A few years ago I was asked to facilitate a multi-team retrospective across a department. It had been previously noted that there seemed to be a psychological safety problem across this department and I was asked to address that specifically, so I did. I introduced the topic, provided some context around psychological safety, and we started to explore what people were noticing and how they felt.
Within about twenty minutes, I and my co-facilitators were receiving panicked messages from managers who had not been invited to the retrospective. They were telling me to stop the conversation and leave it alone. It turned out that people inside the retrospective had felt so uncomfortable just talking about this subject that they had reached out to their own management to get it shut down.
An interesting point is that by the end of the retrospective, everyone inside the room was calm and feeling good about the outcome of the meeting.
Outside the room however, the panic continued for weeks. Various levels of management pulled me into meetings to discuss what had happened. What could have been a clean two-hour retrospective became a weeks-long organizational disruption, triggered not by anything that happened in the room, only by the alarm signals that had spread outward from it.
So what was actually happening?
Neuroception
Dr. Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist who spent decades studying the nervous system, coined the term neuroception to describe something that happens constantly, below conscious awareness. Your nervous system is continuously scanning the environment for signals of safety or threat, and it makes that assessment before thought, before language, before any conscious decision. By the time you are aware of feeling unsafe, the call has already been made.
This is distinct from perception, which involves conscious awareness. Neuroception happens underneath it. And critically, it doesn’t evaluate logic or intent. It evaluates signals: tone of voice, facial expressions, the predictability of your environment, whether the people around you seem calm or alarmed. A well-reasoned argument arrives too late. The nervous system has already decided.
What this means in organizations
The people in that retrospective weren’t being obstructive. Their nervous systems had detected threat signals before anything particularly alarming had been said. The topic itself, psychological safety, in a department where safety was already uncertain, was enough. They responded to the signal the context was sending, not to the content of the conversation.
When they reached out to their managers, they became threat signals themselves. The managers outside the room had no direct experience of what was happening inside it. Their nervous systems received an alarm and responded accordingly. The panic propagated through the organization, not because the situation was actually dangerous, only because the signals indicated it was.
This pattern shows up constantly in organizational change. A leadership team announces a restructure. They communicate clearly, hold town halls, answer every question, explain the rationale. Yet, the team still can’t focus. Still seems unsettled weeks later. Still isn’t performing the way it was before.
This is not stubbornness, or apathy, or unprofessionalism. It is neuroception having made a threat assessment, and no amount of rational communication reaches the system that made that call.
The implication
For leaders and coaches, this matters because it reframes the problem. If you believe that felt safety is primarily a communication problem, you will keep reaching for communication solutions. Clearer messaging, more transparency, better town halls. And you will keep being puzzled when it isn’t enough.
Neuroception tells us that felt safety is a nervous system problem. The signals the environment sends matter more than the logic it offers. Resistance to change isn’t stubbornness. Disengagement isn’t apathy. Persistent anxiety after a well-handled announcement isn’t irrational. It’s biology doing exactly what it evolved to do, in an environment it wasn’t designed for.
Understanding what’s actually happening is the first step toward addressing it effectively. This is the kind of work I do with teams and organizations. Let’s talk.
See also: Polyvagal Theory