The Best Books About Psychological Safety

The Psychological Safety Book Club

We love nothing more than reading fantastic books that help us to understand (and explain) concepts around psychological safety even better. The list below includes many of our current favourite books about psychological safety, but it is by no means exhaustive, and we always love to get new book recommendations from our wonderful community. If you have some of your own suggestions to share, please join the community or get in touch!

The Fearless Organisation by Amy Edmondson

The essential book on Psychological Safety. Dr Edmondson covers the research and theory, examples of failure where a lack of psychological safety was (at least in significant part) a component cause, as well as demonstrating the successes that result from environments of high psychological safety. This book contains excellent insights and actions that you will take away and be able to implement with your teams, whether you’re in a leadership role or not. If you’re going to read anything on psychological safety, it should be this book.

Turn The Ship Around by David Marquet

Whilst David doesn’t discuss psychological safety by name in this book, what he did with his crew and his approach to leadership are very much psychologically safe approaches to high performance leadership. An excellent book, very readable, and provides a wealth of actionable takeaways.

Take it even further by reading David’s follow-up to this, “Leadership is Language“, which is excellent and also very actionable.

Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive, by Amy Edmondson

Amy Edmondson unveils the misconceptions surrounding failure and illustrates the right way to approach it. With a rich background in psychological safety research, she demonstrates that flourishing cultures are those where individuals can openly encounter failure without facing judgment. Edmondson delineates three distinct failure archetypes – simple, complex, and intelligent. She offers insightful guidance on capitalising on the transformative power of beneficial failures while mitigating detrimental ones.

The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan

Diane Vaughan’s The Challenger Launch Decision offers a detailed sociological analysis of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Instead of attributing the tragedy to a single decision-maker’s error or outright negligence, Vaughan highlights a complex organisational culture at NASA in which small rule-bending behaviours—what she calls “the normalisation of deviance”—became accepted practice over time. Engineers and managers gradually adjusted to increasingly risky conditions as normal, losing sight of just how dangerous their actions had become.

This organisational climate had significant implications for psychological safety. Engineers who harboured serious reservations about the O-rings and other safety issues felt pressure to conform to the established norms and decision-making processes rather than openly question them. In this environment, voicing dissent or expressing worry about technical problems could be seen as going against “business as usual.” Vaughan’s analysis thus shows how a lack of psychological safety contributed to the Challenger tragedy by stifling critical dialogue and preventing warnings from being taken seriously.

Confronting Mistakes by Jan Hagen

This is a fantastic and highly readable book about the causes of aviation disasters – specifically faulty communication and failure to speak up – that were exposed by the use of black box technology. As a result, the aviation world introduced Crew Resource Management: a set of principles and training practices that encourage speaking up, and crucially, the creation of environments in the air and on the ground that encourage people to speak up.

Speak-Up Culture: When Leaders Truly Listen, People Step Up by Stephen Shedletzky

Speak-Up Culture is a must-read for any leader or manager who wants to create a more open, honest, and collaborative work environment. This book contains a great collection of stories, theories and concepts, and also consists a practical guide that offers real-world examples and tools to help leaders foster a psychologically safe culture where everyone feels safe and empowered to speak up.

Oops! Why Things Go Wrong by Niall Downey

Errors, just like death and taxes are inevitable. In this book, Niall describes his experiences in both healthcare and aviation, and how core practices and cultures can create environments that are not only safer, but higher performing too.

Radical Candor, by Kim Scott

Radical candor seeks to help us find the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. This is a great book, although the term “radical candor” is sometimes misinterpreted to mean “brutal candor”, which can be weaponised. As Kim points out in later editions, a more apt term might be “compassionate candor”.

Teaming, by Amy Edmondson

One of the earlier books in this list. Teaming draws on Senge and other experts as well as Amy’s own research and expertise to highlight the organic, almost informal process of how teams form and work together. Drawing the focus away from leadership, Teaming is a more devolved approach and requires fostering psychological safety in order to be effective.

Inclusion on Purpose by Ruchika Tulshyan

This is an excellent and challenging book by Ruchika. She offers six strategies for turning empathy into action–be uncomfortable, reflect on what you don’t know, invite feedback, limit defensiveness, grow from your mistakes, and expect change to take time–and encourages readers to examine how policies or assumptions that seem “normal” can cause unintended harm. For example, she describes a workplace where social events always included alcohol, thus excluding employees whose religion, culture, or health kept them from drinking. Tulshyan recommends acknowledging such mistakes, identifying the biases that may have driven them, and working to do better.

Human and Organisational Potential by Ivan Pupulidy and Crista Vesel

Human and Organisational Performance is closely related, indeed dependent upon, psychological safety. This excellent book covers all the basics of HOP, from human error to Ed Schein’s layers of culture. In fact, almost every chapter of this book has at least one corresponding article on psychsafety.com!

The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker

This is an excellent book about the fallacy of “human error”. Definitely worth a read if you work in safety critical environments, and very useful even if you don’t. It does lean towards the academic, so take your time, and make notes!

The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’ will help you understand how to move beyond ‘human error’; how to understand accidents; how to do better investigations; how to understand and improve your safety work. You will be invited to think creatively and differently about the safety issues you and your organisation face. In each, you will find possibilities for a new language, for different concepts, and for new leverage points to influence your own thinking and practice, as well as that of your colleagues and organisation. If you are faced with a ‘human error’ problem, abandon the fallacy of a quick fix.

Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein

Ed Schein describes the approach of asking over telling, and in particular, how to ask questions that draw on curiosity and interest to generate bold new ideas, avoid disastrous mistakes, and develop agility and flexibility in your teams.

The Four Stages of Psychological Safety by Timothy R. Clarke

A useful framework to aid the journey of a team through Tim Clarke’s “4 Stages” model of psychological safety, with echoes of Tuckman’s Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing model. Very readable, though ultimately the model itself fails in practice, and lacks evidential basis.

Wrong, but interesting.

Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart

Jonathan Smart, business agility practitioner, thought leader, and coach, reveals the patterns and antipatterns that will help organisations from every industry deliver better value sooner, safer, and happier through high levels of engagement, inclusion, and empowerment. This is an excellent aggregation of a great deal of insight and best practice into organisational transformation.

Restorative Practice by Lesley Parkinson

I love Lesley’s approach to making restorative practice actually practical – from civility to circle meetings. So much of this book spoke to me, but especially the framing of failure that, as humans, we are certain to err – we can try not to, but we will. We are however in control of how we respond to failure – restorative practice can help us define what a positive response to failure looks like when it happens to us or those around us.

Agile Conversations by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick

Whilst not primarily about psychological safety, this a practical, step-by-step guide to using the human power of conversation to unleash the unique human power of conversation and build effective, high-performing teams. Short, easy to read, and very actionable.

The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim

Specifically about software development teams, Gene Kim refers to “The Five Ideals” of which the fourth (and I believe the most important) is psychological safety. An excellent book for those involved in technology, particularly if you’ve read the precursor – The Phoenix Project.

The Psychological Safety Playbook by Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman

A broad and comprehensive guide to the practices, behaviours and techniques to help foster psychological safety in any sort of work team. This is a great practical guide and also has wonderful illustrations!

It's OK to Make Mistakes, by Annelies Draws

A book for small children and grown adults alike. It’s an excellent (and very chewable) book about being prepared to make mistakes because it’s the best way to learn!

If you spot the (we presume deliberate!) mistake in this book, get in touch and we’ll send you some free stickers!

Under Pressure by Gareth Lock

An interesting dive (ha!) into how human factors, psychological safety, expertise and interpersonal dynamics integrate into the world of sport diving. There are some great takeaways here for those who like to explore parallels to the world of work from other domains.

Under Pressure by Gareth Lock.

What Have We Missed?

If there’s a book that’s transformed your understanding of psychological safety, we’d love to hear about it. Get in touch and we’ll review whether we can add it to the list!

Unlocking the power of psychological safety for your team

If you’re feeling inspired by all this reading and you’re ready to put the theory into practice with your own team and organisation, take a look at our Psychological Safety Action Pack and Practice Playbooks. These toolkits offer a wealth of practical resources to guide you on your journey to understanding, measuring, building and maintaining psychological safety in your teams.

agile measurement performance psychological safety teams work

Tom Geraghty

Tom Geraghty, founder and CEO of Iterum Ltd, is an expert in high performing teams and psychological safety. Leveraging his unique background in ecological research and technology, Tom has held CIO/CTO roles in a range of sectors from tech startups to global finance firms. He holds a degree in Ecology, an MBA, and is pursuing a Masters in Global Health at the University of Manchester. His mission is to make workplaces safer, higher performing, and more inclusive. A renowned speaker, Tom has shared his insights at major events such as The IT Leaders Summit and the NHS Senior Leadership Conference. Connect with him on LinkedIn (@geraghtytom), Twitter (@tom_geraghty), or explore his work at https://tomgeraghty.co.uk and https://psychsafety.com.