Psychological Safety: Static work vs Generative work

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 on autonomy, pedagogy, nursing, software engineering and human factors.

Static Work vs Generative Work, (aka “not being Brent”.)

If you’ve read The Phoenix Project, you’ll be familiar with the character of Brent (not to be confused with David Brent from “The Office”). For those who haven’t read it, Brent is the person in the organisation that knows how to do everything; he’s responsive to everyone, and is generally the most helpful person in every room. Brent quickly becomes essential to the smooth functioning of the organisation. On the surface, it appears that Brent is incredibly valuable, but he is also one of the organisation’s biggest risks. Brent can’t go on holiday without being called about something that only he can fix or move forward. If Brent goes on sick leave, things stop working or processes fail. Brent feels highly valued, but also stressed out, constantly harangued and unable to deliver much of real value.

A phenomenon I see very often in “unsafe” organisations (not just psychologically unsafe, but organisations where one’s role, status or job is perceived as unsafe or precarious) is that people attempt to protect themselves by becoming Brent. Usually it’s unintentional, but people may use it as a deliberate strategy to protect themselves from redundancy. The old advice to “make yourself indispensable” doesn’t help. In fact, there are articles on Forbes actually advising people to “monopolise a particular skill” to make themselves indispensable. 

The problem with Brent’s approach is that he becomes the bottleneck, the constraint, in almost anything he’s involved in. We’ll dive into the Theory of Constraints in a future issue, but right now we’re just going to look at the work types that represent Brent and anti-Brent behaviours, so that we can identify if we’re becoming Brent and do something about it. 

Of course, it’s natural for us all to be in some small ways the Brent of particular processes, projects or functions, particularly new ones. In my experience, those in managerial positions are often likely to become a Brent, but any member of the team can find themselves in this position. It’s probably impossible to avoid entirely, but the trick is to identify when it’s happening and mitigate it. In psychologically safe teams, this is a continuous process; I work with teams where the phrase “I think I’m becoming Brent” is often heard – and it catalyses a valuable conversation about how to share the knowledge, protect and remove the bottleneck, and protect the team and the work.

There are ways to put this principle into practice: in a team I managed many years ago, we applied chaos engineering principles to ourselves, and every now and then would lock someone out of their accounts for a day, provide them with some petty cash to go and have an unplanned day off, and see what broke or what we were prevented from progressing.

The below table is my conceptualisation of the different types of work undertaken when trying to protect your position and role by being Brent (I call this “Static Work”), vs focusing on value creation (what I call “Generative Work”, inspired by Westrum’s Typologies). In reality this is a sliding scale and the table is intended to represent the far ends of the spectrum – we may sit somewhere in the middle, or tend towards one or the other types of work. I believe we should strive for Generative Work practices, but can easily find ourselves in Static Work positions either by accident, or through an effort to protect our position and status in the organisation.

To sum up, what are the differences between Static Work and Generative Work approaches?

Static Work –  Making yourself indispensable and acting as a constraint.

Here you act as the gate that value must flow through by being the only person who knows how to do X or is the expert on Y. You may check work before it can be released, and feel you need to know about everything that’s happening around you. You’re adding value, but you’re adding the same value each time the process runs. If you were instead to release yourself from the process, it would reduce the risk to the organisation of you not being there, and enable you to add value elsewhere; this translates into Generative Work.

At a top-level, Static Work may also manifest as “founder’s syndrome” – the fear a founder feels when the organisation they built grows too large for them to be involved in day-to-day decisions any longer. If they can’t learn to trust and empower others to make decisions, they unintentionally constrain the growth and consequent success of the organisation. 
 

Generative Work – Adding value and ensuring that you’re not a constraint. 

Here, you focus on delegating, abstracting, removing checks and gates or making them part of a system without a single point of failure. You provide value through adding, not gating: creating value rather than ensuring it flows through you. You are constantly elevating and solving new problems. If you find yourself signing off a process, checking something before it’s released, solving the same problem more than once, or being contacted whilst on leave because you’re the only person who knows X, you highlight and find a way to change it.

In the short term, you might feel this places you at risk: from Lean-inspired “streamlining” organisational changes, or the perception that you’re not needed. But it is the only way to ensure that you continue to increase the value you can bring, rather than simply control it.
 

Psychological safety is a key component of being able to move towards Generative Work, whether we’re managers or team members. We need to feel safe that if we raise a concern that we’re becoming a bit Brenty, it won’t be used against us. We need to feel safe that our role isn’t at risk if we delegate work, share knowledge, and decompose processes. And like most aspects of safety culture, moving towards Generative Work also fosters and increases psychological safety for other team members. Modelling that it’s unnecessary to make ourselves indispensable helps ensure we all feel safe to provide extra value rather than protect our positions.

This newsletter is sponsored by Conflux

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

‘The Fearless Organization’ by Amy Edmondson is considered by many to be essential reading on the topic of psychological safety. In this article, Sophie Weston, Principal at Conflux, has put together some key takeaways from the book.

Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Here’s a really interesting piece of research from Paul de Raaij, who gathered data on psychological safety, autonomy and innovation. What this shows is that teams who possess low psychological safety actually innovate less when provided with greater autonomy – this backs up current thinking that effective guardrails and guidelines actually improve psychological safety and performance. It’s only highly psychologically safe teams that can completely take the constraints away and perform highly.
 

Here’s a nice piece from Ankita Kulkarni on How Engineering leaders can create a culture of Psychological safety. I like her example of her boss telling her to only ask “good” questions – which almost stopped her from asking any at all, since how could she know in advance what was a “good” or “bad” question?

George Coxon is a mental health nurse and care home director and wrote this piece for Nursing in Practice. I’m pleased to read how George was at first a psychological safety skeptic, but has now fully turned into a champion of the idea, particularly given the challenges that nurses in the UK are facing at the moment.

The Cult of Pedagogy are “people committed to making you more awesome in the classroom” and their recent podcast episode on How to Build Psychological Safety in Professional Development is worth a listen if you’re involved in professional development and/or facilitation. They go over the importance for emotional intelligence, ground rules and group norms, communication skills, and addressing conflict.

This is excellent, from Steven Shorrock: Twenty Five Years: Reflections on the Practice of Improving Work. Steven is an expert in human factors and ergonomics, and here he presents 25 lessons from reflecting on his experience. There are some great points in here, and well worth a read, but I particularly want to call out “Transcend disciplinary boundaries” because I too enjoy and learn a great deal from studying and practicing other disciplines, and “Stay on the edges”, which aligns with my thoughts on Ecotones in organisations.

This week’s poem:

The Mask of Anarchy (Excerpt), Percy Bysshe Shelley – 1792-1822

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.”

This poem was recited by students at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and by protesters in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution of 2011, was used by protesters during the Poll Tax riots of 1989–90 in the UK, and quoted by Jeremy Corbyn during his speech at the Pyramid stage at the 2017 Glastonbury Festival.