- Psychological Safety: An overview. For the science, see the SAFETY model. For Google's research into why it's important for high performing teams, see Project Aristotle. What happens when we don't have that safety?
- Anxiety and Stress: For the science, see Polyvagal Theory or a description of some neuroscience, illustrated with a bear encounter. To let go of that anxiety, see the Anti-Anxiety toolkit.
- Recommended reading: I'm often asked for book recommendations.
- Generally more about the brain: Cognitive bias, motivation, default mode network, systems 1 & 2 and neurotransmitters (chemicals) that drive behaviour.
- Language patterns: Why language is so important, and Clean Language, a specific language pattern that has excellent application for coaching.
- Improving your meetings: Specifically retrospectives, and standups. What if your people won't participate?
- Improving learning: with neuroscience and LEGO.
- Something fun: The millennial whoop, and inattentional blindness.
When we don’t have safety
While we often talk about psychological safety, we often don’t prioritize fixing the environment to make it better.
Constraints enable creativity
With retrospectives, we generally have specific formats that we follow, rather than just pulling people together and expecting them to talk. This feels very counter-intuitive for many; surely we don’t need rules or formats to get people to come up with creative ideas. Yet doing that will dramatically improve the results we get.
A tale of two teams
I was asked about two teams recently. They worked on the same product, did very similar work, and had similar team composition (team size, skills, etc), yet one of them was noticeably outperforming the other. The company wanted to understand why this was happening and how they could make it better.
Thinking we want more documentation
It’s quite common when we reflect on problems that someone will say “we just need better documentation”, and everyone will nod their heads. Yet we rarely ask the question “if we wrote better documentation, would anyone actually read it?”
Hero culture revisited
Hero culture is a situation where one person, or a small number of people, take on the majority of the work, and others start to step back. If you hear things like “these people don’t pull their weight and I have to do everything for them”, you may not have lazy people at all. You may have the effects of hero culture destroying the teamwork that you should have.
Optimizing for our own effectiveness
One of the mistakes we make is assuming that people will make logical and rational decisions to optimize for the perfect overall outcome. People do make decisions that seem logical to them, however they do so within their own context. They do what’s right for them, not what’s optimal for the overall situation.
Improving learning with neuroscience and LEGO
In a training, the goal is to have people learn. That should be obvious and yet we frequently see sessions where people walk out, having been entertained, but not having learned anything.
Knowing when to Quit
In general, none of us are as good at decision making as we like to think we are. In particular, there is one mistake that we make frequently and that’s not recognizing when it’s time to quit.
Hero culture
It’s fairly common to have a junior team of people, with one far more senior person leading them. This can be an effective way to grow skill across the org.
Mental Health and GenAI
I’m seeing more and more stories about people having mental health conversations with various GenAI tools.