History of Psychological Safety Sign Up To the Newsletter The History of Psychological Safety On the 10th of August 1628, the warship Vasa sailed barely a kilometre into Stockholm harbour, heeled over...

The Case for Less Eye Contact We’ve made the case before that the mainstream advice about eye contact and psychological safety is highly western-centric and neurotypical, and lacks context and nuance....

Organisational substrate is the accumulated physical and non-physical matter that an organisation lives in and on: the power structures, tooling, incentives and punishments, memory and story that dete...

Crisis-Ready Teams I’m by no means a serial corporate dinner attendee, but I do feel I’ve sat through my fair share of after-dinner leadership talks. The speakers are usually held up as shining exampl...

Crisis-Ready Teams I’m by no means a serial corporate dinner attendee, but I do feel I’ve sat through my fair share of after-dinner leadership talks. The speakers are usually held up as shining exampl...

The First Org Chart In 1855, Brigadier General Daniel McCallum, later to become a Civil War officer renowned for “strict precision and stern discipline” as well as for his innovative engineering, crea...

Body Language and Non-Verbal Communication There’s a whole industry, and a lot of terrible advice, built on the promise that we can read people’s minds through their “body language”. Common tropes inc...

Explore a curated map of psychsafety.com articles and scholarly literature on psychological safety, and how it all connects.

The more elaborate and expensive our system for understanding something, the less we may actually understand it. Ecologists face the same problem — you can't measure the health of an ecosystem directl...

The more elaborate and expensive our system for understanding something, the less we may actually understand it. Ecologists face the same problem — you can't measure the health of an ecosystem directl...

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 ...

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 ...

Work as Imagined vs Work as Done In last week’s newsletter about human error, we looked at why and how people make mistakes. One of the categories of error we explored was “violations”, where people d...

Trust is Not the Same as Psychological Safety First published November 2020. Rewritten June 2026. There is sometimes a tendency to use “trust” and “psychological safety” interchangeably, and the habit...

Reading the air: high and low context communication in teams Picture the scene: you’re in a meeting with your new team. You ask what you think is a reasonable question, and knowing glances are exchang...

Who gets to decide if psychological safety matters? Is scepticism about psychological safety a luxury position? What the LinkedIn discourse reveals about who has positive or negative opinions on psych...

Work as Imagined vs Work as Done In last week’s newsletter about human error, we looked at why and how people make mistakes. One of the categories of error we explored was “violations”, where people d...

Many organisations “hold people accountable” by imposing negative consequences for failure. The organisations that actually handle failure best are the ones that make it safe to give an honest account...

Qualitative Measurement of Psychological Safety What the survey can’t tell you A few months back, I was preparing for a workshop with a client, and they shared, anonymised, their staff engagement surv...

An interactive semantic knowledge network of articles from psychsafety.com — explore the connections between psychological safety concepts, cases, and practices.

A while ago I read a post in a parenting forum that struck me for a few reasons. It was by a mum who had taken her daughter to the library, and had watched while her young daughter very politely […]

The Calculus of Voice “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist ...

Our team of experts around the world will help you make psychological safety real. We are psychological safety. Training Online Workshops Resources Organisational Safety and Performance Psychological ...

The Vasa Disaster A few years ago, I was working for a client in Stockholm and in some free time, I visited the wreck of the Vasa, the world’s best-preserved 17th-century ship. She’s housed in a museum built specifically around […]

The Vasa Disaster A few years ago, I was working for a client in Stockholm and in some free time, I visited the wreck of the Vasa, the world’s best-preserved 17th-century ship. She’s housed in a museum built specifically around […]

The Psychological Safety Core Principles Psychological safety is an emergent property of conditions: not a programme, a metric, or an individual attribute. Those conditions are shaped primarily by str...

The cases of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba and RaDonda Vaught Content note: this article discusses the deaths of patients, including a child. Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba is a British paediatrician. RaDonda Vaught is ...

The cases of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba and RaDonda Vaught Content note: this article discusses the deaths of patients, including a child. Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba is a British paediatrician. RaDonda Vaught is ...

The Andon Cord: Stopping The Line Being able to “stop the line” to prevent an issue getting worse, stop a defect passing downstream, suggest an idea for improvement when it can endow maximum benefit,…

The Futility of Utility If we want to make the argument for psychological safety in most organisations, we often need to speak the language of value. There is genuinely strong evidence that psychologi...

Why “Fake It Till You Make It” Doesn’t Work for Psychological Safety I remember early in a new job – one I was excited about and keen to make my mark in – I made a decision to be honest […]

Humble Inquiry By Jade Garratt When was the last time someone told you something you already knew? How did it make you feel? Edgar Schein opens his book “Humble Inquiry” with a story about his own exp...

The SANE Effect Spend any time on LinkedIn or other social media, and you may well come across posts and articles mentioning neuroscience or brain science, using neuro- as a prefix to invent terms lik...

The Pac-Man rule One of the main reasons to go to a conference, event or meetup is to meet people and have interesting conversations. I’ve found myself at day-long conferences where I’ve not attended ...

Learning Teams Often, when we’re trying to improve how work gets done, we start with principles. We agree what we believe in, or are working towards, at a high level, and then figure out how those ide...

ST.R.E.A.M: Status Rules Everything Around Me In the classic hip hop track C.R.E.A.M., the great Wu-Tang tell us “Cash Rules Everything Around Me”. Whilst it might sound like the song is glorifying mo...

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 ...

The Streetlight Effect Measuring the really important stuff is hard. How do we measure inclusion, or safety, or happiness? We can probably all agree that these things matter, but when it comes to meas...