 Thank you for joining this session with Dana. I think I first met you Dana in New York City when we were both at a conference. It's been many years now, I don't remember. So it's an honor to basically have you join us and present at this conference. You're also doing a workshop after the conference. So thank you very much for being part of this conference. Over to you Dana. Hi, thank you so much. I'm super excited to be here today. As Anurish said, it's been many years that we've known each other. I always had a dream to speak at the Agile India Conference. So I'm here virtually. It's still a pleasure to be here. And I'm excited to share a couple of ideas with you. Starting this discussion I'm going to have today that's called I'm going to start sharing. All right, so now we should be able to see my slides. And in order to participate in this session, because we will try to make it a little bit more interactive than this lecture. So you will need a couple of things. You will need your phone or access to a browser, which is something that you already have since you're watching. And if you have a pen and paper somewhere close to you, that would be wonderful because we're going to run a small exercise with you that you will take back to your teams and try it with them. Please turn on your camera. Oh yes, of course. Thank you for reminding me. All right. And with that, we're going to go to our first exercise. And this is where you will need to access your phone. So you don't need to go to www.menti.com and enter the code 782117. Or you can just point your phone at your code and scan it. It will take you to the same place. And once you're there, you should be able to see the first question. And our first question is, where are you doing this from? So just go ahead and respond to the question. And I'll give you a few seconds to see if it joins. Again, it's www.menti.com and the code is 782117. Yeah, and India is a big country. So come on, give me some places where you're coming from. What are you doing from? Looks like Bangalore is meeting. And some people are really beginning to answer the second question. So wait for it. First, we're just going to give a few more seconds for people to enter the form. And it's running here. It's running here too in New York City. So I guess we have something in common. Very cool. All right, so we're going to move to the second question, which is going to be related to the topic that I'm going to be sharing with you today. Because today's session is about psychological fear and things that prevent us, sorry, psychological safety and the fear in workplace that may prevent us from getting to the psychological safety in the teams. So with that, the second question for you would be the first one. What do you think becomes possible with psychological safety? And just go ahead and type in as much as you can. I think you have 25 characters you can do. So think about what you know so far and go ahead and type it in. And if you don't know, that's why you're here. We're going to learn about it. And I love what they're saying, the high performance culture, innovation and effectiveness, honest and open teams, transparency, self-confidence. Yeah, accept theory and learn that's wonderful. Support, appreciation, honest and openness, inclusive leaders, trust. Yeah, speak up culture. I like that. Yeah, because it's hard to innovate. It's hard to discover something new or experiment when you are afraid to speak up. So psychological safety is something that helps us get to the state where we're not scared to share our opinions and not afraid to be different, right? Because differences is something that helps us innovate and helps us get better results. Yeah, innovation better results. Thank you. That's awesome. So you already know something about psychological safety and you're going to learn more with this session. So specifically what we are going to cover today is the impact of psychological safety and organization, what it means possible. We're going to talk about how our brain operates in the presence of fear, which is that we don't have psychological safety. And we're going to recognize some of the symptoms of fear and learn how to spot them in organization. We're going to experiment with one of the base of one of the retrospective games that you can play with your teams. And we even going to play with a little liberating structure that is useful in beginning conversation around fears. A little bit about me. My name is Dana Pulaeva. I'm a natural coach from New York. And I've been in industry for the past 20 years in different areas of organization, different areas of IT, starting from being a developer, then spending a lot of time on the operation side. So I've seen fear. I've instilled fear because I've been a DBA manager and it's a tough job that we have to have a lot of situations to solve. And then as I moved more towards being a natural coach, I had to unlearn a lot of ways of working and I had to learn how to be, how to move away from instilling fear to actually creating a culture where fear is not present. Instead, psychological safety is there and we're able to be more innovative because the culture is different. And so, what I'm doing right now, I'm an independent consultant. I work with organizations around the world, write books, speaker conferences, and it is my pleasure to be here at the Agile in the year 2020 and share what I know with you in this session. And one of the books that inspired me to create this workshop is a book by Amy Atkinson called Peril's Organization. And Amy Atkinson is the one who coined the term psychological safety. So she actually discovered it in her research when she was working with the medical teams. She discovered that teams that are successful in fact have more mistakes than the teams that are not successful. And that finding really puzzled her. And what she discovered through that is that it's not like the successful teams make the mistakes. It's that they are open to talk about them more frequently. Whereas teams that are less high performing, they're hiding the mistakes. And so that's what helped her discover that psychological safety is the one that makes a difference. And in her definition, psychological safety exists when people feel they work space in an environment where they can speak up. Or for a day, ask questions without fear of being punished or fear of being documented. What's interesting, she discovered that in 1999. In 2012, Project Aristotle was something that Google started to discover what makes a team successful. What makes a team high performance. And they discovered that there were five different criterias that helped the team to be successful. Impact, meaning, structure and clarity. But the one that was the most important was psychological safety. So again and again, psychological safety comes back to be an important factor. And seven years later, I'm sure many of you have seen this book, Unicorn Project, a new book that came out recently by Jen Kim. Again, psychological safety was highlighted as the fourth ideal of war on the successful organization. And again, it's about being able to solve problems in this situation where it's a situation of honesty and transparency and trust. And honesty requires the absence of fear. And this is where we come into this workshop, because this workshop is going to be about spotting the fear, being able to talk about fear, without being held back and starting that conversation to help identify what's holding within that and being able to work around it and solve it. So why fear? And why are we talking about it in the context of organizations? Because guess what? When we come to work, our work version ourselves and our whole version of ourselves is governed by the same thing. Hi Dana, sorry. Can you please turn your camera on, because it doesn't seem it's visible. Can you just, sorry to interrupt you. Is it on? It should be on. So right now, are you seeing my screen? So yeah, we can see your presentation, but we can't see your video thumbnail on the top or bottom. So that's interesting. Okay, if you think it's on, then fine, let's not worry about it for now. Is something happening on my screen? Yeah, we can see it now. Okay, sounds good. Okay, I'll just make sure that I don't block the picture of the brain. Okay, so the work version of ourselves and the whole version of ourselves is governed by the same brain. So when we come to work, we're responding in the same way to some of the situation that we face at work. And obviously our brain is very complex. This is what we're seeing right now is a very simplified version of it. And so we have areas of our brain that are responsible for creative thinking, problem solving, for creating new memories, for motivation, focus. And then there is one area of our brain that is responsible for keeping us safe. And what's interesting is that we receive sensory stimuli through two different channels. One channel goes towards the amygdala or the primitive brain, and the other channel goes to the rest of the brain. And so what happens in the situation of danger, which could be physical danger or could be psychological danger. So anything that we perceive as potentially unsafe, physically or psychologically. Amygdala takes over and so it responds to the sensory stimuli a few milliseconds faster than the rest of our brain. And then what we experience is something that's called amygdala hijack. Basically, that part of our brain takes over and it screams danger, danger. So we're not going to get any sensory input to the rest of our brain. Because as far as amygdala is concerned, we have to survive. We have to respond with fight, flight or phrase. So those are the only three responses that we're capable of in the situation of danger. And so as you would imagine, if the workplace is stressful and amygdala is responding with that three type of response, then you're not able to think, you're not able to be innovative because you're experiencing that amygdala hijack situation. And it's hard to expect innovation from people affected by that effect because they're just not able to access that part of the brain. And that's what's making it difficult to be competitive or innovative for those organizations that most of the workforce is affected by this state. And so it's interesting that fight, flight or freeze response shows up and work in a different way. So just like you might have heard the expression brilliant jerks, which means people who are not responding in a way that is conducive to cooperation. So imagine developers and I'm just taking them as an example. So imagine people who are very innovative and very brilliant, but it's very hard to work with them because they are in a way that it's defensive. It's the fight response that they're showing off. And so that's the type of fear response that's showing up at work. The other type of fear response is disengagement or the freeze response. And disengagement is something that affects a lot of work forces and based on the research from GALAV, which is the Research Institute, in 2017 about 70% of US workers were not engaged at work. And it's pretty scary because if they're not engaged, they're not innovating. And we're not able to be competitive as an organization. Another type of response that is a fear response is flight response. When best people are living in an organization because they don't get enough opportunities to innovate, disengage, they're not interested in what's happening in an organization, they're looking for a better place to work. And so that's your flight response. And just like fear stops the flow of sensory stimuli in our brain, the same happens at the organizational level. So this diagram is something I created based on Ron Westrom's study of organizational culture. And Ron Westrom defines three types of organizational culture. One is something that's called pathological culture. That's the culture affected by fear. This is where if something doesn't go right, then the natural response of the system is to suppress the bad news. It's like, should the messenger, that's the response. And unfortunately in those organizations, if something goes wrong, then no one learns from it. The natural response is to hide that information should the messenger and no learning occurs. The other type of organizational culture is bureaucrat. This is where if something happens that's not the right thing, then it's going to be fixed. But we have this tendency of doing the public relations, which is minimizing the impact of that problem during the local fix and trying to prevent that from being shared with others because we're trying to keep the face. So we're trying to show that my part of organization is not having any issues. So even if the problem is fixed, again, as an organization, we're not learning. And the last type of organizational culture that's called generative culture. So this is where if a problem occurs, we're looking at what was in the system that caused that situation to happen. And the assumption is that there are no bad people, there are bad systems. So let's find the problem in a system that caused us to have to mediate with it. And so we are playing this post mortems, which is a type of retrospective when we're looking for a specific root cause of a problem rather than who did it. And we also share information with the rest of organizations. So not only we learn as the department or team where the problem happened, but also others can learn from it. And so we don't repeat the same mistakes over and over again. So generative culture is where learning is possible. This is where we can experiment. This is where we can learn from our mistakes and failures. And this is where when we introduce module, dev apps or any other new things, the response is going to be more favorable. Whereas if you introduce new initiatives, new experiments and other type of cultures, you may generate even more fears. As a response. And you're listening to me right now. I'm thinking, oh, Dana, this is like some US organization that they have in this, which is fine. We have never seen fear in our workplaces. So I want to offer you a little experiment. I'm going to show you if your symptoms appear and see if you can recognize the response from your own experience. Risk avoidance. Typical symptoms of fear is when we are going this is safer solution and we are trying to not drop the boat. Another one is something that's called success theater. So think about a situation where things are not going so well, but really putting up the chain that project status is green. So it's green on the outside, but it's red on the inside. We also call it watermelon status. So we know it's not going well, but for the managers, we report that everything is green. The other symptoms appear conflict avoidance. So similar to risk avoidance, except now we're trying to go with everybody else's opinion and not share our own. If it's different from the rest of the team, because we're trying to avoid conflict. And again, this is one of the symptoms appear. Another one, gossips and rumors. When it's not safe to talk about things publicly, management is not sharing information, something is happening organization, we don't know what it is. And so a lot of gossips and rumors, that's how the news spreads. So again, typical symptom of fear and realization. And the last one is blaming and finger pointing. Again, when something is not going well, we're trying to find who is the person responsible for the problem, we're trying to solve the root cause of the issue. So here is the five samples. And what I'd like you to do is in chat, just go ahead and think about different organizations you've been part of, three or four years, and go ahead and type in the number anywhere from zero, meaning Dana, you're totally crazy. I haven't seen anything like that in my work life. Two, five, where you experienced all five of this through your work career at some point. Just go ahead and in this class, give me the number anywhere from zero to five. So again, the question is, if you've seen any of these symptoms appear in your organizations through your work career, then give me a number anywhere from one to five. And zero in Dana, I haven't seen anything like that before. You're totally crazy all the way. So I'm seeing two, three, three, anything important? Yep, happens a lot. Yeah. And what's interesting is that every time I run this, people recognize anywhere from yes, I'm on the same five. So anywhere from two to five, that's the typical response to this and three, because we've all been there. We've all seen this. And which means that we're not alone. And we can find a way to deal with this together. So I'm going to share a couple of things that you can do. And basically, since we're all in the same boat, so to speak, we have a choice. We can stay with the pathological culture and experience more fear, or we can look for ways to bring more generative culture and help to instill more learning, because that's what generative culture helps with. It helps to be safe to experiment, open to trying new things and know that you're not going to be recommended for failing because you are trying. Because you can't know something new if you're not trying and you can't try without failing. So you will fail at some point and that's okay in the generative culture organization. That's what we want to have more of. So with that, I'm going to share a couple of things that I created in my experience. And this is one thing that helped me to work through the fear situation in one of the days I was in. So I created this game called Fear in a Workplace, which pretty much had all the different types of fears that I experienced myself. I've seen others experiencing around me and using it as a game in retrospective helped us have an open conversation around what's happening in an organization. And here that every monster is some kind of fear that is typical in an organization and fear or symptom of fear, and the way how we run it, we really much gave everyone a deck of these little monsters and asked people to pick which ones they observed happening in their team. And they did it anonymously. So there was a facilitator who collected all the responses face down. And then what you're seeing here, this is where facilitator just looking at the responses without this collection of monsters showing what's happening in the team. And so when you look at seven people responding with different responses and seeing that, for example, depletion of emotional energy was the strongest one, we knew which one we need to start conversation from. So that was the one way to start looking into this. And I created the next version of the game, which I'm going to send a link to everyone to sample if we want to play with your teams. And what was interesting that when people played the game, this is one of the things that they shared is that playing the game helps you put the fear in front of us rather than between us. And so now we're able to have an open conversation, we're able to fight it together, we're able to detach from our feelings and look at the situation from a system perspective, look at it from outside in and have a conversation about how to solve the problem. So what do you do if you don't have this game, but you can still have a conversation around fear? So this is where I'm going to run a little experiment with you. We're not going to share it with each other right now, we don't have their breakouts, but I'm going to walk you through how to do it so you can do it with your teams and you can see how it's useful in starting the conversation around fears. So for that you don't need a piece of paper and a pen and what you're going to do, you're going to start a little drawing session. So I'm going to give you a second to grab a pen and paper and what you're going to do on the pen and paper, you're first going to start making a list of things that worry you the most in your workplace. I'm going to give you one minute and you're not sharing this, so this is just for you personally, just start writing these things on a piece of paper and once you're done, circle the four scariest most alarming things. So I'm going to give you a minute to start writing those things down. Again, these are things that worry you the most in your workplace. You may not call them fears, there might be things that you worry about, but just go ahead and write them down. Okay, looks like my timer was stopped for some reason. So I'm going to go ahead and move on. So hopefully you got a few things that worry you the most and out of those things, if you circle the four scariest most alarming things, you're going to work with those four things in the next step. And for the next step, you're going to flip the page to the other side and you're going to... There's an interesting question coming up in this question and discussion I'll get to this once it goes through the exercise. And for the other side of your page, you're going to start making this little grid. And in the top left corner, you're going to draw one of the shapes. So one shape is going to be a circle and it doesn't have to be perfect circle, it can be oval, just however you can make a circle. In the next grid, you're going to make a square and the next shape is going to be a spiky shape, just any kind of spiky shape that has different angles, different edges. And the last one is going to be this squiggly line and if you haven't seen this squiggly line, it's going to look something like this. It doesn't have to be exactly like this, but these shapes are going to be the bodies of your monsters because what we're drawing right now, we're drawing our tiny monsters. So now I'm going to add fins, ears, eyes, and make those monsters scary. Let me give you a few seconds. And now you're going to take those four things that you circled, your most scariest, most alarming things that you wrote on your list, and you're going to map them to these monsters. Just whatever you added which are the scary monsters, you did map those four worries to your monsters. And so when we do this exercise with the teams, you start with your individual writing lists and drawing the monsters and then mapping the monsters to those specific worries that you listed. And then what we do next is what makes a difference because next we are going to do the master walk. Obviously, we're not going to do it today with everyone in this session, but when you're running it with your teams, this is what you can do. And I'm going to show you. So yeah, we walk around showing the monsters and asking them for advice, asking other people for advice how to tackle the monster. So this is how it looks like when we do it with the collocated team. When we face-to-face pre-COVID, this is what we do. We walk around showing the monsters and what you find is that a lot of times the same worries that we have, others have it in the team as well. And so it helps you build empathy. It helps you build connection between people and the team. It also helps you figure out how to deal with those monsters. Because guess what? Making those drawings, suddenly they become funny. And then when you can laugh about saying set out your worries, it's becoming a little bit less scary. And so that's one of the ways how you can start having conversation around what is happening in the team, what are some of the worries that people have, how can you address them together? So how can you do it in the virtual space? If you have a way to put people in breakouts in pairs, this is what you would do. You would send them into breakouts for each pair. So two minutes per person. And then do the same thing. You're going to introduce the monsters as per advice. It's that one conversation that makes a difference. And then obviously you can come back into bigger room and share all that information. But putting people in pair conversation makes it possible to do the monster walk in the virtual space. Any questions so far? See, I think I'll take a few. So yeah, there was a question who's responsible for psychological safety. It's entirety responsibility. And what we're going to learn in the rest of this presentation is that there are many ways you can approach building psychological safety. There are certain things that you can do as an individual. There are things you can do as a team. And definitely you can do a lot as a leader. Because if you can build a happy bubble at the team level but the entire organization is not a safe place, then you can just go so far. Definitely leaders have the most impact on whether the entire organization is a psychological safe organization. And to that, if you can have a book that was referenced in the beginning by Emma Admondson, that book has tons of information about what are some of the practices that are effective at the leadership level for building psychological space in the organization. And that brings us to the second part of this workshop, which is talking about safety in the workplace toolkit. That's another game that I created that has different practices that are coming either from my own experience working as teams or from the book by Emma Admondson, or specifically the leadership practices. Most of them are coming from that book. So what the game makes possible is that now you have a collection of things and you can quickly flip through them and you can play a game where you can identify the problems or specific fear to deal with and then search for the collection of possible tools and practices that can help you fight that fear. And an interesting model that I like to use in relationship to the safety practices, something that's called SCARF model. The SCARF model was created by David Rock, who is one of the founders of New York Leadership Institute. And he defined SCARF as the acronym. And so it brings together specific social domains that activate the same threat or reward response in our brain that we rely on for physical survival. And SCARF stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. So any time that these domains are affected in the negative way, we feel threatened. Any time that these domains are affected in the positive way, we feel rewarded. And so the practices that are included in my game they are adding positive experience to all these status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. So I'm going to walk you through very quickly because it's a very short session. And as I mentioned, I'm going to share a link to a sample step of both appearing workplace and safety in workplace. So you can experiment with those with your team and see what are some of the practices that you can bring in. So some of the practices that they help in generating the positive response in terms of status. And you've noticed that many of them are leadership-level practices. One of the interesting approach is management of knowing. Ask questions. Don't assume that as a leader you know everything. So ask questions to people who report to you because that will show them that you actually value their opinion. And as a result, the feeling of status is going to be more positive. Asking for help, that's another thing that you can do even within your own team. Share concerns from course hierarchy. So these are the different things that you can do to help people feel that their opinion is valuable, that their status in the team or status in organization is respectful and respectable. And so they will feel positive as they're interacting with others in organization. The other, the main is something that's called certainty. And this is where you can make sure that people know that when they are experimenting and they are making mistakes, that's not something that's going to be looked at as negative. And so one of the practices that leaders can bring is uncoupling fear from failure. So we will fail if we try. If we don't try and we don't fail, we don't make mistakes. It means that we're not going to come up with anything innovative. So introducing different practices and building a culture where fear and failure are decoupled. When something fails, we even celebrate it. We host failure parties. And this is fail, learn, move on. One of the things that people can embrace and make sure that there is that experimental mindset that we're building as organization. So increasing certainty, meaning that knowing that it's not the end of the world if you fail is not as long as you learn from it. The other domain that can be positively impacted by these practices is autonomy. And this is where we all heard about autonomy mastering purpose. And then you'll think that this is one of the things that motivate individuals to be the best version of themselves and to be interested in what they're doing. And again, building ways to tap into people's ideas, bringing in different voices, different perspectives in the conversation, discovering those ideas and as leaders amplifying those ideas, this is something that can increase autonomy. And one of the practices that's very useful in that space is something that's called liberating structures. So I encourage you to check out this website. It has a collection of 33 practices which have different facilitation techniques designed for engaging everyone in the conversation and bringing in different voices. So it's always about not just one person speaking about what I'm doing today, but having an opportunity for everyone in the room to participate in problem solving and discovery and finding solutions together. Another domain that's going to help with increasing psychological safety is relatedness. And this is where there is a lot we can do at the team level, introducing team norms, introducing core protocols, creating ways for team members to connect as people. And one of the practices that I'm very in favor of something that's called user manual. So everyone in the team is asked to create their own user manual, which means what's the best way to operate this mix of how there are my red buttons, which you shouldn't press when you need to work with me. And what are some of the things I'm looking to bring in back to this team. And so each individual in the team creates something like that and then they share so that they didn't get to know about each other. They get to know how to work better together and using that they build team norms and they use those in treatment retrospectives. So again, all these practices that help build on relatedness which in turn helps with creating psychological safety. And yeah, these are some of the examples of team simple norms, which could be written in team language and the team language could be very different from team to team, as you can see here. And the good part is that it's not something that's enforced on the team. It's something that team generates by themselves and it's definitely a bottom-up that would approach. And the last part of SCARF is fairness. This is where again embracing sustainable pace on creating team norms, measuring team health and safety. So making sure that not only we created the team norms once, but we also go back and see are we still living by those norms? Do we get what we need to get from this team for ourselves as professionals and individuals? And so measuring team health, looking at different aspects of teamwork and even measuring psychological safety is something that will help in that area. Okay. And as I mentioned, peer-propositional retrospectives, something that you can do and starting this identifying what is the problem, that what in which fear to talk about first, looking for different psychological safety tools to help you address that specific fear. And then just going through typical link coffee conversation and discussing how to address the fear that we have in your specific situation. And if you'd like to try to see your teams, take a screenshot of this on this link to a pre-sampled version of both the fear in workplace and the psychological safety game so you can experiment and see how you can start conversation about fears and how you can change the conversation from being it about fear to being about how can we make things better in our team, how can we build psychological safety in our team and expand it to our organization. So with that, I think, that's all I had to share. I'd love to hear from you all through the chat what surprised you the most in this session. We're going to add and tap in in this class. What surprised you the most in this session? You are the Monster Game. And I encourage you to try the Monster Game with your teams because it's a fun way to start this very serious conversation because we've all been there, we've all experienced that state when it's not safe at all. And this is a way to start learning that we can actually share some of the challenges that we have and we can put them out in the open and that's the first step to what's open up. Really my response to the question Q&A. So I responded to the question of psychological safety of who is responsible for that was it another question? Who's the other question? That's the only question I'm seeing. Can you retype your... Okay, got it, got it. So I think the points in glasses and rumors are very dangerous to the environment. How do we deal with this as they generally out of control? So yes and no. You can start with addressing this at the team level because this is something that... This is why we have control at the team level. And this is where you can bring this as part of the conversation in the team norms during the retrospective so making sure that people understand that this is not the type of culture they want to build. Of course, if it's a leadership level problem when you're getting finger pointed from the top down then this is a little bit outside of your control. And this is where Amy Edmondson bought Snicket in, give it as a gift to your leaders. Hopefully that will inspire them a little bit. But definitely changing the culture in the organization it's not easy, but starting it from the team itself and changing the culture at that level will be a very good step. And Mr. Aditya, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today and also for the day for you. So I appreciate you sticking through this session. And hopefully you can... Thanks a lot, Yana, for doing this wonderful session. I think we all learned a lot and enjoyed it. So as you can see from the storm of likes, thumbs-ups that you're getting.