PACE: Graded Assertiveness
Psychological safety is about creating a climate in which we feel able to take interpersonal risks in order to communicate our ideas, concerns and issues – and we want to be able to speak up in a way that we
psychological safety
Socioeconomic background affects our appetite to take interpersonal risks at work.
Edited 2025: See our updated research on how socioeconomic background affects interpersonal risk taking and opportunities in the workplace. Research by KPMG shows that people from working class families took an average 19% longer to move up a grade in
Psychological Safety for Students
Personal Experiences of Psychological Safety through Education By Beatriz Poyton In schools, psychological safety is hard to create but easy to destroy. My own feelings of psychological safety, and willingness to put myself and my ideas forward at school were
Psychological Safety is Political
In the real world, psychological safety is political. There are some who say that psychological safety isn’t political. We think it is. What does “political” mean? At its broadest level, politics determine the ways people in groups make decisions. This
Google’s Project Aristotle
How psychological safety captured the world’s attention For a while, from around 1999 to 2014, the term ‘psychological safety‘ was relatively well known in academia, but barely mentioned, let alone understood in the world of practice, the world of work
Paper Collection on Power, Safety, Authority Gradients, and more.
Paper Compendium on Power, Safety, Authority Gradients, and more. Here are several articles, mostly with full-text links, that explore power dynamics within organisations. They cover broader themes like social power, systemic, episodic, and relational forms of power, power gradients, voice,
Psychological Safety Newsletter 153
Psychological Safety in the World Soft SkillsWhilst I’m not really keen on the term “soft skills” (because really, the soft stuff is the hard stuff), this is a good article by Rebecca Knight on improving your soft skills as a remote
Evolution of Leadership and Management in Healthcare: Lessons from Aviation and Crew Resource Management.
Introduction As a result of the ever-increasing scale and complexity of healthcare systems, hierarchies and layers of management have become increasingly necessary (Kumar, 2021). These facilitate operational capability, both in terms of scale and complexity, but also lead to sometimes
Can I feel psychologically safe when interacting with a machine?
An Unlikely Confidant: How AI Became My Private (PsychSafe) Oasis for Public Victory by Navya Adhikarla Psychological safety, a concept traditionally applied to group dynamics, refers to the feeling of being able to speak up, take risks, and make mistakes
I can say whatever I want!
I can say whatever I want! When I met up with Amy Edmondson recently in Boston (yes, this is a humblebrag and I’m owning it!) we discussed one of the prevalent misconceptions around psychological safety: that it means we can say
Making it safe(r) to fail in teaching
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
Issue 150: Celebrating Three Years of the Psychological Safety Newsletter
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
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
Psychological Safety and the Ancient World
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 Newsletter #148
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
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
Do attachment styles impact leaders (and therefore psychological safety) in the workplace?
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
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
Psychological Safety Newsletter #145
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.
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
Can Workplaces Have Too Much Psychological Safety?
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 and Psychological Safety
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: 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
The Theory of Constraints
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
The importance of safe-to-fail wargames
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
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