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
Crew Resource Management In preparing for my conference talk this week, I was reading up further on the 1977 Tenerife disaster and the history of Crew Resource Management (CRM), and came across this excellent paper: The Evolution of Crew Resource Management Training
Verbally Speaking Up at Work Speaking with a client this week, we surfaced an interesting organisational antipattern to psychological safety. Sometimes, within an organisation, there exists an unwritten rule: voice your concerns, but only do it verbally in a call or meeting where
A critique of Eldor, L., Hodor, M. and Cappelli, P., 2023. The limits of psychological safety: Nonlinear relationships with performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 177, p.104255. Occasionally, the slightly absurd notion emerges that teams could have “too much”
Reason’s theory holds that most accidents can be traced to one or more of four levels of failure:
Organisational influences,
Unsafe supervision,
Preconditions for unsafe acts, and
The unsafe acts themselves.
Executive Summary This pilot study explored the relationship between employment protections—in law and organisational policy—and psychological safety at work. Drawing on 84 responses from participants across multiple countries, the research sought to understand whether stronger employment rights correlate with greater
Measuring psychological safety? Here are some tips on choosing the right tool for the job. As awareness of the importance of psychological safety in the workplace increases, there is a corresponding increase in the number of psychometric tools, applications and
Normal Accidents Charles Perrow is regarded as a pivotal figure in the theory of why and how things fail. He served as a sociology professor at Yale and Stanford and was primarily focused on the influence of large organisations on
Psychological Safety is not the goal Now, this might seem an odd thing to say for someone who makes a living by helping people understand and foster psychological safety, but it’s true. Psychological safety isn’t the goal; the goal is whatever your
Psychological Safety: What it isn’t. Psychological safety has become a hot topic recently, for good reason and hopefully this will result in better, safer, and more inclusive workplaces for everyone. However, the rise in its popularity has led to a
Burnout and psychological safety Burnout has many causes, most of them systemic and structural (such as organisational structures and job design), as well as broader societal pressures. Excessive workload, chronic time pressure, relational conflict, lack of control, and sustained cognitive
Employment Rights and Psychological Safety Thanks so much to newsletter reader Andrea Notch for pointing me at Mona Chalabi’s illustrations of statistical ideas and topics – while I was having a look at Mona’s work, this one on unionisation stood
Data Visualisation In the psychsafety.com measurement workshop we cover a lot: research ethics, quantitative/qualitative approaches, longitudinal vs cross-sectional studies, formulating research questions, survey design, and communicating our findings. As part of that, we look at data visualisation, including this classic example: The Broad Street
Local Rationality “People do reasonable things given their goals, knowledge, understanding of the situation and focus of attention at a particular moment.” We do things that make sense to us at the time. And a fundamental premise of psychological safety
Psychological safety and Buddhist Philosophy We’re in Barcelona this week for workshops and meetings, and we decided to visit La Sagrada Familia again. It’s an incredible building, and although construction began in 1882, it’s still unfinished. The architect, Gaudí, dedicated
A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water. “What are
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2023 – the annual survey of The Psychological Safety Newsletter. This is your chance to join thousands of voices, share your experiences, and inform the content of the next year of articles, resources,
Understanding and Implementing the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) This week we’re having a look at the new NHS Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). Whilst this is clearly relevant to our UK healthcare readers, I believe that the
Causes of Disaster at Chernobyl: The Absence of Psychological Safety (See below for the complete article) In 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in the Ukrainian SSR (the territory of modern Ukraine) suffered a catastrophic failure that directly killed
Everest, and psychological safety in the mountains Thanks so much to a client of mine, the excellent Paul Verrico at Eversheds Sutherland, I was lucky enough to attend the 70th anniversary of the first Everest ascent, at the Royal Geographical Society
If we think about how we can apply sociotechnical theory in practice, we realise that organisational change or technological change will fail if we focus on one component (social or technical) in isolation and to the exclusion of others. We must consider how people are affected by technologies, and likewise, how technologies affect the way people behave.
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
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
Psychological Safety and Belonging In recent years, the crucial role of psychological safety and a sense of belonging in the workplace has come to the forefront of organisational research and discourse. These elements are not merely about comfort and inclusion;
https://youtu.be/QhwHGfws1-c Or Leadership vs Management? Leadership and management are not the same thing. But they’re not mutually exclusive either. In order to be a truly effective leader, we must also possess strong competency and capability in our respective domains. We
