learning

psychological safety workshop

Learning at Psych Safety

How We Think About Learning at Psych Safety At Psych Safety, we care deeply about how learning happens. Not just what people take away from a session, but how it feels to be there – what kind of space it

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To illustrate the difference between psychological safety sociology: Term Focus Typical Concerns Psychological Internal states of an individual (e.g. cognition, affect, belief) Do I risk being humiliated if I ask this question? Sociological Patterns and structures among people (e.g. roles, institutions, norms) How does our hierarchy suppress dissent?

Sociological Safety

“Sociological” Safety By Tom Geraghty The term psychological safety has been in use since Carl Rogers’ work in the 1950s and was applied to organisational contexts by Schein and Bennis (among others) in the 1960s. Since Amy Edmondson’s influential research

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team learning types

Learning Types and Toxic Leadership

Psychological Safety in Practice Team Learning in the Field: An Organizing Framework and Avenues for Future Research This excellent paper from Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey affirms that teams learn most effectively when members feel safe to speak up, take interpersonal risks,

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Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Experiments, bets and probes

Experiments, bets and probes One of our mottos at PsychSafety is “everything is an experiment”. The outcome of work shouldn’t just be getting the thing done, it should be learning how to do it better next time.  Experiments don’t mean

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amplifying weak signals

Amplifying Weak Signals

A few issues ago, we covered various kinds of retrospective – the practice of looking back and learning from work, as well as some of the conditions and requirements for effective retrospectives. One of those points was about the “weak

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psychological safety word cloud

Psychological Safety in 2023: unwrapped!

Psychological Safety in 2023 Thanks so much for all your support, feedback, encouragement, ideas, insights and collaboration over 2023! It’s genuinely a privilege to be able to do this work, and I appreciate every single one of you. I recently

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causal pies

Retrospectives

Learning From Work In the spirit of looking back and learning, I thought it’d be nice to dive into a few different practices of learning from the work we do. In this issue, we’re going to have a look at

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cognitive bias

Bad Management

Bad Management It’s important that we learn from our own mistakes and failures, and self-reflect in order to improve. However, there’s also a lot we can learn from things others get wrong. That, after all, is partly why psychological safety is such

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psychological safety playbooks

Psychological Safety & High-Performing Teams

High Performing Teams & Psychological Safety at Work: Psychological safety is the foundation for team performance, whether we’re oriented towards consistent quality, innovation, adaptation, safety or a combination of all outcomes. When people feel psychologically safe, they feel more able

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motorbike

Safe To Fail Experiments

What is “Safe to Fail”? Recently, I failed a motorbike test. This might sound like a mistake, but I fully expected to fail. In the UK, you must pass multiple tests before you’re allowed out on the roads on a

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someone climbing and being belayed by someone else

How to Foster Psychological Safety: Behaviours

Psychological Safety Behaviours: The Big List (Updated Oct 2025) Psychological safety is a belief that the group is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999). There are many ways we can help to foster these environments, but it’s important to

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cognitive load - psychsafety

Cognitive Load and Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety #101 What does Cognitive Load have to do with Psychological Safety? Psychological safety helps to reduce our cognitive load by allowing us to ask for help and worry less about the interpersonal risks we take. Conversely, high cognitive

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"People do reasonable things given their goals, knowledge, understanding of the situation and focus of attention at a particular moment."

Types of Human Error

Human Error We’ve covered failures before, but this week we’re focusing on errors. Failures can be preventable, complex, or  “intelligent” – such as those resulting from experiments where we try something, intentionally, that might fail. However, errors, in this context, refer to the unwanted

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a pug feeling psychologically safe

Psychological Safety: Artificial Intelligence

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses artificial intelligence and psychological safety. Psychological safety and safety culture workshops In the New Year, we’re running two new workshops! The first is a 2-hour Intermediate Psychological Safety Workshop on

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Joan Cornellà - do nothing and you won't be wrong

Learning From Failure

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses dealing with learning from incidents, plus Elon Musk, share of voice, and Extreme Negative Feedback. We have some new stickers too! These glow in the dark,

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The swedish warship Vasa - psychological safety

Psychological Safety: Servant Leadership

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses servant leadership, Swedish warships, being “neurodistinct”, and product development. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people

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learning methods

Organisational Learning & Learning Methods

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You rock 🙂  This week includes Learning Organisations and Learning Methods, cockpit culture, healthcare, education, Peter Senge, social anxiety, and “star employees”.If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social

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