Is Psychological Safety About What Teams Feel or What They Know As Well?

Anti-Impression Management new practice: I wrote a book called “People Before Tech: Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” and you can find a discount for it at the bottom of this page, and we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- come talk to us.

Warning: today’s piece is long, theoretical and introspective so fairly sterile and devoid of actionable take-aways so don’t start on it if you’re in a GSD mode and don’t have any thinking time.

Are Agile teams more Psychologically Safe than teams that aren’t Agile? My instinct is towards a resounding “YES!” but the other day when the question popped up, I realised I didn’t need to rely on my instinct only and I can look at our data.

As some of you that have been with us on the journey may remember when Covid hit we “opened doors” and gave access for free for teams to use our software because we couldn’t, in good conscience, “sit” on a work tool that we knew made people’s lives better and wait for procurement at a time of crisis. We wrote a new set of questions to interrogate how people felt about the new reality of sudden remote-only work as well and then we allowed people to use the dashboard free of charge. Tens of teams took us up on the offer. Certainly, many more than we anticipated and while helping them all has been a swift lesson in building effective support organisations on the double, having them around has meant an immense leap in product to what it is today and we’re very grateful indeed.

When the question above came, about the likelihood of increased Psychological Safety in Agile teams, I went to look at how many of the teams using our solution had been Agile versus waterfall over the last couple of years and I was stunned.