Psychological Safety is not the goal

Psychological Safety is not the goal

Now, this might seem an odd thing to say for someone who makes a living by helping people understand and foster psychological safety, but it’s true.

Psychological safety isn’t the goal; the goal is whatever your organisation, group, or team is trying to achieve, whether that’s saving lives, operating a safe airline, providing a service or launching a successful tech product. In reality, the “goal” for many of my clients might be something like boosting team & organisational performance, increasing resilience, improving the flow of work or fostering greater patient & worker safety.  However, it’s psychological safety, or rather, the behaviours and practices that foster psychological safety and are encouraged by psychological safety, that enable the realisation of that goal.

Of course, we also want to feel psychologically safe at work, we want to feel happy and fulfilled by what we do, we want to make sure our organisations treat people fairly and that people are offered opportunities to thrive irrespective of characteristics such as age, gender, race or sexuality. These aims are noble, true, and morally right, but they are rarely the primary goal of a team or organisation. In fact, sometimes psychological safety is misunderstood as being only about improving wellbeing or employee’s mental health. It can and does do that, but there’s a lot more to it as well. 

This means that with our clients, whilst our primary engagement focuses on psychological safety, via work on behaviours, workshopping practices, learning, reframing, addressing DEI and much more, we usually also end up identifying key areas for improvement in organisational strategy, structure and execution.

To address these issues we help to develop strategy, tactics and delivery practices, improve the flow and visibility of work, and encourage collaboration inside and between teams, and even entire organisations. There is a near-limitless list of practices, skills, tools, and processes we can adopt to support this development, including:

• Developing strategy using the Three Horizons model, Wardley Mapping, OODA and more.
• Utilising OKRs and North Star frameworks. We work on breaking down organisational goals and North Stars into deliverable objectives (such as OKRs), key results, and leading and lagging indicators of success.
• Metrics-Based Process Mapping (MBPM): This is a great practice to examine, in depth, how a process actually works in practice. We surface every little step of an important process and measure how long it takes, how many people and what resources it requires, plus any wait time, handoffs, and the quality at each step.
• Mapping Value Streams – establishing how value flows in an organisation toward the end users or customers: The Value Stream itself is the series of individual processes that connect together to create the value that an organization produces for its customer or end user. By mapping out the value stream, we can reveal disconnects, redundancies and unnecessary complications, and establish better ways and structures for teams to work together, which enable more efficient and faster flow of value.
• Visualising work and Kanban training. This helps to surface issues in workflow, such as where work comes from, and where it gets blocked or constrained, and enables teams to set WIP limits and manage & prioritise work more effectively.
• Adopting High-Reliability Operations, DevOps, SRE, chaos engineering practices and effective learning from incidents. These are practices for technology teams, including software engineers and IT engineering or service desk teams.
• Mapping organisational money flows. This is a relatively new area of work in connection with psychological safety, but is absolutely crucial to cultural and organisational change. Culture is influenced by how money flows – where budgets come from, over what periods, whether budgets are Capex or Opex, and how they’re determined. Mapping these money flows enable us to identify challenges and improvements. Wu-Tang knew this back in 1993.
• Using Agile and Scrum practices in non-technical teams. Technology teams have been adopting Agile and Scrum methodologies for nearly 20 years, but many teams outside technology are yet to make the leap. We help to establish the patterns that suit the team and their context, and build the capabilities to make the most of them.
• Analysing cognitive load. When our cognitive load is too high, we struggle to focus, work grinds to a halt, quality suffers, and we risk burnout and stress. However, it’s difficult to identify when our cognitive load is too high, and even more difficult to work out what we can change about the system to address it. We use tools developed by NASA and adapted by folks such as the OPL to measure cognitive load, examine the causes, and make changes to mitigate it.

And there’s a bunch of other great stuff too, including Team APIs and Inverse Conway Manoeuvres, Design Sprints, experiment design, Formal Relational Contracts, SLI’s & SLO’s, threat modelling and simulations, and Local Rationality Investigation training. All this means we can be confident that we’re not “just” improving psychological safety, but helping teams and organisations to achieve their most important goals. In future newsletters, we’re going to dive a bit deeper into some of these practices and ideas above, and if you’d like us to work with your team on any of these capabilities or find out more, give us a shout!

New stickers!

I think designing stickers is one of my guilty pleasures. We have two new fun designs available to buy now. Alternatively, you can get your hands on some by attending a workshop, or promoting the psychsafety.com newsletter and/or workshops on social media (such as LinkedIn). If you let us know you’ve done this by emailing stickers@psychsafety.com (and include your postal address) we’ll send you some for free!

Psychological Safety and Employment Rights

Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to answer our short survey about psychological safety and employment rights! We have some really interesting preliminary results that we’ll be able to share soon. I’m going to leave the survey open for another week to gather as much data as possible, so please respond to this survey if you have a moment 🙂 Complete it here, it should only take about a minute.

If you leave your email address, we’ll share the anonymised data with you, and the aggregated insights will be presented in a future newsletter. We’re already looking at turning this into a collaborative research piece with a couple of academic institutions in the US and UK.

Do you feel psychologically safe?

If we reply yes, it might be because we don’t feel safe enough to say no. Self-reporting our level of #psychologicalsafety is potentially flawed, precisely because it’s psychological safety that allows us to be truthful in what we say! Neat flow chart here by the folks at Comic Agile.

Here’s a behavioural typology model of leadership ostracism, from a paper called “Leadership Ostracism Behaviors From the Target’s Perspective: A Content and Behavioral Typology Model Derived From Interviews With Chinese Employees” by Mengchu Zhao et al. This shows the subtle ways that leaders (and non-leaders too) can intentionally or unintentionally ostracise people in the workplace and, of course, damage psychological safety in the process, both for the people subject to the behaviour, and the people that witness it.

This week, The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has apologised for mistakenly revealing personal details of all its 10,000 staff by accidentally including the details in a Freedom of Information (FoI) request for salary and structure information. This is all the more serious due to the nature of police work in Northern Ireland. According to press reports, the incident is “being attributed to human error”, and echoes similar attribution to human error the causes of the India train crash that killed 275 people on June 2nd, 2023. The NY Times article covering it described human error as the cause and included the title, “India Vows Punishment for Those Responsible for Deadly Train Crash“. Whilst I’m sure imprecise journalistic language plays a part here, as discussed in previous newsletters here and here, it’s unhelpful to describe “human error” as the cause of an incident. Human error should be the beginning of investigations, not the end.



This week I came across this article by Thomas Curran: Perfectionists Need to Embrace Failure. I’m yet to be convinced that there are perfectionist people and non-perfectionist people, only different standards we hold ourselves to in different contexts and times in our lives. I’ve personally had CBT sessions to address perfectionist behaviours, but I don’t consider myself a perfectionist. This article makes the evergreen point that “you can’t fail at something you don’t attempt“, which we’ve addressed in various previous newsletters. I think it’s interesting that if we take failure off the table – if we attempt something that we believe we won’t succeed at – we can surprise ourselves with our success. It’s often our fear of failure that hinders our success.

An awesome example of this is Rachel Atherton’s winning run at the Lenzerheide Downhill MTB world cup race earlier this year. Rachel took time out of the sport after the birth of her child Arna in 2021, and this year decided to give racing another go: “I 100% came into Lenzerheide with zero expectations. I just wanted to find out if racing was still fun for me and look what happened!” What happened was that she won the race by a significant margin and was called “the fastest mum in the world“. Read this great MTBR interview here with Rachel about her experience of racing, becoming a mum, and how she’s now racing for fun, not for the goal of winning.

Watch Rachel’s winning run on Red Bull TV.

“Just because I can survive harsh conditions, doesn’t mean I should have to.”

Finally, thanks to Balazs and a few folks for sharing this with me: I absolutely love this linocut print by Noah Reinoso (@reinpress on Instagram). Noah is a bi, trans, Cuban/Canadian who has been doing linocut printmaking since September 2019, and what started out as a hobby turned into a whole small business for them now 🙂 Check out Noah’s shop here and bag yourself a Tardigrade linocut!

New Date! Online Practice Masterclass 21st August

Unfortunately one of our clients had to postpone a series of workshops scheduled for August, but the upshot is that we now have some extra time! So we’ve decided to schedule a bonus online Practice Masterclass Workshop for the 21st August at 2pm UK time.  This session sold out last time so find out more and register here.

This week’s poem:

Underface, by Shel Silverstein

Underneath my outside face
There’s a face that none can see.
A little less smiley,
A little less sure,
But a whole lot more like me