Psychological Safety: The Top 7

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses the top seven issues of 2022. Find out which ones were most popular below, and dive back in!

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

In the New Year, we’re running two new workshops! The first is a 2-hour Intermediate Psychological Safety Workshop on the 17th January, and on the 24th January we’re running an Advanced Psychological Safety Workshop. 

In the intermediate session, we dive into the essentials of safety culture, safety theory, examples of good practice from different industries, and facilitation practices as well as team and leadership practices.

In the advanced session, we dive further into the theory and look also at sociotechnical systems, sociological research methods, organisational dynamics and resilience engineering. Both sessions are intended to draw on the expertise of the attendees as well as the course material. It’s going to be a lot of fun!

Prices based upon affordability. Both sessions are available to book online now.
 

2022 in Review
 Thanks so much for helping to make this an excellent year. I’ve really enjoyed writing these newsletters each week, running workshops, doing the psychological safety meetups, and all the other ways in which I’ve been able to collaborate with and learn from you all. With your help, we’ve been able to make the world of work a slightly safer, more equitable, more inclusive and higher performing place. 2023 is going to be even better, and we also have big news coming!

This week, we’re going to look at the most popular issues of 2022, based on your feedback:

Seventh place: Speaking Up: Neurodiversity & Dyspraxia

I nearly didn’t publish this one. In this issue I examined my own experiences with dyspraxia as a child, which meant I had trouble speaking until a later age than most children, and developed a stammer as a teenager. I wondered if these experiences in not being able to speak up, or not having confidence in my own voice, catalysed my passion for the concept of psychological safety and the ability to speak up. I also considered in this issue how psychological safety doesn’t look the same for everyone: some of us may prefer to speak up vocally, some in writing or sign language, some prefer to take time to collate our thoughts and some of us may need to tic or stammer.  These don’t mean that we feel unsafe.

Sixth place: Ecotones

In this, I played with the concepts of the “Edge Effect” and Ecotones that I learned about in my degree in ecology and environmental management. I’m interested in how we could apply the idea of the edge effect to organisations, where different parts of organisations meet to form an ecotone. The edges are where new challenges and opportunities emerge, as well as hybridisation of two or more complementary ideas. 

Photo by Nick Perez on Unsplash

Fifth place: Personal User Manuals I recently ran a workshop where we created personal user manuals and used a 1-2-4-all practice to share some of the insights from them, and it’s proven one of my most popular sessions. Personal User Manuals are a fantastic way to build and foster psychological safety and cohesion in a group. They take our preferences, styles of working, needs and ambitions – and make them explicit and known to the rest of the group. Just the exercise alone helps to foster greater belonging and safety, but the knowledge gained through it also drives team performance through ensuring that we’re all able to align work to our strengths. They’re also a powerful self reflection practice, so it’s worth having a go at writing one even if you don’t intend to share it. Here’s an example personal user manual template below:

Fourth place: 1-1 meetings

In this issue, we discussed good practice for 1-1 meetings and came up with a few key points to ensure psychological safety and effective communication and learning. 1-1 meetings should be:

• Regular enough that issues can be addressed before they become a problem. 
• Long enough to get to the stuff that really matters. 30 minutes is probably not enough.
• Dedicated time, clear of distractions, ideally outside the usual office environment.
• Focussed on the individual’s self-development, learning, morale and wellbeing. Not project progress, targets, KPIs & metrics.
• Foundational to a strong teaming practice.

Third place: Static Work vs Generative Work

This was only last week! In this, we discussed how easy it is to become “Brent” – the only person who knows about a certain system, project or process – particularly if in a management role, and the behaviours that manifest as a result. Being Brent can be intentional or accidental, and I categorise the behaviours as “Static Work” and “Generative Work”.

Second place: Safety I vs Safety II

Erik Hollnagel proposed these two approaches to safety: Safety I and Safety II. Safety I can be considered an approach where we try to ensure that “as few things as possible go wrong”, whilst the Safety II perspective focuses on ensuring “as many things as possible go right”. Safety I cultures result in high volumes of compliance, policy & process – because every time something goes wrong, a mechanism is put in place to prevent it happening again, often regardless of the likelihood of that event. Safety II takes a more humanistic approach, relying more on people – practitioners and operators – to ensure the smooth running of things.

Just as you don’t learn the secrets of a great marriage by studying divorce, we don’t necessarily learn a great deal about success by studying failures. Both approaches are valuable, and neither is sufficient on its own.

First place: The Andon Cord!

The Andon Cord is my favourite psychological safety real-world practice. Created by Taiichi Ohno and part of the sociotechnical approach to quality and improvement that became the Toyota Production System, the Andon Cord is simple: pull the cord if you discover something that could be improved. The team collectively address the problem or implement the improvement, and work restarts. Crucially, anyone who pulls the cord is thanked for doing so: it is a praiseworthy event and one of the core secrets to Toyota’s success. And it is part of daily work: Andon cord pulls are not rare, in fact they occur multiple times a day, and even the Andon Cord itself is subject to pulling the cord, if a way to improve it is discovered.

 Thanks again for an amazing year. I hope you enjoyed all the newsletters and events, and I really look forward to learning more from you all in 2023. Have a wonderful break and a very Happy New Year!

Tom

This newsletter is sponsored by Conflux

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

‘The Fearless Organization’ by Amy Edmondson is considered by many to be essential reading on the topic of psychological safety. In this article, Sophie Weston, Principal at Conflux, has put together some key takeaways from the book.

Things to do and try:

Relax, reflect, and spend time with people you love. You deserve it.

This week’s poem:

Burning the Old Year, by Naomi Shihab Nye, 1995

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,   
lists of vegetables, partial poems.   
Orange swirling flame of days,   
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,   
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.   
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   
only the things I didn’t do   
crackle after the blazing dies.