InfoQ Homepage Psychological Safety Content on InfoQ
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The Impact of Radical Uncertainty on People
Humans look for certainty as that makes them feel safe. Suddenly becoming an entirely distributed team due to the pandemic disrupted people. According to Kara Langford, radical uncertainty can cause people to believe they are in danger and lead to health issues. People will respond differently; uncertainty has also shown to lead to fresh ideas, innovations, and social good.
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The Importance of Psychological Safety for Agile Transformations in Africa
The absence of psychological safety in the world of work limits the agile transformation journeys of organisations in Africa. Psychological safety is an enabler, not an act of weakness. Organisations that do not understand or foster it might find it difficult to survive in these VUCA times.
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Maintaining Psychological Safety under Pressure
When leaders are under pressure they can fall into dark side behaviours that can cause deep and lasting harm to organisation culture and psychological safety. Leaders need to be very conscious about deliberately managing their reactions and responses to pressure situations in order to avoid allowing what are often character strengths to be overused and potentially become toxic.
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Chaos Conf Q&A: Adrian Cockcroft & Yury Niño Roa
In preparation for ChaosConf 2020, InfoQ sat down with Adrian Cockcroft and Yury Niño Roa to explore topics of interest in the chaos engineering community. Key takeaways included: there are clear benefits to running “game days” to develop psychological safety, and the future of chaos engineering points toward incorporating security and scaling up experiments to test larger failure modes.
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Growing Personal and Organisational Courage
Courage is vital for organisations if they want to thrive in today’s complex world as it will create the right conditions for the highest possible levels of creativity, adaptability and productivity. We all have the power to lead with courage, no matter what our role is.
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Trust and Safety in High Performing Teams: QCon London Q&A
People want to feel included in teams, and feel safe to learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo. The first thing for each of us to do is acknowledge that we have a partnership with each of our team members. Like all relationships, care and attention are needed to strengthen the bond and work together effectively.
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How to Debug Your Team: QCon London Q&A
Lisa van Gelder spoke about debugging your team at QCon London 2020, where she presented her toolkit for how to diagnose and address issues with a team’s pace of delivery. “It is all about ensuring they have mastery, autonomy, purpose and psychological safety”, she said. She uses that toolkit to introduce change to teams in a way that gets the buy-in from the team.
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What Is Your Superpower? Neurodiversity and Tech at QConSF 2019
In her QCon SF 2019 talk, Elizabeth Schneider compared neurodiversity to superpowers. Once you know that you think differently, and understand how to protect your skills, you can take on the world.
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Being Our Authentic Selves at Work
Can we truly be our authentic selves at work, or are we at times covering? Covering takes energy and can isolate people; companies that foster authenticity and remove barriers that inhibit people from being themselves tend to be more successful. At Women in Tech Dublin 2019, a panel consisting of Mairead Cullen and Ingrid Devin, led by Ruth Scott, discussed being our authentic selves at work.
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Spotting and Calling Out Micro-Inequities
Micro inequities, small events based on subtle unintentional biases, are pervasive and can lead to discriminatory behaviour, both negative and positive, argued Coral Movasseli in her session at Women in Tech Dublin 2019. The good news is that behaviour containing micro-inequities is malleable through counter-stereotypic training, intergroup contact, and by taking the perspective of others.
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Highlights from JAFAC 2019 Day 2: Leadership, Cultural Readiness, Self Care and Growth Mindset
Continuing the coverage of JAFAC 2019 (Just Another F&#k!ng Agile Conference), the conference brings different voices to the fore and highlighting ways that agile ideas are being applied in a wide variety of contexts. Important themes that emerged on day two included cultural readiness for change, the importance of self care, and the need for a growth mindset at all levels of an organisation.
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How to Grow Teams That Can Fail without Fear: QCon London Q&A
Blameless failure starts with building a culture where failure is acknowledged, shared, investigated, remedied, and prevented, said Emma Button, a DevOps and cloud consultant, at QCon London 2019. Visualising the health and state of your system with CI/CD practices can increase trust and ownership and invite people to help out when things fail.
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Reflections on Technical Leading: Q&A with Julia Hayward at Agile in the City Bristol
Employers need to adopt fluid structures for people to find balance in their role, technical and managerial paths should lie side by side, you can’t have genuine effective growth without psychological safety, and a good mentor to talk about problems and scenarios is invaluable; these are some of the reflections on technical leading brought up by Julia Hayward, technical lead at Redgate Software.
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Psychological Safety in Post-Mortems
Emotions often come to the fore when there is an incident; psychological safety in blameless post-mortems is essential for the learning process to happen. The post-mortem session must be fairly moderated, preferably by an outsider, giving everyone a turn to speak without criticism. Don’t start the analysis of the incident before there is a clear and common understanding of what actually happened.
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Making Games for High Performing Teams
The gamestorming model describes a process to create games. It provides concepts like game space, boundaries, rules, artifacts and goals, for creating compelling learning experiences in an organizational setting. Such games can be used by teams to experiment, focus on outcomes, and try out disruptive patterns.