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 and contributions by members in the community, so joining the Community is a fantastic way to get involved and help make the world of work a safer, higher performing, more inclusive and equitable place.

However, the platform we used for it, Slack, has gradually been deprecating its free features to such a degree that it’s now very difficult to use as a community platform. We looked into upgrading to the paid version, but with that many members it would cost nearly £10,000 per month, so we’re not doing that!

Instead, we’ve decided to relaunch our new Psychological Safety Community on Discord, which has loads of fantastic features, a really easy to use app for iPhone and Android devices, and better safety and moderation capabilities too. Once you’re a member, you can also generate your own invite links for friends, like this one.

We’ve set up channels for a range of industries, from healthcare to aviation, and other channels specific to discussing particular topics such as diversity and inclusion. For those who are looking for jobs or who are recruiting, we have a channel specifically for jobs and careers to post job opportunities or if you’re looking for a job yourself. 

We also have a private forum for our alumni community, which is open to those who have attended any of our workshops, training sessions, or corporate events. If you join the community, and you’ve attended workshops or training, just let me, Jade, or one of the moderators know and we’ll bring you in.

There is a code of conduct, which is open to review and changes by members. 

And I’d like to welcome our moderators! Balazs, our resident DevOps Expert, Tom Barron, our Marketing Specialist, and Diana Stepner, a Product and Leadership Coach based in San Francisco, USA, who is a valued community member and has attended a number of our workshops too. Our moderators help keep the conversations going and will try to help with any questions about the community, and deal with any issues that arise.

As well as being a space to connect with like-minded people, the Community tends to be where we “soft launch” new products, new courses, meetups and events, and other opportunities, before we announce them in the newsletter. So in general, if you want to find out about things as soon as possible, the Psychological Safety Community is the place to be. 

Join us here! We can’t wait to welcome you. 

https://discord.gg/MkmJW685YG

Further Links:

The Psychological Safety Community
Psychological Safety Meetups

Last chance to book: Psychological Safety Online Workshops

The full workshop course bundles are now sold out, but there are still a few places on some of the workshops! Taking place in the last two weeks of July, you can book here.

We also have a Practice Masterclass scheduled for the 8th August at a time that suits people in Australia and New Zealand. It’s an experiment, so if this goes well and we get enough attendees, we’ll schedule a full round of workshops at a similar time. You’re also more than welcome to book a place if you’re not in Australia or NZ if the time suits you! Book here.

Options include Intermediate, Advanced, Management, Measurement, Practices, and the new Train-The-Trainer supplementary workshop. 

Psychsafety.com courses all now come with Credly Badges! After the course, you’ll receive an email to claim your badge, which you can use to evidence your CPD and share on your LinkedIn profile.

Note: in addition to affordability based pricing, we offer one free scholarship place on every workshop we deliver. Preference is given to people in lower-income countries and from disadvantaged or under-represented groups. 

Psychological Safety in Practice

DevOps for Psychological Safety 

Our own resident DevOps Specialist Balázs Szakmáry has written an excellent piece on the practical application of CI/CD as an “Oracle of Truth” for software development teams – DevOps for psychological safety. It addresses how proper implementation and practice of CI/CD fosters greater psychological safety and enables people to speak up more confidently, helps to prevent incidents and learn from them when they happen, and decreases the number of arguments too! 

Watch for people saying things like:

“Oh, that test always fails.”
“My changes have nothing to do with this build failure in my branch.”
“Can you force merge this change for me?”
“I’ll just run another build.”

“We all make mistaks. Everybody has red builds in CI, and this is completely normal. It is the organisation that needs to be resilient to this, not individual people.”

“Bring me solutions, not problems”

We’ve covered this idea before – the all too common but harmful belief among many managers and leaders that by saying “Come to me with solutions, not problems” is encouraging people to be independent problem solvers. What if they can’t think of a solution? What if they don’t have time to come up with one because the situation is urgent? What if they have a half-baked solution but are fearful of being shot down? What if they think they’ve got a solution, but due to not feeling able to discuss it with you or colleagues, it’s not actually workable?

Encourage people to come to you with problems. And solutions, if they have them, but it’s not mandatory.

Thanks to Work Chronicles for the great cartoon!

‘It felt like children were droids at toxic school’

“It’s just basically: be in line, be silent and just get through your day. Do as you’re told,”

This is a powerful article about the toxic culture in the Astrea Academy Trust, a UK school academy responsible for some 15,000 pupils across 26 schools. Reports include “corrections” for “negative virtues”, and punishments and detentions for having the wrong coloured pens in your pencil case. Teachers report being fearful of the repercussions for failure or deviating from strict rules, resulting in, unsurprisingly, many teachers leaving and classes of up to 90 children in one room. 

I have concerns about the long term effects of normalising this sort of high-compliance / high fear environment; children being unhappy in education could result in fewer wishing to pursue it into adult life, and potentially more likely to tolerate or even replicate these types of climates in the workplace.

Beyond Human Error

“…we must move beyond a focus on individual error to systems failure to understand and optimise whole systems.”

This is a great paper by Gemma Rea, Steven Shorrock and Paul Salmon on perspectives on Human Error, and how blaming an incident on “human error” or “operator error” is at best naive, and at worst, harmful. Expecting and relying on people not to make mistakes is a recipe for disaster and likely results in more mistakes, of greater magnitude, than considering and addressing the wider system in which the errors occurred. We must reject human error as a cause of accidents and adverse events.

This is an excellent chart from the paper, showing the evolution of human performance and systems ergonomics models (white boxes), methods (white ovals), and underpinning theory (grey boxes).

Read, GJM, Shorrock, S, Walker, GH & Salmon, PM 2021, ‘State of science: evolving perspectives on ‘human error’’, Ergonomics, vol. 64, no. 9, pp. 1091-1114. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2021.1953615

This week’s poem:

“You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.”

Glenda the Good Witch ― The Wizard of Oz