Organisational behaviour
Amy Edmondson
b. 1959
Psychological safety is the condition under which a group can stay with an uncomfortable fact long enough to learn from it.
Read alongside: Sense · Shape
- Start with
- The Fearless Organization (2018)
- Where they resist the book
- The term has been diluted into comfort. Edmondson's version raises the standard of candour rather than lowering it.
Works worth the time
The Fearless Organization · 2018
Psychological safety stated as a standard of candour rather than a standard of comfort.
Publisher: Wiley ↗Read further
- Harvard Business School: Amy C. Edmondson ↗
Harvard Business School
Where Edmondson appears
Threat narrows the field it most needs open.
Bion describes groups fleeing the work by fighting, fleeing, or waiting for a saviour. Edmondson's psychological safety is the condition under which a group can stay with an uncomfortable fact long enough to learn from it. Kegan's immunity to change explains why the leader's own composure is so often the constraint.
Judgement is an organisational capability, not a personal trait.
The learning organisation is easy to caricature and hard to build. What survives the caricature is concrete: forums where disconfirming information travels upward without cost, and where the reflective conversation is scheduled rather than hoped for.