The “Fist of Five”

The problem with the “Fist of Five” for psychological safety.

Often, with good intent, we find facilitators and teams adopting a practice called “Fist of Five”, where, at the start of a meeting or workshop, participants are asked to hold up their hand and indicate how psychologically safe they feel:

✊ A closed fist indicates zero psychological safety.

✋ An open hand showing five digits indicates very high psychological safety.

Sadly, it’s nonsense.

Here’s why the “Fist of Five” doesn’t work.

– First of all, psychological safety is far more multi-dimensional and contextual than can be simply described in a 1-5 metric. Maybe people feel safe to suggest new ideas, but not ask questions – how would we score that? There’s no psychological-safety-ometer that can describe with a single number what psychological safety feels like: psychological safety is qualitative, not quantitative.

– Secondly, not everyone has five digits on their hands. Or they might, but may have mobility issues or injuries that prevent them easily making their hand into a fist or fully opening it.

– Thirdly, it’s subject to consensus bias. If we happen to feel “three out of five” safe, but everyone else holds out a full scoring five, we’re unlikely to be candid and honest about how we feel. We already feel unsafe – we don’t want to risk excluding ourselves further. So we’ll respond in a way that largely aligns with everyone else. Often, this is unconscious too – we won’t even know that we’re subject to consensus bias.

– Finally, the act itself is subject to psychological safety! If we don’t feel very psychologically safe in that space, we’re highly unlikely to be honest about how psychologically safe we feel. A whole team of folks who fel psychologically unsafe with their manager are entirely likely to state that they’re a four or five out of five, when asked to do so publicly.

All this results, invariably, in a falsely high perception of psychological safety in the space. That can cause more harm than good, because we will think we’re hearing the truth, hearing about risks, ideas, and questions – but in fact we’re not.

It may lead us to believe we’re doing the right thing, when in fact things are going terribly wrong. It’ll make us think we’re hearing the truth, when we’re actually hearing comforting fictions. We’ll believe that we’re finding out about the important issues, when in fact those most important problems remain a secret.

Alternatives to The Fist of Five

There are much better alternatives to explore psychological safety in groups, one being the psychological safety quadrant exercise, and many others involving action research approaches, narrative capture, and other qualitative practices at scale.