Podcast Ep. 176: Psychological Safety: The Key to Successful Teams with Dan Neumann

Episode Description

This week, Dan Neumann is diving deep into the topic of psychological safety, inspired by a couple of articles that got his special attention (references below). Dan is sharing in today’s episode the definition of psychological safety, its link to diversity in teams and innovation, as well as some specific ways to foster psychological safety as the number one prerequisite for a successful team.

Key Takeaways

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is a shared belief that the members of a team won’t be rejected or embarrassed for speaking up with their ideas, questions, or concerns

Bresman and Edmondson present research that supports that diversity on a team is linked to a better outcome

This research explores the bond between diversity and psychological safety, implying that more diverse teams are going to have better ideas and outcomes than teams that are less diverse
From the research, they found that diverse teams tend to be a little lower on performance than more homogenous teams
They also differentiated from highly diverse teams that had high psychological safety and those that did not have it. This first group outperformed by a meaningful degree both the diverse teams that didn’t have psychological safety and also low diversity to homogenous teams
Meeting with the purpose of finding root causes can feel a lot like blame, and blame is one of the behaviors that destroy psychological safety. Transform meetings into opportunities to share information
Seek information. Don’t assume you know. Choose open versus closed-ended questions

In his article, Timothy Clark uses the term dialogic process to explore how teams harness intellectual friction and navigate their interdepending work

If there is a lack of psychological safety, individuals are going to censor each other or result in self-censoring behavior which prevents a highly collaborative atmosphere in a team
High psychological safety promotes innovation as a goal while a lack of it produces fear as a response and survival as the goal
Clark frames agile as a culture implementation, bringing the agile values into practice
Small and seemingly insignificant acts of disrespect, indifference, and rudeness can push a team back into withdrawal and personal risk management
Clark also shares four steps to work in a Scrum team to continue to foster psychological safety

Ways to promote psychological safety at work:

Google has identified five dynamics in successful teams and the number one prerequisite is psychological safety. The second is dependability, in third place are structure and clarity, fourth is the meaning of the work, and lastly, the members of the team have to fundamentally believe that the work they do matters.

Mentioned in this Episode:

“Exploring Psychological Safety and Danger with Ola Tunde”
“Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety,” by Timothy R. Clark
“Research: To Excel, Diverse Teams Need Psychological Safety,” Henrik Bresman and Amy C. Edmondson
“The five keys to a successful Google team,” by Julia Rozovsky
“8 ways to create psychological safety in the workplace,” by Greg Barnett, Ph.D.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip Heath
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, by Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, and Kerry Patterson
Multiple Explanation: A Consider-an-Alternative Strategy for Debiasing Judgements, Edward R. Hirt and Keith D. Markman

Transcript [This transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate in its depiction of the English language or rules of grammar.]

Intro [00:03]: Welcome to Agile Coaches’ Corner by AgileThought the podcast for practitioners and leaders seeking advice to refine the way they work and pave the path to better outcomes. Now here’s your host coach and, agile expert, Dan Neumann.

Dan Neumann [00:17]: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast. I’m your host Dan Neumann. And like every episode, I just want to take a moment to really appreciate you as a listener of this podcast. Thanks for taking the time out of your day and spending a little bit of it with me. And what’s typically a fellow companion here for AgileThought on this podcast. Really appreciate the listenership and appreciate the engagement. Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments that you might have for me to podcast@agilethought.com. Again, thank you very much. Today’s exploration is going to be on the topic of psychological safety. I’ve touched on this in the past with one of my colleagues with Tunde. We explored psychological safety, and we’re going to do a little bit of a deeper dive into that today. There have been a couple articles that caught my eye from the Harvard Business Review.

Dan Neumann [01:15]: One of them was titled “Research: To Excel, Diverse Teams Need Psychological Safety.” And then there was also an article called “Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety.” That article was by a gentleman named Timothy Clark and the former article was co-authored here by Hendrick Bresman and Amy Edmondson, both professors. And so we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into that, as well as share some specific ways that you might bring psychological safety to your team. So, first of all, what is psychological safety, anyway? It’s a shared belief that team members will not be rejected or embarrassed for speaking up with their ideas, questions, or concerns. On its face, it seems like it’s a pretty sense kind of thing. Why would you speak up if you risk embarrassment? Why would you ask a question if you think everybody’s going to look at you and think “idiot, how could they not know that?”

Dan Neumann [02:19]: Or if you have a concern and you’re worried that you might be the only person with that concern and that nobody else would share it and that you’re going to be ridiculed for it. So psychological safety seems on its face to be a very important facet of work. What I really like about the article that is authored by Bresman and Edmondson is that they have research from the field of medicine, with pharmaceutical teams. And what they’re looking at is kind of the notion that diversity on a team is going to get you a better outcome. In their research I think they said they have 62 different teams somewhere in that range that they worked with. And they looked at the correlation between diversity and psychological safety. So imagine if you will, you come into a diverse team, people would expect that that team is going to have better outcomes, that they’re going to have better ideas, that what they produce will be more revolutionary than teams that are less diverse.

Dan Neumann [03:31]: Because their field is medicine, they’re dealing with things like external partners, meeting tight deadlines. They also identify developing drugs that have to meet highly regulatory standards or a high standard for regulatory compliance of safety and efficacy. To me, that sounded really familiar from a software development standpoint. External partners are typically involved. There’s almost always a tight deadline. And, if you’re a financial institution, you obviously have compliance needs. If you’re producing software for healthcare, there are compliance needs. No matter what you’re writing, it has to work. It has to be received well. If you’re releasing it to the public market, your software better work. There’s a lot of downsides to violating any of those expectations. The challenge then becomes one of what happens if people aren’t feeling like they can bring up their concerns and their new ideas. From the research of Bresman and Edmondson, what they actually found was to me, a surprise. They found that diverse teams actually tend to be a little bit lower performing than more homogenous teams.

Dan Neumann [04:52]: So teams that lack diversity across the board tended to outperform groups that had higher levels of diversity. But there was a really interesting caveat to that. Then they differentiated diverse teams or highly diverse teams. And they split that into highly diverse teams that had high psychological safety and highly diverse teams that did not have psychological safety. And what they found was that the highly diverse teams with a high degree of psychological safety outperformed to a meaningful degree, not just highly diverse teams lacking psychological safety, but they also outperformed low diversity teams regardless of the psychological safety level of those more homogenous teams. So that’s a lot of words in there. I think what I’d highlight is if you can master psychological safety and put together a diverse team with that psychological safety, there’s a lot of advantages to be had from that.

Dan Neumann [06:03]: I know there’s a lot that I just shared with you as part of that last minute or so. We will put a link to the article that was authored by Bresman and Edmondson. That will be in the show notes that’s agilethought.com/podcast. So I will encourage you to hop out there, click through to the reference document, and you’ll have a lot more detail behind what I’m sharing with you here. I want to come back to the Edmondson article in a little bit and take a moment to go back to the article I met mentioned from Timothy Clark about agile doesn’t work without psychological safety. The article that Timothy Clark authored, he anchors around the conversation and uses the term a “dialogic process,” really looking at how teams harness intellectual friction, how they talk about their interdependent work. And again, he brings up the concern that if there is a lack of psychological safety, individuals are going to censor each other or resort to self-censoring behavior which is not going to bring forward a highly collaborative environment.

Dan Neumann [07:17]: He states that high psychological safety elicits a performance response with innovation as the goal, whereas low psychological safety elicits a fear response with survival as the goal. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in those teams where sometimes you just feel like your goal is to survive, not necessarily to really be innovative. So Clark goes on to frame agile as a culture implementation and not one of doing the practices. You do, the Standup, you do the Sprint Review, you have a Kanban board with some sticky notes that move left to right across it, et cetera, et cetera. What we’re really looking at is the values and principles of agility. And if you’re a S Scrum team looking at the and principles of that Scrum team. Do you have the ability to really bring forward those values of commitment and courage, focus, openness, and respect.

Dan Neumann [08:11]: When you start to think about an agile culture Clark says “small and seemingly insignificant acts of disrespect, rudeness and indifferent can push a team back into withdrawal and personal risk management.” So think about that when you are on a team and you feel disrespected, are you going to be very willing to go forward and share your ideas? Probably not! But we’re not perfect either. We’re all humans. And we will have at times instances where we might disrespect somebody where we are rude or where we do exhibit indifference, whether intentionally or not it’s going to happen. So I would encourage you as you’re with your team, when you see “bright spots” where psychological safety is fostered, and I steal that term bright spots from chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch about making change easy. When you see those bright spots, those behaviors you want, make sure to highlight those when you do ultimately step in it and you violate somebody’s psychological safety, do what you can to quickly repair that breach. Own up to the fact that yep, you were not at your finest moment at that point,

Dan Neumann [09:28]: and you did something that was detrimental to the other person. I think at that point, it’s a process of doing that repair, striving to do better and acknowledging to the other person that you did breach their boundaries, their right to have psychological safety. I’ll put a link to the Clark article in the show notes. He goes on to describe four steps you might take with your agile team or with your Scrum team in order to continue to foster psychological safety. I’ll just read the titles here, but there’s a lot of nice detail in this article. So he suggests to develop document and display vulnerable behaviors and response pairings. So when somebody exhibits a vulnerable behavior, what is the response that’s expected? Focus on a behavior during each Scrum and practice cultural accountability is his second step. The third one is to formally evaluate your dialogic process in the sprint retrospective and admittedly Clark uses some ten cent words in that. So I will again, encourage you to go grab those details and we’ll link to the article off AgileThought.com/podcast show notes, and then to conclude your Scrum with questions and reflections. And I believe here, he’s actually talking about Sprints, not your daily Scrum. So look for ways to your psychological safety within your team

Commercial [11:03]: Have a topic you want us to tackle, send an email to podcast@agilethought.com or tweet it with a hashtag AgileThought podcast.

Dan Neumann [11:12]: Kind of going back to the, the Edmondson article. They have some really interesting ways in here of fostering psychological safety.

Dan Neumann [11:22]: I think it’s easy for us to get stuck in having meetings that are really about deciding things and about finding root causes, which can feel a lot like blame. And blame is one of those behaviors that will destroy psychological safety. Their suggestion is to really frame meetings as opportunities for information sharing. It made me think back to the book, Crucial Conversations by Patterson and several co-authors where Patterson describes having a “shared pool of meaning.” And what that means is our goal isn’t necessarily to decide or to drive hard to an outcome or to win. But our goal is to make sure that we are contributing to a shared pool of meaning. So if you’re a Scrum master and you’re listening to this podcast, you can really put some intentional thought into facilitating a structure to share and to bring forward those new ideas. One of the techniques that I’m a fan of is using silent writing and creating sticky notes.

Dan Neumann [12:32]: So whatever the topic is you’re exploring, you could ask people to take a few minutes to write down what they have to contribute, share it on a Miro or a Mural board, since we are in the land of remote collaboration work right now, and then to work through that conversation. And of course, people are going to have different perspectives, different opinions, and we need to be sure to frame those differences as a source of value. We as humans have a bias for confirmation. We tend to want to find information that supports our view. We tend to view people who share our view more favorably than those that don’t. And for those interested in cognitive bias, there’s a bias called “my side bias”. I’ll encourage you to really look for ways to shake up that bias for finding information. There’s a really interesting technique called multiple explanation scenario where the problem is once we envision a future, once we state it, we believe that future is more likely to happen. With a multiple explanation scenario,

Dan Neumann [13:48]: what has been found is that you can describe additional scenarios that might also be the future, and that will tend to un-anchor you from the one future you had envisioned. So, if you had envisioned finishing a software product by, you know, the end of the year, that will become something that people tend to get focused on and anchor on. Now to un-anchor that, you ask people to think of different scenarios that might become the reality that would cause you to be done early. What might happen that would allow us to finish at the third quarter instead of the end of the year? What are some scenarios that might happen that would cause us to finish six months late? Three months late? Just the act of going through the mental exercise of thinking of all those different scenarios brings you to the point where you have different frames and you will get unanchored. As a facilitator, or even as a team member of one of these different meetings where you’re seeking to add information,

Dan Neumann [14:58]: it’s really important to focus on inquiry. And there’s a very specific type of inquiry. So don’t focus on evaluation, meaning I’m asking to decide if what you’re going to tell me is good or bad. But really focus more on seeking information. So let me give you an example. Seeking information will be looking for new context. So it might sound like: “Tell me more about…,” And you fill in the blank with whatever that person was talking. That’s very different than evaluation question. That sounds a lot like: “Why? Why did that happen?” Simply asking the question “why” can create a lack of safety and a defensive response in the person hearing that? So you might phrase it very differently in a “tell me more about” as opposed to a “why.” Don’t assume you know. Ask for information. When you’re inquiring strive for open-ended versus closed-ended questions.

Dan Neumann [16:06]: So a closed-ended question is one that can be answered with a single word or doesn’t draw out information. Typically they are like “Will you X, Y, or Z?” The answer is typically yes or no. “Did you A, B, C?” Well, the answer can be yes or no, which is very different than a “what did you…” Well, that leads to a much longer open-ended question. And the last piece I want to share with you as far as psychological safety goes is really about some ways to create psychological safety at work. And Google did a study called Project Aristotle a while back. And of course, who doesn’t want to be like Google? Market share, reputation for innovation, There there’s a lot to be learned from Google. And in their study, which we will also link to in the show notes, they have identified five dynamics to successful teams.

Dan Neumann [17:10]: And the number one factor that Google found was psychological safety as a prerequisite for successful teams or a characteristic of a successful team. Can you take risks on a team without feeling like you are insecure or going to be embarrassed? They then also share four other factors I want to share with you because they may be context for later time, which is dependability sits in number two. Can we count on each other to do highly, to do high quality on time? The third one is structure and clarity. Are the roles, the goals, and the plans clear to everybody? Fourth was the meaning of the work. Are we working on something that is really important to each of us individually as team members? And then lastly, do we fundamentally believe the work we are doing matters, which is the impact of the work. If you don’t have psychological safety, you can’t point out when somebody is maybe not being as dependable as the team would need. You can’t ask about the clarity of the goals and the roles

Dan Neumann [18:22]: You keep it to yourself that the work is maybe not that meaningful, or that you’re struggling to make the connection to your meaning, and that you are unclear about the impact of the work that you’re having. So I thought that was a really powerful set of dynamics and where psychological safety underlies those. And lastly, I will put a link to another article on psychological safety, eight ways to create psychological safety in the workplace. And that article comes from an organization called PI the Productivity Index, where that organization’s mission is to look for ways to impact organizational behavior. So there’s eight real specific takeaways in there. Psychological safety isn’t a simple fix. It’s something, however, that there’s a lot of research to back up as being a critical factor in team performance, especially if you want to harness the benefits that come from having a diverse team. So if you want to have the innovation that comes with diversity, if you want to have the risk mitigation that comes from diversity, you’re going to have to solve the psychological safety problem, because that is what enables diverse teams to be effective. So with that, I would love your questions on where you might like to go deeper on psychological safety. You can email podcast@agilethought.com and I look forward to hearing from you. Until next time!

Outro[19:57]: This has been the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast brought to you by AgileThought. The views, opinions and information expressed in this podcast are solely those of the hosts and the guests, and do not necessarily represent those of AgileThought. Get the show notes and other helpful tips for this episode and other episodes@agilethought.com/podcast.

Speakers

Dan Neumann

Principal Enterprise Coach

Dan Neuman is the Director of the US Transformation and Coaching practice in the Agility guild. He coaches organizations to transform the way they work to achieve their desired business outcomes.

With more than 25 years of experience, Dan Neumann is an experienced Agile Coach with a deep knowledge of Agility at the team and organizational levels. He focuses on achieving business outcomes by shifting both mindset and practices, resulting in a disciplined, yet practical approach to solving problems.

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Podcast Ep. 176: Psychological Safety: The Key to Successful Teams with Dan Neumann

Intro [00:03]

Welcome to Agile Coaches’ Corner by AgileThought the podcast for practitioners and leaders seeking advice to refine the way they work and pave the path to better outcomes. Now here’s your host coach and, agile expert, Dan Neumann.

Dan Neumann [00:17]

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast. I’m your host Dan Neumann. And like every episode, I just want to take a moment to really appreciate you as a listener of this podcast. Thanks for taking the time out of your day and spending a little bit of it with me. And what’s typically a fellow companion here for AgileThought on this podcast. Really appreciate the listenership and appreciate the engagement. Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments that you might have for me to podcast@agilethought.com. Again, thank you very much. Today’s exploration is going to be on the topic of psychological safety. I’ve touched on this in the past with one of my colleagues with Tunde. We explored psychological safety, and we’re going to do a little bit of a deeper dive into that today. There have been a couple articles that caught my eye from the Harvard Business Review.

Dan Neumann [01:15]

One of them was titled “Research: To Excel, Diverse Teams Need Psychological Safety.” And then there was also an article called “Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety.” That article was by a gentleman named Timothy Clark and the former article was co-authored here by Hendrick Bresman and Amy Edmondson, both professors. And so we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into that, as well as share some specific ways that you might bring psychological safety to your team. So, first of all, what is psychological safety, anyway? It’s a shared belief that team members will not be rejected or embarrassed for speaking up with their ideas, questions, or concerns. On its face, it seems like it’s a pretty sense kind of thing. Why would you speak up if you risk embarrassment? Why would you ask a question if you think everybody’s going to look at you and think “idiot, how could they not know that?”

Dan Neumann [02:19]

Or if you have a concern and you’re worried that you might be the only person with that concern and that nobody else would share it and that you’re going to be ridiculed for it. So psychological safety seems on its face to be a very important facet of work. What I really like about the article that is authored by Bresman and Edmondson is that they have research from the field of medicine, with pharmaceutical teams. And what they’re looking at is kind of the notion that diversity on a team is going to get you a better outcome. In their research I think they said they have 62 different teams somewhere in that range that they worked with. And they looked at the correlation between diversity and psychological safety. So imagine if you will, you come into a diverse team, people would expect that that team is going to have better outcomes, that they’re going to have better ideas, that what they produce will be more revolutionary than teams that are less diverse.

Dan Neumann [03:31]

Because their field is medicine, they’re dealing with things like external partners, meeting tight deadlines. They also identify developing drugs that have to meet highly regulatory standards or a high standard for regulatory compliance of safety and efficacy. To me, that sounded really familiar from a software development standpoint. External partners are typically involved. There’s almost always a tight deadline. And, if you’re a financial institution, you obviously have compliance needs. If you’re producing software for healthcare, there are compliance needs. No matter what you’re writing, it has to work. It has to be received well. If you’re releasing it to the public market, your software better work. There’s a lot of downsides to violating any of those expectations. The challenge then becomes one of what happens if people aren’t feeling like they can bring up their concerns and their new ideas. From the research of Bresman and Edmondson, what they actually found was to me, a surprise. They found that diverse teams actually tend to be a little bit lower performing than more homogenous teams.

Dan Neumann [04:52]

So teams that lack diversity across the board tended to outperform groups that had higher levels of diversity. But there was a really interesting caveat to that. Then they differentiated diverse teams or highly diverse teams. And they split that into highly diverse teams that had high psychological safety and highly diverse teams that did not have psychological safety. And what they found was that the highly diverse teams with a high degree of psychological safety outperformed to a meaningful degree, not just highly diverse teams lacking psychological safety, but they also outperformed low diversity teams regardless of the psychological safety level of those more homogenous teams. So that’s a lot of words in there. I think what I’d highlight is if you can master psychological safety and put together a diverse team with that psychological safety, there’s a lot of advantages to be had from that.

Dan Neumann [06:03]

I know there’s a lot that I just shared with you as part of that last minute or so. We will put a link to the article that was authored by Bresman and Edmondson. That will be in the show notes that’s agilethought.com/podcast. So I will encourage you to hop out there, click through to the reference document, and you’ll have a lot more detail behind what I’m sharing with you here. I want to come back to the Edmondson article in a little bit and take a moment to go back to the article I met mentioned from Timothy Clark about agile doesn’t work without psychological safety. The article that Timothy Clark authored, he anchors around the conversation and uses the term a “dialogic process,” really looking at how teams harness intellectual friction, how they talk about their interdependent work. And again, he brings up the concern that if there is a lack of psychological safety, individuals are going to censor each other or resort to self-censoring behavior which is not going to bring forward a highly collaborative environment.

Dan Neumann [07:17]

He states that high psychological safety elicits a performance response with innovation as the goal, whereas low psychological safety elicits a fear response with survival as the goal. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in those teams where sometimes you just feel like your goal is to survive, not necessarily to really be innovative. So Clark goes on to frame agile as a culture implementation and not one of doing the practices. You do, the Standup, you do the Sprint Review, you have a Kanban board with some sticky notes that move left to right across it, et cetera, et cetera. What we’re really looking at is the values and principles of agility. And if you’re a S Scrum team looking at the and principles of that Scrum team. Do you have the ability to really bring forward those values of commitment and courage, focus, openness, and respect.

Dan Neumann [08:11]

When you start to think about an agile culture Clark says “small and seemingly insignificant acts of disrespect, rudeness and indifferent can push a team back into withdrawal and personal risk management.” So think about that when you are on a team and you feel disrespected, are you going to be very willing to go forward and share your ideas? Probably not! But we’re not perfect either. We’re all humans. And we will have at times instances where we might disrespect somebody where we are rude or where we do exhibit indifference, whether intentionally or not it’s going to happen. So I would encourage you as you’re with your team, when you see “bright spots” where psychological safety is fostered, and I steal that term bright spots from chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch about making change easy. When you see those bright spots, those behaviors you want, make sure to highlight those when you do ultimately step in it and you violate somebody’s psychological safety, do what you can to quickly repair that breach. Own up to the fact that yep, you were not at your finest moment at that point,

Dan Neumann [09:28]

and you did something that was detrimental to the other person. I think at that point, it’s a process of doing that repair, striving to do better and acknowledging to the other person that you did breach their boundaries, their right to have psychological safety. I’ll put a link to the Clark article in the show notes. He goes on to describe four steps you might take with your agile team or with your Scrum team in order to continue to foster psychological safety. I’ll just read the titles here, but there’s a lot of nice detail in this article. So he suggests to develop document and display vulnerable behaviors and response pairings. So when somebody exhibits a vulnerable behavior, what is the response that’s expected? Focus on a behavior during each Scrum and practice cultural accountability is his second step. The third one is to formally evaluate your dialogic process in the sprint retrospective and admittedly Clark uses some ten cent words in that. So I will again, encourage you to go grab those details and we’ll link to the article off AgileThought.com/podcast show notes, and then to conclude your Scrum with questions and reflections. And I believe here, he’s actually talking about Sprints, not your daily Scrum. So look for ways to your psychological safety within your team

Commercial [11:03]

Have a topic you want us to tackle, send an email to podcast@agilethought.com or tweet it with a hashtag AgileThought podcast.

Dan Neumann [11:12]

Kind of going back to the, the Edmondson article. They have some really interesting ways in here of fostering psychological safety.

Dan Neumann [11:22]

I think it’s easy for us to get stuck in having meetings that are really about deciding things and about finding root causes, which can feel a lot like blame. And blame is one of those behaviors that will destroy psychological safety. Their suggestion is to really frame meetings as opportunities for information sharing. It made me think back to the book, Crucial Conversations by Patterson and several co-authors where Patterson describes having a “shared pool of meaning.” And what that means is our goal isn’t necessarily to decide or to drive hard to an outcome or to win. But our goal is to make sure that we are contributing to a shared pool of meaning. So if you’re a Scrum master and you’re listening to this podcast, you can really put some intentional thought into facilitating a structure to share and to bring forward those new ideas. One of the techniques that I’m a fan of is using silent writing and creating sticky notes.

Dan Neumann [12:32]

So whatever the topic is you’re exploring, you could ask people to take a few minutes to write down what they have to contribute, share it on a Miro or a Mural board, since we are in the land of remote collaboration work right now, and then to work through that conversation. And of course, people are going to have different perspectives, different opinions, and we need to be sure to frame those differences as a source of value. We as humans have a bias for confirmation. We tend to want to find information that supports our view. We tend to view people who share our view more favorably than those that don’t. And for those interested in cognitive bias, there’s a bias called “my side bias”. I’ll encourage you to really look for ways to shake up that bias for finding information. There’s a really interesting technique called multiple explanation scenario where the problem is once we envision a future, once we state it, we believe that future is more likely to happen. With a multiple explanation scenario,

Dan Neumann [13:48]

what has been found is that you can describe additional scenarios that might also be the future, and that will tend to un-anchor you from the one future you had envisioned. So, if you had envisioned finishing a software product by, you know, the end of the year, that will become something that people tend to get focused on and anchor on. Now to un-anchor that, you ask people to think of different scenarios that might become the reality that would cause you to be done early. What might happen that would allow us to finish at the third quarter instead of the end of the year? What are some scenarios that might happen that would cause us to finish six months late? Three months late? Just the act of going through the mental exercise of thinking of all those different scenarios brings you to the point where you have different frames and you will get unanchored. As a facilitator, or even as a team member of one of these different meetings where you’re seeking to add information,

Dan Neumann [14:58]

it’s really important to focus on inquiry. And there’s a very specific type of inquiry. So don’t focus on evaluation, meaning I’m asking to decide if what you’re going to tell me is good or bad. But really focus more on seeking information. So let me give you an example. Seeking information will be looking for new context. So it might sound like: “Tell me more about…,” And you fill in the blank with whatever that person was talking. That’s very different than evaluation question. That sounds a lot like: “Why? Why did that happen?” Simply asking the question “why” can create a lack of safety and a defensive response in the person hearing that? So you might phrase it very differently in a “tell me more about” as opposed to a “why.” Don’t assume you know. Ask for information. When you’re inquiring strive for open-ended versus closed-ended questions.

Dan Neumann [16:06]

So a closed-ended question is one that can be answered with a single word or doesn’t draw out information. Typically they are like “Will you X, Y, or Z?” The answer is typically yes or no. “Did you A, B, C?” Well, the answer can be yes or no, which is very different than a “what did you…” Well, that leads to a much longer open-ended question. And the last piece I want to share with you as far as psychological safety goes is really about some ways to create psychological safety at work. And Google did a study called Project Aristotle a while back. And of course, who doesn’t want to be like Google? Market share, reputation for innovation, There there’s a lot to be learned from Google. And in their study, which we will also link to in the show notes, they have identified five dynamics to successful teams.

Dan Neumann [17:10]

And the number one factor that Google found was psychological safety as a prerequisite for successful teams or a characteristic of a successful team. Can you take risks on a team without feeling like you are insecure or going to be embarrassed? They then also share four other factors I want to share with you because they may be context for later time, which is dependability sits in number two. Can we count on each other to do highly, to do high quality on time? The third one is structure and clarity. Are the roles, the goals, and the plans clear to everybody? Fourth was the meaning of the work. Are we working on something that is really important to each of us individually as team members? And then lastly, do we fundamentally believe the work we are doing matters, which is the impact of the work. If you don’t have psychological safety, you can’t point out when somebody is maybe not being as dependable as the team would need. You can’t ask about the clarity of the goals and the roles

Dan Neumann [18:22]

You keep it to yourself that the work is maybe not that meaningful, or that you’re struggling to make the connection to your meaning, and that you are unclear about the impact of the work that you’re having. So I thought that was a really powerful set of dynamics and where psychological safety underlies those. And lastly, I will put a link to another article on psychological safety, eight ways to create psychological safety in the workplace. And that article comes from an organization called PI the Productivity Index, where that organization’s mission is to look for ways to impact organizational behavior. So there’s eight real specific takeaways in there. Psychological safety isn’t a simple fix. It’s something, however, that there’s a lot of research to back up as being a critical factor in team performance, especially if you want to harness the benefits that come from having a diverse team. So if you want to have the innovation that comes with diversity, if you want to have the risk mitigation that comes from diversity, you’re going to have to solve the psychological safety problem, because that is what enables diverse teams to be effective. So with that, I would love your questions on where you might like to go deeper on psychological safety. You can email podcast@agilethought.com and I look forward to hearing from you. Until next time!

Outro[19:57]

This has been the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast brought to you by AgileThought. The views, opinions and information expressed in this podcast are solely those of the hosts and the guests, and do not necessarily represent those of AgileThought. Get the show notes and other helpful tips for this episode and other episodes@agilethought.com/podcast.

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