The Definition Of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is defined as the belief, in a group, that we are safe to take interpersonal risks. It’s the belief that we are able to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes, and that we won’t suffer negative social or professional consequences as a result.

At the start of every single talk, workshop, and training session, we introduce our current working definition of psychological safety and provide some context about where it comes from (including Carl Rogers, Schein and Bennis, Khan, and of course, Edmondson’s work). We also provide space for attendees to assimilate, understand, and question this definition.

Clarifying terms doesn’t mean we think our audience is stupid. Far from it. It’s simply a recognition that their context and experience may not be the same as ours, and it would be a mistake to assume we’re all “on the same page” without checking. We’re also conscious that the same term can have different meanings across fields. For example, “resilience” means one thing in psychology, one thing in ecology and another in global health, but there are efforts to reconcile the divergence.

Why is a Definition Important?

Words have meaning. But the meaning we make of a term exists in our individual minds, and when we’re working with others, it’s helpful to establish a shared meaning of important terms. A clear definition acts like a compass pointing to True North, without which we could be heading in different directions. 

In this piece, we’re going to examine why that’s critical in psychological safety, and why there are many tensions pulling on the term psychological safety, away from its canonical definition. 

Maintaining a Shared Understanding.

We shouldn’t assume that everyone interprets terms in the same way that we do. If we begin a discourse with misaligned understanding, it’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to converge on an agreement or a useful decision. When terms are vague or inconsistent, they can lead to misunderstandings, confusion, or even conflict. It’s why so many academic pieces start with defining their terms. It’s also why many conversations fall apart when we haven’t taken the time to check we mean the same thing by what we say. I’ve seen far too many online arguments in the safety world where it’s clear that the participants actually agree, but due to a difference in their interpretation of key terms, they’re at an impasse. 

Definitions also act as conceptual anchors. When terms are clearly and consistently defined, we can build on prior research and knowledge rather than reinventing or misinterpreting what has already been explored. This allows for a cumulative growth of the field, building on the foundations of existing definitions, rather than divergence and loss of meaning that will ultimately devalue the concept. 

As an example, the field of “resilience engineering” sometimes suffers from a misinterpretation of both the terms “resilience” and “engineering”. Rather than abandoning the terms and renaming them, students and scholars in the field work hard to address these misinterpretations and misrepresentations, respecting the vast amount of research and work that has already been conducted.

Preventing Erosion, Dilution and Drift.

Terms often suffer from “epistemic drift” – a passive drift away from their intended meaning. For example, the terms “Agile” and “DevOps” have experienced significant epistemic drift (or to use Martin Fowler’s term, “semantic diffusion”). Diffuse definitions can sometimes be useful – this ambiguity allows a wide latitude of contextual adaptation in practice. But with Agile and DevOps, it has also to some extent hindered our collective ability to apply these ideas in practice because there’s uncertainty about what they actually are. Before we can work on these ideas, we need to start by addressing misconceptions and making sure we’re all talking about the same thing. 

In the worst cases, epistemic drift renders terms so broad that it dilutes their conceptual power and damages our capacity to express anything meaningful with them. In academia, such drift can lead to research that appears to be addressing one topic while, in fact, measuring or discussing different phenomena altogether.

Definitions give us boundaries. They clarify what a term covers, and maybe more importantly, what it doesn’t. Psychological safety, for example, addresses only interpersonal risks, not physical, business, health or other risks. When psychological safety is mistakenly framed as permitting business or safety risks, it misleads people. 

This isn’t to say that creating good, useful definitions is easy. Our definitions must strike a balance between being comprehensive, clear, and precise. Overly simplistic definitions, like “Psychological safety is the ability to speak up without fear,” reduce the concept to just “speaking up” and overlook the complexities of social interactions and the need to create an environment where people can communicate and share in different ways. Conversely, overly broad definitions may suggest psychological safety is about always feeling comfortable, having no accountability, or being your “authentic self”. These frame psychological safety as synonymous with comfort – which it is absolutely not. 

Allowing Conceptual Evolution

All of this being said, definitions should not be set in stone. Doctrine should not become dogma. As our understanding evolves, we should be able to periodically reexamine key terms. This might involve improving the existing definition, providing contextual or cultural clarifications, or even spinning off new terms and subfields entirely. These potential changes should be discussed and documented clearly, and subject to a degree of scholarly rigour: a transparent record of how a term has evolved helps to prevent arbitrary reinterpretations and maintains a sense of continuity. The definition of psychological safety itself has evolved from the original 1965 definition of Schein and Bennis (a “climate… which encourages provisional tries and which tolerates failure without retaliation, renunciation, or guilt”) to become much more specific and actionable in the modern workplace.

When definitions change, they should do so through community consensus within the field and a collective recognition that the existing definition is inadequate in some way. Professional associations, grass-roots and practitioner communities, peer-reviewed journals and expert panels can help to ensure that changes reflect our collective understanding rather than individual interpretations or self-interest. This collective approach is essential to mitigate the risk of important terms, like psychological safety, being co-opted for purposes that diverge from their intended use. 

Intellectual Integrity

Maintaining well-defined terms is part of intellectual integrity: we have a responsibility to engage in honest and clear communication, which includes being transparent about what we mean by terms. 

Misusing or overstretching concepts to our own advantage (sometimes known as “creating a straw man”) not only weakens our arguments but leads to a degradation of the entire concept. We see this a lot with psychological safety. Sometimes this misuse or over-generalisation of the term is intentional, in order to gain some rhetorical advantage, but more often it is unintentional – where people mistakenly think they know and understand what the terms mean.

As an aside here, I’ve lost count of the number of psychological safety spin-off terms, many of which are now trademarked or copyrighted. When a term becomes a trademark or is copyrighted, it should serve as a large red flag: how can we robustly debate, research, and evolve a concept if the very use of it is subject to a proprietary agreement?

Our Shared Commitment

It’s not just that we love to repeat the definition of psychological safety: it’s foundational to the integrity and success of our work, and the entire field. Maintaining clear and accurate definitions of terms such as psychological safety safeguards their theoretical and practical value. 

Something as basic as a collectively accepted definition of psychological safety supports cumulative knowledge, allows for productive debate and enables effective practice and implementation. Our shared commitment to rigour, clarity, and continual learning and growth in this area is what will help keep psychological safety from drifting into just another meaningless leadership fad. 

Thanks to Felix Rosbach for the conversation that led to this piece, and thanks to Jade Garratt for the deep insights behind it!

Further Reading:

What is psychological Safety

What is psychological safety not

Can you have too much psychological safety?

Can a team be too safe?

Resilience Engineering

Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct

Semantic diffusion
15 important shark conservation and management terms explained with memes
Making ‘resilience’ useful again: recognising health system resilience as an effective boundary object
Unifying the concepts of stability and resilience in ecology
Why employer misunderstanding of psychological safety is hurting teams’ performance

Delivering Effective Feedback

Our pilot Delivering Effective Feedback workshop on 26th September was a great success, so we’ve planned another for January 9th, 2025. This session is scheduled for 10am GMT, so if you’re in Asia, Australia or New Zealand, you can attend without interrupting your sleep!

This Delivering Effective Feedback workshop builds on the foundations of psychologically safe practice in order to use feedback effectively and avoid causing harm.

In our work with teams, we’ve found that between 70% and 80% of feedback is not useful or even harmful. Only 20%-30% of feedback that people receive is actually useful!

And this is often simply because it’s delivered poorly.

This workshop examines the purpose of feedback, the characteristics of good feedback, traps to avoid, models to use, and practices to employ. 

All attendees receive a Credly Badge, a certificate of completion to confirm attendance, further reading, materials and resources used in the session, a copy of the Psychological Safety Action Pack and a licence to use it in your organisation, access to a private alumni group, and some swag! If demand is high, we’ll schedule another session for earlier the same day, and you’ll be given the option to switch if you’d prefer the earlier time. Book here.

Psychological Safety in Practice

Trust and Psychological Safety

The relationship between psychological safety and trust comes up quite a lot in our work. In this episode of Trust on Purpose with Charles Feltman and Ila Edgar, we got stuck into it, alongside how the outcome of work should be learning rather than just execution, and how we all carry a bit of psychological safety baggage with us. Thanks so much to the wonderful Ila and Charles for inviting me on such a lovely podcast!

The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety: the sketchnote!

Tanmay Vora is a lovely chap and an excellent sketchnoter. After reading last week’s newsletter on the Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety, he decided to sketchnote it! Here’s the result, and I love it!

This week’s poem:

An Ode to Social Media, by Matt Haig

When anger trawls the internet
Looking forward a hook;
It’s time to disconnect
And go and read a book.

From “Notes on a Nervous Planet”