Coaching and Psychological Safety: listening, trust and letting go of control By Jade Garratt When I first trained as a coach, I realised there were two things I wasn’t very good at: I meant well, but I was uncomfortable with […] The post Coaching and Psychological Safety: listening, trust and letting go of control appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Emergence, substrate, succession, indicator species & ecotones. I started my career in ecology, as an experimentalist working in a research station’s wonderfully named “Weed Science” department – a title that sounds more like a kooky 80s film than a scientific […]| Psych Safety
Are you at the Sharp End or the Blunt End? Most people who’ve been to school (and many who haven’t!) have strong opinions about education. Understandably so – education speaks to how we raise our children, what we value as […] The post The Sharp End & Blunt End of Education appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Forced Vulnerability One of the most persistent patterns in organisational change and dynamics is the search for a shortcut: the belief that if we can just find the right lever to pull, the right activity or artefact, we can bypass […] The post Forced Vulnerability appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
In part one we explored the benefits and risks in naming psychological safety. In part two, we explored power and diversity. In part three we dived into dissent, non-determinism, and the seductive danger of metrics. This week, in our fourth and final part of […]| Psych Safety
Part 3: The Safety to Dissent In part one we discussed the power and danger in naming psychological safety. In part two, we explored power and diversity. This week we’re continuing our series of reflections with some of the things we’ve […] The post Reflections – Part Three appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Part 2: Different people, different safety Continuing our reflections on the last five years. In part one, we explored the name psychological safety itself, and here in part two, we get into diversity, myths, the proliferation of bad advice, and […] The post Reflections – Part Two appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Part 1: The Power and Peril of Naming Over the past five years of our work in psychological safety, it has transformed from a little-known term, understood and explicitly practised by only a small group of researchers and practitioners, to […] The post Reflections on Psychological Safety: Five Years of Learning appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety There really is some bad advice and research around in respect to psychological safety, in particular how it relates to aspects of neurodiversity and culture. In this piece, we’re going to dive […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Isn’t Enough We hear this sometimes, and well… Obviously. It’s rather like saying that having a fully functioning car isn’t enough to make a road trip – and of course it isn’t. We need lots more things to […] The post Psychological Safety Isn’t Enough appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
The Amagasaki Derailment In our workshops and training, we often use real-world stories as a way to explore the dynamics of both failure and success. Stories are a powerful tool to help us reflect on our own experiences, and sometimes […] The post The Amagasaki Disaster appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Books for Children In 2020, we shared a collection of the best books about psychological safety. As new books were published (and there have been a lot of them about psychological safety!), we’ve added to and refined the […] The post Psychological Safety Books for Children appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2025 – the largest global survey on psychological safety ever! Psychological safety is the core ingredient behind high-performing, innovative, and happy teams. It shapes whether we feel safe speaking up, sharing ideas, […] The post The State of Psychological Safety Survey: 2025 appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt It will probably come as no great surprise to those of us who work with the concept of psychological safety that one of the earliest references to the term in academic and psychological literature comes from Carl […] The post Psychological Safety and Creativity appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Barriers to Psychological Safety There are many team-level, organisation-level and broader barriers to speaking up, including (most significantly) steep power gradients, cultural norms (organisational or otherwise), and others. But in this research we wanted to examine the experiential barriers to […] The post Barriers to Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
How you respond matters. “Everything you do is important to your organization. People are watching you. The people in your organization determine how to move forward after both successful work and how to recover after failure by watching how you […] The post How you respond matters. appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Practices that Foster Psychological Safety There are many behaviours that (depending on the context) can help to foster psychological safety, over 170 of which are listed in our big list of psychological safety behaviours. However, there are also many practices […] The post Practices that Foster Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Feedback in the workplace In our “Delivering Effective Feedback” workshops, we explore participants’ experiences of feedback, and we find, of all the feedback they’ve received so far in their career, roughly: So this seemed like an excellent avenue to explore […]| Psych Safety
Job Security and Psychological Safety In a lot of “What Psychological Safety Is Not” articles, we often come across statements like “psychological safety is not job security”. And that’s true, to a degree. Psychological safety is not the same as […] The post Job Security and Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Executive Summary In this Research Pulse, 121 respondents were asked how familiar people in their workplace are with the concept of psychological safety. The results show a broadly “middle-ground” distribution: most people have heard of it, but few would call […]| Psych Safety
How We Think About Learning at Psych Safety At Psych Safety, we care deeply about how learning happens. Not just what people take away from a session, but how it feels to be there – what kind of space it […]| Psych Safety
Why do We Foster Psychological Safety? By Tom Geraghty and Jade Garratt It’s easy, when considering why we should work on psychological safety, to go straight to the organisational benefits: improved learning, greater innovation, higher quality products or services and […]| Psych Safety
Cultural Diversity and Cockpit Communication Here’s a classic paper from 1999 – Cultural diversity and crew communication, by Fischer and Orasanu. They examined how cultural background, rank and gender influence pilots’ corrective communications in the cockpit. Analysing over 500 pilots […]| Psych Safety
Comfort vs Need by Tom Geraghty What do we do when the things that help some people in the team feel psychologically safer don’t work for everyone? Perhaps one person says they need time away from the main meeting group […]| Psych Safety
