Monday, September 2nd, 2024
I was recently asked by the Learning Development Accelerator to take part in a Meet the author session to discuss my forthcoming book, The Great Reset: Unlocking the Power of Organizational Learning. I want to share some one of the fundamental ideas of the book that came up in our discussions. Here I look at psychological safety and creating safe spaces.
Psychological safety is a bit of a buzzword, but it is critical to organizational learning. Without it people won’t feel they can speak up, share their ideas and challenge thinking openly.
So how do you create psychological safe environments? When I work with a group of people, the first thing I do is work on what I call the rules of engagement. So, how are we going to behave towards each other? What is not acceptable and what is perfectly acceptable? How do we challenge etc, etc, etc?
We end up with maybe 10 points that everyone agrees, and that is our benchmark for the day. And if anyone steps outside that, we remind them that’s not what we agreed at the start of the session.
For an organization, there must be agreement on acceptable behaviours and an acknowledgement about the way people are treated when things go wrong. What happens when things don’t work out? What happens when someone makes a mistake? What happens when someone bets on one area and that turns out to be a poor bet, how do we treat these people, and how do we embrace their views and perspectives?
If you can agree that, and if you’re a disparate organization globally, then you have one big picture and lots of local discussions that reflect the local working context. What works in the US might not work in the Philippines, for example. So, agree what psychological safety means in your organization as a whole and then finesse that locally or with different groups.
As well as creating the psychological environment for sharing, you also need to create the physical and virtual spaces where people can come together, share ideas and collaborate. Post-pandemic, companies like Zoom recognized that simply mandating employees to return to the office would not be effective for building a positive, collaborative work environment. Instead, the company created office spaces designed for idea generation and teamwork.
The same goes for virtual spaces. For example, a number of Google staff use design tool Figma as a collaborative virtual board for brainstorming and organizing ideas, allowing teams to interact and build on each other’s contributions in real time.
Collaborative spaces – real and virtual – are a key part of organizational learning. The sharing of information and ideas as well as collaborative working requires environments that encourage creativity, collaboration, and the free flow of ideas.