Summary
Without a culture of safety, people literally can't think. We can't collaborate, create, or innovate. That is because as human beings, we are biologically hardwired to belong to a tribe that can protect us from outside threats. Unfortunately, most of us don’t feel a sense of safety in our work tribes. When our work relationships don’t feel safe, we armor up and spend precious energy protecting ourselves from each other instead of learning, collaborating, and well just … working. In this workshop, DesignOps professionals will get practical tools to build and scale the safety of their teams.
Key Insights
-
•
Lack of safety reduces team members’ cognitive capacity to as low as an IQ of 50-70, severely hindering thinking and problem solving.
-
•
Safety operates at three layers: physical (body safety), emotional (sharing feelings), and psychological (sharing ideas without fear).
-
•
Physical safety includes recognizing that mandatory camera use in remote work may threaten people's physical comfort and sense of safety.
-
•
Trust is dyadic (between two people) whereas safety is created within the group dynamic.
-
•
Meetings, when structured with specific safety-building practices, are one of the most powerful levers to build and scale safety in teams.
-
•
Celebrating mistakes openly in meetings encourages innovation and faster issue detection by reducing fear of sharing errors.
-
•
Open floor plan offices can undermine physical and psychological safety, especially for more sensitive or introverted team members.
-
•
In psychologically unsafe teams, people avoid expressing concern or disagreement, risking catastrophic failures as in Boeing’s 737 Max crisis.
-
•
Anonymous surveys and dashboards can help measure and track psychological safety without bias from social desirability or fear.
-
•
Building safety in remote distributed teams requires thoughtful communication channel agreements tailored to content sensitivity and delivering clarity.
Notable Quotes
"Without safety, human beings literally can't think."
"Our brains haven’t changed much over hundreds of thousands of years—they’re still wired for survival."
"If the primitive part of our brain detects danger, it takes resources from the part that can think."
"The brain doesn’t know the difference between a tiger trying to eat us or an angry email from our manager."
"Trust is something created between two people, but safety is created in a group of people."
"Physical safety involves considering whether our bodies feel relaxed and safe in the work environment."
"Emotional safety allows people to share how they’re feeling without fear, which increases capacity to think."
"Psychological safety means being able to share ideas and mistakes without fear of retaliation or judgment."
"Celebrating mistakes in meetings can be a fun and powerful way to build psychological safety."
"Building safety is a journey, not a destination; teams must continually check if they’re having the conversations needed to feel safe."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Don't be cool, be good—work hard at managing your teams because they need you to nail it."
Adam Cutler Karen Pascoe Ian Swinson Susan WorthmanDiscussion
June 8, 2016
"Sometimes the director is the most senior design person in the org and ends up playing the executive role without the title or support."
Peter MerholzThe Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX (Videoconference)
July 13, 2023
"Digital is a system, not a project. It’s there all the time and you have to keep iterating on it."
Lisa WelchmanCleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
June 14, 2018
"We need to rethink how our cities are designed and function."
Vincent BrathwaiteOpener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams
October 22, 2020
"If you forget the individual, you cut out psychological safety, and that’s the foundation of strong teams."
Brenna FallonLearning Over Outcomes
October 24, 2019
"Most organizations are still asking design questions at a global level; we need to be hyper-local now."
Tricia WangSpatial Collapse: Designing for Emergent Culture
January 8, 2024
"Clusters describing demographics and behaviors alone were not enough; we needed emotional personas to find value propositions."
Edgar Anzaldua MorenoUsing Research to Determine Unique Value Proposition
March 11, 2021
"Our brains are terrible at operating only on one type of information, whether object-oriented or context-oriented."
Designing Systems at Scale
November 7, 2018
"Decades worth of agricultural data had to be thrown out because they lacked control groups and statistical rigor."
Erin WeigelGet Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact
July 24, 2024
