🌱The Quest #24: Psychological Safety
Cultivating psychological safety - what, why, and how
Hello Friends!
Greetings from Barcelona ☀️where I went for my first swim of the year in the sea today🌊.
Many thanks for your feedback on the last edition of The Quest. I loved hearing your comments on my new Creativity Kickstarter e-book. If you haven’t seen it yet you can download for free here💥.
If you are joining The Quest for the first time, welcome to our weekly exploration of creativity, facilitation, and learning. A special shout out to Write of Passage friends joining this week 🙌.
You can catch up on last week’s edition on How the Brain Learns and all past editions here.
This week I will finish Write of Passage, a 5-week online writing course. Again! It’s the only online course that I’ve taken twice. As a facilitator, I have been blown away by the level of community engagement with the course.
🤔Why is it that in some groups you feel comfortable putting yourself out there and speaking up? And in others, you hold back? In some groups, you bond quickly with the other group members. And in others, you don’t?
I decided to dive a little deeper into the research.
Studies on high-functioning teams find that the single most important ingredient to making a team work boiled down to one thing:
Psychological safety.
The same is true for learning in groups. We learn best when we feel safe to take risks, when we can speak our minds, and when we feel supported by others.
So what exactly is psychological safety, and how can you create the conditions where it takes root and flourishes in your groups?
That’s our Quest for this week.
In this week’s edition 🔎
The 4 stages of psychological safety
Facilitation Tips for creating psychological safety in your groups
Learning about video and more!
Let’s jump right in.
🪜The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety
A book by Timothy Clark where he connects psychological safety to our basic human needs. Clark defines psychological safety in 4 stages:
A condition in which human beings feel (1) included, (2) safe to learn, (3) safe to contribute, and (4) safe to challenge the status quo - all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way.
Clark argues that if we can’t do these 4 things fear shuts us down. But when the environment nurtures psychological safety, there’s an “explosion of confidence, engagement, and performance.”
Watch a short video here. You can download a free summary of the book here.
🤝10 Facilitation Tips for Creating Psychological Safety
Everything that I have learned about building psychological safety in groups comes from the 10 years I spent working with Partners for Youth Empowerment. PYE facilitators are seasoned experts in building group psychological safety quickly. They pay special attention to the beginning of programs where the conditions for psychological safety take root and grow.
Here are 10 tips that I use for building psychological safety that I learned from PYE.
Check out the Twitter thread or read the full article here.
What would you include in your top tips?
💻How to Foster Psychological Safety in Virtual Meetings
A Harvard Business Review article by Amy Edmondson, one of the pioneers of psychological safety research, and Gene Daley. They write about psychological safety in a business context. But many of the tips also apply to group learning. Zoom gives us a bunch of new tools like chat, breakout rooms, reactions, and more that can help build psychological safety. Thanks to Romy Solomon for sharing this link. Read the full article here.
🕸️The Complexities of Psychological Safety
Building psychological safety is vast and complex. A participant's ability to feel safe can be influenced by a number of factors: race, ethnicity, gender, ability, and more. What do we need to learn when facilitating groups that acknowledges the complexities of group interactions? This is one of my facilitation learning edges.
If you are exploring this too, check out the free resources on Facilitating XYZ.
What resources and practices have you found helpful?
🎥Free “Film Your First Video Workshop”
I don’t know about you, but I would rather run a marathon in my bare feet, in cold sticky mud before seeing myself on video. But I know how powerful video can be for creating. So one of my goals for this year is to get more comfortable in front of the camera. A highlight of my past week was taking a free 1 hr online video workshop called “Film Your First Video” with Cam Houser. Good news! He’ll be running the workshop again on March 31 @ 2 pm ET.
The workshop is a taster of a 5-week cohort-based course that Cam runs called Minimum Viable Video.
Here are a few things I learned on how to dip your toe into the scary waters of video:
🧰Equipment: The phone camera is all you need to get started
🎤Sound: Audio is more important than lighting
💡Light: Overcast days/sunrise/sunset best times to film outside
👀Angle: Keep camera lens at eye level (this is harder than it sounds)
🖼️Framing: Keep minimal distance between the top of your head and the top of the frame
⏺️Press record and hit send: Make a 30 second “hello” video and send it to a friend/family member
Register here.
Thanks for reading The Quest. I always love hearing your feedback and suggestions. Leave a comment below👇or hit reply to share your thoughts and ideas. Visit my website for ways we can work together here.
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Until next week!
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