Summary
The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety — the shared belief that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and collaboration — just the types of behavior that lead to successful products and services. Creating psychological safety in a workplace - although at times a challenge - can be done. This interactive talk will present the key action steps that DesignOps professionals can immediately take to boost psychological safety in their design teams and create psychological safety between cross-functional teams.
Key Insights
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Psychological safety is a neurophysiological state in the autonomic nervous system where individuals feel connected and calm, enabling optimal cognitive function.
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The autonomic nervous system has three states: safe, mobilized (fight or flight), and immobilized (shutdown), through which individuals move constantly.
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Triggers in the workplace, such as unexpected meetings or aggressive behavior, push people down the autonomic ladder and reduce their thinking capacity.
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Connection with others is key to psychological safety and helps people co-regulate to move back up to a safe state.
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Google’s Project Aristotle found psychological safety to be the number one factor in team effectiveness, outweighing individual traits or skills.
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Trust is relational and context-dependent, but cannot exist without some level of psychological safety, which is neurobiological.
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Teams can create psychological safety by collaboratively identifying specific behaviors that make members feel safe and converting these into explicit, observable agreements.
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Protections (e.g., against retaliation) are needed alongside connection for marginalized people to safely participate in teams.
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Rebuilding trust after leadership missteps requires vulnerability, accountability, and collective communication from the team.
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Remote work amplifies existing cultural dynamics; strong psychological safety cultures can adapt remotely while toxic cultures worsen.
Notable Quotes
"Safety is a state of our nervous system, specifically the autonomic nervous system being in a safe state."
"The autonomic nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a tiger and an angry email, it just feels danger."
"If I make a mistake on our team, it’s not going to be held against me or disconnect me from the group."
"Connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued."
"When we don’t feel safe, our thinking brain, the neocortex, gets shut down and our operating IQ drops by half or more."
"People of color often face additional triggers entering meetings with predominantly white participants; turning cameras on simultaneously reduces this threat."
"Psychological safety is the foundation to creating anything else you want in your organization or team culture."
"If the leader doesn’t realize their impact on team safety, the team should collectively communicate this, not rely on one individual."
"We want to change how people interact with each other from transactional to connected."
"Remote work didn’t create psychological safety or toxicity; it just amplified what was already there."
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