Swap Sterile Learning for Doing - Help Your Teams Today

Last week, after a keynote, someone asked me “How can we break the cycle of eternal awareness-raising and no doing when it comes to Psychological Safety in our enterprise? How do we take the next step?”.

When the conversation with the person who asked deepened, I came to find out they were at that level I both command and bemoan where they are avidly collecting facts about Psychological Safety as an organisation. The top of their awareness curve. A few years ago, someone read something that resonated and the topic had made its way in the organisation’s internal lexicon.

As the storyteller remembers it, the initial focus was a cheerful and optimistic call to arms “Let’s just find out how much Psychological Safety we have in our teams and then make sure they get more of it where needed”. He then recalls a brief exploration of what there is to do in order to measure it and that nothing was found and that for a while, an email with Prof Dr Amy Edmondson’s initial 7 questions was passed around and people answered it individually by sending the responses to their manager.

He can’t recall what effect that had, how often it was done, any overall feedback from it or indeed when that practice stopped, but it certainly wasn't there today. His presumption was that it likely met with the same fate as any survey results do in their enterprise and melted in the big ocean of topics-never-to-be-touched-again. As we know, each of these instances where people feel they have offered feedback and like it was ignored or squandered, gravely add to the overall HumanDebt and erode trust in the organisation.

Beyond this point, he remembers that sometime during the first lockdown, the little conversations they were still having on PS and its behaviours at the team level with their scrum masters or agile coaches and even some HR advocate has all but stopped with the sudden move to remote working and all he could see returning were links to cheat-sheets, books being recommended (mine included to be fair) and links to articles being passed around so he believes the interest is still clearly around and that once people had had exposure to the common-sense idea of the need to speak up and trust at team level if we want better results it’s hard to make them “un-see it” but the execution is non-existent.