Psychological Safety

On a recent Agile Engineering Podcast we discussed cognitive load and how it relates to psychological safety. Cognitive load is also a fundamental aspect of Team Topologies, affects the scale of the domain that a team works with. Cognitive Load Our human working memory, our capacity to learn and solve problems, is a system with limited capacity.…
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Do you want to improve psychological safety and performance in your teams? Are you facing significant challenges that require transformation to overcome? You can download the Psychological Safety Action Pack and put yourself in charge of driving the transformation, but if you would like some extra help in driving true organisational change, improving the performance…
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There’s not a great deal of research or writing available about psychological safety in the military, despite one of the best leadership books available – “Turn the Ship Around” by David Marquet, being about how he used empowering leadership and psychological safety to drastically improve the performance of the crew of the US Navy Submarine,…
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It’s a long and worthwhile journey to build high levels of psychological safety in your organisation, and much of the hard work involves excellent leadership, clarity of direction, effective support, vulnerability, curiosity and much more. However there are some simple exercises that you can carry out with your teams that directly build psychological safety in…
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A safe state of mind. Psychological safety is “being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career” (Kahn 1990, p. 708). That is: psychological safety refers to a personal state of mind of being safe in your team and amongst colleagues; it is not about being protected…
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These posters were reimagined and designed by the brilliant Deisa Teremarias, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Caracas, Venezuela. Normally part of the Complete Psychological Safety Action Pack, you can download all six posters in high quality jpg format by entering your email address below.   And now you can show your love of psychological…
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Psychological Safety is the single most important factor in high performance teams; a fact that is being recognised by more and more organisations across the globe. The organisations below use or have used the Psychological Safety Action Pack to create, build and maintain performance in their teams. By downloading it today, you can join them…
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Psychological safety means being performing well even in uncertain environments, through being able to make mistakes without fear, innovating by trying new and potentially risky endeavours, and through raising concerns or new ideas as they arise. Agile is about delivering quickly in uncertain and changing environments, where the needs of the customer or the constraints…
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How to Measure Psychological Safety We know psychological safety is essential for high performance teams, and particularly so for technical delivery teams. Innovation is so critical for creating products that delight customers and serve critical business needs, and psychological safety is a fundamental enabler of innovation. There are many great benefits from building psychological safety…
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It’s no wonder that information security gets a bad press. Consumers entrust organisations with their personal information sometimes only to find that it has been breached and used by criminals or marketeers for nefarious purposes. Some of the biggest breaches, such as those of Facebook, Marriott hotels, or OxyData, consist of hundreds of millions of…
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