The online Psychological Safety Community has been live since early 2021, and currently has around 800 members. It’s completely free to join, and we have some great conversations there. A lot of newsletter topics and sharing items come from discussions
Psychological Safety and DevOps Practices This is a special edition article by Balázs Szakmáry Developing software of any real complexity is a task that goes well beyond one person and one computer. The people, the machines, and the processes involved
After the success of our last Psychological Safety Day in Barcelona, we decided to do it again in 2024, in Seville! Last Friday, the bright open-plan area of a wonderful coworking space in Seville buzzed with lively debate, laughter, and
Non-Violent Communication (or “Giraffe Language”) I saw this great post by Robin Weinick on LinkedIn about her bowl of tiny giraffes, and it reminded me to share a photo of our own “Speak Up Giraffe”! This giraffe is passed around
The increase in awareness and popularity of psychological safety I thought it would be interesting to look at the frequency of the search term “psychological safety” over time, and map certain events onto that. If you head to Google Trends,
Leadership and Empathy One of the most powerful capabilities that leaders and managers can possess is empathy. Arguably, the same could be said for anyone – we can best understand and help others when we’re able to see the world
Hard to Say I’m Sorry: Apologies in the Workplace Guest post by Jonathan Cohen, MD It shouldn’t be a surprise that good apologies are not the norm. There are several reasons for this. Most of us have not undergone formal
Types of Silence The authors of this literature review “Silence in organizations and psychological safety” from 2015, describe a number of group dynamics that can lead to silence, and more interestingly, describe a few different types of silence, drawn from
Icebreakers If you’re anything like me, when you see “icebreakers” on an agenda or schedule for a meeting, you immediately become a little anxious. Ice breakers are intended to make us feel more comfortable and at ease, increasing the overall
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
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
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
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
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 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 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
Updated September 2026: we’ve corrected the citation for Amy Edmondson’s hospital study (1996, not 1999) and described its findings more precisely. Introduction As a result of the ever-increasing scale and complexity of healthcare systems, hierarchies and layers of management have
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! 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 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
