Personal User Manuals

Personal User Manuals (aka “Personal README” or “Manual of Me”)

What is a “Personal User Manual”?

One of my favourite practices for building psychological safety is the use of personal “user manuals” (also know as README’s, manager guides and other names). These user manuals, if written well, can significantly help build psychological safety through understanding each other’s needs, behaviours, and personalities on the team. They make what is usually implicit and unknown, explicit and known. They’re also a great tool for self-reflection – we rarely think deeply about trying to articulate our own desires, needs, preferences and expectations. Even if you don’t end up sharing it with anyone, a personal user manual can be a powerful exercise in its own right.

Here’s the updated psychsafety.com Personal User Manual template as part of the Psychological Safety Playbook add-ons for the action pack, for you to download and use with your teams.

However, as with any practice, there are dangers and pitfalls. They can, in certain environments, be used to excuse certain counter-productive behaviours – so they should probably be done alongside a team charter or social contract. They can also be wrong: you may be tempted to write (even subconsciously) what you want other people to think about you, not what is true about you. If this happens, the way people work with you may not be constructive, because their understanding of you is not aligned with reality. Also, they go out of date – this may occur over a long period of time as we mature, develop and change, or it may happen quite quickly, as with the birth of a new baby or other major life event. All documentation incurs debt – and personal user files are no different.

Here’s a good article with a personal user manual template from Future Forum. 

Here’s a good piece about personal user manuals for developers from arc().

I LOVE this version of a personal user manual from Steph Smith:

Here’s a great example for managers joining a new team, – a manager manual from Rands: 

This is a great personal user manual template from Shopify that includes good sections on assumptions and feedback:

This personal user manual by Molly White is a great example, and as it’s on Github, you can fork it easily and create your own.


And this is a great example by my wonderful colleague at Red Hat, Aidan Cammies:

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

I went and did an actual in-person meetup this week at DevOps London, organised by the fab folks at Broadlight, discussing what tech teams can learn from aviation, healthcare, and heavy industry in respect to safety science. One of the examples was the Challenger disaster in 1986, where engineers raised concerns about the O-rings in the SRBs becoming brittle at low temperatures, but in part due to time and commercial pressures on management creating a psychologically unsafe environment, those concerns were either not communicated to leadership, or were diluted so much that nobody considered them serious enough to address.
 

In project management, we often call this “greenwashing”, where red statuses (when RAG – Red, Amber, Green status signifies risk) get gradually diluted to amber and green as information flows up the chain, until leadership sees a field of green that started off as a sea of red.

Tim Beattie, founder of Stellafai, a new platform that helps team track success towards their North Star, talks about the same thing here with “the watermelon effect” – where it looks green, but inside it’s actually very, very red!

This is great, shared by Timothy Van Goethem – a company in Belgium includes the following in their employee terms: “I acknowledge that from time to time it is completely normal, human and to be expected that mistakes will be made. And if they do, I will not feel overly guilty about them.” I love this explicit calling out of psychological safety to make mistakes. I’d love to see more organisations doing this.

I had a great chat with Bazil Arden this week, discussing psychological safety and life in general. Here’s a great piece by Bazil that highlights the three “lenses” through which we can view psychological safety: the Academic, the Commercial, and the Personal. I like this framing – and I think it may be useful as a way to set the tone of a discussion on psychological safety – sometimes we want to dive in to the academic: we want to play with semantics, meaning, correlation and causation. Sometimes we’re addressing the commercial benefits: the impact on team and organisational performance. And sometimes we’re primarily addressing the human, personal, lived experience of psychological safety. These three lenses overlap, are interdependent and cannot stand alone, but I think are definitely useful.

Tim Clark, of “Four Stages of Psychological Safety” has created a collection of “notes” that each address a different aspect of psychological safety, I think he’s up to 31 now, and I particularly like this one – 19: Avoiding The Bear Trap of Success. I’ve often said that success hides failure in organisations – sometimes a strong business can hide the organisational dysfunction underneath, and especially from the perspective of a CEO, who thinks everything is going swimmingly, until it doesn’t. I sometimes call this “executive hubris”. As in his book, “Only the Paranoid Survive“, former Intel CEO Andy Grove said, “Success leads to its own demise.”

Here’s a really interesting piece from Rob Jones. Rob frames the concept of sociological safety, to make the point (this is my interpretation) that we can’t take the fabric of society out of the equation in respect to interpersonal fear and safety, because we are *part* of the fabric of society. He’s created a restatement of Maslow’s need that maps physiological safety, psychological safety and sociological safety together.
 

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.

This week’s poem:

(Actually a song this week)
 

Dissecting The Bird by John Craigee.

It’s a miracle

That you’re here at all

So when the candle flickers, when the days get dark

They call them first world problems but they still break your heart

The universe feels like it’s against you

Just take a minute to realize, all it

Took to make you

Your parents had to meet, as random as that was

And hang out long enough at least

To make some love

And make a baby

And give it your name

And ALL your ancestors had to do the same exponentially backwards

To the start of life

So much had to happen, just exactly right

Sparks had to catch, oceans had to freeze

Billions of cells had to survive, Endless disease

Civilizations had to crumble, wars had to be fought

Bad presidents had to get elected

Good presidents had to get shot

People had to leave, hearts had to get broken

People had to die

Just so your eyes could open

The Universe is not against you

The Universe is not against you, it went through a lot

Just to give you a chance, it must have wanted you

Pretty bad

No pressure though, no pressure though

The Universe went through a lot but no pressure bro

You don’t gotta be perfect, you don’t gotta be a saint

Just don’t waste it, this was not a mistake

Oh you’re doing it wrong, dissecting the bird

Trying to find the song

It’s a miracle

That you’re here at all

Listen to John perform this live here – it’s a beautiful song with a powerful message.

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.