Example: What's it to me?

Starting Out

Finance Corp’s customer success 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 and have even happier customers in the future. They have chosen to adopt the tool “What's it to me?”.

Before starting, Charlie has scheduled a morning meeting in which they will use the tool Laying the Foundation, so that everyone has been introduced to the subject. After this session, Charlie shares the description of “What's it to me" with the team. The team agrees to try it out for a week, and then discuss their experiences at the next meeting.

At 5:00, Alice is about to head home. She picks up a post-it, and thinks about her day. Earlier, she had overheard Bob and Dave have a conversation about how to best handle a tricky customer. Alice has not been working at Finance Corp as long as Bob and Dave, but she remembers having a similar customer at her previous job. She hesitates, but decides to join the conversation, offering her idea based on her previous experience. Alice writes this experience down, noting how she was hesitant in the moment, but managed to overcome her feeling of not wanting to be intrusive.

Fifteen minutes earlier, Eve jotted down some notes on her computer, describing her experience of an earlier meeting with Charlie. Herein, Eve had refrained from asking a clarifying question when Charlie spoke, because she had felt that she should have known the answer already. She later spent half an hour frantically Googling for answers, trying to figure out what Charlie had meant, before caving and asking him anyway. Charlie was happy to reply, and Eve felt a little silly for wasting those 30 minutes. She saves her note next to the one from the day before, and goes home.

After a week, the team meets up, and discusses their experiences, finding common themes in their notes.