The Futility of Utility

If we want to make the argument for psychological safety in most organisations, we often need to speak the language of value. There is genuinely strong evidence that psychological safety is associated with better team performance, including decades of work linking psychological safety to reduced error rates in healthcare, aviation, and high-stakes industries. There are real, measurable outcomes of high psychological safety: better retention, more innovation, fewer incidents and faster learning.

And if we can’t make this case, we often won’t get in the room. Budgets are limited, and if we can’t demonstrate value, programmes don’t get funded – and psychological safety becomes a privilege of only exceptionally well resourced organisations rather than reaching the places that need it most.

I’ve made these arguments myself when pitching, justifying a budget line, or helping a client make the case internally. The evidence is real and it’s worth citing.

So the impulse to frame psychological safety in utilitarian terms: to ask what it’s for, what it produces, what return it delivers, is not cynical. It comes from a legitimate place.

But there’s a problem with it too.

What utilitarian logic actually does

Utilitarianism, in its classical form, aggregates welfare across a population and optimises for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. On the surface, this sounds fair: everyone counts, everyone’s interests are included in the calculation. But the utilitarian framework contains a structural flaw that philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries: the welfare of a minority can always be legitimately overridden if the aggregate calculation favours doing so. This isn’t a misapplication of utilitarianism. It’s how it works.

“A man’s virtue is tested by whether he treats those who are useful to him and those who are not useful to him in the same way.”
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

When we ask whether psychological safety “delivers ROI”, we’re (whether we intend to or not) invoking this logic. We are setting up a calculation in which the value of each person’s ability to speak up is weighed against organisational cost. And once that calculation is running, its conclusions are unfortunately rather predictable.

Who loses?

Helping people speak up is not equally easy across a workforce. For some people – those who are already confident, possess more power, or who resemble the leadership – many of the conditions for speaking up exist more or less by default. Creating psychological safety for these people is low-cost, because the system was largely built around (or by) them.

For others, it’s much harder. Improving psychological safety for someone who is neurodivergent, for a person of colour in a predominantly white organisation, for a woman in a male-dominated team, for LGBTQ+ folks in more conservative cultures, for a manual worker in a professional environment, for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, or for anyone with a “marked identity” (something that marks them as different from the contextual norm), this work is often slower, more structural, more disruptive and challenging to existing habits and hierarchies. Essentially, in terms of resources, time and money, it may be genuinely more expensive.

A utilitarian approach can keep finding reasons why this particular work, for these particular people, is not quite “worth it”. Not because anyone is being deliberately cruel, but because the framework itself will keep producing that answer. The least safe people are often the most costly to serve, and in a cost-benefit world, cost wins.

And it’s worth noting that it always seems to be other people who are judged to be receiving “too much” psychological safety – as costing too much. The people (who are almost always people for whom speaking up is already safe) making that argument never seem to volunteer themselves for experiencing less psychological safety.

A different framework: capabilities and rights

The philosopher Amartya Sen argued in Development as Freedom, that human wellbeing cannot be captured by utility measures (such as GDP) alone. What matters is whether people have genuine capabilities (the real and practical freedoms to do and be). Martha Nussbaum extended this to describe central human capabilities that function as threshold conditions that must be met regardless of what an utilitarian argument might warrant. The key point is that these capabilities are not inputs to an equation. They are things that must be in place, for everyone.

I believe that the safety to speak up without fear of punishment or humiliation fits squarely within this framework. It is not (solely) a productivity lever. It is a basic condition of full participation in our own working lives. 

“Each person is an end, and none is merely a means to the ends of others.”
Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities

This is also what rights-based thinking has always understood. Rights function not as goods to be weighed against other goods, but as constraints on what we are permitted to do regardless of the cost / benefit calculation. We don’t ask whether freedom of speech delivers ROI. We don’t (or shouldn’t) evaluate the right to education, or to bodily autonomy, or to freedom of conscience in terms of economic return. We treat them as things that cannot be sacrificed even when the utilitarian maths might point that way. In the human rights sphere at least, the opposite way lies fascism.

Psychological safety belongs in this category of capabilities. Not as a productivity lever, but as a fundamental condition of dignity at work.

Noting the benefits is not the same as measuring utility

None of this means we should stop talking about what psychological safety produces. We should talk about it. Better innovation, improved quality, reduced harm, greater retention, stronger wellbeing are real and very important outcomes and they’re worth naming. 

But there is a difference between noting the benefits of something and making those benefits the justification for its existence. We note the benefits of free speech in that it produces better public discourse, more accurate information, and more accountable institutions, without treating those benefits as the reason we defend it. The defence comes from somewhere more foundational.

And I wonder if the same shift is needed for psychological safety. We can point to what it produces but we should not make production the point.

What this means in practice

Framing psychological safety as a right rather than a utility makes the practice of it more honest. It means we stop asking “what might it cost us to foster psychological safety” and start asking “who are we currently excluding, and what does that cost them?”

It means that the people for whom creating safety is hardest: the people with the least power, who are the least visible or represented, and with the least resemblance to whoever set the norms, are no longer at risk of being deprioritised when budgets get tight or attention moves on. And it means we can hold a clearer line when the utilitarian cost/benefit pressure mounts (as it always eventually does) and someone asks whether all of this is really “worth it.”

The answer is that it’s not a question of worth. It’s a question of what kind of organisation, and what kind of working life, we think people are entitled to.