The Game Creates or Destroys Psychological Safety
Scaling Psychological Safety Requires Getting Out of the Way
Psychological safety is created indirectly. Systems, structures, practices, principles, and policies define the field of play. What happens within the field of play is done by individual actors.
Ideally, the rules of the game are set up so that emergent effect of the game being played is the desired outcome.
We Can Learn A Lot From Exploring Actual Games
In board games, this is clear. Board games are a tool for creating a qualitative experience: fun. If the game mechanics work well, fun emerges naturally as a result of playing. If the game mechanics are poor, frustration emerges instead.
Not all games are right for all situations. Picking a good game for the particular people who want to play involves matching their preferences as individuals with a set of rules.
This is why games as team-building activities often fall short of expectations. Unless the team is small with shared preferences and a well-chosen game, it is easy for the choice of game to create division between team-members who are delighted by the game and team-members who experience participating as forcing them to pretend they are having fun.
If fun is the goal, the activity should be chosen via a process that ensures the intended participants anticipate that fun will emerge as the experience of participating in the chosen activity.
Once The Game Has Been Chosen, Let People Play
In a game situation, the leader’s job is to ensure that the conditions for good play are maintained.
Think of a baseball game. In order for the game to play well, the grounds must be maintained, the spectators contained, and the rules enforced fairly.
When these conditions exist, the players focus on applying all their skills to the challenge at hand and play.
The moment the grounds become unsafe, the spectators become unruly, or the rules appear to be enforced unfairly, an enormous amount of energy is diverted to reestablishing those conditions.
If you have set the game up well, people want to play the game and people want to watch the game being played.
If you haven’t set the rules of the game and conditions of play up solidly, the game itself doesn’t get played and people start arguing about what game should be played.
Without a Solid Set of Rules, You Cannot Play
In organizations, setting the rules involves two different sets of rules.
The first set of rules governs how the organization manages growth and change.
The second set of rules are the rules about how work is being done at the moment.
The Agile movement has done a lot of good work creating models for these sets of rules but hasn’t always done a good job articulating the principles that explain how to think about using these models to inform business decisions. This makes sense because the Agile movement is a celebration of empiricism and emergent design and actively resists abstraction until the need for it arises.
The Rules About How Work Gets Done
There are two ways to set rules about how work gets done: top-down and consensus-driven.
In a top-down model, someone or a small team decides on the rules and enforces them. This works in large settings where certain conditions need to be maintained for the group’s goals to be met.
For example, I am part of the admin team for an online community in which parents dealing with a shared set of difficult circumstances gather for support and idea sharing.
To create enough psychological safety for that group to serve its purpose, we established ground rules for communication and moderation which we enforce strictly and hold ourselves accountable to modeling and teaching the boundaries of.
This seemed excessive when the group began with 5 people, but now that it is over 10,000 people, it is essential.
Consensus-derived rules about how work get done allow people to ask for what creates safety for them. In small groups, this can be tightly customized for the specific people involved. This is why creative industries tend to function in groups of 4-10 and deep therapy happens in pairs. The more customized the rules of the game, the deeper the psychological safety possible.
For organizations, baseline organization-wide rules that make the worst behaviours unacceptable plus optimization through customization at the small group or meeting level strikes an optimal balance.
The Rules About How Change Happens
No set of rules is good for every game.
At some point, circumstances will change enough that the rules of the game need to change.
Some kind of process for making change, including making changes to the process for making change creates a necessary relief valve for pressure that builds up when change needs to happen.
If you want to maximize psychological safety across an organization, this change process should maximize opportunities for bottom-up change and minimize top-down change. Psychological safety happens at the individual level and ripples through teams and working groups to the organization as a whole.
For bottom-up change to serve the whole organization, transparency about the organizational constraints posed by financing and the market is necessary. Without such transparency, individuals don’t have enough information to drive effective change.
Leadership is needed to keep the system accountable to the process of continually renegotiating the rules of the game for maximum amounts of safety.