Making it safe(r) to fail in teaching By Jade Garratt, Director of Education, Iterum Years ago, I was lucky enough to teach in an amazing secondary school English department. Teachers’ enthusiasm for developing their practice was infectious and there was
The psychological safety newsletter is now three years old! The first issue went out on February 19th, 2021 to just 139 people, and you can read it online here. And this is issue 150! Over these 150 issues we’ve evolved
Psychological Safety Case Study: The Sales Team One of the most popular requests from the newsletter feedback survey was for some case studies of psychological safety in practice, so here’s the first one! It’s an interesting case that illustrates why
Guest Post by Beatriz Poyton The term psychological safety is believed to have originated in 1954 by clinical psychologist Carl Rogers. William Kahn has since defined psychological safety as “the sense of being able to show and employ one’s self
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
Civility Saves Lives If you wanted to completely destroy any psychological safety in the group, what would you do? If you wanted to create a culture of fear, where nobody felt safe to speak up, suggest ideas, highlight concerns, or
In a word, yes. The importance of mental health and well-being is now being recognised in the workplace. Some would even argue it’s being respected. Though not universal in its reach, this new attitude is seeing employers investing in a
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
Psychological Safety at Work Lean and psychological safety Here’s a great analysis by Ben Hutchinson of a paper examining the relationship between Lean and psychological safety in construction projects in the US. This combines two of my favourite subjects so
Telling the boss bad news twice. Soon after I graduated from university with my degree in ecology, I got a job as an Experimentalist at Jealott’s Hill Research Station, Berkshire. I worked in a department called “Weed Science” (yes, it does
Team performance isn’t the only reason that we foster psychological safety. We also do it because we want people to feel fulfilled in their jobs, we don’t want people to leave a team because they don’t feel included, we want people to experience less unnecessary stress and have greater mental wellbeing, we want to foster greater diversity and inclusion. Ultimately, we foster psychological safety because it’s fundamentally the right thing to do.
Crew Resource Management (CRM) and the Centrality of Psychological Safety CRM was developed in the 1970s and operationalised psychological safety in safety-critical, complex environments. Crew Resource Management (CRM) recognised, as a result of accidents such as Tenerife in 1977, that
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
The Theory of Constraints (ToC) A long time ago, I read a book that profoundly changed the way I think about work. That book was The Goal, written by Eli Goldratt in 1984, The story revolves around Alex Rogo, a
Guest post by Nick Drage, Strategy Lead and Game Designer at Path Dependence Limited, co-author of “The Handbook of Cyber Wargames: Wargaming the 21st Century”. At its most abstract level a wargame is a “representation of conflict or competition in
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
Selection Pressure and Psychological Safety Why has it taken so long for some industries to recognise the importance of psychological safety, whilst others have been doing it for decades? One possible answer: selection pressure. Over the past few decades, the
The Challenger Disaster: AKA The Normalisation of Risk In previous articles we’ve differentiated error into three types: slips and lapses, mistakes, and violations. This time, we’re exploring a certain type of violation called the “normalisation of deviance”, a term coined
Tool: Foster psychological safety We realised recently that the Google Project Aristotle page for their guide on team effectiveness and building psychological safety was 404’ing, so for anyone looking for it, we went over to the Way Back Machine and
The Whitehall Studies and The Social Gradient of Health The relationship between formal or positional power (seniority & status) and psychological safety is strong. In general, we know that people holding more senior and higher status roles often feel safer
The First Org Chart In 1855, Brigadier General Daniel McCallum, later to become a Civil War officer renowned for “strict precision and stern discipline” as well as for his innovative engineering, created the world’s first organisational chart. This chart was
Guest post by Navya Adhikarla, graduate student in the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke University (Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact “Look me in the eye and tell me you are not lying,”
15/5 Reports To manage teams in a way that fosters psychological safety requires clear communication and feedback channels. Team members should have well-defined platforms to share achievements, voice concerns, and seek assistance. Ideally, these feedback mechanisms will be consistent, high-cadence and
Stutters and Stammers I’ve written previously about my experience growing up with dyspraxia, which I was diagnosed with at an early age. My dyspraxia made it difficult for me to pronounce and articulate certain sounds (called phonemes), and meant that I
Deming’s 14 Points of Management I’m a Deming fan, and sad that I never got to meet him or attend any of his lectures. W. E. Deming is possibly most well known for his “PDCA” (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, which is actually
