Selection Pressure and Psychological Safety Why has it taken so long for some industries to recognise the importance of psychological safety, whilst others have been doing it for decades? One possible answer: selection pressure. Over the past few decades, the […]
Psychological safety
The Normalisation of Deviance In previous articles we’ve differentiated error into three types: slips and lapses, mistakes, and violations. This time, we’re exploring a certain type of violation called the “normalisation of deviance”, a term coined by Diane Vaughan. We […]
The Whitehall Studies and The Social Gradient of Health The relationship between seniority/status and psychological safety is strong. In general, we know that people holding more senior and higher status roles often feel safer speaking up in groups, and those […]
The First Org Chart In 1855, Brigadier General Daniel McCallum, later to become a Civil War officer renowned for “strict precision and stern discipline” as well as for his innovative engineering, created the world’s first organisational chart. This chart was […]
Guest post by Navya Adhikarla, graduate student in the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke University (Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact “Look me in the eye and tell me you are not lying,” […]
15/5 Reports To manage teams in a way that fosters psychological safety requires clear communication and feedback channels. Team members should have well-defined platforms to share achievements, voice concerns, and seek assistance. Ideally, these feedback mechanisms will be consistent, high-cadence and […]
Stutters and Stammers I’ve written previously about my experience growing up with dyspraxia, which I was diagnosed with at an early age. My dyspraxia made it difficult for me to pronounce and articulate certain sounds (called phonemes), and meant that I […]
Deming’s 14 Points of Management I’m a Deming fan, and sad that I never got to meet him or attend any of his lectures. W. E. Deming is possibly most well known for his “PDCA” (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, which is actually […]
Bad Management It’s important that we learn from our own mistakes and failures, and self-reflect in order to improve. However, there’s also a lot we can learn from things others get wrong. That, after all, is partly why psychological safety is such […]
Crew Resource Management In preparing for my conference talk this week, I was reading up further on the 1977 Tenerife disaster and the history of Crew Resource Management (CRM), and came across this excellent paper: The Evolution of Crew Resource Management Training […]
Verbally Speaking Up at Work Speaking with a client this week, we surfaced an interesting organisational antipattern to psychological safety. Sometimes, within an organisation, there exists an unwritten rule: voice your concerns, but only do it verbally in a call or meeting where […]
Reason’s theory holds that most accidents can be traced to one or more of four levels of failure:
Organisational influences,
Unsafe supervision,
Preconditions for unsafe acts, and
The unsafe acts themselves.
Employment Protections and Psychological Safety You may recall back in issue 121, we released a small survey on employment rights, protections and policies. It was a preliminary, pilot study intended to see if there was anything worth investigating further in […]
Measuring psychological safety? Here are some tips on choosing the right tool for the job. As awareness of the importance of psychological safety in the workplace increases, there is a corresponding increase in the number of psychometric tools, applications and […]
Normal Accidents Charles Perrow is regarded as a pivotal figure in the theory of why and how things fail. He served as a sociology professor at Yale and Stanford and was primarily focused on the influence of large organisations on […]
Psychological Safety is not the goal Now, this might seem an odd thing to say for someone who makes a living by helping people understand and foster psychological safety, but it’s true. Psychological safety isn’t the goal; the goal is whatever your […]
Psychological Safety: What it isn’t. Psychological safety has become a hot topic recently, for good reason and hopefully this will result in better, safer, and more inclusive workplaces for everyone. However, the rise in its popularity has led to a […]
Burnout and psychological safety There’s a strong link between psychological safety and burnout in employees in the workplace. I mean, there’s a strong link between psychological safety and just about anything in the workplace, but the connection between psychological safety […]
Employment Rights and Psychological Safety Thanks so much to newsletter reader Andrea Notch for pointing me at Mona Chalabi’s illustrations of statistical ideas and topics – while I was having a look at Mona’s work, this one on unionisation stood […]
Data Visualisation In the psychsafety.com measurement workshop we cover a lot: research ethics, quantitative/qualitative approaches, longitudinal vs cross-sectional studies, formulating research questions, survey design, and communicating our findings. As part of that, we look at data visualisation, including this classic example: The Broad Street […]
Local Rationality “People do reasonable things given their goals, knowledge, understanding of the situation and focus of attention at a particular moment.” A fundamental premise of psychological safety is the belief that you will not be punished for making a […]
Psychological safety and Buddhist Philosophy We’re in Barcelona this week for workshops and meetings, and we decided to visit La Sagrada Familia again. It’s an incredible building, and although construction began in 1882, it’s still unfinished. The architect, Gaudí, dedicated […]
A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water. “What are […]
Understanding and Implementing the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) This week we’re having a look at the new NHS Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). Whilst this is clearly relevant to our UK healthcare readers, I believe that the […]
Executive Summary: Causes of Disaster at Chernobyl: The Absence of Psychological Safety (See below for the complete article) In 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in the Ukrainian SSR (the territory of modern Ukraine) suffered a catastrophic failure that […]
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