Kategori: Psychological safety

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Goffman’s (1959) Impression Management theory is one of the best-known theories of identity performance. Goffman said that individuals present themselves based on the perceived audience from scene to scene, and our identity presentations are designed and prepared behind these scenes. In short, you try hard to meet the audience’s expectations…

I did quick research of the available leadership training on the internet, and after discussions with these training companies, I found that none of them has Psychological Safety on the agenda. Psychological Safety is implicitly covered in topics like feedback, participation, soft skills etc, but cannot be found anywhere in…

The general approach for a Swedish coach is inclusiveness, which involves and activates the brains in the team. I often watch team sports live and, on the TV, and have been a sport coach myself and know how to get the best out of Swedes – and it is certainly…

Professor Amy Edmondson has in her book “The Fearless Organisation” a part about how to measure Psychological Safety. I have used her questions in five different organisations as part of my Psychological Safety workshops as surveys. You will find them in the exercise section later in this book. When a…