Psychological safety

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock.

Happy to be here yet again, Peter. Great to uh see you in a great mood. And uh I'm in a great mood. I think it's the trick is we're recording on a Friday, right? So we're all looking to the weekend.

Although I since we have uh a video in front of here, your your smiles almost throw me off. I almost didn't make it through that time.

So what are we chatting about this time?

So today we are talking about psychological safety. I suppose that's actually an example of uh is it safe to uh talk about these things?

Don't crack up at the beginning of a talk. Um psychological safety is really an interesting one, isn't it? Because uh it's all over again. I think we we did a talk recently around the mandate, uh mandated return to work policies. And one of the things I find really interesting, and I I totally get why companies are doing that, I really understand that the desire to get into some sort of normalcy and so on as as summer is coming and all the rest of it. But the interesting thing about that mandated approach is my first thought is what does that do for psychological safety? And psychological safety is is something that is still poorly understood. It's almost like a tagging system for understanding things that we don't really understand, if that makes sense. And I think we're gonna have a lot of you know space to understand that, but we need to recognize that psychological safety is is very, very uh uppermost on many individuals' minds, right?

Very much so. And it's uh it's a it's been a topic that's underlying so many things in the uh in the business agility space for a number of years now. It's uh it's key to a lot of the the change that uh we look to bring into organizations. Uh and it uh it's it's such a key part of it. It's uh it's uh one of these things though as well that doesn't necessarily get talked about as much in terms of well, well, how do you know when you've got it and what would that look like and how might you measure it and how would you tell? And there are some general pieces and general models, things like uh Westram's uh pathological degenerative uh organization. I love the title of that one, by the way.

Anything that has pathological in the title is a great place to start, I think. Well um, just as an example, my my daughter is just uh going to be graduating in the next year or so from a psychology, completing a psychology degree. And what I've found fascinating listening to the topics that are being covered and and the state of kind of understanding is psychology in the last few decades has gone through a renaissance. It's it's you know data-driven, there is an understanding of how our brains work that certainly, you know, back in the day was not common knowledge, was not out there. And the reality is that psychological safety is a phrase that is used to describe an incredibly complex array of interactions of how our brains work in different situations.

Exactly. And uh this is one of those interesting pieces because it is such a complex topic, that's why it's not so easy to boil it down into very sort of a few, uh like a very small number of uh of ways of looking at it. Uh one of the uh one of the models that I like to use uh quite a lot when I'm uh looking at how are people reacting to things and help explain this to people is uh David Rock's um scarf model, um, which I know we've we've talked about before around this idea of uh status certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness, and the how as these get impacted by events, um it triggers your uh internal fight and flight response, it triggers your way that you uh behave. So as we impact more of these, then we can have we have an even larger impact on people. And when we when we think of things like the return to work, if you're mandating that somebody must go back in, you you could start to look at this and say, hey, look, I can see how this is uh going to start impacting people, I can see why people might be reacting like this.

Yeah, and and just picking out because the scarf model, what I like about that is it's multidimensional, there's a number of different things to look at, but it's also ambiguous, there's plenty of room for interpretation. And also, as I'm just thinking about it as well, there's plenty of uh this is that psychology piece again, there's plenty of evidence behind each of these. So in in days gone by, it was a maybe it was a gut-feel way of looking at things, this psychological safety. Well, now there's more and more evidence around it. And we were talking earlier on, if we look at that return to work mandate, the two things it immediately impacts is certainty, how what's going to happen in the future, because we're coming out of a period, we're still in a period of insane uncertainty around us, and that is disruptive, it's destabilizing for ourselves, and then the autonomy, how much control. And there are people who've made significant changes in their lives, they've they've moved, I'm thinking of the GTA that around the Toronto area. I've talked to many people who've moved hours out of the GTA to get a better quality of life, and now their sense of control over those events as organizations are beginning to stipulate the need to move back in, in the sense of at least commuting back in for a few days a week, perhaps. That's it's and then there's the fairness piece that comes in in terms of whether it's compensation, whether it's how different individuals are treated based on where they're they're based in those situations. So there's a lot there that kind of starts destabilizing people's comfort and safety levels.

Yeah, and as with uh as with any model, there's always uh some some value, or often some value to be extracted from this. I find this one is particularly useful for when looking at uh at this type of situation. Uh where if something like fairness is, am I being treated fairly? Uh if you feel like you're not being treated fairly, then you and uh it's not fair that you're mandating me back into the office, then you're gonna react poorly.

Well, I think one of the there's a couple of other kind of nuances that come in. So if we touch on one of them being it's really poorly understood, and it's it's a difficult thing to get our our uh to get an understanding of. But there's another element that I've noticed, which is people have very different expectations. And I've consciously called it people there, but maybe it's more demographic led or something like this. But there are there are different situational, you know, you can have the same situation for multiple different people, and some of them will feel that this is absolutely reasonable and psychologically comfortable and safe environment, and others will feel that they're not in a psychologically safe environment. And and there are many, you know, different nuances there, which just complicate it. It means there is no one answer, there's no single solution to this. It's something that is a continuous, almost like a feedback loop of how to continually stay in a psychologically safe environment or or build a psychologically safe environment for many different individuals with many different experiences.

Yes, the whole uh whole concept of uh netaprograms and then how we respond to different situations and depending on which situation you're in, and that but we'll we'll cover that some other time.

Well, but but what's really interesting about your response, and I love the fact that you you kind of bring the technical eye to everything as soon as we kind of go through that with the conversation here. But uh, one of the things is we're in a really, really early state of understanding how to use tooling to manage psychological safety. So I uh I've got a note here tool current tools are just rubbish at handling the nuances of these environments, they're not there, and it'll take a long time before we really have sort of the confidence in some of those that solutions. So this is an area where technology can't necessarily come galloping to our our be our savior in this case.

No, no, but it there's it's there's not it's not a technical solution, it's a people solution. It's understanding like how are how are people uh in general responding to the the changes and the the how do they feel about the situation they're in. Because you'll have and part of the reason for that variance as well is that you have good days and bad days, it's not it's like uh no everybody needs to be different, you know. Maybe you've uh had a something happen on the way into work, you dropped your coffee and you're in a bad mood, and and then so somebody puts something in front of you and your immediate reaction is bad. It's uh there's but that doesn't mean that in general the the the overall organization is uh uh psychologically unsafe. Uh the the what one of the the common ways in which I've seen people try to to measure this is to uh have a regular sort of um touch base, uh very quick sort of hey, here's here's a list of questions. Um if you uh how would you rate these on a scale of one to five? And then look at very much like a strengths finder type thing, and over time use that to see the trends, like are we going in the right direction? Are people generally feeling better about being here and relating to other people here and feeling like it's safe to speak up and that it's uh if that if they do speak up, they're not gonna get uh shot down. Like uh I I know in some organizations I've worked with that would uh almost certainly be the case.

So so are there classic questions, standard questions that you would point to?

Or uh there there are there's some from um Mind Tools and some from some others. Uh so some of the common ones that I have uh like written down here were around uh I I I feel safe to take a risk in this organization. Is it difficult to ask other members of this organization for help? People at this organization sometimes reject others for being different. If I make a mistake at this organization, is it often held against me? Questions like this where it's about how are you relating to others and how are others relating to you? Um so that's and there I think there are there are some companies out there that are really focusing in on this to work out how to make it uh um easier to understand this within your organization.

I I think one of the things that I was going to add to that is I love the sense making approach to gathering data. So whether you're using sense maker from um the cognitive edge uh field, if you like, or just I mean, part of it is this is the way we we were talking about when you go into an organization in person and we go and hang around and listen to the language and the stories that they share, that's where those narratives, those micro-narratives, tell you an awful lot about the the comfort level of psychological safety within an organization. And of course, tools like SenseMaker, they're doing the same thing, they're capturing those micro-narratives and they're helping helping us almost listen in at the water cooler to understand, you know, it's it's it's one thing for an executive team to say we're in a psychological safe environment, it's a very different thing to hear the stories that reinforce the fact that the workforce feels they're in a psychologically safe environment.

Exactly. Yeah, that what what are the stories that people tell each other? How are they how are they communicating? Uh are they even communicating? Is the uh some of the sim simple things you can look for are just like how uh how often do people reach out to each other and uh and how are they communicating when they do. So the there's definitely things like that which I think drive uh a lot of um a lot of understanding and we've got more capability of that. Though I I do agree with you that yes, there's there's still a lot of room for improvement with all of these uh tools and capabilities.

Oh, and uh just following up on this, we you you started this sort of section of our conversation here by saying that the solution is less a technical solution and more of a people solution. And uh I mean I've been looking a lot at networks and at how people interact with one another rather than hierarchical interactions, but then sort of network relationship-based ones. And what's interesting when you look at that is what you often find are there are a very small number. It's not like every third person, it's a very small percentage of individuals are highly, highly networked. They're the nodes in these networks, which everybody is connected to. And we all know who they are because they were our friends who made sure we got invited to the parties that everybody else was getting invited to, kind of thing. There we know instinctively what these sort of nodes in the networks are are about. And one thought is these are great, great connectors who it's all about spreading that comfort level. And I do wonder how much uh how organizations might be able to free up those connectors, because they're often they're the people who would walk backwards and forwards across an organization, across different floors, break silos down and so on. Well, these are also great individuals for making connections, and I'm just thinking of those sort of digital tools that try and artificially make connections. Well, these are the people who can not artificially make them, but in a reality kind of draw connections between different individuals, which can really help foster that sense of stability and security, and touch on on David Rock's scarf model, for example.

Yeah, that sense of belonging. I am uh I'm a part of something, and uh and people want me here. And so people want to be wanted. It's uh the uh uh so I I I think we've had a good conversation. I love talking about this stuff. I could uh rabbit on about it for hours, honestly. But uh uh we we should wrap this up now, and uh so how would you sum up what we've talked about in uh in three or so points?

Well, first of all, I think the recognization that psychological safety shouldn't be a tick-box issue. It's it's complex, there isn't a single straightforward, simple solution that's going to be there. I love the fact that you brought in the scarf model, uh, David Rock's work there, because that has that complexity built into it and ambiguity, and there's a lot of room to explore there. The second thing I would say is that that uh people are different, they and and psychological safety isn't a one size fits all. So we have to understand that on top of the complexity of the problem itself. And then solutions and technology is not racing perhaps to uh our rescue. So we probably need to look at some sort of people-driven solutions, and and I know you you and I touched on a handful of those as we went through. Anything you'd add?

I I think that's a good way of summing it up. I think uh we that there is a there's a lot of room to to understand that uh something that we sometimes forget because we're so busy and we're so focused on our own stuff, that the reason that the person that you're talking to may be reacting the way that they're reacting is because something else happened and it's not to do with you. That uh uh that that uh that ability to be to step back and uh put yourself in the other person's shoes is uh is an important one, I think. So so with that I think we could uh wrap it up for today. Uh if if anybody would like to reach out to us, they can at uh feedback at definitely maybeagile.com and I look forward to the next one.

Thanks again, Peter. Look forward to the next one.

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.