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 c...
The Normalisation of Deviance In previous articles we’ve differentiated error into three types: slips and lapses, mistakes, and violations This time, we’re exploring a certain type of viol...
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 stat...
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 engineeri...
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 floo...
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 ...
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 an...
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-A...
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 g...
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 t...
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 a...
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 ...
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 t...
Measuring psychological safety Here are some tips on choosing the right tool for the job As awareness of the importance of psychological safety in the workplace increases, there is a corresponding inc...
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 influe...
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 recen...
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 Statis...
Psychological Safety is not the goal Now, this might seem an odd thing to say for someone who makes a living by helping people understand and foster psychological safety, but it’s true...
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...
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 ha...
Data Visualisation In the psychsafetycom measurement workshop we cover a lot: research ethics, quantitative/qualitative approaches, longitudinal vs cross-sectional studies, formulating resea...
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 psycholo...
Psychological safety and Buddhist Philosophy We’re in Barcelona this week for workshops and meetings, and we decided to visit La Sagrada Familia again It’s an incredible building, and although con...
A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water “What are [...
Understanding and Implementing the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) This week we’re having a look at the new NHS Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) Whilst this is c...
Executive Summary: Causes of Disaster at Chernobyl: The Absence of Psychological Safety (See below for the complete article) In 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in the Ukrainian SSR (the ter...
Everest, and psychological safety in the mountains Thanks so much to a client of mine, the excellent Paul Verrico at Eversheds Sutherland, I was lucky enough to attend the 70th anniversary of the...
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 isol...
Newsletter 112 High Performing Teams & Psychological Safety at Work: I love this Twitter thread from James Heathers, who dives head-first into some of the terrible takes on remote work that h...
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...