Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
Gold
Thursday, September 8, 2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Share the love for this talk
Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
Speakers: Alla Weinberg
Link:

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

  • Safety is a neurobiological state governed by the autonomic nervous system, not just a social feeling.

  • The autonomic nervous system has three states: safe, mobilized (fight/flight), and immobilized (shutdown).

  • Humans constantly move up and down these states throughout the day based on internal and external triggers.

  • Trust is relational and situational, requiring prior safety but distinct from feeling safe.

  • Psychological safety is the strongest predictor of team effectiveness according to Google’s Project Aristotle.

  • When the nervous system is mobilized or immobilized, rational thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration sharply decline.

  • Connection—feeling seen, heard, and valued—is essential to creating and restoring safety within teams.

  • Leadership changes greatly impact psychological safety, either eroding or building team trust and safety.

  • Remote or hybrid work affects psychological safety variably depending on company culture and how connected employees feel.

  • Psychological safety fosters vulnerability, openness, innovation, lower attrition, and better business outcomes.

Notable Quotes

"Safety is a state of our nervous system."

"Our autonomic nervous system is our personal surveillance system, always checking if we feel safe."

"The nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a tiger and an angry email from a manager."

"You can’t have trust if you don’t have some connection with that person."

"Team effectiveness was not at all related to individual traits but to psychological safety."

"If I make a mistake on our team, it’s not going to be held against me."

"Connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued."

"When people don’t feel safe, their IQ drops by half and their vision narrows."

"Leadership heavily influences whether psychological safety is built or eroded in teams."

"Creating psychological safety means creating connection—this can happen quickly and effectively."

Ask the Rosenbot
Leah Buley
Closing Plenary: The Crisis of Digital
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Setting the Table for Dynamic Change
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Jorge Arango
Exploding the Notebook: How to Unlock the Power of Linked Notes (2nd of 3 seminars) (Videoconference)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Sean McKay
Whole Product Thinking: Expanding beyond problem and solution space thinking (Videoconference)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Alexis Lucio
Scaling Accessibility Through Design Systems
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sylvie Abookire
A Civic Designer's Guide to Mindful Conflict Navigation
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Samuel Proulx
Invisible barriers: Why accessible service design can’t be an afterthought
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Kurdin Bazaz
Culture, DIBS & Recruiting
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Llewyn Paine
[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Sarah Williams
A Framework for CX Transformation
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Jon Fukuda
The Big Question about Innovation: A Panel Discussion
2024 • DesignOps 2024
Gold
Michelle Morrison
Practice What You Preach
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Alla Weinberg
Workers Are Sick of Change: The Cure is Psychological Safety
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Yalenka Mariën
Designing for Digital Inclusion in the Belgian Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Dane DeSutter
Keeping the Body in Mind: What Gestures and Embodied Actions Tell You That Users May Not
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold

More Videos

Jennifer Kanyamibwa

"Process can make things scalable and bring folks together in ways that are not even imaginable."

Jennifer Kanyamibwa

Creating the Blueprint: Growing and Building Design Teams

November 8, 2018

Brigette Metzler

"Having a repo isn’t the same as having a strategy for socializing and evangelizing the research."

Brigette Metzler Dana Chrisfield

Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community (Videoconference)

August 27, 2020

Carl Turner

"The project team gradually realized they were in charge of their own process and could get work done."

Carl Turner

You Can Do This: Understand and Solve Organizational Problems to Jumpstart a Dead Project

March 28, 2023

John Mortimer

"Trust, facilitation, change, and complexity—if you wrap your mind around those, you’ll get reasonably far."

John Mortimer Milan Guenther Lucy Ellis Patrick Quattlebaum

Panel Discussion

December 3, 2024

Dante Guintu

"Information overload with checklists on top of checklists does not create a great onboarding experience."

Dante Guintu

How to Crush the Talent Crunch

September 8, 2022

Richard Buchanan

"Principle is an idea or value that gives unity and organization to a product, system, service, and human experience."

Richard Buchanan

Creativity and Principles in the Flourishing Enterprise

June 15, 2018

Dan Willis

"Shemus Bern is going to talk about how you drop into a client site and grok what’s going on without losing why they hired you."

Dan Willis

Theme 3: Intro

January 8, 2024

Dan Ward

"We study failure without blame; this is the path to progress."

Dan Ward

Failure Friday #1 with Dan Ward

February 7, 2025

Chris Geison

"This is a weird time for research. Layoffs have torn through our field. I've been laid off too."

Chris Geison

Theme Two Intro

March 28, 2023