 To design means to prototype. To prototype means to fail and to fail means to learn. But what if you're stuck in a work environment where failure isn't celebrated? Well, in this episode, you'll learn how you can create a fail-safe environment and which important role psychological safety plays there. Here's the guests for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Steppen Wiedner and this is the Service Design Show, episode 164. Hi, my name is Mark van Tijn and welcome back to the Service Design Show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden things that make the difference between success and failure all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and, of course, our planet? Our guest in this episode is Stefan Wiedner. Stefan has developed a unique perspective on psychological safety by developing evidence-based training, building technology that helps leaders to master their interpersonal skills and he leads a research study supervised by Harvard professor Amy C. Edmondson. You've probably heard this quote before. Fail fast to succeed sooner. Failing is a key part of the design process. In design, we're inherently doing something new and the best and most effective way forward is to try, fail, learn and try again. But let's be honest, as good as this sounds, failing still isn't seen as progress or celebrated in most work environments. It's seen as a waste of time and resources, especially when you're in an established organization where everything is focused on maintaining the status quo. So what can you do to break out of this trap? Well, you need to build a fail-safe environment, an environment that above all fosters psychological safety. Now, this might sound fuzzy, but what if I told you that psychological safety can be measured quite well? Even better, it can be linked to business outcomes and the results don't lie. When you increase psychological safety in your work environment, team performance goes up as well. If this sounds interesting, make sure you stick around till the end of the episode because we go over what psychological safety really means, how you can effectively measure it and what the common misconceptions are. Spoiler alert, it doesn't give you the permission to be a jerk by sharing everything that's on your mind. So at the end of this episode, you'll know how you can take the first steps to build a fail-safe environment for you and the people around you. If you enjoy conversations like this that help you to grow as a service design professional, make sure you subscribe to the channel and click that bell icon to be notified when a new episode comes out. That about wraps it up for the introduction. Now, it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Stefan Wiedner. Welcome to the show, Stefan. Thanks for having me, Marco. I appreciate it. Looking forward to our conversation about the topic that I don't think has been explicitly addressed on the previous 163 episodes. I think it has come by indirectly, but today we're going to give it its own stage. But before we dive into that, could you maybe share a bit about your background and how did you get into what you do these days? That sounds like a really long teaser there, Mark. You didn't mention the key topic that we're going to be talking about. Is it okay for me to mention that or should I? Let's do that, sure. Yeah, well, the main topic that we're going to be talking about today is psychological safety. So my story for how that came across my radar is that I started my career in the world of coaching about 15 years ago. So my business partner and I, we started up newme.com and it's a network of thousands of coaches all over the world. And in so doing, we were approached quite a few years ago, originally it was a B to C. So we were offering coaching to individuals and then organizations started to come to us and say, hey, you have lots of coaches and we need coaches. So can you do some work for us? And of course we said, sure. And then we started delivering coaching service to organizations with a whole variety of leaders. We had C-suite leaders, we had frontline managers, VPs, EVPs, et cetera. And so everything in between. And there was something really common among all of those leaders. And by and large, they were all trying to improve their ability to lead a group or a team. So they're trying to delegate better or maybe be more inspirational as a leader or have better executive presence. Also for a number of those leaders it was about being a little less harsh or a little less direct. They needed to soften their approach. And when I looked back upon all of those engagements, one thing that was common is that they were all ultimately trying to build psychological safety. At least I connected the dots when I discovered what psychological safety is. And the reason why I was really excited about psychological safety is because you can measure it. And organizations, of course, when they're spending lots of money on coaching they wanna know, are we getting an ROI? Are we getting a substantial return on investment for the money we spend? And it's challenging to link results or at least increase business performance directly to coaching. Because within a business setting lots of things are happening. And yet what we knew we can likely measure and more directly influence was psychological safety or the experience that members of a team have within their team, do they feel psychologically safe, yes or no? And we can measure that before and after the coaching. So that's my sort of foundational interest in the topic of psychological safety. And we'll unpack many of the things you already addressed, super interesting. Like the fact that it's measurable, I really wanna learn more about this. But before again, we dive into that. We have a lightning round, which are five questions to get to know you even a little bit better, maybe a bit more of the personal rather than the professional side. So five questions. Your goal is to answer them as quickly and as briefly as possible. Okay. Now it's early, but are you ready? I'm ready, Mark, I'm ready as I'll be. Let's put it that way. Okay, let's give it a go. So my first question would be, if you could work from anywhere in the world, where would you like to work from? Well, I've had the experience to work from lots of different places in the world. So the first one that comes to mind, place that I really enjoyed working with Thailand, the beaches of Thailand. So there you go, Thailand. Let's mark that one down. Question number two is, which books or books are you reading at this moment, of any? Yeah, I'm reading a book right now. I can't remember the title of it. I apologize. It's about a Canadian explorer. He goes out into the forest and hikes all sorts of crazy places and he's exploring Labrador, which is in or connected to Newfoundland, which is the far east of Canada up north. And he's exploring these myths that were, there's these crazy sightings of, like the Yeti or some snow beast or that kind of thing. And he's exploring what's going on there. And he's also a mythologist, if you will, looks at history of storytelling and so on and so forth and turns out what people are seeing is not some crazy beast or monster, but a wolverine, which is a very hard to spot animal. They're very hard to spot. Even today, a hundred years later, because he's looking at myths from about a hundred years ago, even today, they're very challenging to find. Well, make sure to add a link to the book and the show notes for anyone. Yeah, I'll actually find the title, Mark, so that folks can read it. Yeah, this was a good pitch for the book. Question number three is, what's always in your fridge? Oh, well, I generally always have some creamer for my tea. I drink black tea. I don't drink coffee. And I like to have a few extra snacks, like hummus and some fresh vegetables. All right, next question is, what was your very first job? My very first job was, my very first job, I worked for my folks and my parents had a jewelry business. And we basically started, or I started up the engraving division of the business. So we purchased an engraving machine and that was my job. Mainly I would create all the little plaques for all the hockey tournaments, little trophies for hockey tournaments. So that was my job. Awesome. And the fifth and final question, and I don't know if you have an answer to this as surf design isn't specifically your domain, but I'll still ask it anyway, do you recall the moment when you sort of first heard about service design? Well, I think it's something that I've always kind of intuitively thought about because we're constantly talking about wanting to create a good customer experience. And what is that UI, UX that we're thinking about when it comes to web design? So that's the way I've been introduced to the idea. Okay, fair enough. Thank you for answering this lightning round. Now we can transition into the topic of today. You already mentioned psychological safety, but we also in our preparation conversation, you basically came up with a very interesting title that I think is maybe even more appropriate for this community. And that was the idea of a fail-safe environment. That's something that I also would love to explore with you, but how would you first of all describe what is psychological safety? Like what is your definition? Because I can imagine that there are different perspectives, multiple perspectives. What is your perspective on it? Mm-hmm. Well, I'm gonna offer two definitions here. The first of which is from Amy Edmondson, who's the Harvard researcher who's really popularizing and done the lion's share of the research, at least the initial research in this domain. And her definition of psychological safety is that it's a belief that within your work environment, you can speak up, say what's on your mind, express concerns, even in the stakes. And you're doing all of that without the fear of reprimand. So there's no fear of some sort of social consequence to you speaking up. And obviously one of the fears might be, oh, I'm gonna get fired, but it's often a lot more subtle than that. You just don't wanna come across as someone who's ignorant or maybe someone who's oppositional. You know, just, oh, you're just a stick in the mud kind of thing. Those are the social consequences we're often thinking about. And so in our work to help people think about creating environments of psychological safety, we use a different definition, which is it's the courage to speak up and the confidence to know that you'll be heard. So there's two halves to the equation there. Yes, we want people to speak up and we also want them to know that when they do, they'll be heard or at least appreciated or understood. Is that helpful, Mark? Yes, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's good to set this baseline and have a starting point. Now, what you're describing sounds to me very much like something that we all want. Like the question, no, let me first ask a different question. Again, this might be obvious, but I just wanna establish a baseline. Like what is the importance of having an environment where you have the courage to speak up and the confidence that you'll be heard? Why should we care? Yeah, good question. It's sort of the million dollar question. It matters because we know it's linked to high performance. That's the first thing. So the data suggests, and there's a lot of robust data that high performing teams have the highest degree of psychological safety and the lowest performing teams have the lowest degree of psychological safety. And I'm pretty sure most people wanna be part of a high performing team. And why is that? Like why is psychological safety such a common factor among the most high performing teams? And it's because that's how decisions are made. It's how teams learn. And it's how individuals within that team can feel like they can contribute their best efforts. So let's unpack that a little bit. Like how are decisions made? Well, remember, it's all about sharing. It's about, hey, this is what I'm noticing or I don't think that's a great idea. You know, it's those sorts of contributions that lead to much better decision making because if everybody is just towing the line and if the loudest voice in the room is the one calling all the shots and pointing the team in a certain direction, there's no correction, right? There's no ability for the team to learn. It's all just, okay, we're doing X, Y, and Z. Everybody toe the line and follow. And you don't want that. You don't want just blind followers following the leader right off of a cliff, right? You want some form of correction. And so that's the real value. It's not just the quality of the decisions. It's also then the speed at which those decisions can make. So the more forthright that people feel within their work environment that they can share what's going on, what they're observing, any issues they're noticing, then that leads to much quicker decisions. The more quickly the team can respond and go, oh, wow, what are we gonna do about this? So it's linked to performance, better decisions get made quicker, right? That's the bottom line eventually. Now, if we make the assumption that there is still, that psychological safety has, there's room for improvement in many organizations to create this kind of environment. And we have this data that shows that it is valuable. Like, how did we get here? What is the source or where is this lack of psychological safety coming from? Where is the lack of psychological safety coming from? Well, I think there's varying degrees of psychological safety everywhere. And even if you, quote unquote, have psychological safety, it's not like it's a static thing. It's dynamic. It changes. It changes as events occur and as there's change in the environment and change in your systems, change in your team. You add a new player or someone leaves. There's constant change and there's constant flux of psychological safety or the degree to which people feel like they can speak up and say what's on their mind. I think where a lot of this is coming from is that I think it's a response to the amount of change and the amount of complexity that's in our work environment. Cause if you go back 30, 40 years, I don't think the technology that we were dealing with was nearly as complex. Things were not moving nearly as fast. You know, one of the statistics I look at is the graph of, it was presented by David Yafi. He's a Harvard Business Strategy Professor and he has this graph which demonstrates all of the uptick of various technologies and the amount of years that it took for 50% of the population to have that technology. So he starts with, I think, the frigid air or television or those forms of technologies and those technologies took decades to be adopted broadly across the United States is where he's typically looking but you can extrapolate that to most countries. And then you look at Facebook and Facebook took what, I don't know, 24 months or something. And then you look at more recently TikTok and it's probably, we're not talking years anymore, we're talking weeks or months for 50% of the population to embrace that technology. And so when you consider the speed at which things are changing, that's the real impetus for psychological safety and the need for it because teams now much more than in the past need to be working together. You need to have multidisciplinary teams solving more and more complex and global problems. Is that helpful, Mark? I don't think it answered your question directly, did it? Well, somehow, well, my sort of my conclusion here or my insight here is that maybe we're becoming less secure or feel less confident because there is more information. We feel like we are less of an expert to say something about a specific topic, about a specific subject and therefore we don't wanna come across like you said as dumb or I don't know, is that in line with what you just shared? Yeah, it's not, exactly. And also think about once upon a time, so many people were some sort of called within a much bigger system, right? Where here's your job, you're on the factory line, just do your job and shut up and leave at the end of the day. And that's no longer the case, right? People need to be contributing and putting their raising their hand when they're noticing that something's wrong or that there's some sort of an issue. And we rely on that information so much more than we had been in the past. And again, here is a challenge because knowing when you're wrong, like when you're working on something with a very limited scope, it's easier to see if something is wrong. Now with everything being intertwined, working on holistic experiences, like, is there something really wrong or is it just me? Or like, is it my lack of experience or knowledge? Should I interrupt the process to speak up? I can totally see how that is potentially a blocker for people contributing, speaking up. Well, yeah, just notice all those little questions you had in your mind, right? Oh, should I speak? Is this a time to be speaking up? So even if you promote the idea of psychological safety, people are still gonna have that dialogue in the back of their heads going, should I be, is this one of those times? I'm not really sure. I wonder if anybody else is noticing what I'm noticing. These are all the little voices. So I love that you bring that up because that's what's really driving psychological safety or the lack thereof is that little internal voice that we all have. And we all have it to such an extent that I suspect that most listeners here are withholding information from time to time. They don't even notice it. And when I say withholding, it's not like you have a bad intent there. It's just, you're going, ah, that's kind of weird. I wonder if I should tell someone about that. And you just don't tell anyone about it. Yeah, you're basically unsure if you are unsure. Yeah. That's what happens. And then you sort of put it away and don't speak up. Now, I think this is a very, again, very good baseline for the rest of the conversation because I was thinking about how does this apply to the design process? And I think it has a huge impact on me, maybe more than other industries, but let's stick to design. I was thinking like in the design process, we strongly advocate the idea of prototyping, experiments, testing things out. So in order to do that, like some people would call it failures. I don't really like that word. I'd like to use the word learn. But nevertheless, you have to try stuff and you have to do stuff where things can go wrong or not as intended. And you need a certain degree of confidence, freedom, in order to do that effectively. I think this is critical in the design process. And I think that was also the moment where you sort of introduced the idea or the notion of a fail-safe environment. Can you share your thoughts a little bit about that? Like what is a fail-safe environment and how is it different from what we've just discussed? I think it's very related, fail-safe environment. I think for most, it certainly depends, I think, on your environment and what it means to fail-safe. So for example, if you're in banking, fail-safe might be a lot different than if you're in a design shop, right? That might be a lot different. And yet we all, I would say we all have an aversion, a natural aversion to failure. And so a lot of what we need to do to support and build psychological safety is to reframe failure. And so I think that constant reminder for folks that failure is not failure, failure is an opportunity to learn. So you always have to be asking yourself not what did you fail at, but instead what did you learn in the process? And constantly reframing that. I think one of the best examples is Google, where have you heard of Google Moonshot? Yes, I have, but I'm sure you can't tell me something I didn't know yet about them. Well, the main thing there is Google sets up these projects that are super forward-looking, right? Like they're thinking, okay, what's gonna be the next massive innovation 20, 30 years from now? And so they're asking engineers, these bright engineers who have a really bright future ahead of themselves as it's earning lots of money and contributing lots of great ideas. And they're saying, we want you to invest one to two years of your life on something that will with about 98% degree fail will be completely shelved. You're gonna invest all this time and energy and it will literally just be shelved, thrown away. And that needs to be celebrated. So they had to really create a culture of celebration around those failures so that it didn't appear as this black stain on their resumes. And as someone who's trying to move ahead in their careers, you could see how that would really be a stain, right? You would look and someone would say, so what do you do from 2022 to 2023 here? You kind of don't write a whole lot about what's going on. Yeah, because I had launched this project that totally failed. But that could be perceived as a really negative thing. So creating a fail-safe environment is about de-stigmatizing failure and really reframing it as a positive, as what you can learn in the process. And I think a lot of people are already doing that. Are you seeing a lot of that, Mark, already in your experiences? Well, I'm seeing a lot of practitioners changing their language around failure. I think in the community, this idea is there for sure. I think the challenge is the organizations, people are embedded in or the clients we work with who have different agendas or have a different heritage when it comes to this. So yeah, I think that's like the community wants is the practitioners want this, but it's challenging with the organizations that we work with. So let me ask you a follow-up question related to this. So let's imagine I'm a service design professional working inside, I don't know if banking is the easiest sector, but let's give it a go. And I believe in the story and I wanna create an environment for my people, for my team, where they feel more open to speak up, where they will speak up, where they don't see failure as failure but as an opportunity to learn. What are some typical steps you advise people to take? What could I do as a leader in that team? Well, I like to distinguish between your strategy and your tactics. So the strategy part is, you generally wanna take a three-step strategy to foster psychological safety and the first step is to set the frame. So you wanna set the frame in a way that lays the groundwork for people to be able to speak up. So you wanna first of all inform them that, hey, psychological safety is really important. And it's something that we should be talking about openly. So it's not just me telling you how we're gonna be psychologically safe but us having a conversation about why we should be psychologically safe and create a psychologically safe environment and how we as a group are going to foster it because that then makes it a jointly pursued effort as opposed to something I'm just imposing on you. If you start with trying to impose it, it's not gonna work. There's gonna be some resistance there. Step one is creating awareness, making it a subject that people can discuss, can co-create around making it tangible. That's right, that's right. And then the next step is coming back to our definition of it's the courage to speak up and the confidence to know you'll be heard. So that second piece is really important, which is the confidence to know that you'll be heard because it's easy to say, we want you to speak up, I want you to speak up, I want you to speak up. What you need to then follow that up with is every day the right interactions with your people that reinforces that idea. And one way to do that is when people speak up is you're acknowledging what it is that they're saying. You're really seeking understanding. Okay, let me help like, I wanna make sure I understand what you're trying to say here is sort of the mode that you wanna be in as a leader is you wanna be constantly demonstrating that you understand what that other person is saying and maybe even able to understand it in a way that you're adding more value to the team and to the organization because someone might be saying something and might not be articulated just right and then you can say, is this what you're trying to say? Are you trying to say X, Y, and Z? And then the team can say, yeah, okay, that's right. Does that help, Mark? And I know that seems so obvious, right? It seems so obvious. And yet it's so subtle how often we just go, yeah, yeah, okay, I get it, uh-huh, yeah, yeah, whatever. Let's move on. And there's that sort of let's move on part. And there are probably many reasons for why people feel rushed and don't take the time and make a lot of assumptions. I can totally see that. But acknowledging and leading by example, which can be, I can imagine that that's a catch 22, like if you are a leader and who sets the example for you. So it has to start somewhere, but okay, this was point number two and you had a third thing to do, right? Well, if you break it down, I sort of gobbled two, one and two together. So first is setting the frame. The second is inviting participation. So you set the frame, then you invite participation and then you respond productively. So making sure that when people do contribute, you're responding productively. And you know, that's not my innovation. This is coming straight from Amy Emerson, this is what she would call the leaders toolkit. And there's a bunch of extra information about all three of those. And you can read about it in her book, The Fearless Organization. So I'm just paraphrasing her work. So set the frame, invite participation and then respond productively. Now you mentioned it sounds so simple. Why aren't we there yet? What are the barriers to more adoption and quicker, a broader rollout of these ideas? I think it's because, you know, we pointed back to, oh, should I say this? Should I, I don't know. Did anyone else noticing, you know, that internal dialogue that we all have? It's always there. It's always there. So it's so subtle. And I want to relate that, you know, like our individual thoughts back to norms, group norms. And how, I bet most people here have the experience of joining a new position in a new company or might even be moving from one team to another team in the same organization. And when you first join a team, notice how your antenna are up and you're kind of going, okay, how do we do things around here? If I have an issue, who do I go to? How do I raise that issue? Like you see, we're these highly attuned social beings. And we want to know how do we fit in? Like what's the right way to operate in this environment? And those are so powerful. And again, it's like those little thoughts in our heads, we're so tuned in to those norms and we're not even aware that they're, it's like the fish swimming in water, not recognizing that the water's all around them kind of thing. These group norms are all around us and they're driving our behavior much more than we even know or think. And how do, if that's the case, and I totally believe you in this specific instance, how do we get that recognition that we are swimming in the water? Like what does it take for somebody to see like, aha, like, okay, this is what's going on? Well, part of that comes out in group discussion when there's some form of an issue. So you want to discuss, so one of the strategies there is when you have some sort of an issue and maybe it's not just like, it's a one-time thing but you're seeing a pattern. So maybe like, I'm just noticing a pattern where we're not hitting our targets week over week. What's going on there? And so in that discussion, what you want to be looking at is, what are the norms that are supporting the status quo that are keeping us where we want to be and what are the trade-offs? Like what are the, sorry, what are the benefits of those norms? We are maintaining the status quo for a reason, right? There's some sort of benefit there and you want to unpack that. So then you can say, okay, well, what new norms can we create and be explicit about it when you start to see those patterns of behavior that are getting in the way. And what is your experience related to just general awareness around this topic inside organizations? And what I'm thinking of is like, do organizations have the vocabulary to even articulate what's going on? Like when you mentioned high performing teams have a high level of psychological safety, you would have to understand what these factors and characteristics are before you can sort of project that on your own situation. So is there, is that level of, to which extent is the level of awareness there? I think it takes a long time to really have solid language and agreement and that those norms are established. So it takes time, it takes constant effort and work. It's not super easy. It's not something you can just go out in the store and buy it and put it on the shelf and now you have psychological safety, yay. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing I think is where I would point organizations is to their core values and really trying to think about their core values and using those as a roadmap for the behaviors that you wanna see within the organization. And does that make sense? Like, because the core values are typically things like, you know, we're gonna be diverse and we're gonna strive for excellence and humility and integrity and et cetera, et cetera. Okay, those core values, like what I'm seeing is brochures and posters on the wall which everybody walks by, but they're just there to fill up the empty space on the wall, like does it really work? Like I'm just, I'm not skeptical, but I'm curious if people are able to sort of live these norms and values, these company values and translate that into their day-to-day environment. It's specifically related to psychological safety. It's easy to be skeptical about core values because you're right, you know, you'll see companies that'll print them up on the wall and it looks all pretty. And some person from some MBA program put those together and boy, they were clever. What degrades the way with which organizations and individuals and teams within that organization honor those values. I think as soon as you see something that's not congruous with those values, that's when they're like, that's just this, right? It's just big talk. There's no action there. So what you need to be, and I say you, I mean, in particular, the senior leadership needs to be particularly attuned to those values so that they are modeling the behavior they wanna see within the organization. And if it's all about, let's say transparency, well, you better be ready to be transparent on the biggest issues that you're facing in your organization. And if you can model those behaviors, then that's how it can really trickle down within the organization. Yeah, and that is like the challenging thing because if you are not living up to what you say, it breaks down really quickly. But that's a bigger problem than we have time for to discuss in this episode. So what I'm seeing, or what I can imagine is that somebody who's not at the senior leadership level who is maybe a project manager or a team lead as people directly working with or under them sees the value of this, wants to create this, but then they sort of have to move up into the next layer in the organization, the higher layer in the organization, and they have to sell the message of, let's say we need to fail more often and we need to be okay with that. Well, the top level might be very risk adverse, which they most likely are. How does that conversation go? What have you seen? Yeah, that can be very challenging. We've also worked in some fairly risk averse industries and there might be pockets where there is a need to be more innovative. I'll give you an example. So there's an organization they have been around for I think it's 60 years or so. So they create products that are being sold in big box retail shops. And they're the incumbents, they're the top products. And so they get lots of shelf space and lots of sales. And for them, their whole organization now 50, 60 years since its early days is all about protecting the castle if you will, right? So they're wanting to make sure that all of their products maintain market share. And so they're very risk averse naturally. However, they recognize also at the same time that the future of their business, if it's going to grow, if they can increase their revenue by 15 to 20% every year, year over year, they have to do so with new products. So they're not gonna get more sales out of their existing products, they have to develop new ones. And in particular, they want products that have a certain amount of IP protection. So it's novel and ideas that can be protected through copyright or through trademarks or even through patents. And so that requires a totally different mindset. And their product innovation team is like this tiny little island living in a world of risk aversion. And it's challenging for them because they need to operate with the marketing team, for example, and the marketing team is like, well, what are you, huh? You didn't get 18 people to double check the headline on this landing page. No way, right? So that was a really challenging case study wherein you have one team that needs to be much more risk. What's the opposite of averse, risk friendly, risk embracing? They have to have an appetite for risk, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we had to have developed language that has both sides see the needs of each other. Like it really requires some open dialogue there where the leadership has to rethink how they're talking about risk across the entire organization. So that we can have people, there's obviously the team that needs to embrace risk and then the rest of the organization that shouldn't, but then you need all those other parts that are gonna interface with the risk taking team. They need to like let go of that need for things to be so perfect and all the Ts crossed and all the Is dotted and that's not an easy challenge because again, we're coming back to those norms, right? So you have to establish new norms in these environments. So that's where the work has to be done. Yeah, and it is work. Like you said, it takes time. It takes a lot of diplomacy. It takes a lot of politics. It takes a lot of leading by example. And I think you sort of, at least for me made a very good point to recall is that most people in the service design space are innovating. They are doing things that aren't here today. Like I would say that's maybe just what design is about. That means you have to take risk. You have to explore the unknown. That is just the nature of our job. And the reality is that we're often in established organizations who have come into a certain position and now want to protect the castle. And that's where the struggle occurs. Like we want to innovate. We want to take risks. We want to do things that are new and different but we need to also find the language that helps the existing organization appreciate and see how it benefits them. Like we need to do that. Yeah, and I think one way to do that, Mark, is you need to push back on the organization and ask, what are you really committed to here? Because that organization was truly committed to maintaining the fortress, the moat. It wasn't fully aligned with the product innovation team. And so the product innovation team was really struggling in that environment. And because that was a very small component of their business and yet it's a big component for their future. And so you have to push back on the leadership and say, are you really committed to helping this innovation team succeed? Are you willing to figure it out? And because if it just becomes inconvenient for you to have that innovation team, well then the innovation team's not gonna succeed. Yeah, and you have to be willing and courageous enough to ask these tough questions but it's better to sort of rip the band-aid off as soon as possible rather than getting people into burnouts in the next two years because they are not making progress. That's right, and I think that means also potentially turning down work and saying, It's not a good fit. It's not a good fit. We're not gonna work in this environment. If you're not all in, we're not all in. Or if you're not all in, I'm out. Yeah, and I think that's a good thing to do and find where to get fit is. Now I had one note here on my topic list that I almost forgot to ask you but you briefly mentioned it and I wanna cycle back to it quickly. And then as you said, we're able to measure psychological safety. Can you share a bit more about that? Yeah, it's very simple. Amy Emerson developed an assessment. Seven questions, that's it. So it's a simple seven question assessment that we administer to the team and it's very context dependent. So many leaders and managers are in multiple teams. Maybe you have multiple design teams or maybe you have a team that you manage. So you have direct reports and you're also part of a more senior team. So where you're a member of that team and you could imagine within the context of both of those teams, you might have a different experience of psychological safety. So maybe within your own team, you feel high degree of psychological safety and as a member of a team, you feel low degree of psychological safety. And of course we can ask those questions but the results we get back are only as valuable as the honesty with which people answer the questions. So part of asking those questions is setting again, setting the frame so that people feel safe and know that A, their answers will be anonymous and B, that we or the organization or the leader really truly wants to know and understand the degree to which people feel psychologically safe. And there's a way of being able to ask, make that ask, right? But if anybody detects like, okay, you're just asking me because you're looking to who to fire next then obviously people are gonna be perhaps not quite as honest as they might be otherwise, right? Yeah. Even more biased, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So if you're in an environment where a lot of heads are rolling, a lot of people are getting fired like at Twitter right now. If you ask these questions, I don't know what kind of answers you'd get back. If you're not listening to this live, well, I don't know if we need to go into any details of Twitter. I think. Let's not go over Twitter today. So you do these seven questions, you do take this assessment. What comes out? Is it like a score or is it like gaps? What kind of insights does this offer? Yeah, it looks at the average score and then there's a distribution bar. So it shows you how varied are the results. So for example, if let's say the score is 75 out of 100, which is pretty good. You want to be up in that high 80s, 90s, ideally, if you want to be in that top quartile. So a 75 out of 100 is a good score. And let's say you have 10 people and everybody basically answers the question so that you get this average of 75 and everybody's in agreement on that. And of course you can take that same team, split it up in half and you have 50% of your people think psychological safety 100% we're all in. And then half of them feel like it's at 50%. So there you go. So that team will have a much broader range. You have some people way up here, some people way down there and that matters. So that's what we show to the team. So we're showing how much agreement is there on whatever score you did provide. And that's very telling because generally what we see a lot of is a great degree of variability. Not everybody feels that psychological safety is the same. Some people think feel very safe and others don't. And we also of course can see the individual scores. So we'll often conduct one-on-one interviews with everybody to get a little bit better sense of what some of the dynamics are. And then we can help try to flush those out in group discussion without revealing or without kind of throwing anybody under the bus. But we know what some of the underlying issues are. And furthermore, I know I'm kind of talking at length about this, the other thing that the reports do though, we use the fearless organization scan. So developed again by Amy Emonson and it breaks down psychological safety into four different dimensions. So we can look at each of those dimensions, one of which is for example, the degree to which there's diversity and inclusion within the team or how willing are people able to help one another in the sense that people have around that. So it helps us break it down into the sub-domains, sub-dimensions and we can address each one of those independently. And I guess this gives you a conversation piece. So you have some data and then you get into, okay, you're scoring 50 while your teammates are scoring 80 on average. What's going on? Like tell us more about this. And then you have something, you have something to build upon. Exactly, it's really a conversation starter more than anything. And broadly speaking, our approach is, we look at how did we get here? How did we get to this score? And why? And then that gives us insights into, okay, well what can we do differently into the future? I'm kidding, this is really helpful and I think people will be able to look up most of these resources online and I'll try to add most of the links in the show notes. So you don't have to do too much Googling. You've heard many people talk about this topic. You talk about this daily. I'm curious to like maybe one or two of your favorite myths or misconceptions around this. Yeah, well probably the biggest one we see with psychological safety is, oh, this clearly gives me a license to say everything and anything that's on my mind. And so it gives people the ability to basically be jerks or be disrespectful. And so that's definitely not it, right? It's not the license to just say whatever you think. So we need to maintain a level of respect. Yeah, I wanted to say it's not about trying ethics overboard when you wanna create psychological safety, yeah. Absolutely not. Another myth is often people will think of it as basically mental health. And I think they're related, but it's not the same thing. Like if this is for someone who just hears the word psychological safety, psychological safety. Okay, well, you're talking about mental health, right? And so that's a slight misconception there. And in fact, I think psychological safety is being used to describe psychological safety or rather mental health in some environments. So I think there's multiple definitions for psychological safety and you wanna make sure that everybody's on the same page in your work environment. And then I'd say a third myth that we see, especially for leaders and managers, is that they construe psychological safety and seeking other people's input as needing to agree with them. So they're confounding understanding and agreement. So yes, you wanna hear all the voices in the room and no, you don't have to agree with them all. It's about the discussion. And I can imagine that that last point is maybe one of the things that keeps, that is a barrier for adoption of this because if you are a decision maker and you think you have to agree with people, there goes your decision-making power, there goes the speed at which you can make decisions. There might be, yeah, I can totally see that there are some fears around that. Oh, I definitely see those fears. And especially if you think you're the smartest guy in the room or gal in the room, how likely are you to wanna hear other people's opinions, when you're just gonna tell them why they're wrong or why their opinion doesn't matter? Now, that's, I think, a bit of an extreme case. I think most people are not of that ilk. And if they are, they're probably not listening to this podcast. Yeah, yeah. And we have to go back to what we said, like when you are in a diverse team where the situation is complex, where nobody holds the truth, then I think this is where psychological safety excels, like if you're in a highly expert-oriented environment, I don't know, medical room or something like that. I can assume that psychological safety would also matter there, but it would have a different dynamic. Well, it really matters there. And in fact, that's where Amy Emerson has done a lot of research in surgery rooms, in medical environments. And just think about it, right? Like the surgeon has got some human cut open and they're doing whatever they need to do. And there's reports of instruments being left inside someone's body, right? Is it possible? Is it conceivable that someone noticed and didn't say anything because the last time they questioned the surgeon, they got reamed out? There was an interesting study where Amy Emerson and her folks were looking at, in fact, the leadership style of the surgeon around this particular new form of surgery. Basically, there was open heart surgery and then they developed this new technology where you basically go in and insert a balloon which expands a cavity within which you can work. And that requires an entire team to basically relearn how they do surgery. Because it's way different than the previous mode of surgery. And the degree to which the surgeon set the stage for group learning was really critical for the outcomes later down the road because the entire team had to go away for like two or three days to relearn how to deliver the surgery. And the surgeons who just said, yeah, you just gotta go and learn it. And then the other, there's basically two modes that the leaders, which are the surgeons took. The first is they just looked at as a task, just go and you have to learn this new information. And then the second approach was one where it was a lot more about, okay, we need to learn this as a team together and figure it out. And when the surgeon took that approach, the degree to which that surgery team was able to embrace the new form of methodology for doing this surgery and the outcomes for the patients were much better. Yeah, I can totally see that. And we need examples like that to sort of strengthen our belief that this isn't just a belief, but this is almost science that it works and that it's valuable to invest in. You already mentioned the Fearless Organization book. Is there any other resources you think might be very helpful to dive into after listening to this episode? Sure, the first that comes to mind is The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. So that book talks not so much about psychological safety, although it's definitely in there, but it also talks a little bit more toward values and group norms. A lot of those things that we talked about earlier. So check out that book. It's a really good read. The Culture Code, yeah. I'll make sure to add it in the list. Now, if somebody made it all the way here into the conversation, what do you hope is the one thing that they will at least remember? The first, well, what they should remember versus what they could do, well, I'm gonna offer, I guess some, not advice, but recommendation for what next, what to do next. And that is to, if you're interested in this concept of psychological safety is to tune into it. Notice in yourself throughout the day, times where you perhaps don't say what's on your mind because of some sort of internal dialogue and just notice that. Just start to notice. And also start to notice it within your team, other team members, et cetera. Notice what might be happening within the team that might cause one or two or more people within the team to not want to share as openly as they might want to. And so just start to notice what it is that is causing psychological safety to go down in you and in others. That's it. Super simple. Well, yeah, the simplest things are often the most hard, but some critical reflection is always good. And I can also see how just asking this question to your teammates, like, when was the last time you wanted to speak up but didn't, like, what happened? And what was the situation? And that will reveal so many interesting things. Exactly. Yeah. Stefan, I'm going to sort of wrap up this conversation. It was super interesting. I think, again, this is one of those conversations where it's on the fridges of the service design space but it has so many similarities and things in common and helpful ideas that we should really embrace it, learn more about it and know when we don't know enough and know where to look for more. So thank you for sharing this with, quote, unquote, our community and, yeah, thank you. You're welcome, Mark. It was a pleasure. I hope everyone got at least one little nugget that they can take away from this call. I really want to thank Stefan for coming on the show and sharing his thoughts with us. I really hope that you enjoyed it and got something useful out of it. If you haven't done so already, click that subscribe button so you'll be notified when a new episode comes out. My name is Mark van Tijn and I want to thank you for tuning in to The Service Design Show and I look forward to see you in the next video.