Perhaps the biggest question going into the Artemis II mission this spring was how the heat shield at the base of the spacecraft would perform during reentry through Earth's atmosphere.

The ablative heat shield, designed to char upon reentry while keeping the crew safe, had experienced unexpected losses of large chunks during a test flight in late 2022. After much deliberation, and not without controversy, NASA decided to fly the Artemis II heat shield as is but modify the spacecraft's reentry trajectory.

Obviously, the heat shield worked. The crew of Artemis II, led by commander Reid Wiseman, safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a triumphant trip around the Moon. Afterward, they and other NASA officials offered general comments, saying the heat shield looked good.

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Andy Burnham has the highest leadership approval ratings of any leader, in a boost to to the new Prime Minister.

According to polling carried out by campaign group More in Common, Burnham’s approval rating has jumped to +13, which is higher than Keir Starmer’s post election high of +11.

Meanwhile Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is on an approval rating of +3, while Ed Davey is on -5. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who has been embroiled in a number of scandals, is on -22, while Zack Polanski is also on -22.

The ‘Burnham bounce’ will be welcome news for many Labour activists and members, as the party also narrows the gap with Reform UK to just two points.

According to the latest poll carried out by More in Common, Reform are on 26%, with no change since the last poll, while Labour are on 24%, increasing their support by 2 points.

The post Andy Burnham has the highest leadership approval ratings of any leader appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

Last month, I attended the Boye and Co Digital Leadership Group meeting at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The group exists to connect digital leaders across organisations so we can learn from each other’s challenges and avoid mistakes others have already made.

The turnout was smaller than expected. Last-minute cancellations meant the group was more intimate than usual, but that actually made it better. More time for real conversation. Better questions. The kind of peer learning that doesn’t happen in bigger conferences.

Here’s what stuck with me.

On CMS Migrations: You’re Not Alone in This

Sam Hope-Evans at Soundcloud shared the start of their journey moving from a vendor to OpenSource CMS. What struck me wasn’t the technical choice, it was that they were asking the same questions we’ve been asking at Edinburgh: Is our current system giving us what we need? Can we move without losing everything? What does discovery look like when we’re under pressure?

Using AI in their discovery phase to build prototypes and get buy-in from stakeholders quickly without spending valuable time developing prototypes. When they asked me about our Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 migration, I realised how much we’ve learned that’s worth sharing. The pitfalls (data quality, stakeholder fatigue, scope creep). The wins (getting to a modern platform, being able to move faster). The ongoing question they’re wrestling with: cloud-hosted or on-premise?

If you’re thinking about a CMS migration, the lesson is this: talk to people who’ve done it. Not vendor reps. People in organisations like yours who’ve lived through it. That peer learning is invaluable.

On Legacy Systems: The Long Game

Mahesh Patel at The Royal College of Surgeons shared how they consolidated from 100 separate CMS instances down to one Umbraco system. They’re also grappling with medical data systems that need overhauling. How do you start looking at legacy infrastructure when you’re managing multiple competing priorities?

This resonated deeply. We’re managing four services simultaneously across the university. Our website platform EdWeb 2 was a significant architectural shift: we rebuilt from Drupal 7 (which used organic groups to simulate subsites within a single installation) into Drupal 10 with 160+ separate websites built on a single codebase. When we push updates, all 160 sites get them automatically. It’s modern infrastructure, but we’re still evolving it.

MyEd is different. We’re managing the legacy system in production while simultaneously starting a parallel modernisation project to rebuild it from the ground up with Drupal at the heart. That’s not a simple upgrade. It’s building the new while keeping the old running. Staff Profiles is coming next. The question of ‘how do we tackle these transformations without breaking what’s already working?’ is one I’ll been trying to figure out for years.

Their approach resonated with me: be clear about what needs to move first, understand the data, plan for the long game. Don’t try to solve everything at once. That’s exactly what we’re doing: one service transformation at a time, while maintaining the others.

On AI: The Uncomfortable Conversations

Simon Jones at Studio 24’s presentation on the ethics of AI pulled no punches. And it’s worth repeating what they said, because it challenges the hype.

AI is being sold as a solution to everything. But the reality is more complicated:

The real costs are often invisible:

• Financial: AI companies are running at a loss. Most aren’t profitable. You’re investing in something that hasn’t proven it’s sustainable and it’s becoming more expensive than developers.
• Human: Data taggers in developing countries get paid little wages. Communities live near data centres can strain local resources (AI consumed 21% of all electricity in Ireland in 2023). The environmental cost still unknown.
• Creative: Copyright issues (Authors suing OpenAI over copyright infringement (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66866577). Bias in training data and Quality dropping as AI trains on itself.

The harms are real:

• Phishing attacks and security risks are on the increase.
• Misinformation and ‘AI slop’ being generated which users are believing.
• Bias in training data and system prompts.
• Filter bubbles and reduced trust – AI starts to mimic the user.

But there are genuine opportunities:

• Understanding large codebases and content
• Speeding up routine tasks
• Research and discovery
• Accessibility (tools available like ai that focus on inclusive models)

The key question Simon posed: Before you adopt AI anywhere, ask yourself:

1. What’s the business value?
2. Is it high-risk? (Chatbots, for instance, can be high-risk and not actually helpful.)
3. How important is accuracy?
4. Who benefits? Who could be harmed?
5. How can you test it?
6. If it goes wrong, how do you give people recourse?

This matters because AI FOMO is not a strategy. Just because everyone’s talking about it doesn’t mean it’s right for your specific problem.

What I’m Taking Away

Three things:

1. Peer learning beats everything else. The group exists because we’re all managing similar challenges in different contexts. The value isn’t in vendor pitches or abstract frameworks. It’s in hearing from the Royal College of Surgeons about consolidating systems, from Soundcloud about CMS choice, from Studio 24 about navigating AI responsibly. You can’t get that in a conference. You get it from peers who are living it.
2. The unglamorous work matters most. CMS migrations, legacy system consolidation, data quality. These aren’t flashy. They don’t make headlines. But they’re the foundation of everything else. The organisations doing well aren’t the ones chasing every new trend. They’re the ones making deliberate choices about their platform and sticking with them.
3. Be cautious of cost, all kinds of cost. Financial, human, environmental, security. When you’re evaluating any new technology (AI included), understand the full picture. Ask the hard questions. Don’t let FOMO drive the decision.

Should You Attend Next Year?

Even with lower attendance, this was worth my time. I came away with real insights, real connections, and a clearer sense of how other digital leaders in the UK are navigating the same pressures we are.

If you’re leading digital work in a university or similar organisation, find peer groups like this.

I was pleased to have a talk accepted at the annual UCISA Women in Tech (WiT) conference. I went to Newcastle for a day of talks, workshops and networking. I left with a better understanding of the WiT community , and a reinforced appreciation of the need for inclusivity in Higher Education.    

UCISA is an industry body supporting digital professionals working in the education sector. I have been actively involved in UCISA since 2022 when I helped set up the UCISA UX Group and became co-chair of this UK-wide community of practice. I’ve organised many UCISA UX events but had not attended one of UCISA’s flagship annual conferences, the Women in Tech event, until this year. My presentation about our project on staff profiles resonated with attendees, I learned a lot about diversity and representation in the sector from attending the other talks and I enjoyed connecting with other Higher Education professionals over shared inclusivity challenges. Here, I reflect on my highlights from an interesting day.

Sharing our staff profiles work piqued interest from other universities

As well as the clear focus on inclusivity, one of the themes of this year’s WiT was real-world applications and problem-solving. I felt our staff profiles project spoke to this theme, so I submitted a talk to share what we learned from research and the steps we have taken towards finding a new profiles solution.

My session was well received – perhaps unsurprisingly, colleagues from other institutions shared the same concerns and challenges in designing a profile solution that showcases staff in the best light, keeps them findable in searches, and yet remains easy for staff to update. I valued the chance to make new contacts, exchange ideas, and learn about other institutions’ diverse approaches to the ‘profiles problem’. I resolved to stay in touch as we take steps towards implementing a profiles solution at the University, recognising just how universal this need is across the Higher Education sector, and seeing an opportunity for meaningful collaboration.

Read more about the staff profiles project in the blog post series:

Collected blog posts about staff profiles project

Results of a 2025 WiT survey revealed risks and opportunities

One of the core activities of the UCISA WiT committee is to regularly collect data to understand diversity within IT departments across the FE/HE sector. At the conference, WiT committee co-chairs Christi Hopkinson and Katie Wilde shared a preview of the results of the 2025 survey, completed by more than 200 respondents from 66 institutions, with 74.5% of the respondents identifying as female. Several findings stood out from the preliminary report in terms of risks and opportunities.

There’s a risk of retention due to barriers to progression

Responses to a question about progression routes revealed significant proportions of respondents had started in IT in the following areas:

• First/Second Line Support
• Application Support
• Business Analysis
• Project Management
• Web Development

Responses to a follow-up question about the roles respondents were currently working in showed continued representation in these areas, which indicated a degree of stasis when it came to progression in the sector. Areas where women were underrepresented included:

• Infrastructure
• Security
• Enterprise Architecture
• Senior Management.

The survey results showed a third of respondents had considered leaving their institutions or the sector, citing pay, workload and progression as popular reasons motivating them to think about moving on. Common blockers to progression included:

• Lack of available higher-grade roles
• Promotion structures tied only to management, not technical excellence
• Career pathways not transparent
• Women having to ‘prove more’ to progress

There’s potential to be gained by investing in non-technical skills

Most respondents cited the following skills as important for the roles they were currently in as well as for progression:

• Problem solving
• Communication
• Analytical skills
• Customer service
• Business analysis
• Strategic thinking

This spread of skills reinforced the value of focusing training and development on non-technical abilities to complement technical skills, and to ensure expertise was appropriately directed to deliver on broader institutional goals.

There’s room to improve on diversity, inclusion and discrimination

Responses to questions about inclusion and belonging revealed positives and negatives about the workplace respondents were part of.

On the positive side:

• 79% felt valued as part of a team
• 67% felt they were treated fairly and equitably

On the less-positive side:

• Only 34% felt the leadership reflected diversity in the workforce
• 41% felt there were opportunities for careers advancement
• 46% felt their organisation supported under-represented groups
• 47% were satisfied with their organisation’s diversity initiatives

The spread of these numbers provided a clear steer of areas to focus on to achieve less exclusive, and better-balanced IT workplace.

Achieving inclusivity starts with individuals and requires thinking beyond statistics

The survey data gave a snapshot of the current state of inclusivity in the sector, however, anecdotes from individual presenters painted a more vivid picture of what inclusivity could look like. The WiT programme included several women sharing stories of their induction into tech and reflecting on their individual progression routes. It was refreshing to see the diversity of pathways they had taken and interesting to hear about what they had learned along the way, and their tips for success.

Monica Jones, Chief Data Officer at the University of Leeds acknowledged that career progression paths rarely run smoothly, and advised setting personal goals and milestones to work towards, to be best-prepared for promotion opportunities when these came up. Julia Lloyd, College Manager – Business and Law, at the University of the West of England, emphasised the benefits of ‘quiet leadership’ and shared tips to create space for different voices – such as thoughtful structuring of meetings, design of communication channels and rewarding contributions over confidence. A joint talk ‘The Not-So IT Crowd’ from Catriona Blair, Joanna Addison and Sasha Titus from the University of Kent, and a session by Amber Mothersille from the University of Northampton emphasised the value of non-technical skills in technical roles – recognising the need for empathy, trust-building and adaptability to strengthen teams and build excellent digital services.

Breaking barriers requires breaking old biases and habits

A final takeaway from attending the WiT event was a call-to-action to question the way we work – specifically to foster inclusivity by making room for new ways of thinking and for fresh perspectives.

In an interactive exercise led by Katie Wilde, we considered five roles necessary for the operation of successful teams (the Navigator, the Connector, the Builder, the Challenger). In a period of honest reflection, we shared the roles we naturally adopted in team settings, and the roles we tended to overlook or disregard. Going through this exercise was a good leveller as well as a reminder to make room for diversity in everyday team settings instead of relying on familiarity.

The day closed with a thought-provoking talk on male fragility, delivered by Jake Dovey, a UCISA mentor. Drawing on personal anecdotes experienced through his involvement with UCISA, Jake’s talk described instances where men had overreacted defensively to being challenged and where women had inadvertently softened situations to avoid potential conflict and ‘keep the peace’. Jake challenged the women in the room to recognise these instances going forward, and prompted a call-to-action for all to recognise these harmful patterns and call them out to collectively help break the disruptive cycle.

Final thoughts – WiT26 was less about women and more about inclusivity

WiT26 delivered a packed programme which encouraged me to think outside my work in UX and more broadly about the joint responsibilities we all have in creating and fostering an inclusive work environment. I came away with recommendations of books to read and concepts to learn more about, and a heightened awareness of embedding inclusive practices in my day-to-day work and activities. I am keen to see the full results of the WiT 2025 survey and to remain part of the WiT community going forward.

 

The Strange Confidence of 360 Degree Feedback

360 degree feedback promises that it will offer truth in all directions. It will illuminate blind spots, reveal the development areas people couldn’t see before and unlock potential they didn’t know they had. It promises, above all, to make honesty safe, offering confidentiality and anonymity for the people with less power, so they can finally tell the truth about the people with more. It is an appealing set of promises, but whether it can keep them is another matter.

The Murky History of 360 Degree Feedback

Let’s just clarify first what we mean by 360 degree feedback. Generally, the term refers to a process of gathering feedback about an individual from the people around them, perhaps their manager, but also peers and direct reports, hence the full circle – 360 degrees. This is ostensibly to support their development, to feed into an appraisal, or both. Responses are typically anonymised, often pooled in groups of three or more so that in theory no single rater can be identified (although that’s rarely watertight in practice).

So where does this popular practice actually come from? Rumours abound. I once heard a version involving a KGB sabotage manual, which I’d love to believe as it would make a great story. Unfortunately, I’ve found no evidence for it. The more likely history, referenced widely online, traces an early version to officer selection in the German Reichswehr around 1930, under a military psychologist named Johann Rieffert. Nobody called it 360 degree feedback, but multiple observers would feed into a single judgement about who should make the cut.

The name “360-degree feedback” was coined in the mid-1980s by an assessment firm called TEAMS Inc, who registered the phrase as a trademark, and then spent years trying to enforce their ownership of it until the company was sold. There has always been money in this, and attempts to trademark concepts and practices should always raise an eyebrow, if not a red flag.

None of which stops 360 degree feedback being treated today as a solid, almost scientific HR default. For a practice this murky in its origins, that’s quite a leap, and as we’ll see, neither the evidence nor people’s experiences of it seem to justify the confidence.

Experiences of 360 Degree Feedback

I’ve worked in organisations running 360 degree feedback processes, and I know the anxiety of waiting on anonymised comments, followed, almost always, by one of two deflations:

1. You’re handed some critical but cryptic line, spend an unreasonable amount of energy trying to guess who wrote it and have to actively resist the urge to go and just ask them what they mean, or: 
2. You get the other thing entirely: bland, school-report style platitudes about being a great colleague, which are technically positive, but don’t really say anything at all.

Both versions arrive by the same route. The 360 degree feedback process tips into a tick-box exercise, and once it has, it doesn’t just fail to start a constructive, developmental conversation; the anonymity built into it often makes sure that conversation can never happen at all.

None of this is unique to me. I have these conversations regularly with clients, people in mid-sized and large organisations where 360 degree feedback has become so completely entangled with performance management or appraisal that all ideas of feedback get drawn into this dreaded annual cycle. It seems like once an organisation has a formal annual mechanism for feedback, that mechanism exerts a gravitational pull over all other feedback instances. The ordinary, day-to-day, low-stakes, useful versions of feedback – like a quick check in after a meeting or small flagging of a blind spot – start to feel like something to save up rather than say now. People batch it all up for judgement day and the process that’s designed to surface feedback ends up suppressing many more useful, and low-threat, day-to-day exchanges.

And then there are the others, the ones just starting out on their 360 degree feedback ‘journey’, asking important questions before they commit: why are we doing this, and what is it actually going to do to psychological safety here?

The Evidence Gap

It turns out that the case for 360 degree feedback is pretty underwhelming, given how embedded all this is. Despite three decades of near universal corporate enthusiasm, nobody has ever managed to show, convincingly, that it does what it’s supposed to do. The Institute for Employment Studies spent a year interviewing organisations running these schemes and combing through the available research, and concluded that widespread adoption of 360 degree feedback reflects “faith rather than proven validity,” which is, it turns out, a rather generous way of putting it. Evidence of actual impact on individual development or organisational performance was, in their own words, “scant.” Similarly, the most authoritative meta-analysis in the field, pulling together twenty-four longitudinal studies, found that improvement in ratings over time, the entire point of the exercise, was ‘generally small’. As the authors put it, “practitioners should not expect large, widespread performance improvement after employees receive multisource feedback.”

That meta-analysis was published in 2005. Two decades on, the more recent literature isn’t full of fresh studies overturning or confirming it, it’s largely quiet, with prominent practitioners in the field noting a “glaring absence” of new research even as usage of 360 feedback keeps climbing. The honest answer to “does this work?” still sits somewhere closer to “a bit, maybe, for some people, under conditions nobody’s fully pinned down” than anything resembling a “yes!”

None of which has slowed adoption down. Which brings me back to the money. Google “360 degree feedback” (a reasonable start for any investigative dive into the practice!) and the first page is dominated by sponsored placements and paid products, all companies selling their own version of a 360 degree feedback tool. Twenty years ago, the IES were already noting the volume of “spin from external providers” surrounding this practice. If there was a lot of spin then, I suspect there’s a great deal more now.

More Raters, More Bias

All feedback is subjective. I’ve written about why that matters elsewhere, so I won’t revisit the whole argument, except to say that the moment you treat a rating as a fact about a person rather than an impression formed by another person, you’re already in trouble.

What’s worth adding in this context is a particular claim some 360 degree tools lean on, implicitly or explicitly: that gathering feedback from many sources cancels out individual bias and delivers something more objective than a single manager’s view. It’s an appealing idea, but averaging several biased judgements doesn’t remove the bias, it just blends it into something that looks smoother and harder to attribute while carrying the original distortions inside it. Gender and racial bias don’t disappear when you collect more ratings; in fact they may well accumulate while becoming harder to see, hidden behind an aggregate score that feels objective and is anything but. 

There’s another issue too: 360 asks how a person is performing, rarely about what pressures and constraints they were facing. The forms have feedback for the individual and rarely for the conditions, so the subject of the feedback ends up holding the weight of the system around them.

The Trouble with Anonymity

Anonymity exists in these practices for an obvious reason: people are supposed to feel safer telling the truth if they can’t be identified for it. Aside from the (very real) risk that this reinforces the idea that it’s actually not safe to speak up unless we’re anonymous, the IES researchers did find this working roughly as intended – raters giving upward feedback anonymously were more critical than those who knew their names would be attached. But they also found the protection failing in two different ways. In some cases, managers asked direct reports to provide them directly with “anonymous” feedback, which of course undermines the anonymity from the start. In other cases, raters who had been promised anonymity colluded with each other, with several colleagues agreeing in advance to write identical negative comments about their manager so that no single person could be singled out and blamed. They didn’t trust the protection the system offered, so they built their own on top of it.

There’s a further risk in anonymous feedback – it can easily mask people over- or under-rating for political reasons, which is most likely when the stakes are high. In some organisations, 360 degree feedback has reportedly been folded into the machinery of ‘rank and yank,’ the practice of ranking people by their performance ratings and firing the bottom 10%, a practice which is (thankfully) effectively unlawful in many parts of the world. But where it, or practices like it, still exist, are you really going to risk rating a colleague higher than yourself? 

When the IES researchers looked at places where anonymity was removed instead, some people reported being approached and made to feel uncomfortable for giving honest upward feedback. Yet others preferred it that way, worried that anonymity would let others use the process to settle old scores under cover rather than to give honest feedback. “At least the feedback can be challenged if the names are on it,” as one of them put it, and I see their point. We know feedback is most useful when it’s context-rich – when it can be located in specific incidents and relationships – and when it’s part of a two-way conversation. Anonymised 360 degree feedback removes both the context and the conversation.

So take anonymity away, and people fear retaliation for their honesty. Leave it in place, and people suspect the cover is being used to settle scores or game the system. Either way, the distrust is still there. The problem was arguably never about anonymity at all, but that nobody in the system trusted that honest feedback would be received well, used fairly, or kept safe, regardless of whether names were on it.

Which brings us back to psychological safety. What people need in order to offer honest feedback, is consistent, demonstrated, lived experience that speaking honestly won’t cost them anything. That can only be developed slowly, through what actually happens when people speak up – we can’t shortcut our way to it via an anonymous feedback form.

The Costs of 360 Degree Feedback

There is a financial and relational cost to 360 degree feedback which is easy to overlook when it becomes ‘the norm’. We work with a number of large organisations stuck with a frustrating annual ritual, gathering and inputting reams of data into a system most people resent, kept alive less by conviction that it actually works than by a software licence they’re tied to. These platforms cost a significant amount of money, and the decision to buy one was often made a long way up the organisation. The cost is sunk; the plan is the plan, and questioning it means telling someone senior that their expensive choice isn’t working. It’s often easier, on balance, to just keep doing it.

In another organisation, someone told me their HR team was considering bringing 360 feedback in specifically to deal with one ‘bad manager’. The logic, as it was explained to me, was that this was the only way to get that manager some direct, unfiltered feedback from the people reporting to them. Which might be true. But it also means reaching for an entire organisation-wide measurement system, with all its cost, fatigue and risk, to solve a problem that’s really about one person — a siege engine wheeled up to a door that only needed knocking on.

So where does that leave us?

Not, unfortunately, with a tidy verdict. I’m not here to tell you 360 degree feedback never works, or that everyone running it should stop tomorrow. The honest position is that we don’t really know what it does, the evidence has been thin for twenty years and a great many organisations are running these processes at real cost to time, money and trust without properly questioning whether they’re helping or harming.

If there’s a structural point underneath all of this, it’s that candid feedback isn’t a system we install. The IES researchers, after all their interviews and analysis, landed somewhere strikingly modest: that organisations might do better simply reminding people to give honest, regular feedback as a matter of ordinary practice, rather than building elaborate machinery to extract it once a year. 

I don’t think the story of 360 degree feedback is over. The tools are still being sold, the licences still being signed, the annual cycles still grinding on in organisations full of people wondering what they’re for. I suspect I’ll be having these conversations with clients for a long time yet. But maybe we can at least take a step back and ask what problem this process is actually meant to solve, and whether this is a good way to solve it.

Further Reading

Silverman, M., Kerrin, M., & Carter, A. (2005). 360 Degree Feedback: Beyond the Spin. Report 418. Institute for Employment Studies.

Bracken, D. W., Rose, D. S., & Church, A. H. (2016). The evolution and devolution of 360° feedback. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 9(4), 761–794.

Ostroff, C., Atwater, L. E., & Feinberg, B. J. (2004). Understanding self-other agreement: A look at rater and ratee characteristics, context, and outcomes. Personnel Psychology, 57(2), 333–375.

Smither, J. W., London, M., & Reilly, R. R. (2005). Does performance improve following multisource feedback? A theoretical model, meta-analysis, and review of empirical findings. Personnel Psychology, 58(1), 33–66. 

All Feedback is Subjective

Feedback in the Workplace

Giving Feedback With Psychological Safety

Delivering Effective Feedback Psych Safety Workshop

If this leaves you wondering what good feedback actually looks like, the more personal, everyday kind that doesn’t need an annual cycle or an anonymous form, that’s exactly what we cover in our Delivering Effective Feedback workshop. Full details are here.

The post The Strange Confidence of 360 Degree Feedback appeared first on Psych Safety.

As we approach the first anniversary of the launch of the new Effective Digital Content course it was timely to review our approach to marking the content design exercises completed by learners to look for ways to simplify and potentially automate aspects of the process.

In May 2025 the UX Service launched a new version of the Effective Digital Content (EDC) course. The course covers content design fundamentals relevant to digital publishing at the University. To ensure we continue to improve the quality content across our digital estate, all those who publish content for our institution are required to complete the course.

Read more about the Effective Digital Content course, its contents and its development in the blog post from the UX team:

The new Effective Digital Content course is now live

Completing exercises within a workbook is a key part of the EDC learning experience

Content design is a practical discipline that is best learned by doing, therefore, when we redesigned the EDC course, it was important to include an interactive element that ensured learners gained practice trying out key techniques as part of the learning experience.

This practical element manifests as a workbook – as learners work though the different modules of the EDC course, they complete related exercises in a workbook. When they have finished all six EDC modules, they submit their workbook with their completed exercises to the UX team. We mark their exercises, return feedback on their work in the form of comments within the submitted workbook and then issue them with accreditation in the form of a digital badge.

The UX team devised a workflow to manage marking workbooks and providing feedback

The workbook submission, assessment and feedback process represented a new way of training publishers in content design, and back in May 2025, Nick Daniels, Katie Spearman and Mel Batcharj from the UX team came up with a series of steps to ensure they could access the submitted workbooks and mark them, to provider the learners with feedback on their work:

• Receive the submitted workbooks from the EDC course to a Microsoft OneDrive via a Microsoft Form
• Allocate them to be marked by members of the UX team using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet
• Once marking is complete, the marker returns the workbook with feedback to the learner via email

A year after launch, we observed some kinks in the process

With a steady influx of workbooks from learners, the process worked well, with Nick, Katie and Mel splitting the marking and feedback provision between them. That said, when there were spikes of increased numbers of learners completing the course, prompted for example by reminders to complete it to gain web editing access, the process revealed itself to have some areas of inefficiency. Working as a team, we took some time to map out the existing process in granular detail to pinpoint some areas for improvement, detailed below.

Keeping track of submissions involved manual additions to a spreadsheet

An Excel spreadsheet was set up to keep a record of all the workbook submissions along with their marking history. This spreadsheet was in a different location to the OneDrive where the workbooks were received, however, therefore it was necessary to copy and paste the names and details of learners into the spreadsheet each time a submission was received, to keep it up-to-date. On occasion, this had meant that the Excel spreadsheet and the OneDrive were out of synch – with workbooks to be marked in the OneDrive that hadn’t yet been logged on the spreadsheet.

Notification of submissions came via individual emails and were easy to miss

When a learner submitted a workbook having completed the EDC course, a notification was sent to Nick, Katie and Mel’s email accounts from a Microsoft Forms account email address. These emails could sometimes be overlooked as they existed alongside other emails in individual inboxes, meaning the step to log the submissions in the Excel spreadsheet was delayed.

Returning marked workbooks from individual email accounts made it tricky to keep track

When marking of a workbook was complete, the marker (either Nick, Katie or Mel) composed an email to the learner with the marked workbook as an attachment. In some cases, learners replied directly to Nick, Katie or Mel either with comments in response to their workbook or with feedback on the EDC course or process. As a team, it was helpful to keep track of these interactions with learners as they were a valuable source of feedback, but this was difficult to achieve in a streamlined way since the responses were held in individual email accounts.

There wasn’t an easy way for the team to share marking and feedback approaches

As they marked more and more workbooks, Nick, Katie and Mel developed more and more efficient ways of handling workbook marking and feedback issuing. They shared best practices through meetings and calls but it was clunky to keep track of the tips and techniques they had found since the marked workbooks were passing through individual email accounts.

Issuing digital badges required learners’ UUNs which needed to be manually extracted

Once the marking was complete and the feedback issued, the final step was to issue an EDC digital badge to the learner. This process was managed by the UX team using the learner’s email address to assign the badge. If the learner had submitted the workbook using their alias email address, there was an additional step for the marker to find their UUN email address in order to award them their badge.

We identified ways we wanted to automate and streamline the process

Since the end-to-end process was handled entirely by Microsoft products, using learner data available in the same system, we felt that it should be possible to streamline and automate certain aspects of it. We mapped out a wish-list of areas to improve, largely focused on alleviating active effort required from the team, and on automating aspects of the process that were prone to human error associated with the manual data handling. These were as follows:

• Workbook submissions automatically dropping into a central location to be marked without the need to log them in a separate spreadsheet
• Correspondence regarding workbook submissions (including notifications, sending out marked workbooks and emailed feedback responses) centrally handled through a single, universally accessed account
• Learner data associated with workbook submissions automatically formatted to facilitate returning marks and feedback and issuing digital badges

With help from the SharePoint Solutions team, we were able to make improvements

Several of the UX team had researched the potential of Microsoft’s Power Automate to achieve the identified changes but we had little experience of using this service. We reached out to the SharePoint Solutions team and Richard Sharp, SharePoint Solutions Specialist helped us build a Power Automate flow handling data through a SharePoint site and a central EDC Online Course email account to achieve the automations we had requested, helping us optimise the process.

AI culture prompts us to embrace automation but it starts with reviewing processes

In an age where every day brings a new AI-powered innovation, there’s an inherent urge and temptation to seize opportunities to apply AI to our processes and procedures to free up human time and avoid human error. Identifying such opportunities must start with looking at the processes and procedures in granular detail, however.

In this case, AI intervention wasn’t an appropriate solution to the inefficiency problem, but as it turned out, going through the groundwork mapping out the process was still helpful to spark thinking about another automation mechanism to save our team time and effort.

Going through the EDC marking and feedback process diagnosis made me reflect on the broader value of applying AI thinking as a mindset shift to bring in new ways of thinking to old problems, to effect change making best use of the tools available to us.

Last month I was honoured to receive a national award for Outstanding Leadership from industry body UCISA, recognising my work driving positive change through UX. This achievement prompted me to reflect on my experiences leading UX in different realms over the past few years, and to think about what UX leadership means to me.

At the start of 2025 I was asked to step up to a senior leadership position within the global open-source Drupal community. Drupal, the primary content management system used by the University, has a long-standing reputation for being developer-centric and, coinciding with the launch of a new low-code site-building product, they needed help to steer it towards non-technical audiences.

Without thinking too hard, I jumped at the opportunity. I knew it wouldn’t be easy but I was motivated by the chance to use UX as a force for positive change. I didn’t really have much of a plan, but I was confident I could draw on the UX knowledge and experience I had and figure out ways to make things better. Looking back, this represented a milestone in my UX leadership journey and my broader approach to leadership.

I took over running the University UX Service in October 2022. At the start of 2023, I was a UX team of one and I needed to recruit some team members to rebuild and re-establish the service. I was fortunate to be able to bring in some amazingly talented people to work in my team and with their help, and with some successes, failures and near-misses along the way, was able to transform the UX Service into what it is now – a thriving unit delivering sustained value for the University, one improved digital experience at a time. With that behind me, at the start of 2025, I was open to new opportunities to stretch my leadership capabilities. I had accepted that I would get things wrong before I got them right, but I was drawn for the associated learning, which I recognised would help make me become a better all-round leader.

As it turns out, 2025 became quite the year. I won the Women in Drupal Define Award (in October 2025), and the inaugural UCISA Outstanding Leadership award (in March 2026). Taking on the challenge of leading UX in Drupal paid off in more ways than I could have anticipated. Seeing my work bring about positive UX change in Drupal provided me with a renewed sense of purpose in my job leading the University UX Service, as well as in my roles running the UCISA UX Group and contributing to W3C. I’ve boiled down my thoughts on what successful UX leadership looks like for me into three reflections which I’ve turned into action points to take forward as I progress in UX leadership.

UX needs an adaptive leadership approach, and you always need to promote UX value

When I run brainstorms for UX events with the UCISA UX Group committee, ‘Getting buy-in for UX’ is a topic that regularly comes up. How do we get senior decision-makers to invest in UX? Surely making digital services, products and systems more user-centred is something everyone wants?

Well, yes, but it’s complicated. UX can be disruptive. UX research reveals problems, and once problems are unearthed, there’s an obligation to address them, and that requires time, resource and effort which may not be readily available.

Keeping this in mind helps me shape my UX leadership approach. When I’m contributing to Drupal, I take into account that Drupal is a volatile, fast-moving, open-source community, where new ways of thinking and novel ideas are the norm. There is room for UX amongst the many other forces driving change. The Drupal community has autonomy to make changes and is a solutions-powerhouse, ready to react and respond to the needs and demands arising from UX research. Taken together, this mean I can effectively lead UX in Drupal by presenting and talking about UX on a conceptual level, conducting UX research and openly sharing the findings to prompt and rally the community around making user-centred changes.

Leading UX in the public-sector context of the University context needs to be handled differently. Before initiating any UX research activity, I take time to understand the nuances of a situation, to anticipate the context-specific value UX may bring, and honestly assess the resource and commitment required to achieve that value.

The UX Service receives many requests for UX help, but a fraction of the requests we receive are not progressed, meaning digital experiences that could be improved are left unchanged. I recently led a retrospective with my UX team to understand reasons why, and to look for patterns. We concluded that in a number of cases, there is a gulf between people’s expectations of what UX improvement involves and the reality of making improvements happen. This gap is often what causes teams to abandon their UX plans.

This insight shapes how I lead UX at the University. Rather than describing it in purely conceptual terms, I make a point of bringing teams into the practical reality – the sometimes messy, non-linear steps required to achieve improved UX. Leaning on  the persuasive power of word-of-mouth, myself and my UX team take every opportunity to cite and promote successful case studies and testimonials from teams we’ve worked with, demonstrating the real-world value UX brings, and praising teams that choose to apply agency and sustained will to make things better, acting on what they’ve learned from user research.

If you’re going to be a good UX leader, you need to be worth following

As part of her talk at the UCISA Leadership Conference in March 2024, the inspirational rugby player Maggie Alphonsi shared a short video of a person dancing alone at an outdoor event to make a point about leaders and followers. As the seconds ticked by, another person joined the first dancer, and then another and another until a crowd formed. I reflected that being a leader (akin to being the first dancer) is a lonely existence unless people follow you, and that doesn’t come as a given, it all depends on your actions and the impression people have of you, and whether they can meaningfully relate to you.

Since UX is universally applicable, leading it effectively requires more than UX expertise alone. In the service dominant logic model, value only emerges when operant skills (in this case, UX skills and techniques) are applied to operand resources (digital experiences to be improved) through genuine partnerships. Successful partnerships depend on trust and shared understanding, which in turn rest on contextual knowledge and empathy. To lead meaningful UX improvements, I need to retain a constant understanding of what good digital experiences look like, and that means stepping out of the UX bubble to engage with emergent technologies, developing standards, market forces and digital trends.

Distilling down the focus of UX down to ‘making digital experiences better’ leading UX carries a perpetual invitation to innovate, and to seek creative ways of addressing problems. I approach this with a magpie’s mentality – actively scanning to learn about anything that might help me do my job better, whether that’s a change framework, a data modelling tool, an assessment approach. My radar is deliberately wide and I opt not to stay in my lane, always aspiring to grow my sphere of knowledge, influence and connections, motivated by the learning rewards and staying true to the mantra: ‘to get different results, do things differently’.

The breadth of that knowledge pays dividends. As a UX leader, stepping outside familiar territory and taking a genuine interest in different fields puts me in a stronger position to build partnerships across a wide range of spheres — and to respond intelligently to the UX challenges that arise within them. Technology is constantly evolving, as are human needs from it. So I never turn down an opportunity to learn. Furthermore, adopting a humble position of learner means I can absorb knowledge freely, without the constraints of defending expertise I’ve already declared.

Managing and growing partnerships, is of course, just one dimension of UX leadership. In his Driesnote recorded at DrupalCon Chicago 2026, highly-respected Drupal leader (and all-round duderocker and legend) Dries Buytaert reflected on his own leadership journey, describing how his drive and ambition for building and growing open-source Drupal led to him becoming an ‘accidental leader’.  I reasoned that, being an effective leader needs an inherent passion, goal and inner sense of worth, which emulates to others like the energy from the lone dancer, drawing them to follow.

As a UX leader, you’re responsible for shaping future UX leaders

I take my leadership roles very seriously, and I am committed to using my position as a platform to support and encourage widespread adoption of UX approaches and practices. My goal as a UX leader is not just to convince people of UX’s value, but to inspire them to practise it and learn for themselves.

When I was invited as a guest lecturer to speak about running the University’s UX Service to students from the University of Edinburgh Business School, I emphasised the time and effort I devote to building operational capability – in other words, thinking bout the future, and pre-empting needs and demand for improved digital services and developing a strategy to address these in a sustainable way.

A core part of my UX Service strategy is a UX coaching model, built in response to a clear reality – there will always be more user experiences to improve than there are UX professionals to improve them. Coaching others in UX techniques and approaches is an effective way to address the imbalance. When colleagues have the ability to carry out UX research to diagnose UX problems themselves and then apply UX techniques to address them, it’s a win-win. Not only are more  digital experiences improved, problems are caught earlier and UX becomes firmly on the radar.  Democratising UX skills through coaching embeds UX capability, driving a future-state mindset where UX is part of normal software and digital management processes and procedures across the institution.

As well as converting colleagues to the UX cause, there’s the next generations of UX leaders to consider. In summer 2026, the UX Service will continue working with interns and we will grow the number of student workers in our team from three to four. As in previous years, I am excited for the opportunity to support and learn from these emerging UX leaders, to encourage them to bring  their new ideas, provocations and thoughts on how we can do better. Because when it comes to UX leadership, there are always ways to do things better and therefore continual opportunity for motivation and drive.

Here are some photos of my UCISA award and me

I was unable to attend the UCISA Leadership Summit when my award was presented, but it was transported back to me to enjoy and celebrate after the event.

 

From the birthplace of the original Industrial Revolution, a group of around 2000 intrepid EdTech practitioners and enthusiasts sought to examine and understand what has been dubbed the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ I was fortunate to be among them for Jisc Digifest 2026 in Birmingham this week.

There were many opportunities to contribute and get creative

 

Adobe offered delegates a chance to design their own chocolate bar wrapper using the AI tools embedded in Adobe Express. Origami, jigsaw puzzles, and colouring in were available in the Community Hub area.

We have the power to affect change

The conference kicked off with an inspiring keynote speech by climate activist Melati Wijsen. Since the age of 12, Melati has been a passionate advocate for environmental issues, having addressed audiences at the UN and Davos. Her compelling argument underscored the crucial need to include young people in our decision-making processes.

Daniel Liu from the University of Sydney provided a compelling case in allowing students to direct their own learning with AI tools. His case study showed examples of students generating their own self-directed learning tools using an LLM trained on their course materials. In seconds, they were able to generate pop-quizzes, simulations, and interactive graphics to supplement their learning experience.

Liu and many other speakers emphasised that we would do our students a disservice by denying access to these tools, and that it is the duty of educators to ensure that they are taught to use them effectively.

Access to technology is essential to living in the modern world: We must work to ensure that nobody is left behind

I was particularly interested to hear about the positive steps being made in digital inclusion spaces.

Elizabeth Newall presented a set of guidelines that Jisc has developed to assist transnational education (TNE) students and staff. This session was an excellent reminder of the considerations we must make when building our digital estates: for example, we might not think twice when uploading a large image file on one of our webpages over fibre-optic, but such an image might be a severe pain point for a consumer on a cellular-based internet connection.

Such considerations are of particular interest to me: as the Service Manager for the portal service, MyEd, I need to ensure that our services are as lightweight and responsive as possible in order to remain accessible to all of our users.

In a similar vein, I was interested to learn about the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan. For many of us, completing tasks like paying for parking or filling in a tax form is made more convenient when done online. However, this is a source of enormous risk for the 8 million people identified by this plan – especially when the action can only be completed online.

Enthusiasm for AI is high among professionals, but questions remain

It is my perception that AI in education technology is beginning to mature and that there is an increasing sense of surety around its potential. This was perhaps best illustrated by the collaborative art piece that was drawn in real-time over the course of the two days. Seeded with the simple question ‘What kind of future do you want to help create?’, a clear picture began to emerge of the exciting potential that these disruptive technologies could provide.

 

On the other hand, there are still fundamental questions about AI that are still outstanding, such as: ownership and sustainability of the hardware that AI relies on, the reliance many AI models have on consuming the intellectual property of others, and even the potential for AI to erode the very skills and qualities that make us human.

In perhaps my favourite session of all, ‘Inside the student experience: change, challenges and future hopes’, such concerns were echoed by a panel of student digital champions. They emphasised the importance of listening to student voices and involving them in the decision-making process at all levels. Their perspectives reinforced the notion that the technology of tomorrow must be developed not just with intelligence, but with wisdom and a deep respect for what it means to be human.

Growth Mindset

When American psychologist Carol Dweck published her book “Mindset” in 2006 it made waves in the education world and beyond. Drawing on her work developing mindset theory, it offered a shift in perspective: instead of assuming that someone’s ability was fixed, it invited us to see ability, intelligence and competence as things that could be developed over time, through effort, feedback and sometimes struggle. Her work sits within a broader school of psychological thought that recognises how strongly our beliefs shape our behaviour, and, ultimately, our lives. In the case of “growth mindset”, the claim is that what we believe about our abilities and intelligence profoundly influences how we respond to challenge, the effort we make and therefore the opportunities we have to learn and grow

As Dweck puts it:

“In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work – brains and talent are just the starting point.”

For many educators, this felt hopeful and also perhaps a little confronting. It asked us not to locate difficulty or failure in the student and instead to look more closely at the beliefs shaping the learning environment – both our own and theirs. Rather than asking “What’s wrong with this student?”, we were encouraged to ask “What messages are they receiving about effort, ability and failure?”

Photo by  Anastasia  Shuraeva

Perhaps because I came across Dweck’s work on mindset fairly early in my career, when I was thinking a lot about how to orient myself and be in work and education, it undoubtedly shaped my own world view. When my three-year-old gets frustrated because she can’t write her name perfectly, I remind her that she can’t do it yet. I make a conscious effort to praise her for effort rather than “cleverness” (despite my entirely biased view of her intelligence!). Not because I necessarily think praise alone changes outcomes, but because I do want to reinforce the idea that it’s good to keep trying at things that are hard.

Are psychological safety and growth mindset connected?

So when, recently, I started to hear more organisations and businesses talk about growth mindset, my ears pricked up. I was asked by a couple of people how psychological safety connects with growth mindset, and my initial response was pretty positive: the two concepts support each other, they’re complementary.

Much of what we’re doing when we talk about fostering psychologically safer workplaces is creating the conditions for people to learn together. Teams that can share ideas, ask questions, raise concerns and admit mistakes are teams that can adapt and improve.

And these behaviours are exactly the sort of behaviours we would expect and hope to see when someone has a growth mindset. If we see people asking questions, admitting uncertainty, sharing half-baked ideas and trying things that might not work, they’re all reasonably good indicators that the person has a growth mindset – they believe they can learn and get better. But we also need to remember that every one of those behaviours carries interpersonal risk: the risk of looking foolish, being judged, losing status or being blamed for trying something that didn’t work.

Psychological safety lowers that risk. In a sense, psychological safety reduces the interpersonal cost of learning together enough for people to act on their growth-oriented beliefs. Even if we have a growth mindset, and believe deeply that learning is possible, without psychological safety we may well still decide it’s not safe to “learn out loud” here.

There’s a second, subtler connection too – we know that fostering psychological safety often means we need to do the difficult work of changing our behaviours and approaches, even unlearning behaviours we previously thought were helpful. If instead, we adopt an entrenched view about our abilities, something more akin to a fixed mindset, perhaps telling ourselves we’re just “not a team player,” or “not cut out for leadership,” or as I heard recently “bad at communication,” then we miss the fact that all of this is learnable too. 

So a growth mindset, at its best, can support the work of building psychologically safer environments, and sustaining that over time. If we genuinely believe that people, ourselves included, can grow through effort and feedback, then interpersonal risk-taking has a purpose. Believing in the possibility of growth and improvement gives us a reason to share feedback rather than avoid it, and even more importantly, a reason not to write someone off after a single mistake.

One way I sometimes frame the distinction is this: psychological safety is about our beliefs regarding the environment we’re in; growth mindset is about our beliefs regarding the people in that environment, including ourselves.

The problem with growth mindset

Where things start to go wrong is when “growth mindset” is lifted out of its original context and used in ways that stretch, or outright distort, Dweck’s work. It’s not uncommon to see organisations urging employees to “adopt a growth mindset” as the business scales or targets become more demanding. And this is where things get tricky from a psychological safety perspective.

Growth mindset was never about relentless positivity, believing harder, or insisting that everything is possible if you just try hard enough. It’s grounded in effort, struggle, feedback and learning over time. When it gets reduced to “just be positive” or “push through”, the term becomes a flimsy platitude, and one that can easily be weaponised. “You’re struggling because you don’t have enough of a growth mindset,” is not helpful feedback; it’s dismissal. When growth mindset is misrepresented in this way, it is all too often used to judge people for not performing at 100% (or more) all the time, or manipulate them into accepting unreasonable workloads or demands.

Used this way, growth mindset rhetoric can damage psychological safety, much like toxic positivity does. It risks creating spaces where only good news and confident updates are welcome. 

This is especially true when organisations talk about growth mindset without attending to power, context or collective responsibility. Behaviour does not arise in a vacuum; it is shaped by the conditions people are working in. When that context remains unchanged, growth mindset language can feel hollow and even coercive. Responsibility shifts from the organisation “we need to listen better and make it safer” to the individual “you need to be bolder, braver and more ambitious.”

And I have noticed that doggedly insisting everyone adopts a growth mindset can easily slide into the moralistic or judgemental. Even the way the concept divides people into two camps – those who have a growth mindset and those who have a fixed one – can be quite damaging. I once heard a headteacher say they would never employ a teacher who talked in their job interview about helping students “meet their potential”, reading the phrase as evidence of a fixed mindset. Now, you might reasonably want to explore what the teacher meant – whether they were imagining potential as a ceiling or an open-ended capacity – but dismissing someone’s entire professional capability on the basis of a single phrase uttered at an interview feels somewhat harsh, and leaves little room for discussion, nuance or learning.

The thorny ethical bit

There’s also a broader ethical issue here about organisations seeking to “change people’s mindsets”, rather than recognising an important boundary, which is people’s right to cognitive sovereignty. What organisations ultimately need is behaviour: people doing the work well, and also speaking up, experimenting, learning and improving so the work can be done better next time. But is it appropriate for employers to stray into employees’ inner worlds – into their beliefs, attitudes and ways of making sense of themselves? 

As psych safety community member Paul Tevis puts it:

“I think that mindset and beliefs are a perfectly reasonable focus for your own development, but it’s the wrong thing for managers and organizations to try to affect… what organizations should actually care about is behavior, because that’s what drives performance… and your employer doesn’t own your brain. They only rent it.”

This is where work on psychological safety offers an important corrective. It helps guard against the risk of overreach – of making psychological judgements or attempting interventions we’re neither qualified to make nor entitled to impose. It helps keep us focused on the environment, not on “fixing people”. 

And although we define psychological safety as a “shared belief”, what we’re really talking about is the perceived interpersonal risk of a situation. We don’t shift that by trying to implant different beliefs into people’s minds. We shift it by changing the environment – by ensuring that we provide consistent social proof that it really is safe to speak up, to question, to make mistakes and to learn.

I think where I land is this: mindset doesn’t override context and we can’t simply will our way into growth if the environment punishes learning behaviours. If it’s a choice between asking how we can change our behaviour to make workplaces safer for everyone, and asking everyone else to change their mindsets, I’ll choose the former every time. 

Further Reading

Individual Resilience

Safety and the Myth of Self-Reliance

Reflections – Part Two: Power and Difference

Just Culture

Psychological Safety Doesn’t Mean Feeling Comfortable

The post Growth Mindset appeared first on Psych Safety.

Plan Continuation Bias, or “Get-There-Itis”

I got pretty sick this week. I was wiped out with a nasty bout of tonsillitis – high temperature, exhausted and felt awful. The doctor put me on strong antibiotics, painkillers, and told me, in no uncertain terms, to rest up and take it easy. 

What felt even worse than the illness was having to cancel a client workshop. As far as I can remember, we haven’t cancelled one in about four years. We usually manage to build in enough redundancy for someone else to deliver it, but this time, for various logistical reasons, it just wasn’t possible.

And we really wrestled with it. We spent far too long trying to find a way to make it work. Maybe I could load up on painkillers and caffeine. Maybe the 3 hour drive there, delivering the workshop, driving back and then collapsing wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe I could just power through on adrenaline. 

Looking back, I can see all the forces pulling us toward keeping the plan on track: a worry about disappointing the client; all the preparation, travel planning and childcare we’d already arranged; and, if I’m honest, the deeply normalised idea that “pushing through” is the right thing to do. All of that created a powerful feeling that we should still try to deliver.

In reality it would have been a very bad idea for me, for the client, and for other road users! Eventually, we contacted the client, postponed the session… and they were perfectly fine about rescheduling.

This fierce desire to continue with the plan, even though it no longer makes any sense, or is actually unsafe to do so, is a great example of plan continuation bias.

What Is Plan Continuation Bias?

Plan continuation bias (also known as get-there-itis in aviation, course correction bias, or “summit fever” in mountaineering) is the cognitive tendency to stick with an existing plan even when the conditions have changed and the plan no longer makes sense or isn’t safe to continue.

It’s best known in aviation, where get-there-itis means that pilots may press on with planned courses in bad weather, continue flights with marginal fuel, or persist with unstable approaches that should really demand a go-around. The same pattern is common in mountaineering, and I’ve got many experiences of this myself – I can particularly remember one occasion on Crib Goch where we reluctantly turned around after bad weather set in, but the decision itself was really hard, almost emotionally painful, because we were already well up onto the ridge.

It happens in healthcare too, where teams continue to attempt procedures when it’s time to stop or change (as in the tragic case of Elaine Bromiley), and we also see it in product or project teams, where people press on towards the original brief even though the context around them has completely changed.

It’s worth noting that plan continuation bias isn’t plain old stubbornness – it’s about how we humans make sense of the world, particularly when we’re under pressure, operating in uncertainty, and subject to social risk.

“You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.”
— Kenny Rogers

Cognitive load and confirmation bias.

When we’re under high workload and time pressure, our attention naturally narrows on the task – the goal we’re trying to achieve. We may simply not have the bandwidth to process everything, and our confirmation bias means that we pay more attention to information that appears to support the plan, and discount, or don’t even see, information that suggests we should change course. So even when most of the signs point towards “turn back”, we cling to the scraps of evidence that say “it’ll be fine, keep going”.

This is one reason why we can often spot plan continuation in hindsight, and it can become something of a counterfactual, as “obviously wrong” after it’s already happened. Although to an outside observer afterwards, it seems obvious that we should have changed course, this may have been cognitively invisible to the person in the moment. 

Sunk cost fallacy

There’s a strong sunk cost element to plan continuation – when we’ve already invested time, money, effort, and reputation something, it means that stopping or changing direction feels like a failure: “We’ve put so much into this, we can’t stop now.”

But of course, that’s a fallacy, even though it feels right and noble to continue. It doesn’t make sense to keep pouring resources into something that’s no longer going to deliver value, or is actively unsafe to ourselves or others. Yet the more we have invested, and the closer we are to our goal, the more we tend to rationalise continuing.

Power, authority, and interpersonal risk

Plan continuation bias is compounded when the plan was defined by someone in power – a CEO, senior leader, major client, or powerful stakeholder. In these cases, we may well predict that challenging that goal is likely to incur interpersonal or career risk. None of us want to disappoint our boss, and challenging decisions that were made by someone with power over our employment status or career success is rarely easy. And of course, there are other risks too. We might worry that in raising concerns about the plan, we’ll be seen as a poor team player, as not being “committed enough”, or as the negative one in the group.

We humans tend to have a deep need for harmony and belonging, so continuing with the plan often feels more coherent, comfortable and socially safe than being the dissident who says, “We should stop.”

Symbolic goal fixation 

Some goals become symbolic of what overall “success” means – in mountaineering, it’s the summit, but in organisations, it might be a launch date, a target, or an OKR. This is especially true if that goal has been made public, or committed to with large posters and announcements. Sometimes organisations even use mountaineering metaphors to describe these lofty and ambitious goals. All this can mean that we drift into an all-or-nothing mindset where summit = success, and turning back = failure.

If you’ve read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air about the Everest disaster in the ’90s (Everest is the colonial name for the mountain known locally as Sagarmāthā in Nepal and Qomolangma in Tibet), you’ll be familiar with this story: along with other errors and misjudgements, some climbers pushed for the summit even after bad weather set in and the safe window had closed. Summit fever, along with a great deal of sunk cost (it’s expensive to climb Everest, and climbers spend months preparing) meant that climbers became fixated on this singular goal of summiting Everest at any cost. For many of them, that cost was their lives. 

But as one of my climbing instructors used to say “Getting up is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” (I don’t think he was the first to say this!)

The same goes for organisations delivering projects and products: the real failure isn’t “we didn’t ship,” but shipping something that no longer makes sense and delivers no real value. It’s much wiser to be here the following day to try something new, than to risk the business, or our lives, on a potentially already failed project.

“Hazardous attitudes”

CRM (Crew Resource Management) in aviation talks about five “hazardous attitudes” that make plan continuation bias more likely:

• Macho: “I can handle it. I’m the expert.” This is practically one of the definitions of toxic masculinity: a sense of superiority, or an anxious need to prove oneself in the face of adversity.
• Impulsivity and a bias to action: “We should do something.” We often assume that action is better than inaction, and we tend to regret waiting, or pausing, more than we do taking a step – even a misguided one. In many organisations, people are punished more for not doing something (for holding back until they can make a better informed move) than for acting too quickly, even when it would make greater sense to pause and allow more information to surface.
• Invulnerability: “It won’t happen to me.” Success can incubate failure. Just because it’s gone right in the past, doesn’t mean it will this time. Indeed, if it had gone wrong in the past, we possibly wouldn’t even be here to make this judgement.
• Resignation: “What’s the use? I can’t change this.” We may feel that once we’ve settled on a plan, we’re stuck on the railway tracks, unable to change direction. But we are not trains – we can make decisions based on new information, and change direction. And even trains have brakes.
• Anti-authority: “I’m special. The rules don’t apply to me.” In so many books and movies, the hero is the subversive renegade who breaks the rules and succeeds. But real life doesn’t always play out the way movies do. Ignoring new risks because we believe we’re the exception doesn’t actually make the risk go away. 

All of these can mean that we’re more likely to press on than to pause, turn back, or “go around”.

Organisational Examples: Projects, Products, and OKRs

In product teams this shows up all the time. We might carry on building a feature even after a competitor has released something better and captured most of the market. We may stick to an OKR even though conditions have shifted and the objective is no longer a good idea. We become so fixated on achieving the “key result” that we stop asking whether it’s still a useful or sensible result. 

If the objective is the summit and the key result is “Reach the summit camp by 3pm”, what happens when a storm rolls in at midday?

In other cases in organisations, we simply keep burning money and time on a project that clearly won’t deliver the hoped-for return. Often because the goal has been cascaded from “higher up”, and as with symbolic goal fixation, not hitting it is framed as failure. “We said we’d deliver X by date Y” becomes more important than checking “Is X still the right thing to do?” This pressure intensifies when goals are publicly announced, a tactic often intended to “motivate” teams to deliver but which frequently drives teams to chase the original commitment rather than pursue the best outcome

Without psychological safety and sound decision practices, teams will often keep climbing to the summit because that’s the OKR, even when it’s clearly unsafe or pointless.

A Plan Continuation Feedback Loop

Plan continuation bias is dangerous because it becomes a feedback loop:

• The closer we get to the goal, the harder it feels to turn back.
• The more we invest, the more we rationalise continuing.
• The more things go wrong, the more urgent it feels to “just get it done”.

Research in aviation suggests that a large proportion of decision errors, (some suggest the majority of errors) are essentially plan continuation errors: pressing on when the safer option was to stop, divert, or go around. Charles West wrote about this goal proximity dynamic in “The Barn Door Effect”: pilots who would normally deviate widely around severe convective weather while en route often continue final approaches directly beneath dangerous thunderstorms when landing, simply because they can see the runway (the “barn door”) and because aircraft ahead of them have done so successfully (social proof of the Normalisation of Risk).

This certainly isn’t unique to pilots. It’s fundamental to how humans behave in dynamic, uncertain environments.

Where Psychological Safety Fits with Plan Continuation Bias

Psychological safety doesn’t magically remove plan continuation bias, but it can provide some counter-pressure that helps to interrupt this feedback loop. In groups with higher psychological safety, people are generally more willing to say things like “Are we still doing the right thing?”, and point out issues like a storm coming or a competitor’s similar product launch. People feel safer in pulling the Andon Cord, call to Stop Work, or suggest a go-around. 

However, in teams with lower psychological safety, plan continuation bias is structurally reinforced, because people are more likely to stay silent with those insights, perspectives or concerns. If we’re in a team with low psychological safety, we don’t want to disrupt the group harmony, offend someone in power, or risk damaging our own status or reputation. We may end up pressing ahead not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it feels less interpersonally risky than challenging the plan itself.

How to Reduce Plan Continuation Bias

Plan continuation bias is a deeply human tendency shaped by many different cognitive biases and heuristics, so we can’t eradicate it, but we can reduce its impact through some practical approaches:

1. Define exit criteria in advance. We agree in advance that if certain criteria are met, we stop, change direction, or take an opportunity to re-evaluate. For example, if a competitor releases an equivalent or potentially better product, we reconsider the business case. Or if certain safety thresholds are crossed – deteriorating weather conditions or issues with the equipment – we pause or “go around”. Pre-defining the criteria for interrupting the loop takes some of the emotional and interpersonal load off making the call in the moment.

2. Establish decision points at regular intervals. Similar to above, we can also build in regular check-in points to re-evaluate and consider “Should we still be doing this?” or simply regularly ask ourselves “Do we continue, pivot, or stop?”. If we were climbing a mountain, we may check in every 30 minutes and simply ask “Are we all still good to go?” The point is to deliberately reopen the question, not simply assume the plan is still valid.

3. Invite dissent explicitly. Sometimes called “devil’s advocate”, but I prefer the less evocative and more straightforward practice of “inviting dissent” by asking things like “What are we missing?”, “How could we see this differently?”, or even “We’re not leaving this meeting until we’ve heard five reasons why this is a bad idea.” We may even designate a small “red team” whose job is to be strategically awkward: to poke holes in the plan and look for reasons we shouldn’t continue.

4. Train people to recognise hazardous attitudes. This is deeper work, often part of CRM and similar training, to help people notice these hazardous attitudes emerging – in themselves and in others. That might include an inappropriate bias to action, a sense of invulnerability, resignation or resistance to authority. The aim isn’t to blame or single people out, but to build shared literacy and the skill to spot and respond to the attitudes that make continuation bias more likely.

5. Build diverse teams. The more diverse the team in background, expertise, perspectives, and experience, the more likely it is that people in the team will see what others have missed. Diversity, in its many facets, increases the chances that someone will notice the storm building on the horizon.

6. Finally, normalise and reward course correction. This is perhaps the biggest cultural shift, and the most impactful (but rather more difficult, organisationally). Stopping, cancelling, or changing course when it no longer makes sense to continue should be seen as success, not failure. That might look like celebrating teams who say, “This project no longer makes sense so we’re stopping it and moving onto something of higher value,” or explicitly rewarding people who highlight new risks or factors reducing the value of a project. Storytelling can be a powerful tool here too, by having open discussions about times when not continuing saved money, delivered greater value, or saved lives. Fundamentally, changing the plan should be framed as competent, expert, adaptive behaviour, not as failure.

Summarising Plan Continuation Bias

Reflecting on this piece, I’d describe plan continuation bias like this: 

Plan continuation bias is the cognitive, emotional and social tendency to stick with an established plan even when new information or changing conditions mean it no longer makes sense, is unlikely to deliver value, or increases risk to intolerable levels. It’s amplified by confirmation bias, workload and pressure, ever higher sunk costs and proximity to the goal, symbolic goal fixation, power dynamics, and the myriad interpersonal risks of challenging the plan; and it often leads individuals and teams to press on long after they should adapt or stop.

And sometimes, avoiding it is as simple (and as difficult) as admitting that you might be too poorly to drive across the country and deliver a workshop.

Further resources on plan continuation bias:

Managing Plan Continuation Bias with Mike Adolph on the Delivering Adventure Podcast

Orasanu, J., Martin, L., Davison, J. and Null, C.H., 1998, January. Errors in aviation decision making: Bad decisions or bad luck?. In Fourth Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20020063485/downloads/20020063485.pdf 

“Just a Routine Operation” Martin Bromiley.

Continuation Bias: SKYbrary Aviation Safety. https://skybrary.aero/articles/continuation-bias

West, C.A., 2009. The “Barn Door” Effect. In Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology. https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/162457.pdf 

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Vertical and horizontal psychological safety

Psychological safety means feeling safe (note: not necessarily comfortable) to take interpersonal risks. To foster it, we need to consider the dynamics of both the transmission and reception of information – whether that’s an idea, a mistake, a problem to address, or an opportunity for collective learning.

And if psychological safety pertains to the flow of information, it can be useful to describe the direction of that flow. When information moves between peers in a group, we can think of it as horizontal psychological safety. When it moves up or down a hierarchy,  for example between a team member and their manager, we can think of it as vertical psychological safety.

In a typical modern, corporate, Western organisation, the organisational chart is usually constructed with the senior leadership at the top and people at the front line (or the sharp end) towards the bottom. Most of the time when we’re thinking about how psychologically safe people feel, we’re regarding either interactions between peers, where the information flow is horizontal, or those between a team member and their manager, in which case the information flow is vertical. Of course information may flow in infinite other directions too, but for now, let’s see what use this distinction lends us. 

We’re far from the first to make this distinction of course – 100 years ago in 1925 Mary Parker Follett presented a paper entitled “Constructive Conflict” to the Bureau of Personnel Administration conference, where she introduced the concepts of vertical and horizontal organisational conflict.

The majority of psychological safety discourse and research regards horizontal psychological safety: the flow of information between members of a neat, well-defined team. Hence why most “diagnostic” tools ask primarily about the safety of the team(s) that one works in. But information also flows upward and downward in an organisation, via management reporting paths and command lines, and this is what we at psychsafety.com refer to as “vertical” psychological safety. After all, most organisational dysfunction occurs not within teams, but between them.

This simplistic binary framing of a complex phenomenon will no doubt rankle some – it bothers me too – but it is useful because the dynamics of vertical and horizontal information flow are very different. Generally, when communicating with our teammates, there isn’t such a pronounced power gradient. However, when we’re communicating upwards in an organisation, perhaps sharing a concern with our manager, we are addressing someone with greater formal and hierarchical status-based power than we possess, and therefore we’re having to speak up against a power gradient.

And when information needs to flow between multiple layers of an organisational hierarchy, it’s having to traverse a power gradient every time it’s passed on. Few of us enjoy giving our boss bad news, and often we’ll mitigate or soften our language when we do so, even unconsciously. We might try to downplay a problem slightly, couch it with caveats, or sandwich it with good news. This is true at any and all layers of an organisation, and every time it happens, we lose some of the integrity of the message. The steeper the power gradients, the more layers the information has to pass through, and the lower the vertical psychological safety, the more that message is attenuated during its journey.

Greenwashing and The Watermelon Effect

So as information traverses an organisational hierarchy, particularly a steep and/or many layered one, it gets diluted and distorted. The classic example of this is “greenwashing”, sometimes called the “watermelon effect,” because what appears green on the outside is actually red on the inside. 

If you’re familiar with RAG charts used in project and programme management, you may have experienced it yourself. In RAG project reports, deliverables that are safely complete, or expected to be, are coloured in green, those at risk are amber, and those already failing, overdue or over budget, are coloured red. Sometimes these are called traffic light charts.

When these charts are created at a ground level, they’re largely correct (well, -ish). But each time they pass through a management layer – perhaps shared initially with the team lead, then they share it with the project manager, who passes it to the programme manager, then the director and so on – the colours may well be tweaked in order to avoid the judging, disappointed visage of our boss. An amber gets turned green because we believe we can get in front of it next week. And a red is turned to an amber because we’re sure we can fix it. When this happens over just a few layers, before we know it, a RAG chart that was awfully red at the sharp end, looks rather more green by the time it gets to senior leadership at the blunt end.

And with or without actual colour-changing RAG charts, there are many examples of this phenomenon in reality, where bad news at the sharp end is gradually softened and diluted as it travels upwards, until it reaches the most senior leaders and doesn’t look so bad after all.  

For example, when engineers at NASA raised concerns about the safety of the Challenger’s O-rings, their warnings were diluted and filtered through layers of management until decision-makers believed the risk was acceptable. Similarly, during the Volkswagen emissions scandal, technical teams knew that diesel tests were being manipulated, but information was suppressed and reframed as it travelled upward through the hierarchy. There are suggestions that by the time it reached senior executives, the full scale of the issue was obscured behind layers of attenuated reporting and fear-based silence.

Sometimes the effect isn’t about a scandal or disaster, but can still have consequences on business performance. At Ford, before Alan Mulally’s leadership, managers often hesitated to report problems for fear of being blamed or judged. When Mulally became CEO in 2006, in their update meetings, every chart was colored green, a curious thing for a business losing $17 billion. He created weekly “Business Plan Review” meetings where leaders were encouraged to flag red items without fear of punishment. When Mark Fields finally showed a red, Mulally thanked him and asked how the team could help. That began shifting Ford’s culture toward openness and candour, which is credited as central to Ford’s turnaround and survival during the 2008 financial crisis.

So what can we do about it? 

There are two primary mitigations for this loss of truth as information travels upwards:

1. We can work on improving the degree of psychological safety felt by middle managers when communicating “up the chain”. Make it clear that we’d rather hear the challenging truth than a comforting work of fiction.
2. We can reduce the number of layers that information must traverse in order to reach senior leadership. Simplifying reporting chains or creating more direct communication channels from frontline staff to senior leaders can help improve the flow of information.

Fundamentally, we should remember that horizontal and vertical psychological safety are different dynamics, and require different interventions. It’s no good creating loads of high performing bubbles of teams in an organisation if news can’t effectively travel “upwards”. Adopting either, and ideally both, of these vertical strategies will improve the clarity and accuracy of information reaching senior leadership. 

Further reading:

• The First Org Chart: https://psychsafety.com/the-first-organisational-chart/
• Reducing Power Gradients: https://psychsafety.com/reducing-power-gradients/
• Organisational Fabric: https://psychsafety.com/the-organisational-fabric-of-psychological-safety/
• Follett, Mary Parker, 1918. The New State. Available at: https://archive.org/details/cu31924016856209
• Mary Parker Follett: Constructive Conflict (2012), Roi Word. Available at: https://roiword.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/mary-parker-follet-constructive-conflict/
• Lunenburg, F.C., 2012. Organizational structure: Mintzberg’s framework. International journal of scholarly, academic, intellectual diversity, 14(1), pp.1-8.
• Keeling, R.P., Underhile, R. and Wall, A.F., 2007. Horizontal and vertical structures: The dynamics of organization in higher education. Liberal Education, 93(4), pp.22-31.
• Edmondson and Roloff, 2015. Leveraging Diversity Through Psychological Safety. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/afriberg/files/leveraging_diversity_through_psychological_safety_hbs_article.pdf 
• Edmondson, Amy C. Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. Jossey-Bass, 2012. 
• Kim, S., Lee, H. and Connerton, T.P., 2020. How psychological safety affects team performance: mediating role of efficacy and learning behavior. Frontiers in psychology, 11, p.1581.
• https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01581/full

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Coaching and Psychological Safety: listening, trust and letting go of control

By Jade Garratt

When I first trained as a coach, I realised there were two things I wasn’t very good at: 

1. Really listening
2. Allowing for periods of silence

I meant well, but I was uncomfortable with silence, and I was usually focused on what I was going to say next. This meant I might try to speak before the person was done thinking, or I’d give them space to talk, but not pay full attention to what they were actually saying.

Coaching training was therefore quite confronting for me. I had to learn to sit with silence, to resist the urge to fill it, to tolerate my own discomfort, and to trust that thinking takes time. I also had to let go of worrying about how I sounded – how clever, switched on and helpful, and instead drop into a place of trust, that the other person could, and would, find their own answers.

Psychological Safety in the Coaching Relationship

I now realise, although I didn’t have the language for it at the time, that in a coaching relationship, a lot of what we are trying to do is cultivate psychological safety. If the coachee doesn’t feel able to share ideas, reflect, admit mistakes and ask questions, we probably aren’t hearing what matters and any impact of the coaching is unlikely to be more than surface deep. Often, that starts with giving people the time and space to think – whether they do that out loud or in silence. 

This connects to what we believe is the first recorded use of the term ‘psychological safety’, by Carl Rogers, who saw it as a necessary condition for creative, constructive thinking within the therapeutic relationship. Essentially, people need to feel psychologically safe before they can think freely and generate new ideas. 

Coaching is not therapy, but it benefits from that same foundation of trust – a belief that the relational space between coach and coachee is safe for experimentation, trying out new ideas and as Rogers put it, “genuinely creative adaptation.” 

Coaching to Foster Psychological Safety

So far we’ve been considering psychological safety within the coaching relationship. But coaching also offers something powerful beyond that space – a way of leading, listening and working with others that builds psychological safety more widely. 

As we often remind ourselves, we don’t make it safer for people to speak up by telling them to speak up (that usually makes it worse!). Instead, we do it over time, by fostering the conditions that help people to feel safer in speaking up, and responding better when they do. At the heart of that is cultivating curiosity rather than judgement, and listening well. When we coach, we have to listen, and active listening is a powerful psychological safety practice. It says: your voice matters, and I’m giving it my full attention. 

Sometimes, of course, even if we’re taking a coaching approach in our leadership, we learn about problems that it’s on us to solve, but a lot of the time, the first step can be much closer to our coaching stance: we’re listening in order to understand. As Michael Bungay Stanier puts it:

“The key behavior change is this: Can you stay curious a little bit longer? Can you rush to action and advice-giving a little bit more slowly?”

Trusting Others and Letting Go of Control

Both coaching and psychological safety rely on humility – the willingness to admit we don’t have all the answers. And at its core, a coaching mindset is a trusting one. You trust that the other person is capable, reasonable and will more than likely arrive at just the insight they need if given the right support. You’re humble enough to know that you don’t have all the answers, and that a lot of the time, it’s the insights of those around you that allow the team to thrive. Coaching can actually help us better see and value what others are capable of. 

In both coaching and leadership, the moment we stop trying to prove we have all the answers is often the moment others begin to shine. 

Coaching approaches can also help to reduce power gradients. If, as leaders, we’re always telling rather than asking, giving orders rather than inviting ideas, we’re saying to people “I’m up here and you’re down there.” We’re making it clear that we’re “in charge” and that in some way at least, we consider them and their insights less useful, valid or important than our own. However, if we lead through coaching others, we begin to redistribute that power – we see our power as being power with, rather than power over, and we help empower others to make a positive difference. 

To try to bring this to life, imagine how a coaching approach might shape the way a manager responds to a team member’s request:

The scenario: A team member asks their manager for a change to their working hours. 

In one version of this story, the manager shuts the conversation down: “It won’t work – the job is too big, the requirements are too rigid, it’s impossible.” The team member feels fully put in their place, the power gradient increases and resentment builds.

In another version, the manager takes a coaching approach. They stay open and curious, asking questions like:

• “How do you see this new arrangement working?”
• “What potential challenges might we run into?”
• “How could we address these?”
• “Who will be affected by the change?”
• “What will happen if we don’t do this?”
• “How will we all know whether it’s working?”
• “What support might we both need to have the best chance of success?”
• “What’s a “safe-to-fail” experiment we could try first to see how it works?”

This time, the outcome is very different. The team member feels respected and trusted. They’ve had a chance to think through the practicalities and logistics and are now much more invested in making it work for themselves, their manager and the team. Of course, it might still not work, but both will have learned more by exploring it than they ever would by shutting it down. 

Coaching as support for the inner work of psychological safety

There’s another side to this too – one that’s about the inner work of leadership. Receiving coaching might help us as we begin to build psychological safety in our teams. In part, this is simply because coaching gives us space to pause, reflect and consider what we might need to change. Many of us need to reconsider and unlearn habits that were formed in workplaces where psychological safety was not the norm.

But perhaps even more than that, fostering psychological safety for others can feel uncomfortable – it may mean we end up hearing things that are hard to hear, such as critical feedback or unexpected challenges to our ideas. This is a good sign – it means we’re creating spaces where people feel safe enough to share that with us – but that absolutely doesn’t mean it’s always easy to hear; sometimes it can feel pretty awful.

If we’re doing this work alone, the self-reflection and emotional regulation we need to be able to process this might be difficult. In its worst cases, we might end up just shutting down the channels of communication because it’s all too much. But if we are supported by some coaching, we might find that it offers a container and a space to work through the discomfort more constructively. So much of psychological safety work isn’t about what we do to others – it’s about the work we do on ourselves that allows us to listen openly, receive feedback without defensiveness and stay present when things get uncomfortable.

I don’t “do coaching” as much in my day-to-day work now, at least not in a formal way, but those early lessons in coaching are still with me. They shape how I listen, how I facilitate and how I try to show up. On the days when I get it wrong, when I speak too soon or fill the silence because it feels awkward, I try to remember what coaching taught me: that space, trust and curiosity can do far more than proving cleverness ever will. 

Further Reading:

• Psychological Safety and Creativity: Carl Rogers’ Origins of Psychological Safety
• Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry 
• Power and Mary Parker Follett
• Reducing Power Gradients
• How We Respond Matters
• Psychological Safety Doesn’t Mean Feeling Comfortable
• “Different domains or grey areas? Setting boundaries between coaching and therapy: A thematic analysis” Giraldez-Hayes, 2021
• The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier

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