psychological_safety

Agile Within Podcast

I’m on episode 80 of The Agile Within podcast. Click here to listen. Also see the follow up link mentioned in the podcast

Improving Psychological Safety

We talk a lot about psychological safety, but most of it is platitudes: “It’s good. Do more of it.”

“This is a safe space”

I’m seeing more and more situations where someone will say “this is a safe space” in a meeting invite or at the beginning of a session. While I appreciate that the person saying the words really wants that to be true, the fact they feel the need to say it, highlights the fact that it probably isn’t. If it really were safe, we would already know that.

SAFETY model of psychological safety

When discussing psychological safety, we like to use the SAFETY¹ model from the Academy of Brain-based Leadership. Note that we’re not affiliated with this organization - we just find their model very useful when discussing the topic.

1. The SAFETY model is described in depth in the book Psychological Safety: The key to happy, high-performing people and teams by Radecki and Hull, 2018 ↩

Presentation: Neuroscience of psychological safety

Neuroscience of psychological safety

I find that many of the conversations we have about psychological safety tend to devolve into platitudes: “It’s good and we should have more of it” or “managers should create safer spaces”. This doesn’t give anyone any context into why it’s actually important or how we can go about improving it.

Google’s Project Aristotle

You may have already heard of Google’s Project Aristotle. Back in 2012, Google set out to identify what made their most effective teams so much better than others. They wanted to reproduce that magic that some teams had across the company and so they interviewed 180 teams and collected all kinds of data.