The term “psychological safety” is often misleading. When managers hear safety, many dismiss it as a soft style that implies complacency. Meanwhile, psychology implies too much mumbo jumbo. High-profile figures like Elon Musk advocating for a “hardcore” style perpetuate this misconception. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship| Leading Sapiens
Project Aristotle was a multi-year research initiative by Google to understand what made teams effective. Some of its findings, psychological safety in particular, were counterintuitive. It changed how companies viewed teams and performance. Yet, a decade later, implementation remains challenging. I examine common challenges leaders face in applying psychological safety| Leading Sapiens
Context is a powerful tool in leadership but goes underutilized and misunderstood - a deep dive into why mastering context is essential to effective leadership.| Leading Sapiens
The systems thinking iceberg is a useful thinking model for leaders when dealing with intractable problems that never seem to go away. Part of the challenge is what the model calls “events” — surface level issues that are constantly on our radar — which are essentially fire-fighting, but that never really address| Leading Sapiens
Setting high standards is well understood. But a critical step often gets left out. Bezos captured this key idea in his 2017 shareholder letter.| Leading Sapiens
The "if...then" way of thinking about cause and effect is common in business. Circular causality is often missed in the decision making process.| Leading Sapiens
In The Fifth Discipline, there's a useful primer on systems thinking that I keep going back to. Senge calls it the laws of the fifth discipline, or in other words, laws of systems thinking. [1] Senge's ground-breaking book was published in the early 90s, and yet in the ensuing decades,| Leading Sapiens