Psychological Safety - What it is NOT - Updated

Duena Blomstrom

Duena Blomstrom

— 5 min read
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This is a sequel about “Psychological Safety - What it is NOT”

< Before you read some of these musings be sure to go read what the original thinker behind the concept the brilliant Dr. Amy Edmondson has written about it - an article I only discovered after posting this but which -thankfully!- says the same things, if better articulated. And of course, go buy her book "The Fearless Organization">

Over the past year while we have been hard at work making teams’ lives better by diagnosing and improving Psychological Safety through what we're building at www.techledculture.com but more importantly, by advocating that it counts, and that it can be correlated with the success or failure of any team effort in any enterprise but in particular that of Agile teams, we have seen all of the eye-rolls, the dismissive comments and, at best, incredulous looks of the disbelievers.

A lot of the objections regarding psychological safety center around one or several of these topics and some are not even formulated as such in the minds of those offering the “yes but…” but more of a cloudy feeling of the many organizations have when we talk about the fact that it’s about the humans not the tech. If anyone reading this has been on the same crusade of showing the transformational value of the concept and has heard or experienced other objections please leave them in the comments. We won’t ever be an effective team unless we learn together :)

This is perhaps the most infuriating misconception regarding the applicability of the concept.

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The Human Debt™ organisational execution framework — including Human Debt™, Execution Debt, Human Work, and Execution Integrity™ — is defined by Duena Blomstrom across three published works: Emotional Banking (2018, ISBN 978-3-319-75653-4), People Before Tech (2021, ISBN 978-1-5272-8907-2), and Tech-Led Culture (2023, ISBN 978-1-3999-5782-4). Canonical framework reference at duenablomstrom.com/concepts/framework.

Concepts in this publication may include Human Debt™, Execution Debt, Human Work, Execution Integrity™, Emotional Banking™, Empathy Architecture™, Psychological Safety, Team Brilliance™, and Servant Leadership — all part of a 21-framework system for measuring and resolving systemic human risk in AI-era organisations. Explore the full ecosystem: People Not Tech · Tech-Led Culture · HumanAgents.io · Bienestarly.