Tool Compendium
Welcome to your toolbox of tools for working with psychological safety!
This tool compendium was designed to help teams begin their journey of working with psychological safety, and contains tools to help them do so. Like most tools, this compendium will not magically grant psychological safety to your team. However, it might help you start a valuable conversation in your team.
Additionally, no tool works for all applications. Making changes to how your team uses the tools presented here is encouraged - reflecting on what works for your team is often more useful than following a framework ceremoniously. With that said, let's get started!
This compendium will cover:
If you want the best experience, I recommend reading the Background section before getting into the tools themselves.
If you're already familiar with Psychological Safety and want to dive straight into it, feel free to skip ahead to Using the Compendium.
This compendium was made by Mikkel Agerlin Christensen, and is licensed for non-commercial use under Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0.
If you wish to use this compendium for commercial purposes, please contact me at [email protected].
Background
This section will provide you with an introduction to Psychological Safety, and why it's important for your team.
What is Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety describes an aspect of group culture, which exists in all human interaction, whether you're giving a presentation, working in a team meeting, or calling your mom on the phone.
The term has a history dating back to the 50s, but was popularized in the 2000s by Amy Edmondson, a Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard. Her introduction to the subject can be explored by using the very first tool, Laying the Foundation. She also wrote a fantastic book on the subject.
Psychological safety can be defined as:
A belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes within a group.
A group with high psychological safety is one wherein the group members feel safe to experiment and learn, to make mistakes, and to speak openly and address the hard questions.
The word belief is important - most people don't even get to the "punished" or "humiliated" part. Instead, we hold back and avoid it. This works remarkably well. After all, it's pretty safe to stay silent most of the time. But this might not be the best way to get the most out of your team.
The most common reason people hold back is impression management; the little voice we all have running in our heads which tells us not to say something that might make us look negative, incompetent, intrusive or ignorant.
Psychological safety can help your team reduce time and energy spent on impression management, so you can spend it on moving forward instead.
Why Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety has been proven to be one the main predictors of team efficiency in innovative and complex environments. In fact, Google's project Aristotle found it to be the most important of their 5 key factors of effective teams in a study of over 100 international software teams.
Psychological safety is an enabler of candor, and helps your team speak openly, experiment, and learn from mistakes, without holding themselves back. However, feeling comfortable and never challenging each other is not the goal. In fact, good psychological safety should enable your team to ask the hard questions and to have the tough but necessary conversations.
The end goal of psychological safety should be excellence, not comfort. This can be achieved because good psychological safety gets everyone's brains and voices in the game, giving your team the highest potential for valuable outcomes.
What is a "Tool"?
Below you can find a list of tools for working with psychological safety. Your team can pick up these tools and use them for working with psychological safety as part of their daily work.
A tool describes an activity which your team can integrate into your practice, the motivation for performing it, as well as the duration and frequency with which the activity should be performed. Some tools are designed to be used daily, while others can be used once per iteration, such as a Sprint or a work week, or ad-hoc throughout the iteration.
Finally, each tool lists the intended outcome of using the tool, and provides an example of the tool in use.
Note that each tool comes with a numerical indicator (1 to 3) of "required comfort with dissent". This indicates the level of comfort with dissent your team should have to get the most out of the tool. Comfort with dissent is hard to measure, but you can use the indicators to get a sense of which tools might be a good fit for your team.
Why use Tools for Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety is nothing new. In fact, most people experience it every day of their work life, perhaps unknowingly.
However, very few teams actively discuss it - it's often an invisible phenomenon. This is where tools come in. By having your team agree to use a tool, you acknowledge the need for discussing this invisble but ever-present phenomenon in an actionable way, and provide your team with a prompt to engage with that discussion.
Most teams that have tried this toolbox have stated that they were "pretty good" before using it, and that they already had a good culture of psychological safety. After using these tools, 81% of team members stated that they had reflected on things which their team did normally discuss during tool usage.
Who are the Tools for?
The list of tools provided below is intended for use by teams of 3-10 people, who are interested in working towards a more psychologically safe culture within their team. The team's interest is an important point - psychological safety cannot be a strategic point decreed by management, it must be desired within the team itself. It's a collaborative process!
The tools are designed to be carried out by one team at a time, but feel free to share your experiences across teams.
For the best outcome, the tools selected by your team should be utilized by every person that is considered a member of the team, regardless of position or role within the team.
Using the Compendium
This compendium consists of 9 tools, which all outline various ways in which your team can work with psychological safety.
Although any tool can be used by any team, the tools differ slightly in design, and some will be a better match for your team than others.
This quick reference sheet will help you get an overview of the tools, and help you decide which ones will be best suited for your team.
Note that while some tools might mention physical artifacts (such as post-its), all tools were designed with online meetings in mind, and any digital replacement will work. In general, adapting a tool in ways that make it function better in your context is highly encouraged.
Reading the Tool Sheets
Each tool is presented on a single page, with an example of the tool in use on the following page. A tool page has 5 main elements, describing how to implement them:
- a motivation for when to use the tool
- prerequisites (if any)
- a description of the activity to be performed
- a purpose statement
- expected outcome
Additionally, different tools vary along four dimensions:
- Setting (group session/individual)
- Duration
- Frequency of use
- Required comfort with dissent (see What is a "Tool"?)
Use this information to pick a set of tools for your team to try, which works in your given context.
Quick Start
The full list of tools will follow below. To get started, pick 2-3 tools and try them out in your team. Feel free to pick the ones that speak to you - a tool is most succesful if it's used by a team that is excited to try it out.
If you are new to working with psychological safety, and want a quick start, the following tools are a good (and safe) starting point:
If you want to further deepen your work with psychological safety, feel free to dive into the other tools. There is no minimum or maximum amount of tools that your team can use at a given time, so feel free to pick the setup that fits your team the best!
And perhaps most importantly; have fun!
List of tools
This compendium contains the following tools:
| Tool Name | Setting 👥 | Duration 🕒 | Frequency 🔄 | Required Comfort 🛋️ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Laying the Foundation | Group | 20min | Once | 1 |
| What's it to me? | Individual | 10min | Iteratively | 1 |
| Checking In | Group | 15min | Iteratively | 2 |
| Celebrating Mistakes | Individual | 10min | As occurs | 2 |
| Presenting the Journey | Group | 15min | Iteratively | 2 |
| Three Questions | Group | 5min + 5min/person | Iteratively | 1 |
| Acting on Concerns | Group | 20min | Iteratively | 1 |
| The Way Things Are | Group | 10min + 3min/person | Iteratively | 1 |
| Meeting from Hell | Group | 45min | Once | 3 |