What is Psychological Safety and Why Should We Care?
Psychological safety is the unconscious belief that a situation is safe enough for risk-taking. The modern construct finds its roots in organizational research conducted in the 1960s around what makes organizational change possible. It reached the modern popular audience through the books of Amy Edmondson.
Research in management, organizational behavior, and social psychology spanning organizations in many industries consistently find connections between measures of psychological safety and learning on the individual, team, and organizational levels.
Creating psychological safety is the key to creativity and innovation, so any organization that wants to adapt to changing conditions needs to think about psychological safety. Of course, psychological safety alone isn’t enough, but it is a necessary condition for learning and growth. The skills for creating psychological safety are an enabling technology.
What makes creating psychological safety difficult, and especially difficult at scale, is that whether a situation is safe enough for risk-taking is an unconscious belief processed through the embodied cognition of the human beings involved.
The more diverse the group of people involved, the more complex the problem becomes. What makes one person feel safe may make another feel threatened, and a third way that makes both people feel safe enough to take risks must be found. Diversity and inclusion initiatives make it more difficult to create psychological safety, and more imperative that the relevant skills are developed widely.
And in 2022, existential anxiety is high. Climate change–related extreme weather events are becoming more common. The vulnerability of humanity to the coronavirus and other pathogens is impossible to ignore. And the threat of nuclear weapons being used has risen to the surface again.
Without innovation and creativity, we will not be able to solve these wicked problems. Learning to create psychological safety may be the foundational challenge of our time.