If we think about how we can apply sociotechnical theory in practice, we realise that organisational change or technological change will fail if we focus on one component (social or technical) in isolation and to the exclusion of others. We must consider how people are affected by technologies, and likewise, how technologies affect the way people behave.
Human Organisational Performance (HOP)
Human and Organisational Performance (or Potential) is based on five principles that shape and influence the way organisations think, act, view success and respond to failure. These five principles are integrative and work together to change the way we think about work and how to improve it.
1. People make mistakes
2. Blame fixes nothing
3. Context drives behaviour
4. Learning is vital
5. Response matters
High Performing Teams & Psychological Safety at Work: Psychological safety is the foundation for team performance, whether we’re oriented towards consistent quality, innovation, adaptation, safety or a combination of all outcomes. When people feel psychologically safe, they feel more able […]
What is “Safe to Fail”? Recently, I failed a motorbike test. This might sound like a mistake, but I fully expected to fail. In the UK, you must pass multiple tests before you’re allowed out on the roads on a […]
Psychological Safety Behaviours: The Big List Psychological safety is a belief that the group is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999). There are many ways we can help to foster these environments, but it’s important to remember that we […]
Checklists I read Atul Gawande’s “Better” some time around 2008 and absolutely loved it, so when he published “The Checklist Manifesto” in 2009, I grabbed a copy immediately. The Checklist Manifesto describes the power of checklists in reducing human error and increasing effectiveness across various industries, […]
Psychological Safety, Aviation Disasters and Crew Resource Management This week I’ve been reading “Confronting Mistakes” by Jan Hagen. This is a fantastic book, focusing on the human factors behind a multitude of aviation incidents. Jan highlights how miscommunication and failures to speak up […]
Welcome to the Psychological Safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You’re amazing. Having tried switching to a biweekly pattern, I’m now experimenting with alternating short-form and long-form newsletters each week. This week is a short form newsletter and highlights Just Culture, […]
Providing constructive feedback is one powerful way you can help people excel, achieve their goals and be happier in their work. Done well, it can create psychological safety and help teams and organisations perform at their best. However, feedback can […]
Psychological Safety #101 What does Cognitive Load have to do with Psychological Safety? Psychological safety helps to reduce our cognitive load by allowing us to ask for help and worry less about the interpersonal risks we take. Conversely, high cognitive […]
What is Conway’s Law? This week we’re diving into the concept of Conway’s Law, and its relation to psychological safety. Conway’s Law essentially describes the “force” that means how a team or organisation is structured will affect what the organisation […]
Resilience Engineering Today we’re diving into the field of Resilience Engineering. This subject ticks a lot of my interest boxes: from complexity and sociotechnicality to psychological safety and leadership. I hope you find it interesting too! Resilience Engineering is a […]
1- Artefacts. These describe any overt, visible, describable aspects of the organisation. Think things like branding and logos, office design, dress code, policies and tools. Things that you can see.
2- Espoused values. This is how people would describe the organisation, in current or aspirational terms. These include missions, goals, value statements, and social contracts.
3- Underlying assumptions. These are unconscious, unspoken, hard to articulate elements of the organisation, particularly from within.
Work as Imagined vs Work as Done In last week’s newsletter about human error, we looked at why and how people make mistakes. One of the categories of error we explored was “violations”, where people don’t carry out the work as per protocol or procedure. This […]
Human Error We’ve covered failures before, but this week we’re focusing on errors. Failures can be preventable, complex, or “intelligent” – such as those resulting from experiments where we try something, intentionally, that might fail. However, errors, in this context, refer to the unwanted […]
Provan’s “safety of work” and “work of safety” are two different ways of thinking about occupational health and safety (OHS) in the workplace. The “safety of work” approach focuses on the risks and hazards that are inherent to a particular […]
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses the way in which aiming for zero defects can actually result in more defects, not fewer. Zero Defects. I’m currently reading “Boyd, the fighter pilot who […]
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses team longevity and Tuckman’s Model. Plus another great piece from Amy Edmondson, research on women in in the workplace, and Herbie Hancock playing a wrong chord. […]
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses failure archetypes, human factors, more Elon Musk, stinky fish and more. Human Factors & Categorising Failure In the past couple of issues, we’ve spoken about failure – how […]
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses dealing with learning from incidents, plus Elon Musk, share of voice, and Extreme Negative Feedback. We have some new stickers too! These glow in the dark, […]
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses guardrails, micro-behaviours, weak signals, diving and more! Safety Guardrails, Mechanisms and Culture. In working with psychological safety, we often touch on “real” or physical safety and […]
As much as Dunbar’s limits on group sizes might seem to be common sense, and reflected in many real world examples, Dunbar’s theories on group size boundaries have been deconstructed and shown to possess confidence intervals too large to be robust in the real world. That is, group size boundaries do exist, but may be anywhere from 30 to 250, depending on context, culture, and other factors.
Stopping The Line Being able to “stop the line” to prevent an issue getting worse, stop a defect passing downstream, suggest an idea for improvement when it can endow maximum benefit, or ask for help in the heat of the […]
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are awesome. This week discusses Dr Richard Cook, clarity, and climbing, and is the first newsletter issue to be received by over 5,000 readers! Dr Richard Cook I was recently saddened […]
Safety I & Safety II (Also known as Safety 1 and 2) For anyone familiar with the concepts of Resilience Engineering, you may have heard of the work of Erik Hollnagel, who states that “resilience engineering maintains that ‘things go […]
Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions The 6 Cultural Dimensions is a framework in cross-cultural psychology developed by Geert Hofstede. It elucidates the influence of a society’s culture on its members’ values and behaviors using a structure derived from factor analysis. This theory […]
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