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,
Safety Guardrails, Mechanisms and Culture. In working with psychological safety, we often touch on “real” or physical safety and how the two are related. By “real” safety, I mean not only safety from the risk of injurious accidents but also all
Can a team be too psychologically safe? A question I get asked in many (maybe even most) workshops is “Can a team be too psychologically safe?” Or sometimes framed, “What’s the impact of a team being too safe?“ My short answer,
As much as Dunbar’s limits on group sizes might seem to be common sense, and reflected in many real world examples, Dunbar’s theories on group size boundaries have been deconstructed and shown to possess confidence intervals too large to be robust in the real world. That is, group size boundaries do exist, but may be anywhere from 30 to 250, depending on context, culture, and other factors.
Westrum’s Cultural Typologies Dr Ron Westrum wrote in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal in 2004 about The Three Typologies of Organisational Culture. He was looking at how information flows through an organisation, and he considered that because information flow is influential and indicative of other aspects
Team Charters In a previous newsletter, we discussed “personal readmes” or “user manuals”. I’m a huge fan of personal readmes as a way to foster psychological safety and cohesion in a group. Through making explicit our own needs, desires, preferences and
The Andon Cord: Stopping The Line Being able to “stop the line” to prevent an issue getting worse, stop a defect passing downstream, suggest an idea for improvement when it can endow maximum benefit, or ask for help in the
Dr Richard Cook I was recently saddened to learn of the passing of Dr Richard Cook, and felt it appropriate that I dedicate this issue of the newsletter to Richard and his achievements. I was hoping that Richard may be able to
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses 1-1 meetings, diversity, experiments, scrum masters and design principles. 1-1 Meetings Every great manager I’ve ever met adhered to a strong and principled practice of regular
Non-Violent Communication Last week, in talking about the Yamas and Niyamas from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, I mentioned Non-Violent Communication (NVC), and I thought it’d be good to dive into it here a bit. I was first introduced to NVC a few years ago
Yogic Philosophy: Ahimsa and Satya You’ve probably realised by now that I love drawing together ideas from diverse fields and disciplines to examine what they can teach us about psychological safety. I’m also interested in how ideas that come from
Psychological safety, power, and Mary Parker Follett Power dynamics are closely intertwined with psychological safety. We’ve highlighted power types and addressing power gradients in other pieces, but I wanted to dive into it a bit more this week. Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), writer, social worker,
Whether organisations like to admit it or not, toxic work culture is still a major problem. A study from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that any workplace, which holds some form of toxicity and hostility, will likely see
Safety I & Safety II (Also known as Safety 1 and 2) For anyone familiar with the concepts of Resilience Engineering, you may have heard of the work of Erik Hollnagel, who states that “resilience engineering maintains that ‘things go
“You should know that already.” “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” “Who’s to blame for this?” “We cannot get this wrong.” “There will be zero mistakes on this project.” *eye roll* “Don’t be so negative.” “You don’t need to
Personal User Manuals (aka “Personal README” or “Manual of Me”) What is a “Personal User Manual”? One of our favourite practices for building psychological safety is the use of personal “user manuals” (also know as README’s, manager guides and other names). These
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses Inspiration (and mountain biking), more emissions scandals, speaking up, bullying at work, autonomy, work agreements, and measuring psychological safety in Japanese. If you enjoy reading this
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses Drive, Dissent, and Checklists. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people who may appreciate it! To
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses sales teams, game theory and the Agile Prime Directive. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people
Last June, Psych Safety Day made its US debut in New York City, with Brooklyn as our home base and a gorgeous cafe in Greenpoint as a warm, LGBTQ‑friendly meeting spot. Despite the sweltering heat and stifling humidity, practitioners and researchers
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses science and experimentation, the Toyota Production System, and meetings. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses making work visible, and rockstar employees. Making Work Visible Dominica DeGrandis is the author of the excellent book “Making Work Visible“. It’s a fantastic book, and covers
The Mythical Man Month Thanks to Amy Edmondson for the signpost to this tweet from George Orosz, who describes the damage that can be done when managers don’t trust in their team, or don’t understand the difference between “I’m updating you” and “I’m asking
Weaponisation of Psychological Safety This week was a bit rubbish to be honest. We had a nasty experience when we were the victims of a rather sophisticated fraud attempt. It could have been awful, but with the help of various
