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...
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 en...
Leadership and Management In my first-ever conference keynote on psychological safety, in 2019, I introduced this graphic, based on Grace Hopper’s quote, “You manage things, you lead peopl...
Psychological Safety: Speaking Up at Work Imagine an objectively psychologically safe workplace environment People are praised, rewarded, and incentivised to speak up with ideas, questions, conce...
Bullying at work If you’re in the UK, or even if not, you may have heard the news on Friday that Dominic Raab resigned from his post as Deputy Prime Minister as a result of multiple ac...
The recent resignation of Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister of Great Britain, has put the issue of psychological safety in the workplace under the spotlight Mr Raab resigned following an investi...
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 Ch...
Welcome to the Psychological Safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You’re amazing This week is a short-form issue and has content on anonymous feedback, layoffs, “woke”, ...
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 h...
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...
Providing constructive feedback is one of the most powerful things you can do to help people excel, achieve their goals and be happier in their work Done well, it can create psychological safety...
Cognitive Load Why are some tasks more “difficult” than others Some tasks require us to know a lot already, such as how to code, diagnose an illness, or repair a car For other tasks, we need to...
AKA: When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression Not everyone is a fan of psychological safety Sometimes that’s because people don’t yet understand what it...
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” th...
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 le...
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-...
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 ...
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 resultin...
Agile It seems like the word “Agile” gets thrown about a lot Sometimes it refers to a more flexible approach to working hours and locations, sometimes it refers to Scrum practices, and s...
Lean Coffee and Agenda-less Meetings Welcome back and Happy New Year! I hope 2023 has started well for you and you’re excited for the year ahead Next week, we have some big announcements to...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses the top seven issues of 2022 Find out which ones were most popular below, a...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses how not to be Brent (Static work vs Generative work), plus great resources ...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses artificial intelligence and psychological safety Psychological safety and safety...
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, no...
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 Edmon...
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing You are amazing This week discusses some things to think about before measuring psychological safety Measu...
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 Hum...
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 Extrem...
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, ...