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
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 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
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
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 Conway’s Law? This week we’re diving into the concept of Conway’s Law, and its relation to psychological safety. Conway’s Law essentially describes the “force” that means how a team or organisation is structured will affect what the organisation
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses artificial intelligence and psychological safety. Psychological safety and safety culture workshops In the New Year, we’re running two new workshops! The first is a 2-hour Intermediate Psychological Safety Workshop on
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
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
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses servant leadership, Swedish warships, being “neurodistinct”, and product development. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people
Ever since Google’s Project Aristotle in 2013, we’ve been able to recognise that psychological safety is the foundation for high performing teams. This is an ever-evolving collection of articles, papers and resources on psychological safety in relation to technology, software
Introduction Thanks for subscribing to the psychological safety newsletter! This week we have how to deal with toxic leadership, artwork by Sherrill Knezel, Lean, DevOps, and a poem about equality. This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Red Hat Open Innovation Labs. A globally
These posters were reimagined and designed by the brilliant Deisa Teremarias, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Caracas, Venezuela. It includes two psychological safety checklists, illustrations of Tuckman’s Model, the psychological safety performance exercise, The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
We recently covered Agile in the Psychological Safety Newsletter, so head over there for an updated perspective. Psychological safety enables teams to perform well even in uncertain environments, through being able to make mistakes without fear, innovating by trying new
It’s no wonder that information security gets a bad press. Consumers entrust organisations with their personal information sometimes only to find that it has been breached and used by criminals or marketeers for nefarious purposes. Some of the biggest breaches,
