The Case For “PSYCHOLOGICAL UNSAFETY”?

From Psychological Safety and Radical Candour to Radical Development

Firstly, let me be very clear that I am not advocating organisations that use or tolerate fear, where employees are not able to speak up or have to suffer undignified or disrespectful working practices. My argument is more subtle, and applies to organisations that do not willfully abuse positional power or endorse managerial malpractice. So what is the point?

Psychological Safety relates, roughly, to the belief that we won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Which certainly sounds like a good idea. Unsurprisingly, then, “psychological safety” has become a staple and uncontested truth in current debate…

Yet, sometimes when HR colleagues or consultants noisily call for more “safety”, I sense that we are approaching organisational transformation from the wrong angle. Let me explain. Why do we have psychological risks in the workplace in the first place? Most of the psychological risk exists simply because organisation are not an interaction between robots, but an encounter between human beings. Risk is there because employees are not just resources to be molded and disciplined, but subjects of action and responsibility.

So, why do we need safety? Here things get interesting. Beyond those truly abusive cases mentioned above (shame on them!), we really want more safety to enable “engagement” and stimulate the generation of new ideas and perspectives. "Organising" today is not simply about perfectly matching “input” and “output” in stable markets, but about agility, collective learning and growth. In other words, we do not only create businesses to produce and achieve results, but also to enable employees and stakeholders to learn, develop and flourish...

But growth, learning and development are not simply about the absence of risk. They often require tension, conflict, and even crisis. And, hence, we cannot focus only on the establishment of equal rights, or the liberation of (individual) autonomy and freedom from punishment or humiliation, or the increment of choice — but need to also build mutual trust, interdependence and a collective responsibility for “lifting each other up”. Not to mention resources (don’t expect people to contribute if they have no real rights, or participate in the benefits). In a nutshell, we must craft both social and — what Aristotle called ‘koinonia’ — political community. Here, we cannot simply place employee participation into a “market logic” of choice, or a “deontic logic” of rights, and not even a “psychological” logic of safety — but we need to (also) situate it in an “emancipatory” and educational logic of transformation.

In order to support both individual and collective growth, we need to create “holding environments” and “public places”, where people collectively deliberate, and care and take accountability for each other. Where personal needs, ideas and desires are transformed into collective and shared needs, ideas and desires — and where agents of such ideas are themselves transformed through their participation in the practice of community.

This is where I have always found the notion of “radical candour” more interesting than “psychological safety”, because it is focused on a reciprocate call to action, not just an absence of punishment or fear. We provide constructive “radical” feedback, “because we care”, in the context of a common constitutive end — yet, I believe Kim Scott’s concept often focuses too much on just improving organisational performance, and too little on personal and collective growth. (And I hear that her concept has sometimes been abused to condone bullying behaviours by superiors). So, what I think we need is a move towards “radical development” to enable individual and collective flourishing…

In this context, to simply demand risk-free organisations misses the existential fact that all people have their own ways of being. We cannot deny this away, but rather must enable spaces to contain mutual exposure and build relational resilience and “political” maturity and reciprocity. This is not about compromising, but about transforming our inter-personal dialogic ability to co-develop with each other. If we focus human organising on the elimination of risks for the individual, and simply seek to “immunise” ourselves from the necessarily ambiguous exposure to each “other”, we might get more diverse “voices” in a meeting, but we won’t truly construct a space to co-develop both our behaviours and our identities — and there is a real chance that we miss out on much of the aliveness of organisations altogether.

Hence, the real question might not be whether organisational spaces should be absolutely safe or not, but rather what kind of safety is desirable, and at which point our desire for safety becomes counter-productive. In the modern and sometimes superficial debate about “psychological safety” it often becomes a binary “either-or” question in which the opportunity to exercise judgment virtually disappears. But if we unconsciously reify an almost infantile denial of relational risk, and foster individual negative freedom at the cost of collective development — by quickly moving towards top-down rules, behavioural etiquette, D&I programmes, and standards to eliminate safety hazards — rather than inspiring a climate of care, instigating “liberating disciplines” and opening conversations about the “appropriate containing of the appropriate risks”, we might be missing a trick.

In my experience, true transformation is not a central programme or a top-down installation of behavioural norms — it is the slow, frustrating, difficult, and often unpopular change of individual and collective attitudes and behaviours. It is founded on the embracing of relational risks, rather than the avoidance of them. But in the long run this may well be the only sustainable way, since we all know that systems aimed at the total control of what human beings do and think eventually collapse under their own weight, if they have not already been cracked open from the inside before…

Based partly on Gert Biesta’s "The Beautiful Risk of Education"

#transformation #leadership #GoodOrganisation #education #personaldevelopment