

Le travail mène à la richesse.

Pauvres poètes, travaillons!

La chenille en peinant sans cesse

Devient le riche papillon.

Caterpillar – translated by Robert Chandler

Work hard, poets, work with good cheer:

Work leads to wealth and freedom from fear;

And butterflies, for all their graces,

Are merely caterpillars who persevere.



I saw this on the tube in London this week, and thought it was an excellent poem for the newsletter!

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.