The direction of the "Psychological safety" movement bothers me in that psychological safety isn't something we directly can influence. (a thread.... apparently...)

What I'm going to try to tell you with this thread is that if you want to get better at building psychological safety you have to study psychology, not management.

Psychological safety is more like the churn of a product. And as you know we do things with our product and hope that churn decreases as a result. Or maybe leading indicator is better because change does happen quite quickly and can be measured easily.

But let's start by mentioning what psychological safety is - It's a -neurological state-. It's basically when the brain experiences safety and you have access to the pre-frontal cortex. And it's kind of a big thing since the alternative is that our brains are in threat mode.

When our brains are in threat mode, and the amygdala takes over, stress goes up, we lose access to abstract thinking, empathy, logic, language, creativity, and memories (both accessing and storing new ones since the hippocampus is disconnected).

But, so back to psychological safety. You don't get psychological safety by saying it's important. It's not a structure. It's not a principle. It's not a value. It's not a process. It's a neurological state.

And what makes one person feel safe may, in fact, make other people feel unsafe. So people's different needs trigger each other.

Just take the whole thing of saying hi to people every morning. Meeting them with a smile and looking them in the eyes. That's great. That acknowledges people. But not everyone likes that intimacy. For some, that's overwhelming.

Why? Because of childhood or cognitive variance, or just recent past experiences that went bad.

The same goes for literally EVERYTHING AT WORK.

Titles. Incentives. Processes. Flexibility. Seating. Freedom. Tooling. You name it.

Some people absolutely need titles. They don't feel safe without them. And when you have a team with seniors and juniors, and juniors have a high need for status, guess what, you've reduced psychological safety via your HR processes.

"Ok, let's remove the titles." That doesn't work either, because people have a need to understand their position in the social ranks. And titles help with that. When they're not explicit we infer status through e.g. tenior or something else.

If you have someone with a high need for autonomy and you're recruiting a lot of people or need mentors, guess what, that person's autonomy goes down and that person's safety goes down.

And this goes on and on. For some, predictability is so extremely important that it's more important than changing a plan or having autonomy. Great. Good luck with working in an agile environment.

Failure... don't even get me started. For some, talking about surprises or learnings as failures puts them directly into low psychological safety. "It's safe to fail here!". Sure, you may think so, not everyone is comfortable. Some really do have a past of blame and punishment.

Accountability - "wait a minute. That's the same as blame! Not good!"
"No, it's not, it's about understanding boundaries and expectations. So it's about status and autonomy."

Great. Another polarized thing that puts one group into low psychological safety.

So while psychological safety is an important thing, there's no "copy these things and you'll have it".

A very cruicial element of psychological safety is knowing thyself, finding internal alerts that indicate that you're heading into amygdala takeover, and learning tools we can use on an individual level.

Because even if you build structures, those structures will have a negative impact on some. The social life at Spotify was overwhelming. It did not make me feel safe to have so much friends and people in my life to think about and hang out with.

But surely Viktor, there are Some things we know will be helpful? Absolutely. But they're probably not what you think. They're not about reducing or increasing change. Nor are they about being more data-driven or more intuitive.

You're probably going to need to decide what level of diversity you want and then need to optimize for the needs of URM. That's how you get safety in the long run. But that's also going to mean that people will leave.

So if you want to learn more about psychological safety start with learning about yourself through Will Shutz work with FIRO, David Rocks work with SCARF, and Virginia Satir's work. Then move on to Non-violent communication.

After that, you'll be better equipped to start designing your environment. Because if you don't know about people's needs, and preferably through different frameworks, how will you know what to optimize for and how?

What I've tried to tell you with this thread is that if you want to get better at building psychological safety you have to study psychology, not management.