The Fearless Advantage

How does a tech company find out if the latest deployment satisfied the customer? By putting it in the customer’s hands and being open to feedback. That means real software on a real device, not a set of PowerPoint slides showing the customer what the product might hypothetically do. Let’s be clear: you take a big risk by letting a real customer play around with an actual product. You risk looking bad. You risk failing. But if you fail, you do it fast and get the chance to quickly adapt to the market’s desires. This helps you ultimately succeed.

Great organizations recognize the need to learn constantly. Turning onto a highway is a good analogy; if you’re going the wrong way, you want to find that out as soon as possible, so there are signs dedicated to that purpose. Learning in product development can start before anything is ever released to the public, with frequent demos to stakeholders and UX research with potential customers early in the lifecycle. For this early feedback to be effective, teams need to feel safe presenting rough ideas to gain straightforward, honest feedback. Psychological safety is essential for that to occur.

Psychological safety has become a new hot topic in corporate journals, management books, and software websites but the real reason companies need it is to enhance performance, regardless of how they work. Without it, we can’t learn—or we learn much more slowly—and we cut ourselves off from a vital competitive edge.

What is psychological safety and how can you enable it? In The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson defines safety as “the belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” Edmondson offers her readers a short survey designed to quantitatively measure safety in a team or an organization. This is useful, but in my experience, it requires a certain level of safety to admit to a lack of safety. Psychological safety is one of those “you know it when you see it” qualities, and when it is present, it has real power. Imagine a casual conversation among a group of close friends and compare that to a formal presentation to C-level executives. When your meetings at work feel more like the former, you’re getting there.

There are a growing number of excellent resources on organizational safety and how to achieve it. I highly recommend Edmondson’s book; it’s a great way to start. Here are some techniques I’ve gathered that have been successful for me and my team: