Part 1: The Power and Peril of Naming

Over the past five years of our work in psychological safety, it has transformed from a little-known term, understood and explicitly practised by only a small group of researchers and practitioners, to one recognised around the world, and familiar to many in the workplace. This is good: awareness has spread to millions, and more and more people are making it safer to speak up in their teams and organisations. 

But there’s also a downside. As the term has gained popularity, its meaning hasn’t always stayed intact. Through epistemic drift, psychological safety has been frequently misunderstood and misapplied, even weaponised at times – and in some quarters dismissed as just another fad. There are still some people who are dubious or cynical of psychological safety, often due to common misconceptions about it, and sometimes simply due to a preference for the status quo. Or, both. We’ve seen psychological safety treated as a managerial or HR checkbox, stripped of its depth or intent. Thankfully, the overall impact is still very much a net positive effect, but today we have to be even more cautious of misuse and misunderstandings than we did a few years ago when the term was new to most.

The field of psychological safety itself has also matured.There is now a much stronger recognition of power in its various forms, and power gradients that shape how people experience the workplace. We’re also increasingly aware that psychological safety looks different to everyone – differences in national cultures, neurodiversities, past experiences and personal backgrounds all influence how safe it feels to speak up. On LinkedIn, you’ll still encounter a swathe of quick fixes, “simple steps”, and one-size-fits-all recommendations that often do more harm than good, but in practice at the sharp end, psychological safety is fortunately moving away from simplistic models to more complexity-informed approaches. This is encouraging, though it also brings a challenge: we need to be conscious of not making the concept inaccessibly unwieldy, abstract and difficult to communicate, especially for newcomers. 

At the same time, the past few years have seen the rise of other human-oriented paradigms, such as Safety II, Just Culture, HOP, Resilience Engineering, Restorative Practice and more – which align with or complement psychological safety. In the safety-critical domains of healthcare, aviation, rail, and other high-consequence fields, the more we do this work, the more we observe how intrinsically connected psychological safety is with physical and patient safety. Too often, physical harm arises from silence or attenuated speech. 

It’s a great time to be working in this field, and the time is right for making even more progress. Here, and over the coming series of articles, I’m reflecting on the past five years of dedicated work in the psychological safety space, what I and we have learned, and what the future of psychological safety might look like.

Why name it at all?

First of all, it’s worth revisiting the name “psychological safety”, as it’s such a crucial anchor for our work. It originally emerged from Carl Rogers’ work in psychotherapy in the 1950s, and while the concept has evolved and matured since then, it remains at its core, the same ‘psychological safety’ that Rogers envisioned: which means fostering conditions where an individual feels they are safe, understood, and their intrinsic worth is not conditional upon what they know or achieve. 

Edmondson’s team-level definition of psychological safety (1999) is the direct descendant of Rogers’ original concept.

“The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”

Over the last 70+ years, fields like aviation – specifically the concept of CRM (Crew Resource Management) – recognised that communication in high-stakes environments is key to the prevention of disasters. Whilst the terminology in aviation and similar contexts was that of “attenuated speech” and “safety silence”, and “cockpit gradients” or “authority gradients” instead of “power gradients”, in practice it was psychological safety in action long before the term was better known — grounded in the evidence that in complex, high-consequence contexts, the right words at the right moment can save lives.

There have been numerous suggestions to rename psychological safety, which often, if you’ll allow me to be completely frank, have commercial motivations behind them. Renaming it would not only be a disservice to the great work of people like Rogers, Schein, Bennis and Edmondson who built the foundations of the field, but they also risk dissolving our understanding of the concept entirely – without the term ‘psychological safety’, we risk losing such a strong conceptual anchor for both research and practice. 

Psychological safety theatre and facadism

Having a name for it isn’t without risks though. The very term psychological safety can formalise and reify what is at heart an emergent and relational phenomenon. It can fuel the seductive desire that we might systematise and roadmap our way to a utopian end state where everyone feels completely safe to speak up at all times. At worst, this risks psychological safety work becoming performative rather than experiential. That’s why I feel we need to stay collectively attentive to the danger of it slipping into “psychological safety theatre” or facadism.

There’s also another subtler risk. Once something is named, we tend to fix its boundaries in our minds – narrowing what we believe “counts” as psychological safety. This can unintentionally exclude the ways it is experienced by those whose voices are less represented. The stakes are higher for some to speak up than others, which is why one of our key principles is that a team is only as safe as the least safe person. Psychological safety should evolve, and be collectively owned rather than imposed.

Our understanding of the complexity around psychological safety continues to develop. The concept first gained traction in fairly narrow contexts: white-collar, neurotypical, Western workplaces – but we, along with the Psych Safety community and others, are pushing it into broader, more inclusive territory. The task now (for all of us, readers included) is to keep the concept porous: open enough to be interpreted and enacted differently in different contexts, without ossifying into rigid, prescriptive models. It’s often those rigid models that risk turning a valuable concept into just another commercialised fad. 

Naming something is both an enabling constraint (it creates coherence and agency – it’s hard to change what we cannot name) as well as a limiting constraint (it risks calcifying the concept and preventing evolution). On balance though, I believe that naming psychological safety has been far more valuable than not naming it. For many of us, encountering the term feels like a revelation; suddenly, there is language for something we’ve felt but couldn’t articulate. And with that language comes the power to address it. 

To be continued…

In part two, I expand on how psychological safety can look different for different people, why power matters so much, and how we can keep pushing the concept into more inclusive and practical territory.

Part three dives into dissent, non-determinism, and the danger of targets, KPIs, diagnostics and benchmarks.