The Adaptive Cycle This is a great paper for the ecological and complexity geeks, like me The adaptive cycle: More than a metaphor Thanks to Christina Bowen for sharing The adaptive cycle is a conceptual framework used to understand the dynamics […]...
The Whitehall Studies and The Social Gradient of Health The relationship between seniority/status and psychological safety is strong In general, we know that people holding more senior and higher status roles often feel safer speaking up in groups, and those […]...
The First Org Chart In 1855, Brigadier General Daniel McCallum, later to become a Civil War officer renowned for “strict precision and stern discipline” as well as for his innovative engineering, created the world’s first organisational chart This chart was […]...
We cannot adequately respond to changes, incidents or threats if we’re operating at capacity And it applies to people, machines, computers, traffic and more - whether you’re running a factory floor, a busy kitchen, a software development team, or a hospital ER, percentage utilisation is impactin...
Guest post by Navya Adhikarla, graduate student in the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke University (Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact “Look me in the eye and tell me you are not lying,” […]...
15/5 Reports To manage teams in a way that fosters psychological safety requires clear communication and feedback channels Team members should have well-defined platforms to share achievements, voice concerns, and seek assistance Ideally, these feedback mechanisms will be consistent, high-caden...
Stutters and Stammers I’ve written previously about my experience growing up with dyspraxia, which I was diagnosed with at an early age My dyspraxia made it difficult for me to pronounce and articulate certain sounds (called phonemes), and meant that I […]...
Deming’s 14 Points of Management I’m a Deming fan, and sad that I never got to meet him or attend any of his lectures W E Deming is possibly most well known for his “PDCA” (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, which is actually […]...
Bad Management It’s important that we learn from our own mistakes and failures, and self-reflect in order to improve However, there’s also a lot we can learn from things others get wrong That, after all, is partly why psychological safety is such […]...
Crew Resource Management In preparing for my conference talk this week, I was reading up further on the 1977 Tenerife disaster and the history of Crew Resource Management (CRM), and came across this excellent paper: The Evolution of Crew Resource Management Training […]...
Verbally Speaking Up at Work Speaking with a client this week, we surfaced an interesting organisational antipattern to psychological safety Sometimes, within an organisation, there exists an unwritten rule: voice your concerns, but only do it verbally in a call or meeting where [&hel...
Reason's theory holds that most accidents can be traced to one or more of four levels of failure: Organisational influences, Unsafe supervision, Preconditions for unsafe acts, and The unsafe acts themselves...
Employment Protections and Psychological Safety You may recall back in issue 121, we released a small survey on employment rights, protections and policies It was a preliminary, pilot study intended to see if there was anything worth investigating further in […]...
Normal Accidents Charles Perrow is regarded as a pivotal figure in the theory of why and how things fail He served as a sociology professor at Yale and Stanford and was primarily focused on the influence of large organisations on […]...
Psychological Safety in Teaching The way incidents are managed in a system extends far beyond the individuals directly involved, impacting everyone within that system This is illustrated in this recent case of a dedicated teacher whose punishment for a mistake highlights […]...
Statistical Process Control and Understanding Variation In a chat with a great client this week, we got talking about different approaches to measurement and metrics I introduced the concept of Statistical Process Control (SPC), so that’s what this week’s newsletter […]...
Psychological Safety: What it isn’t Psychological safety has become a hot topic recently, for good reason and hopefully this will result in better, safer, and more inclusive workplaces for everyone However, the rise in its popularity has led to a […]...
Burnout and psychological safety There’s a strong link between psychological safety and burnout in employees in the workplace I mean, there’s a strong link between psychological safety and just about anything in the workplace, but the connection between psychological safety […]...
Employment Rights and Psychological Safety Thanks so much to newsletter reader Andrea Notch for pointing me at Mona Chalabi’s illustrations of statistical ideas and topics – while I was having a look at Mona’s work, this one on unionisation stood […]...
Local Rationality “People do reasonable things given their goals, knowledge, understanding of the situation and focus of attention at a particular moment” A fundamental premise of psychological safety is the belief that you will not be punished for making a […]...