In part one we discussed the power and danger in naming psychological safety. In part two, we explored power and diversity. This week we’re continuing our series of reflections with some of the things we’ve found make some folks uncomfortable about psychological safety work. We dive into dissent, non-determinism, and the danger of targets, KPIs, diagnostics and benchmarks.
Sometimes psychological safety is presented as something akin to comfortable conformity. Really, it’s the opposite – safety in discomfort and safety in dissent and difference. Psychological safety is what allows us to feel safe to be different, safe to dissent, and safe to deviate in our behaviours from cultural or organisational norms – even (and perhaps especially) if that deviation challenges the system itself or results in positive change at the expense of compliance.
In many domains (such as healthcare), it’s not formal policies, processes or procedures that keep things running: it’s the constant human deviation and adaptation from those rigid and defined processes to make things work in the complexity of the real world. Systems (and people) survive because people at the sharp end are bending rules, solving complex problems on the fly, and compensating for gaps between work as imagined and work as done. Success comes not from conformity and compliance, it emerges from adaptation, diversity and difference.
Psychological safety is quite the opposite of conformity and comfort – it’s working to create the conditions where it’s safe to dissent and be uncomfortable together. This means safety in difference and intelligent adaptation. After all, most systems, in practice, run on deviance.
Like all organisational dynamics, psychological safety is non-deterministic, and we cannot reduce it to simple cause and effect interventions. In complex systems (i.e. organisations), we cannot guarantee that any intervention will produce the intended effect, and it would be naive or misleading to pretend otherwise. The work of psychological safety is much more ecological than engineering. It’s about creating conditions where it can emerge, differently, in different contexts, with attention to local dispositions, histories, and contexts. This, as I’ve described previously in Rewetting Organisations, is about making small changes to the substrate – that foundation upon which the collective organisation thrives. Psychological safety is not fostered through Gannt Charts, plans and roadmaps. They may provide some utility, but we should remember that they are, ultimately, works of hopeful fiction.
What we can do, however, is guide, assist and empower people to experiment:
This is about providing people with ideas and patterns and inspiration rather than prescriptions – there’s no one-size-fits-all, cookie cutter approach to human interaction. Practices, tools, and behaviours can and should be adapted to the local context, because we trust that people understand and can navigate their own workplaces, and apply their learning intelligently. For example, PACE works in many contexts, but not all. Lean Coffee is excellent for many collaborative settings, but not all. The key is in intelligently deciding which practices and behaviours to experiment with, and ensuring that we hold on to them lightly, adapting or moving on entirely if they don’t work (whilst, of course, learning as much as possible from the experience). The practices and interventions may work, or they may not, but either way they teach us something. And if they don’t work, being honest about our failed attempt may in fact provide an opportunity to demonstrate that it’s safe to humbly and intelligently fail, and learn from the process – thus nudging us towards greater psychological safety after all.
Not every interpersonal risk will succeed (and some will certainly fail). And this brings us to an important question that often comes up – how do I speak up if my workplace or team really isn’t at all psychologically safe? It’s important to be honest here: sometimes there’s really no “safe-to-fail” option. Psychological danger can be very real, and in those situations, the most locally rational choice could well be to stay silent. If, for example, we work for a boss who will genuinely fire us for admitting a mistake, then the fear of being honest is justified. No amount of conceptual reframing will make that situation safe to speak up and admit it.
What we can do is work to create the conditions where, iteratively, it gets safer to take those interpersonal risks. This starts by recognising that the group can only ever be as safe as the least safe person. In the case above, that might mean creating psychologically safer spaces for the team members when their boss isn’t there, or opening up alternative channels for raising concerns through the organisational hierarchy. And there are things you can try, even when the person you’re trying to foster psychological safety with is your boss. But it’s important to acknowledge that none of this is easy or guaranteed.
Progress in complex systems isn’t linear, and it’s never complete. Psychological safety is emergent, contextual, and it can’t be “implemented” or imposed. It arises from conditions, constraints, and repeated interactions and patterns, not through top-down rollouts. We can always do better, and if we’re not actively working to improve, we’re probably regressing.
Having said that, continuous improvement should be opportunistic and adaptive, not an end in itself (or, god forbid, a metric target to be gamed). Sometimes the term “continuous improvement” can itself become a dangerous attractor if it’s imposed as constant pressure, and can be weaponised. What I guess I mean is that it’s ok to just keep doing a good job. Good things often come from persistence: sometimes just sustaining and keeping on going is more valuable than chasing the next improvement initiative. To quote the great Nemo, “Just keep swimming!”
Persistence matters more than chasing shiny new initiatives, but that doesn’t mean progress can (or should) be reduced to numbers. I’m generally pretty dubious about psychological safety “diagnostics”, benchmarks, KPIs and targets. Metrics in complex systems often serve as retrospective distortions (i.e. someone, somewhere, chose what to measure, what that measure means, and how to interpret the data – and those decisions are rarely made by the people actually being measured). The sheer existence of a measure alone can be enough to invoke Goodhart’s Law (more strictly Strathern’s Law) and distort or harm the very thing that we’re measuring. Even worse, if the results of an engagement or psychological safety survey are incentivised, punished or rewarded, then that effect is amplified. If a manager gets a bonus or promotion for their team scoring high in the psychological safety survey, are we actually measuring psychological safety, or how much influence that manager has over the team members’ survey responses? Since measurement appears to be the current orthodoxy (and is likely to remain so for some time), then the task is to ensure that the way we measure is as faithful as possible to the phenomenon itself, not a proxy that ends up undermining it.
“What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so”
Simon Caulkin in 2008, summarising VF Ridgway 1956.
Another danger we come across with measurement is survey fatigue, where employees are endlessly surveyed about any and all aspects of their work experience, and the related phenomenon, survey theatre, where despite these near-constant requests to complete yet more engagement surveys, very little seems to change as a result. In these cases, the surveys are performative – they serve to provide the appearance of “doing employee engagement” or “consulting staff” without taking on any of the hard work of actually changing things for the better. When survey metrics replace actual dialogue, measurement has become part of the problem.
Along with cautions around surveys and measurement, we also advise against trying to establish a single measure of “organisational psychological safety”, despite this being quite a popular idea. This is because as neat and tidy as it feels to have one metric that represents the entirety of psychological safety across an organisation, in reality it’s completely meaningless, and tells us little to nothing about the lived experience of employees within that organisation. Aggregating psychological safety in teams to an organisational measure is a category error.
Worse, these aggregated metrics can risk allowing leaders to take comfort in a good looking score, while overlooking the uneven distribution of safety across different groups. In that sense, aggregation probably does more harm than good.
We sometimes jokingly call ourselves the “anti-measurement club”, but there’s a serious point here: as soon as we measure psychological safety, we risk incentivising people to perform it rather than live it.
Metrics, averages and snapshots can give false reassurance. Instead, we focus on action research (learning whilst doing the work), narrative capture (stories of lived experience), qualitative sense-making (drawing insights from the interactions and outputs from workshops), and prioritising directional movement rather than magnitude (working iteratively towards “better” rather than a numerical target or goal). I believe that moving in a good direction is more important than a simple measure telling us where we are now. Knowing you’re 30,000 feet in the air is less useful than knowing that you’re plummeting at a rate of 500 feet per second.
To be continued! Read part four here.
Next week, we explore a completely different lens on psychological safety, and look to the future of the field.
We’re excited to share something brand new: the Psychological Safety Trainer Toolkit!
This incredible digital resource has already had a fantastic reception from our Train the Trainer course graduates and our Psych Safety community – and now we’re opening it up to newsletter readers too!
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Inside, you’ll find:
It also comes with a commercial licence, so you can use it both in-house and externally.
Get the Trainer Toolkit here
We hope the Trainer Toolkit helps you gain more clients and deliver more value to existing clients – and we can’t wait to hear how you use it.
The post Reflections – Part Three: The Safety to Dissent appeared first on Psych Safety.
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