True psychological safety creates the space for unsafe thinking.

  • True psychological safety creates the space for unsafe thinking.
    • Unsafe thinking means looking at disconfirming evidence, actually digging into disagreements, and considering other options.
    • Psychological safety, when done properly, can create the space for much better outcomes, because it allows rigor and ground-truthing that improves the quality of the ideas.
    • Superficial psychological safety is about being conciliatory, never challenging anyone on their beliefs, just agreeing all of the time.
    • This leads to brittle teams doing poor quality work.
    • To get strong teams doing great work requires true, earned psychological safety.
    • It's very hard to do the true one!
      • For example, it's easy to fall into a trap of either never challenging anyone's thinking, or on the other side, intellectual bullying from powerful people, where they think they're helping people be more rigorous and actually they're just pushing others into a defensive crouch.

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