By Marina Capizzi, author of Hierarchy to Die or to Thrive?
Psychological Safety is the concept launched by Amy Edmondson (Harvard) in The Fearless Organization, which has made her famous worldwide. What is Psychological Safety? It is the pre-condition for achieving excellent team performances. Psychological Safety is the result of an accidental discovery, because in the 1990s, a counter-intuitive finding emerged from research on errors committed in hospital environments: the highest-performing nursing teams made ten times more errors than the lowest-performing teams. Why was that, Amy wondered? The answer: excellent teams report errors, openly discuss about them, and they improved by learning from each error. Low-performing teams, on the other hand, sweep errors under the rug. But why do some teams discuss about the errors and others don’t? What allows a team to discuss about errors?
This is where Psychological Safety, the real discriminating factor for team performance, comes in. What is Psychological Safety? It is the perception of being able to expose oneself without taking relational risks, e.g., being pointed at as guilty, branded as inept, incompetent, stupid, etc. The research that Edmondson conducted in the following decades revealed that there is an exponential relationship between PS and team performance.
Well, Psychological Safety, the concept launched by Amy Edmondson, has a biological basis.
Which one? The hierarchy that structures our Autonomic Nervous System, described by Stephen Porges, neuroscientist and author of the Polyvagal Theory. Porges, whose studies purely focused in the neurological field, describes our Autonomic Nervous System as a h24 active radar that works below awareness and intercepts safety/danger signals by selecting behaviors from two types: regulation or defense. Regulation behaviors (e.g., listening, empathy, questioning, helping, etc.) are the product of the biological imperative of connectedness and prompt us to open up and engage socially to establish and maintain relationships, with the goal of building safety together with others. Defense behaviors, which respond to the imperative of survival and are manifested through flee/fight or immobilization, lead us to seek safety by closing ourselves off, with the goal of protecting ourselves from others and against others. Porges shows that the neural pathways of connectedness are the only ones that activate the physiology of well-being and are the same ones that fuel our health, while the imperative of survival promotes malaise and the onset of disease.
What does Psychological Safety have to do with our Autonomic Nervous System?
Let’s start again from the mistake. When we make mistakes, we feel vulnerable: danger. Therefore, the Autonomic Nervous System tries to save ourselves. To do so, it has two alternatives. The first, defense/closure that can express itself through fight (e.g., searching for the culprit) or flee (e.g., hiding the mistake) or immobilization (e.g., apathy). Defense feeds defense: by taking this route, it is impossible to feel safe – both physiologically and psychologically – because we’re always on an alert state. The effects? Stress, reduced personal and collective efficacy, negative energy and climate, malaise of people and results. The alternative that Autonomic Nervous System can select is connectedness/openness that is expressed, e.g., in authentically sharing mistakes, searching with others for causes and solutions, learning together to prevent them. Exactly the behaviors that fuel Psychological Safety! Safety feeds safety, neural and psychological. In this state we open up and care for each other because we feel part of a greater whole: the team, the organization, the community… The effects? Wellbeing and excellence. More people’s health and results because this is the only condition in which our bodies can access all their resources and integrate them with those of others. Diversity & Inclusion is possible only in this state of neuro-psychological safety. Otherwise, they are just words.
Neuro-psychological safety opens up unprecedented evolutionary perspectives. While writing Non morire di gerarchia*, where I first applied Porges’ studies to the organization by linking them to Amy Edmonson’s construct of Psychological Safety, the clear interconnection between the backbone of our Autonomic Nervous System (described by Porges) and the backbone of our organizations was revealed: hierarchy. Organizational hierarchy and biological hierarchy: the evolution of people, teams, and the organization goes through both. And neuro-psychological safety is the key.
But are traditional training tools enough to support this evolution?
Stay tuned.