Have to agree Mark and, from what I've seen, even Amy Edmondson would agree. She keeps saying it's not a single thing, and not a panacea, but these days, a meme becomes a meme so....
My background in this comes from researching the conditions for change and creativity. Back in my consulting days in PwC we used research from the applied creativity world which separated things out. Creative Problem Solving comes with a toolkit, but the toolkit doesn't come with a recipe book - you have to iterate and explore your way to outcomes. To get there, you need to pay attention both to people's individual psychology (biases and state) and the context, particularly the climate in the room or team.
The model of climate we used came from the same field, and it didn't mention psychological safety, but it did talk about trust, challenge, freedom, support, risk, space, debate, conflict, and playfulness. It too talked about these as outcomes, but people also took them as levers and tried to impose them with the inevitable consequences.
The key thing about climate is that the instrument measures these as individual dimensions using a questionnaire. These then get added to map the overall 'climate'. But of course it's measuring perceptions. not a concrete reality. And people's perceptions are influenced by their conditioning, biases, context, and a whole lot more. Ever since PwC, I've focused my time on showing people how to:
- influence their perceptions by noticing their conditioned reactions and fixed opinions, and creating a more resourceful internal state that gives them more clarity and choice
- interact differently with others to help create some of that climate, but focus on the reality of each interaction (e.g. questioning, listening, exploring, contracting)
- make shared progress whatever the situation - not holding tightly to fixed opinions or perspectives that constrain what's possible
In the end, we build safety, or trust or climate or whatever labels people prefer, by achieving new things together, and that's often messy and uncomfortable and, as you say, heavily influenced by context.
The organisation's code lives in the nervous system of everyone who works there.
I like the analogy of DNA. What an organism becomes is encoded in what its cells actually do, accumulated across billions of interactions. Organisations work the same way. The real architecture is in the collective habits and unspoken assumptions that accumulate over years, and the way people flinch when their manager's name appears in their inbox.
You can't mandate psychological safety from the top down. Safety is a physiological state. And if your employees are carrying personal debt and a standing fear of redundancy, no workshop is going to overwrite that. The biological imperative to protect yourself doesn't switch off because HR sent a slide deck.
The code for safety gets written in smaller moments. A leader who reacts to mistakes with blame trains everyone around them to hide problems. And when someone edits what they say before they say it, the meeting isn't real.
If the individual parts of the system don't feel safe, the system cannot generate safety. You can't produce a collective feeling that only a few of the parts possess.
Thanks Gerrit for as such a thoughtful comment. I absolutely love that code and DNA framing. Thanks for sharing, and I fully agree that in an org, it's a similar principle on a smaller scale - no slide deck can undo all those previous interactions. Not even a dozen workshops.
Interesting read Mark. Got me reflecting on how psychological safety in these spaces is actually created. It's not through introducing a policy change or new wellness program. It's what leadership decides to tolerate regardless of results. Employees are watching what happens when bad behaviour surfaces, particularly whether authority decides to act or look away. Those patterns write the culture over time, and a team building workshop can’t undo that
We do need to have deeper conversations about PS that include but go beyond the Amy Edmondson model. While organisations can't do everything to raise the level of PS, they should still be accountable for creating an environment that, at a minimum, does not further damage PS.
We’ve been recently asked for workshops on this and our response is “psychological safety is a symptom not the diagnosis” — pinpointing unique behaviors for the team or organization is key.
Though I'm not sure I've encountered any whole orgs (or even teams) that truly sign up to and live by a unique set of behaviours. I'm sure it's possible, but also very very rare.
The point about equal speaking time reminded me of when I first started working as a coaching duo with Fanny Norlin. After our first client session I said (like a true wannabe woke modern male😆) that I was concerned I’d spoken way more than her in the meeting. To which she laughed and told me the point was that she spoke exactly as much, and when, she needed to. Furthermore, she actually wanted to speak less and let me do most of the meeting scaffolding so she could tune in more deeply - she’d notice things I didn’t and now and again contributed a real zinger of an insight. Aiming for 50/50 talk time would have been a ridiculous measure! But as you say - context is everything and what works for us certainly won’t work for all!
" reliably produce this “mythical beast”. Run the workshop, adopt the practices and mindset, et voilà, you’ll have a high-performing team out the other end."
Have to agree Mark and, from what I've seen, even Amy Edmondson would agree. She keeps saying it's not a single thing, and not a panacea, but these days, a meme becomes a meme so....
My background in this comes from researching the conditions for change and creativity. Back in my consulting days in PwC we used research from the applied creativity world which separated things out. Creative Problem Solving comes with a toolkit, but the toolkit doesn't come with a recipe book - you have to iterate and explore your way to outcomes. To get there, you need to pay attention both to people's individual psychology (biases and state) and the context, particularly the climate in the room or team.
The model of climate we used came from the same field, and it didn't mention psychological safety, but it did talk about trust, challenge, freedom, support, risk, space, debate, conflict, and playfulness. It too talked about these as outcomes, but people also took them as levers and tried to impose them with the inevitable consequences.
The key thing about climate is that the instrument measures these as individual dimensions using a questionnaire. These then get added to map the overall 'climate'. But of course it's measuring perceptions. not a concrete reality. And people's perceptions are influenced by their conditioning, biases, context, and a whole lot more. Ever since PwC, I've focused my time on showing people how to:
- influence their perceptions by noticing their conditioned reactions and fixed opinions, and creating a more resourceful internal state that gives them more clarity and choice
- interact differently with others to help create some of that climate, but focus on the reality of each interaction (e.g. questioning, listening, exploring, contracting)
- make shared progress whatever the situation - not holding tightly to fixed opinions or perspectives that constrain what's possible
In the end, we build safety, or trust or climate or whatever labels people prefer, by achieving new things together, and that's often messy and uncomfortable and, as you say, heavily influenced by context.
The organisation's code lives in the nervous system of everyone who works there.
I like the analogy of DNA. What an organism becomes is encoded in what its cells actually do, accumulated across billions of interactions. Organisations work the same way. The real architecture is in the collective habits and unspoken assumptions that accumulate over years, and the way people flinch when their manager's name appears in their inbox.
You can't mandate psychological safety from the top down. Safety is a physiological state. And if your employees are carrying personal debt and a standing fear of redundancy, no workshop is going to overwrite that. The biological imperative to protect yourself doesn't switch off because HR sent a slide deck.
The code for safety gets written in smaller moments. A leader who reacts to mistakes with blame trains everyone around them to hide problems. And when someone edits what they say before they say it, the meeting isn't real.
If the individual parts of the system don't feel safe, the system cannot generate safety. You can't produce a collective feeling that only a few of the parts possess.
Thanks Gerrit for as such a thoughtful comment. I absolutely love that code and DNA framing. Thanks for sharing, and I fully agree that in an org, it's a similar principle on a smaller scale - no slide deck can undo all those previous interactions. Not even a dozen workshops.
Interesting read Mark. Got me reflecting on how psychological safety in these spaces is actually created. It's not through introducing a policy change or new wellness program. It's what leadership decides to tolerate regardless of results. Employees are watching what happens when bad behaviour surfaces, particularly whether authority decides to act or look away. Those patterns write the culture over time, and a team building workshop can’t undo that
We do need to have deeper conversations about PS that include but go beyond the Amy Edmondson model. While organisations can't do everything to raise the level of PS, they should still be accountable for creating an environment that, at a minimum, does not further damage PS.
We’ve been recently asked for workshops on this and our response is “psychological safety is a symptom not the diagnosis” — pinpointing unique behaviors for the team or organization is key.
Yes on the behaviours, in an ideal world...
Though I'm not sure I've encountered any whole orgs (or even teams) that truly sign up to and live by a unique set of behaviours. I'm sure it's possible, but also very very rare.
Love the photo. Want to be there ...
This is great Mark, really skilfully laid out!
The point about equal speaking time reminded me of when I first started working as a coaching duo with Fanny Norlin. After our first client session I said (like a true wannabe woke modern male😆) that I was concerned I’d spoken way more than her in the meeting. To which she laughed and told me the point was that she spoke exactly as much, and when, she needed to. Furthermore, she actually wanted to speak less and let me do most of the meeting scaffolding so she could tune in more deeply - she’d notice things I didn’t and now and again contributed a real zinger of an insight. Aiming for 50/50 talk time would have been a ridiculous measure! But as you say - context is everything and what works for us certainly won’t work for all!
Mark, thanks for writing all this.
" reliably produce this “mythical beast”. Run the workshop, adopt the practices and mindset, et voilà, you’ll have a high-performing team out the other end."
Oh no it does not...