A couple of years ago I worked for SPP, an old Swedish insurance company, hired as an Agile coach to support their transformation to a digital and Agile company. It took me nine months until the same manager who hired me, and also had become my friend travelling with me on a private football trip, […]
Kategori: Psychological safety
The company that drove 35 employees to suicide
In 2010 there was an investigation on more than 35 suicides in the France Telecom workforce[1]. One of them just jumped out from a window at work and another person was found hanging in his garage with a France Telecom T-shirt on. An official report found that “pathogenic” management methods were applied to achieve job […]
The men who saved the world
In 1983 the nuclear balance was 35.000 rockets for the Soviet Union and 23.000 for the US. At that point our planet came terrifyingly close to a nuclear holocaust. The Soviet Union’s missile attack warning system displayed with “high reliability” that a US intercontinental ballistic missile had been launched and was headed toward the Soviet […]
Nicklas Lidström is a coward
Nicklas Lidström is, in my opinion, the best hockey player ever. You say Gretzky, I doubt. Here we could spend hours debating, which I am happy to do over a beer or two. But if you have read this book so far perhaps you can see my point, as there is more to it than […]
Psychological safety is a myth
Is Psychological Safety possible or is it a vision or a myth? 1996 Dr Alex Lifeson and Professor Geddy Lee received the Nobel Prize in Biology for their research on apes and how they challenge each other and could replicate this behaviour to humans. Their accomplishment was the discovery of key mechanisms and structural details […]
The best company
Now let me tell you about an old Swedish engineering company, Sandvik. They are the Swedish Champions in Psychological Safety, but regardless still don’t meet my high standards. This company is sprung from steel production and today working with tools for the industrial sector. The tools are becoming more and more digital, and IT is […]
Toxic company #1
I got a call from a friend I had been working with previously in a consulting company. The year is 2009. My friend was a project manager and wanted me to join this online gaming company with roots in offline gaming. At that point I was running my own betting service but without any profit […]
The sect
Having introduced Psychological Safety as a cornerstone for companies, this company was trickier. Psychological Safety was removed from the original Agile transformation agenda for some reason, but I introduced it as a channel in MS Teams, where the discussion started. I helped HR with workshops on the topic, hoping they would be the messenger in […]
My top 3 challenges for Psychological safety
If I should sum up the three biggest challenges for Psychological Safety it would be LCD – Leadership, Culture and DNA – all previously covered in the book, here emphasised. But these three are not the root cause for Psychological UNsafety. There is someone accountable for Psychological Safety, can you spot who it is? I […]
Functional stupidity
Mats Alvesson is a Swedish professor at Lund University who has succeeded in adding a term to the Swedish Academy’s dictionary SAOL – Functional Stupidity. His definition is “the inability and/or unwillingness to use cognitive and reflective abilities in anything other than narrow and circumspect ways. It involves a lack of reflexivity, a disinclination to […]