Psychological Safety at Work

Psychological Safety in Schools

This is an excellent piece on the EdCan Network website on the importance and dynamics of psychological safety for students. The authors make a few key points – psychological safety and inclusion are interdependent, and psychological safety enables, but does not guarantee, inclusion. Diverse teams perform better, with the foundation of high-performing teams being psychological safety. Crucially, inclusion is a key component of wellbeing and is also one of the primary social determinants of health – students learn best when they feel their best. I also absolutely love that the authors, Kyla Christiansen, Maxine McKenzie-Cox, Pamela Korczak, and Kathleen Lane, have adapted my psychological safety inclusion and diversity pyramid further, to show the effect on learning and outcomes. 

Psychological Safety in Higher Education

Here’s a great piece in the Times HE: Universities jeopardise workers’ ‘psychosocial safety’. Thanks to Isabella von Holstein for sharing this one. This definitely aligns with our experiences and findings working with Higher Education institutions. Although interestingly our experiences actually suggest that it’s less to do with the speed and volume of work – the sheer capacity burden – (as suggested in the article) and more to do with the often adversarial environment, competition and the “publish or perish” culture, conflicting priorities between research and teaching, lack of modern or progressive leadership and management, and also the huge transition that HE has gone through. Many HE institutional cultures still feel themselves to be research-driven, purely academic entities, when in fact they are to a degree now commercial education providers, and students pay very large fees, so expect a lot in return. That creates internal conflict and a lot of friction between people, departments, and priorities.

Read also: Psychosocial Safety

Neurodivergent Learners

I like this piece by David X Crowe on Cognitive Load, the Learning Environment, and Neurodivergent Learners. A crucial point that I appreciate in this, which is one we include in all our psychological safety workshops, is around the educational practices that enforce “masking” of neurodivergence, such as discouraging stimming or mandating eye contact. These can be particularly burdensome for neurodivergent people, and requires people to adopt behaviours that feel unnatural or are very uncomfortable, creating a significant cognitive load that ultimately reduces our ability to learn.

Intentional Spaces

Here’s a great piece by Dr. Misha Inniss-Thompson, Dr. Seanna Leath, and Dr. Jamelia N. Harris, Seeing Black Girls in Their Glory, studying black girls in an after school program in the US. This is a powerful piece that describes articulately how we may create intentional spaces where marginalised and disadvantaged people can experience liberation and healing. Thanks Tony Joyce for sharing with me.

Listening

Thanks to Dan Harley for sharing this paper: “Listening to understand: The role of high-quality listening on speakers’ attitude depolarization during disagreements.” Active listening: paying attention, fostering understanding, and showing positive intent bridges divides across people who disagree, even when those disagreements are highly polarised. To a degree, we can file this under “you don’t say?!” but it’s always useful to be able to pull some peer reviewed evidence out for good practice! 

Boeing

Thanks to Sarah Powell for sharing this episode of the Daily podcast, describing the recent “blowout” incident of an Alaska Airlines Boeing MAX9. It dives a little deeper into how and why the bolts retaining the door came to be missing after some maintenance work. And this article in Business Insider by Linette Lopez does a really good job of examining the broader financial, structural and political factors that have gradually changed elements of the culture at Boeing after the McDonnell Douglas merger. This post, Boeing’s Shift from Engineering Excellence to Profit-Driven Culture: Tracing the Impact of the McDonnell Douglas Merger on the 737 Max Crisis, by Aram Gesar takes a similar approach, as do many other commentators and researchers. On the other hand, I know some folks inside Boeing, and whilst this perspective is true of a higher level representation of the economic dynamics, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the experiences of people at the sharp end of the organisation. I agree that Friedman’s economic approach of the purpose of corporations being to maximise shareholder returns has certainly had an effect on turning Boeing away from a very engineering focused culture, towards a shareholder value driven culture. However, many people inside Boeing would argue that, at the sharp end, there is still a very high standard of engineering culture and a pride in quality and workmanship – it is the systems from which quality standards and culture derive that we need to address. My concern is that there is a narrative developing that makes it seem otherwise. 

Health and Safety

This piece in Forbes reflects the growing transition of the safety world towards the “new view” of safety, including Safety II and Resilience Engineering. “Safety’s Evolution Towards Psychological Safety Programming“. The relationship between physical safety and psychological safety is strong – indeed, psychological safety is a prerequisite for physical safety. This is shown not only in academic research but in real-world experience too, from mountaineering to Chernobyl. What is interesting is the pushback on psychological safety from some quarters of the safety world who sometimes appear to feel wedded to traditional or conventional approaches of supervision, compliance and enforcement: a belief that people are the problem, not the solution.

Behavioural Health Today podcast

This was a super fun podcast to record – Behavioural Health Today. We got into a ton of stuff around psychological safety, including body language and eye contact as in David Crowe’s article above, and also talked about the power of stories to help people talk about the consequences of leadership and peer behaviour in a safe environment. We also discussed how managers and leaders who use fear as a motivation tool and reject psychological safety, are usually doing so as a result of fear themselves. 

Book Club!

Finally, here’s a new Miroverse Template Book Club Guide for The Fearless Organisation by Amy Edmondson. Thanks so much to Viktor Cessan and  Magdalena Björkman for all the hard work that went into this. We hope that we’ll soon have one for “The Right Kind of Wrong” soon too!

This week’s poem:

Risk, by Anais Nin

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.