Blamelessness and Psychological Safety

Psychological safety

The belief that a person will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes

Work environments with low psychological safety:

• People keep concerns or ideas to themselves
• People are afraid of looking incompetent and ignorant
• People are afraid of being ridiculed

With low psychological safety in the workplace = Stifled learning and innovation

How to solve

1. To frame work as a learning problem and not an execution problem
2. To ccknowledge your own fallibility
3. To model curiosity

• Bridging is encouraged
• Cooperations is high
• Messengers are not punished when dilivering bad news
• Failure is treated as opportunity for improvement
• New ideas are welcomed

Blamelessness

Blamelessness fosters psychological safety

Reasons for blame:

Hindsight bias

The tendency of people to overestimate their ability to have predicted an unpredictable outcome

In working environments, it can lead to blaming the person in charge.

Discomfort discharge

When people blame others to discharge discomfort and pain at a neurobiological level.

How to correctly perform

Blamelessness is the notion of switching responsibility from people to systems and processes

• Assume good intention.
• Focus on systems and processes, not people.
• Innovation requires some degree of risk taking.