InfoQ Homepage Psychological Safety Content on InfoQ
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Adopting Agile by Increasing Psychological Safety in a Software Team
To test the agile way of thinking, a software team worked on their psychological safety with kick-off exercises, sharing coffee breaks, celebrating wins, a stand-up question, and 1-on-1 talks. This helped them to increase psychological safety in their software team.
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QCon London: The Art, Science and Psychology of Decision-Making
At QCon London 2024, Hannes Ricklefs, head of architecture at the BBC, gave a well-received talk on decision making. Ricklefs summarised the key reasons behind applying art, science and psychology to the discipline of decision-making, focusing on appropriate methodologies to use and the effects of biases on our ability to make good decisions in both a personal and business context.
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Fostering an Experimentation Culture in Software Development
An experimental culture is a way of thinking; it is about trying new things and learning together, solving complex software problems, and creating value together. According to Terhi Aho, an experimental culture in software organizations requires strong management support and psychological safety.
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Why Leading without Blame Matters to Leaders and Teams
According to Diana Larsen, a culture of blame is a waste of human potential. People cannot achieve their best and most creative work when their energy goes into avoiding shame and blame. To lead without blame requires a shift toward learning and curiosity, she argues. It begins by building or restoring a relationship of trust and trustworthiness with the people.
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How to Become a High-Performing Software Team
The four major elements that enable high-performing software teams are purpose, decentralized decision-making, high trust with psychological safety, and embracing uncertainty. Teams can improve their performance by experimenting with their ways of working.
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Handling Conflicts by Dealing with Emotions
Emotions are at the heart of conflicts, influencing their initiation, escalation and dynamics. Effectively managing your own emotions and understanding those of others can greatly impact the outcome of a conflict. Two steps to be taken are to label emotions, and take control and determine which emotion you want to focus on.
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Embracing Complexity and Emergence in Organisations
Focusing on the actual emerging organisation and the work people are doing can make a difference in embracing complexity and dealing with it a bit better. Psychological safety is critical for people giving feedback without fearing retribution or negative consequences. Fred Hebert spoke about embracing complexity at QCon New York 2023.
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Curiosity and Self-Awareness are Must-Haves for Handling Conflict
When you're in a team, collaborating with others, it's crucial to embrace diverse opinions and dissent; you need to have good conflicts. Conflicts have bad reputations, but with curiosity you can harvest more positive outcomes and build trust and psychological safety. Self-awareness of your emotions and reactions can help prevent saying or doing something that you might regret later.
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How Open-Source Maintainers Can Deal with Toxic Behavior
Three toxic behaviors that open-source maintainers experience are entitlement, people venting their frustration, and outright attacks. Growing a thick skin and ignoring the behavior can lead to a negative spiral of angriness and sadness. Instead, we should call out the behavior and remind people that open source means collaboration and cooperation.
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Learnings from Measuring Psychological Safety
Asking people how they feel about taking certain types of risks can give insight into the level of psychological safety and help uncover issues. Discussing the answers can strengthen the level of safety of more mature teams and help less mature teams to understand how they could improve.
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How the Hybrid and Remote Working Revolution Impacts Maintaining Mental Health
Whether working remotely or in a hybrid environment, the way in which we work with one another is changing, and can impact mental health and well-being. Personality characteristics can influence how we respond to remote or hybrid working environments. Organizations can foster psychological safety by focusing on culture, transparency, clarity, learning from failure, and supportive leadership.
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Creating Environments High in Psychological Safety with a Combined Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach
Leadership is critical for making psychological safety happen, but they need to lead by example and show that it’s safe for people to take interpersonal risks. Complementing leadership with team workshops in communication skills can enable people to speak up and feel safe to fail.
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Learnings from Applying Psychological Safety across Teams
Applying ideas from psychological safety can enable people to speak up in teams about what they don't know, don't understand, or mistakes they have made. Trust and creating safe spaces are essential, but more is needed. People need to feel that they will not be punished or embarrassed if they take interpersonal risks.
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Becoming an Effective Staff-Plus Engineer
To increase your effectiveness as a staff-plus engineer, it can help to develop your communication, listening, technical strategy, and networking skills. Blanca Garcia Gil presented Five Behaviours to Become an Effective Staff-Plus Engineer at QCon London 2022 and will present at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity
Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.