Psych Safety
@psychsafety.bsky.social
Building psychologically safe workplaces so teams can thrive. At Psychsafety.com, we blend research-backed evidence with hands-on practice to foster psychological safety, performance and outcomes. 🚀
Give an organisation a number and it will do what organisations always do with numbers, which is stop looking at anything else. So Measure doesn’t benchmark. measure.psychsafety.com
Measuring Psychological Safety
An anonymous psychological safety survey for teams. The report shows the spread of answers, not an average, why people hold back, and what to try next. The self-check is free.
measure.psychsafety.com
Psychological safety wasn’t invented in 1999. Long before Edmondson’s landmark paper, psychotherapy, aviation, quality management, manufacturing and safety science were all running into versions of the same problem. That convergence matters. psychsafety.com/the-history-...
The History of Psychological Safety
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...
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"Some things are easier said to a potato than a face." psychsafety.com/the-case-for...
The Case for Less Eye Contact
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....
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People seldom dismantle the power structures that got them into power, for much the same reason that trees seldom destroy the ground they're rooted in. On the organisational substrate: psychsafety.com/the-organisa...
The Organisational Substrate
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...
psychsafety.com
"performance under pressure is shaped less by what happens at the peak than by what happens before it" psychsafety.com/crisis-ready...
Crisis-Ready Teams
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...
psychsafety.com
Behold the world's first org chart! I am torn between lamenting a democratic biosteampunk future corporate past and not having acted soon enough to destroy a clearly parasitic living organism ... psychsafety.com/the-first-or...
The First Organisational Chart
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...
psychsafety.com
Addressing power gradients (gap between those with the most & least power in a team or system) is THE most effective lever for increasing psychological safety within a team. Many ways to take action for this: psychsafety.com/reducing-pow.... By jadegarratt.bsky.social via tomgeraghty.bsky.social
"The standard body language advice isn't just unhelpful, it's actively harmful." psychsafety.com/body-languag...
Body Language and Non-Verbal Communication
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...
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This is a very good text on comparing ecology and organizational dynamics when it comes to harvesting signals; big fan of this one. psychsafety.com/a-practical-...
Organisational Indicator Species: being an Organisational Ecologist
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...
psychsafety.com
In a fast-flowing stream, the sludge worm is a warning sign. In a lake, it's completely unremarkable. Same species. Opposite readings. Which is the first thing to understand about reading organisations too: context precedes reading. There is no universal indicator. psychsafety.com/a-practical-...
Organisational Indicator Species: being an Organisational Ecologist
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...
psychsafety.com
🥾 We've just released a new feature to the Knowledge Map: Paper Trails ! There are a number of trails available to explore - this is Measurement, which explores Goodhart's, The Streetlight Effect, Qualitative approaches, Measurement Ethics & more! explore.psychsafety.com?trail=measur...
So glad to see high context/ low context phenomenon getting discussed! It is impactful for sure
This newsletter always has excellent content, but this one particularly struck home psychsafety.com/the-strange-... As all tried and tested HR practices this one has been tried, tested and has failed . In short, total bollocks, just like personality inventories, interview-based selection etc etc.
The Strange Confidence of 360 Degree Feedback
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 ...
psychsafety.com
360 feedback promises to make honesty safe: truth from every direction, protection for the people with less power, a chance to finally speak. An appealing set of promises. After three decades, there's strikingly little evidence it keeps any of them. psychsafety.com/the-strange-...
The Strange Confidence of 360 Degree Feedback
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 ...
psychsafety.com
We would be much better at automation if we admitted that there is always a gap between work-as-imagined and work-as-done, we need people to bridge that gap, and they need tools to do that. psychsafety.com/psychologica...
Work as Imagined vs Work as Done
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...
psychsafety.com
Trust and psychological safety aren't the same thing. And sometimes trust works against safety: the more we trust someone's competence, the less we challenge them. New piece on the difference, and why it matters. psychsafety.com/the-differen...
The Difference Between Trust And Psychological Safety
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...
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In Japan there's a term for someone who misses implicit social cues: kuuki yomenai – a person who can't read the air. But in diverse teams, expecting everyone to read the air is the problem. Jade Garratt on high and low context communication: psychsafety.com/reading-the-...
Reading the air: high and low context communication in teams
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...
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"One can afford to question whether psychological safety matters when speaking up has rarely cost you much." psychsafety.com/who-gets-to-...
Who gets to decide if psychological safety matters?
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...
psychsafety.com
One of my favorite things I learned about through resilience engineering is the idea of work-as-imagined vs work-as-done. This administration does not make that distinction. At all. psychsafety.com/psychologica...
Work as Imagined vs Work as Done
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...
psychsafety.com
That newsletter is one of the few I make a point of seeking out in the mess that is my inbox, because the authors consistently try to acknowledge that we are people inside bigger systems.
An organisation that punishes honest accounts will eventually receive only dishonest ones. psychsafety.com/accountabili...
Accountability
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...
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In many organisations, status dictates behaviour more than value. Performative "busyness" often replaces genuine impact when quality is hard to measure. We must shift the status economy toward learning and candour to build real psychological safety. Dive in: https://psychsafety.com/st-r-e-a-m-st...
'The best research you can do is talk to people.' — Terry Pratchett. Jade Garratt on what surveys can't tell you about psychological safety. psychsafety.com/qualitative-...
Qualitative Measurement of Psychological Safety
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...
psychsafety.com
We just launched a visual knowledge map of 300+ articles and papers on psychological safety — including which papers are open access and which aren't. No search bar required. Just explore. 👉 explore.psychsafety.com
Psychological Safety Knowledge Network — psychsafety.com
An interactive semantic knowledge network of articles from psychsafety.com — explore the connections between psychological safety concepts, cases, and practices.
explore.psychsafety.com
"It's easy to advocate for psychological safety when people are sharing what you want to hear." The real test is staying open when they don't. Psychological Flexibility - by @jadegarratt.bsky.social psychsafety.com/psychologica...
Psychological Flexibility
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 […]
psychsafety.com
When someone stays silent or softens what they were going to say, that's not a failure of courage. It's a rational output of a system of power. "The calculus of voice." psychsafety.com/the-calculus...
The Calculus of Voice
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 ...
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