In Search of Safety
Safety, Aliens, Gout and Jurassic Park
Something crazy, that way went.
It was October 2016, and while commuting 3–4 hours / day I was listening to a lot of podcasts. I loved the podcasts focusing on agile ways of working and software engineering like Agile for Humans and SPaMCAST. And, I loved the beautiful radio from Radiotopia and This American Life.
I asked myself, wouldn’t it be awesome, if I could create something that was creatively like something I might hear on Radiotopia but about agile ways of working?
And, since we are here, I guess my answer was yes.
(Although I don’t remember it; looking back over the last few months of work reveals gaps in my memory that leave me wondering if I wasn’t picked up by some overly friendly extraterrestrials with a questionable code of conduct involving the insemination of inadvisable ideas.)
Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
So there I was, suddenly a podcaster. But there was a problem. I had no idea what I was going to talk about. And, despite having been involved with sound engineering for the last 25 years, had never produced radio before. I wanted to start a podcast, with nothing to talk about (not a state I’m regularly used to) and no idea how to talk about it.
At the very last minute, and with as yet undiagnosed gout in my wrist, I decided to head up to Edinburgh to Lean Agile Scotland 2016. Nothing better for a gout ridden wrist than to be holding microphones all day.
So I spend the day listening to talks and interviewing some amazing people. In search of, something, an idea, a spark. There was this one thing; an undercurrent, a foundation, that seemed to underpin every talk, every discussion. People were mentioning it, implying it, describing the signs of it’s presence and absence. But no one could pin it down. Seeming both essential and enigmatic in equal measure, like dark matter or dark energy, it’s holding the universe together, but no one knows what it is.
And this thing, was safety. Which, by the time I left was decidedly not what I was feeling. In excruciating pain, my gout having unsurprisingly worsened over the day, I was now stood at the automated barriers desperately trying to retrieve my ticket out of my front right trouser pocket, each attempt sending fiery pain shooting up my arm.
I stared at my new nemesis, the barrier, seriously considering requesting assistance. But, asking an increasingly impatient person behind you in a queue if he could just slide his hand into your trouser pocket is rarely a good idea. After some effort, I managed to connect my pinky and ring fingers to the ticket and tentatively slid it into the reader. In my mind, the barrier opening like the gates to Jurassic Park.
Triumphantly, I sat on the train. The pain slowly dissipating. So I thought “Safety, that seems like a nice, simple starting point.” And, having just opened the gates to Jurassic Park with my pinky, that seemed, as my biology teacher used to say, easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Yes, yes, yes, uh oh.
So, the following day, I considered what to do. I had some tape recorded at the conference, but I needed more. So, I looked over at my bookshelf and reached out to as many people as I could. Thinking, that I might get a couple to agree to an interview. But, people did respond, and generally, they said yes.
Over the following months I interviewed more than 40 people, captured more than 75 hours of audio and read more books and papers than I have ever read. Suddenly, this whole thing was getting out of hand.
The greeks were onto something.
My own research started with a Google research project named Aristotle.
Google have a lot of teams, and they noticed something quite unsurprising; Some of their teams were better than others. Not exactly the revolution of the century. But, what they did was pretty amazing.
It’s very easy to just say, yeah, right, so what, two teams, one good, one bad. The better team obviously has better people. Simple right? Maybe, maybe not. Google, decided to question the obvious. And kicked off Project Aristotle to try and prove (empirically) that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
Over 2 years Google studied 180 teams across their global organisation. And, amazingly they found that teams with a similar makeup or even some of the same members demonstrated varying results and metrics like social connections, strong management, team structure, shared personal interests, gender and tenure provided no clear insights.
Instead, it seemed that group norms played a key role in predicting effective teams. Group norms are unspoken and often unwritten or informal rules governing individual behaviors in a group. They vary based on the collection of individuals and the issues important to them.
On this discovery, they found 5 key indicators that presented in the teams they evaluated as being highly effective and were generally not present in teams that were considered to be less effective.
They were: Impact, Meaning, Structure and Clarity, Dependability and Psychological Safety.
Over the next few posts I’m going to dig into each of these 5 areas before we take a deep dive into the one to rule them all, Psychological Safety and how it underpins the other 4.
For even more details about Psychological Safety check out the first episode, search for The Agile Path wherever you get your podcasts.
Many thanks to
and for giving me feedback on this post in it’s various stages 😊