Psychological Safety 63: Open Secrets & Half-Baked Ideas

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses internal reporting, open secrets, whistleblowing and half-baked ideas.

If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people who may appreciate it! To view this newsletter and previous issues online, head to psychsafety.co.ukYesterday’s psychological safety online meetup was incredible! Thanks so much to Dr Kim for her insights on psychological violence and psychological safety, power structures, gatekeeping, moral courage and so much more. It was a truly inspiring, provocative and energising event, thanks also to all the amazing participants who contributed and got involved.

Our next meetup is likely to be September (date tbc), and we’ve got an amazing speaker lined up to talk about neurodiversity, autism and psychological safety. More details to follow!

This newsletter is sponsored by Conflux.

Conflux is the leading business consultancy worldwide helping organisations to navigate fast flow in software. We help organisations to adopt and sustain proven, modern practices for delivering software rapidly and safely.

Many organisations today are stuck using ways of working from a bygone age. In this article, Sophie Weston, Principal at Conflux, takes a look at why knowledge work needs a new approach in which psychological safety is a key ingredient.

Psychological safety news and opinion

Last week I wrote about how psychological safety doesn’t look the same for everyone, and here’s a great example of that from Faith Saenz on Linkedin. Faith is autistic, and has days when she is nonverbal. For Faith, a psychologically safe environment means the difference between comfortably communicating that this is one of those days, and not speaking. To an allistic (not autistic) person, this may look like a psychologically unsafe space, but for someone like Faith, it can mean the world to her to be safely silent.


Here’s a good piece in MIT Sloan Management Review by Antoine Ferrère, Chris Rider, Baiba Renerte, and Amy Edmondson, about ethical conduct and internal reporting (specifically not external whistleblowing), and the relation with psychological safety. Through measuring psychological safety on teams in Novartis around the world, the research showed a correlation between psychological safety and likelihood of reporting unethical behaviour internally, as the chart below shows. What’s also interesting is the double jeopardy of unsafe environments – where employees observed unethical behaviour, they felt less psychologically safe; and this in turn reduced the likelihood of that behaviour being reported. 
 

Following from this piece, here’s a great article in opensource.com by Laura Hilliger about “open secrets” in organisations. Laura describes how the more people in an organisation who know about a particular “secret” (such as a serious bug in code, or a personnel issue) the less likely any one person is to report the issue or do something about it. It’s analogous to the bystander effect, where the greater the number of people present, the less likely people are to help a person in distress. Laura highlights three component causes of these “open secrets” as Fear, Policies, and Marginalisation, and suggests some strategies to address the problem. 

Thanks to our Meetup speaker and all-round excellent person, Dr Kimberly Young-McLear, here’s her paper: Beyond Buzzwords and Bystanders: A Framework for Systematically Developing a Diverse, Mission Ready, and Innovative Coast Guard Workforce. This paper was (I understand) catalysed by her incredible work in exposing gross misuse of power in how the Coast Guard handled bullying, harassment, and discrimination allegations. Inclusion, diversity & equity, mission readiness, and innovation, are only truly achievable by building an authentic individual and organizational foundation of psychological safety, moral courage, and cultural competence.

Ok, this article pretty firmly sits in the “getting on the bandwagon” realm of psychological safety pieces, but it is actually pretty good and makes some interesting points! Does Your Office Design Sabotage Your Team’s Psychological Safety? by Dennis Daisey and Amy Clark at Work Design Magazine. There are some tenuous links to psychological safety, but the point of creating spaces for retreat is very good – “Workplaces with lactation and prayer rooms not only provide refuge but can convey to mothers and people of faith that their employer is sensitive to their needs.“

I like this tweet from Gabby Muncy about psychological safety (“safe spaces”) in sports teams, and why it’s not “wrapping people in cotton wool” – rather, it’s a very effective way to increase performance as well as ensuring a more inclusive environment.

This is neat – Mike Haber has created this neat table of different kinds of “safe spaces”, what their social contracts involve, and what they are good or bad for:

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

This is a fab list from Toby Sinclair – Books To Help You Change Your Organisation. Categorised neatly by role or position, and with Amy Edmondson’s Fearless Organisation squarely in the middle, for everyone to read. There are a couple here that I haven’t read, including “Connect” and “Radical Focus”, so I’m remedying that as soon as I can!

I love this piece from Seth Godin about bringing “half baked” ideas to the table, based on the interactions between members of The Beatles, specifically Paul McCartney’s approach: “Play a song before it’s ready.

Because in the moment before it’s ready, that’s when it’s ready.

By bringing music that’s half-baked to the table, he takes a risk. It means that George might become critical or mopey. It means that John might not be engaged. It means that the room might not feel it.

But the risk is worth it. Because the half-baked work, shared in a trusting environment, is the fuel for the system that created the works of genius.“

To me, that’s psychological safety. The feeling within a group that you can bring your half-baked idea, and rather than being humiliated or criticised for being incomplete, it creates the interpersonal energy to take that idea and improve it together.

Things to do and try:  

A very effective way to help foster psychological safety is to ensure that we use inclusive language with our teams, and outside our teams and in written communications too. Or, conversely, a very effective way to damage psychological safety for already disadvantaged folks is to use non-inclusive or exclusionary language. This is a handy article by Ongig listing exclusionary words and their inclusionary counterparts. What’s interesting is that instinctively, I disagree with some of them – but I feel that’s a key point: if you’re not sure – ask. Language evolves over time, and what feels right for someone may feel wrong for another. 

 Related to the above, here’s a fantastic piece by Katrina Kibben on Creating Safe Spaces For Trans Employees. There’s some great, and very straighforward advice in here, specifically for HR or People dept folks.

This week’s poem:

Excerpt from Audre Lorde, The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992:
 

“Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
 

Mission statement

The mission of this newsletter is to make the world of work a better, safer, more inclusive and equitable place. We work towards this by sharing, as widely as possible, new research and opinion, case studies, news, practices and methods related to psychological safety. 

This includes topics such as inclusion, human factors, facilitation, safety critical environments, systems thinking, leadership and management, diversity and equity, mental health, organisational dynamics, culture, ethics, and more. 

A core goal is to amplify the voices of minoritised groups and those who are less represented in this field. This includes (but is not limited to) voices of people of colour, neurodiverse people, LGBTQ+ people, women in leadership and tech, and more.

Another goal is to share insights and best practices across different domains: for example, so that those of us in tech may learn from healthcare, and those of us in education can learn from aviation.

I believe knowledge is worthless unless it’s accessible. A key principle of this newsletter is to only share content that everyone can access. This excludes content behind paywalls, research papers that are not open-access, and proprietary tools that don’t open source their algorithms (preventing us from observing how systems make decisions about us). There may be some exceptions to this principle in practice, for example, where authors are able to share original texts of papers.

Whilst this statement will evolve this over time, the core principles of equity, amplification, and progressive & humanistic leadership shouldn’t change.