Psychological Safety Quadrant

The Psychological Safety Quadrant Exercise

This is a really powerful (and fun!) exercise that helps participants learn and understand psychological safety, as well as an opportunity to qualitatively measure psychological safety, and can be carried out remotely or in-person.

This is also really effective for short-lived teams, who haven’t had, or won’t have, time to build and establish common norms and behaviours. For long lived teams, you can also measure psychological safety using the psychological safety survey.

There is sometimes a misconception made that psychological safety is a “fluffy” concept, about being “soft”, or about accepting lower standards. This is not the case. In fact, a culture of psychological safety necessitates and requires higher accountability and standards of performance.

The diagram below, adapted from Dr Amy Edmondson’s excellent book “The Fearless Organisation” illustrates one way of modelling your team’s culture, by plotting psychological safety against “drive to perform”. In the book, Dr Edmondson uses different terminology, and depending on the language of your team, you may wish to substitute a different term such as “motivation”, or “drive” – utilising Daniel Pink’s “Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose” trifecta.

Here’s what each of the psychological safety quadrants mean:

• Apathy – A team with neither psychological safety nor a drive to perform will be unhappy and reluctant to work. This team will not achieve anything meaningful, and can remain stuck here for a very long time – because there’s no way out if we can’t talk about the problem! We may also see people leaving to find greener grass and better results in other teams.
• Comfort Zone – A team with high psychological safety but without a drive to succeed will feel safe, but may not be reaching their potential for performance. This team may be long lasting, because there is low incentive to change, and will achieve at least some of their goals. They may even consider themselves a high performing team. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with being here, especially if the team are delivering what they need to deliver, but there remains untapped potential.
• Anxiety – If a team has low psychological safety but is highly driven, the result can often be high levels of anxiety. This can often be seen in highly pressurised sales teams where team members are pitted against each other for results. These teams are often characterised by high turnover of team members, burnout, high stress levels and conflict. Teams don’t last long in this zone, so it’s a dangerous place to be for both the people in the team, and the broader organisation.
• High Performance – The optimum team lives mostly in this zone. They feel a great deal of psychological safety and demonstrate a strong drive to deliver results. This is also known as the “learning zone”, because team members are empowered to innovate, experiment and learn from mistakes. This team will deliver on their goals, and will show typically low turnover of team members, though team members may leave to pursue career goals due to the high levels of personal development achieved whilst on this team. The team may set their own stretch goals, and may be confident in communicating their success outside the team.
  

How to run the Psychological Safety Quadrant exercise

The exercise has four main steps:

1. Discussion of psychological safety and what it’s like to be in a team in each quadrant. For this, facilitate a discussion and introduce psychological safety as a concept to everyone present or reaffirm if the team already understand it. Surface and discuss the definition of psychological safety.
2. Make it relevant. Starting as the bottom left, in the “Apathy” zone, ask everyone to contribute post-its or virtual stickies with words that describe that zone. Time box contributions and then discuss the words that have been put on the board. Move through each zone, and end with the top-right, the high performance or “learning” zone.
3. Measure psychological safety. Using different colour notes (blank, so they’re anonymous) for each stage, ask people to first put a note on the board to show where they felt they were a year ago. Your context may suit a different time period of 6 months, two years, or whatever works: essentially you’re looking for “past state”. Discuss any clusters, any reasons why, and what that was like. Then move on to put a note where each person feels they are at present in their team, on average (given that we move around this matrix all the time, hour by hour). Discuss the present state, and ask for contributions about what it’s like on the team.
4. Look to the future. Finally, move to a different colour for the future state – “where do we want to be?“. This will likely be somewhere in the performance zone, but might be towards the comfort zone, and that’s ok. Use this stage to discuss what everyone can do on the team to help everyone get to that place.

It’s worth noting a few things about the Psychological Safety Quadrants:

It’s ok to be in the comfort zone, both individually and as a team. Sometimes we just need a breather from the hustle of work, maybe the team needs to heal from a loss or change, maybe someone on the team has had a baby and isn’t getting any sleep at the moment, or maybe they’re supporting a sick relative. The highest performing teams don’t simply live in the high performance zone – they openly discuss moving between comfort and performance. Sprinters take rests between races!

Make particular note of outliers. A team is only as safe as the least safe person. We may have 9 members of the team in performance, with one in anxiety; in this case, it’s the person in anxiety that we need to address. Maybe they’re the lynchpin in the team, feeling under a lot of pressure, or maybe they’re the only LGBTQ person in the team, and feeling excluded – either way, it’s critical to ensure everyone feels psychologically safe and included.

Fostering Psychological Safety in the Team

To facilitate the moving forward, about the behaviours and practices that will enable the team to build psychological safety, try using the Circle of Safety as described here. It’s a great way to facilitate a discussion about practices and behaviours that build (and avoid ones that damage) psychological safety.

This is a really powerful exercise, and can be run remotely via a tool such as Miro, Mural, or Google Jamboard or using a whiteboard if everyone is colocated.

A template for this exercise is in the Psychological Safety Action Pack.

Try using this with your teams to increase psychological safety and performance, and let us know how it goes!