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Example: Acting on Concerns

Building the house before building the roof

MedTech Corp’s UX team consists of Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave and Eve. They have agreed to start working with psychological safety, in the hopes that it can help their team grow and develop even better user experiences in the future. They have chosen to adopt the tool “Acting on Concerns”, and have decided to conduct it as a bi-weekly meeting as part of designing and developing the user experience for their new online patient platform. The team meets online where Eve introduces the tool, and asks everyone to take five minutes to write down any concern they could think of, related to the upcoming project. She states that a concern can be related to anything in the workplace, whether it be the product, the process or the work environment.

The team brainstorms individually for five minutes, putting their concerns on post-its on their digital whiteboard. After the five minutes have concluded, Eve draws two columns on the whiteboard, and labels them “things we can change” and “things we cannot change”. She asks the team to place their post-its in the columns they believe they belong to. With the two columns in front of them, Eve hides the “things we cannot change” column, and zooms in on the other column. Eve picks out the first post-it, which says “I am worried that we did not spend enough time on research for the new patient history overview. There are a lot of different patients - the design might not work well for colorblind patients for example.” She reads it aloud, and asks the team for their thoughts. Alice says: “I had not thought about this, but I think I am also worried about that now”. “I think this might be a good place to spend some time. Maybe we could re-use our A-B testing survey with different groups of patients?”, Bob adds. Eve continues down the list of post-its, writing down the team’s suggestions along the way. She finally reviews the list of suggestions with the team, discussing and agreeing on actions points to help alleviate the concerns the team has addressed.

Note: If it's hard to get things off the ground​

Sometimes asking people to voice their concerns can be seem like an overwhelming task. If your team is struggling, it can helpful to prepare a prompting question for the individual brainstorm, based upon what you think your team could be concerned about. Examples could be:

  1. Do you think we have found the best way to solve the problem?
  2. Do you think we will make it in time? Why, why not?
  3. Do you see a clear path to the finish line?