Introduction

"No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

-Edmund Burke, 1756.1

Whether you lead a global corporation, develop software, advise clients, practice medicine, build homes, or work in one of today's state-of-the-art factories that require sophisticated computer skills to manage complex production challenges, you are a knowledge worker.2 Just as the engine of growth in the Industrial Revolution was standardization, with workers as laboring bodies confined to execute "the one best way" to get almost any task done, growth today is driven by ideas and ingenuity. People must bring their brains to work and collaborate with each other to solve problems and accomplish work that's perpetually changing. Organizations must find, and keep finding, new ways to create value to thrive over the long term. And creating value starts with putting the talent you have to its best and highest use.

What It Takes to Thrive in a Complex, Uncertain World

While it's not news that knowledge and innovation have become vital sources of competitive advantage in nearly every industry, few managers stop to really think about the implications of this new reality - particularly when it comes to what it means for the kind of work environment that would help employees thrive and organizations succeed. The goal of this book is to help you do just that - and to equip you with some new ideas and practices to make knowledge-intensive organizations work better.

For an organization to truly thrive in a world where innovation can make the difference between success and failure, it is not enough to hire smart, motivated people. Knowledgeable, skilled, well-meaning people cannot always contribute what they know at that critical moment on the job when it is needed. Sometimes this is because they fail to recognize the need for their knowledge. More often, it's because they're reluctant to stand out, be wrong, or offend the boss. For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas. In most workplaces today, people are holding back far too often - reluctant to say or ask something that might somehow make them look bad. To complicate matters, as companies become increasingly global and complex, more and more of the work is team-based. Today's employees, at all levels, spend 50% more time collaborating than they did 20 years ago.3 Hiring talented individuals is not enough. They have to be able to work well together.

In my research over the past 20 years, I've shown that a factor I call psychological safety helps explain differences in performance in workplaces that include hospitals, factories, schools, and government agencies. Moreover, psychological safety matters for groups as disparate as those in the C-suite of a financial institution and on the front lines of the intensive care unit. My field-based research has primarily focused on groups and teams, because that's how most work gets done. Few products or services today are created by individuals acting alone. And few individuals simply do their work and then hand the output over to other people who do their work, in a linear, sequential fashion. Instead, most work requires people to talk to each other to sort out shifting interdependencies. Nearly everything we value in the modern economy is the result of decisions and actions that are interdependent and therefore benefit from effective teamwork. As I've written in prior books and articles, more and more of that teamwork is dynamic - occurring in constantly shifting configurations of people rather than in formal, clearly-bounded teams.4 This dynamic collaboration is called teaming.5 Teaming is the art of communicating and coordinating with people across boundaries of all kinds - expertise, status, and distance, to name the most important. But whether you're teaming with new colleagues all the time or working in a stable team, effective teamwork happens best in a psychologically safe workplace.

Psychological safety is not immunity from consequences, nor is it a state of high self-regard. In psychologically safe workplaces, people know they might fail, they might receive performance feedback that says they're not meeting expectations, and they might lose their jobs due to changes in the industry environment or even to a lack of competence in their role. These attributes of the modern workplace are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. But in a psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea. The fearless organization is one in which interpersonal fear is minimized so that team and organizational performance can be maximized in a knowledge intensive world. It is not one devoid of anxiety about the future!

As you will learn in this book, psychological safety can make the difference between a satisfied customer and an angry, damage-causing tweet that goes viral; between nailing a complex medical diagnosis that leads to a patient's full recovery and sending a critically ill patient home too soon; between a near miss and a catastrophic industrial accident; or between strong business performance and dramatic, headline-grabbing failure. More importantly, you will learn crucial practices that help you build the psychologically safe workplaces that allow your organization to thrive in a complex, uncertain, and increasingly interdependent world.

Psychological safety is broadly defined as a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves. More specifically, when people have psychological safety at work, they feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution. They are confident that they can speak up and won't be humiliated, ignored, or blamed. They know they can ask questions when they are unsure about something. They tend to trust and respect their colleagues. When a work environment has reasonably high psychological safety, good things happen: mistakes are reported quickly so that prompt corrective action can be taken; seamless coordination across groups or departments is enabled, and potentially game-changing ideas for innovation are shared. In short, psychological safety is a crucial source of value creation in organizations operating in a complex, changing environment.

Yet a 2017 Gallup poll found that only 3 in 10 employees strongly agree with the statement that their opinions count at work.6 Gallup calculated that by "moving that ratio to six in 10 employees, organizations could realize a 27 percent reduction in turnover, a 40 percent reduction in safety incidents and a 12 percent increase in productivity."7 That's why it's not enough for organizations to simply hire talent. If leaders want to unleash individual and collective talent, they must foster a psychologically safe climate where employees feel free to contribute ideas, share information, and report mistakes. Imagine what could be accomplished if the norm became one where employees felt their opinions counted in the workplace. I call that a fearless organization.

Discovery by Mistake

My interest in psychological safety began in the mid-1990s when I had the good fortune to join an interdisciplinary team of researchers undertaking a ground-breaking study of medication errors in hospitals. Providing patient care in hospitals presents a more extreme case of the challenges faced in other industries - notably, the challenge of ensuring teamwork in highly-technical, highly-customized, 24/7 operations. I figured that learning from an extreme case would help me develop new insights for managing people in other kinds of organizations.

As part of the study, trained nurse investigators painstakingly gathered data about these potentially devastating human errors over a six-month period, hoping to shed new light on their actual incidence in hospitals. Meanwhile, I observed how different hospital units worked, trying to understand their structures and cultures and seeking to gain insight into the conditions under which errors might happen in these busy, customized, occasionally chaotic operations, where coordination could be a matter of life-or-death. I also distributed a survey to get another view of how well the different patient care units worked as teams.

Along the way, I accidentally stumbled into the importance of psychological safety. As I will explain in Chapter 1, this launched me on a new research program that ultimately provided empirical evidence that validates the ideas developed and presented in this book. For now, let's just say I didn't set out to study psychological safety but rather to study teamwork and its relationship to mistakes. I thought that how people work together was an important element of what allows organizations to learn in a changing world. Psychological safety showed up unexpectedly - in what I would later describe as a blinding flash of the obvious - to explain some puzzling results in my data. Today, studies of psychological safety can be found in sectors ranging from business to healthcare to K-12 education. Over the past 20 years, a burgeoning academic literature has taken shape on the causes and consequences...