🔮 ‘Psychological Safety’ and embracing discomfort

Howdy! 🙂

At the Uncertainty Project, we highlight tools and techniques for strategic decision making that are either thought-provoking, applicable, or both!

Every other week we package up our learnings and share them with this newsletter as we build The Uncertainty Project!

In case you missed it, last time we talked about ‘Divergent Thinking’ and tools to facilitate it. This week we’re continuing on with the theme of ‘the power of disagreement’ with Psychological Safety.

This week

• 🧠 Topic: ‘Psychological Safety’ and embracing discomfort

• 🎥 Upcoming Talk: At the end of the month we’re sitting down with Christian Bonilla, who sold his company to UserTesting and spent the last four years as the VP of Product there. We’ll be talking about managing the product roadmap amidst uncertainty. Have questions? Reply to this email and we’ll try to cover them!

✨ Highlights (Interesting resources we’ve found):

• The Three Kinds of Tacit Knowledge: We’ve been digging into research on tacit knowledge and its relationship to company ‘memory’ and decision making culture. This article introduces tacit knowledge and outlines different types of tacit knowledge.

• How This Head of Engineering Boosted Transparency at Instagram: James Everingham defines ‘transparency’ at Instagram - clear and consistent communication, clarity on how decisions are made, honest and clear feedback, and admitting when we are wrong.

• The Stepladder Technique: We’ve talked quite a bit about nominal group techniques, groupthink, and helpful prompts - this technique is an interesting approach (especially for smaller teams).

• The Charrette Protocol: another interesting technique to bring new or dissenting perspectives to problems. This technique was adapted from the architectural community for “when the members of the team have reached a point in the process where they could use other perspectives that will help them move forward”.

‘Psychological Safety’ and embracing discomfort

Psychological safety is a term that has grown significantly in popularity over the last five years, even though Amy Edmundson first coined the term at Harvard in 1999.

The spike in interest in 2015 likely followed Edmundson’s popular TED talk and Google’s recognition of psychological safety (through Project Aristotle) as the single most important factor for high-performing teams.

In short, Edmundson describes psychological safety as “a felt permission for candor.”

Edmundson stumbled upon the concept while studying team performance in hospitals. She initially posed the question, “Do better hospital teams make fewer mistakes?”

She was surprised to find the opposite was true. ‘Better’ teams were making more mistakes. This insight became the foundation for ‘psychological safety’.

Coming into this research, I was surprised to find that psychological safety (or what seems to be its original intent) is a bit different than I thought.

Edmundson’s original paper, as well as the continued research, proposes an environment that fosters the surfacing of hard truths, interrogating information, trust, accountability without blame, and decisiveness - all of which are uncomfortable.

It seems many interpretations, like this recent article from McKinsey, paints a much different picture - articles like these are riddled with words like ‘comfort’ and ‘positivity’.

These words are not even mentioned in Edmundson’s work.

Psychological safety enables teams to learn from mistakes and handle effective discord by facing conflict in a healthy, productive way. This ‘illusion of positivity’ alternative breeds groupthink and a swift regression to a dangerous state of complacency.

Without candor and conflict (the core tenets of psychological safety), a false sense of comfort can often lead to a situation described as the Abilene Paradox - when groups choose to conform rather than speak up; leading to a decision that doesn’t reflect the preferences of anyone.

In a previous post on collective illusions, we found that our own preferences are heavily influenced by how we perceive the beliefs of others. (and those perceived beliefs are often inaccurate)

This tendency fuels the Abilene Paradox. In an effort to avoid conflict (potentially due to the fear of social repercussion), we tend to project preferences that are neither ours nor the true preferences of others. A true lose/lose situation.

We’re all thinking to ourselves, “Well this doesn’t relate to me, I speak my mind. I don’t care what others think”, but we tend to underestimate the impact external factors have on us.

This is referred to as the ‘introspection illusion’ - a cognitive bias that suggests we often wrongly attribute the origins of our preferences, motivations, and desires or general likes and dislikes.

For example, research on the ‘Spiral of Silence’ (why we tend to operate differently if we believe we share a minority vs majority opinion) suggests that our response to a situation is often subliminal and heavily influenced by social norms or our perception of a situation.

All of these factors flourish in environments that do not foster psychological safety - and they do so largely undetected.

So what is Psychological Safety?

There are plenty of blog posts that stray from the original intent of psychological safety, but abiding by the research it seems clear what psychological safety is not:

• Comfortable: It’s a framework for dealing with uncomfortable information or perspectives.

• Easy: Contradicting information is difficult to deal with - it’s in our nature to confirm our beliefs, not challenge them.

• Rays of sunshine: At the heart of psychological safety is candor and dissent, not agreement and unfounded positivity.

• Inauthentic: It’s about breaking down façades that mask the real problems.

As far as what Psychological Safety is, we can go back to Amy Edmundson’s original three bullet points for fostering psychological safety:

• Frame work as a learning problem, not an execution problem: “Have we learned something?” or “Did something surprise us?” vs “Is it done?”. In our post on divergent thinking, we talked about techniques like ‘how might we…?’ questions.

• As a leader or a contributor, recognize your own fallibility: In their book, Playing to Win, Lafley and Martin suggest using language that transitions from ‘advocating’ your point of view, towards more open communication that welcomes feedback and challenge.

• Model curiosity and ask a lot of questions: This continues to surface as something that can be done systematically as well (like a document that represents uncertainty through ‘open questions’). In Atif Rafiq’s book ‘Decision Sprint’ he suggests ‘Question and Answer’ lists as an artifact for recognizing and managing uncertainty.

What do you think? Are we missing anything? Let us know!

We hope this post was helpful and interesting! Have feedback? Just reply to this email! It would be great to get in touch!