It’s not all LOLs and dick gags.
Why writing jokes is so useful for building psychological safety in teams
Google’s famous Project Aristotle sought to discover the secrets of effective teams. So named because of this phrase attributed to Aristotle:
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
They found that the most important element that needed to be present in a team was something called psychological safety. The term has been popularised more recently by Amy Edmondson from the Harvard Business School but makes its first appearance almost 30 years ago in an academic journal article (Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work) by William Kahn.
Kahn defines psychological safety as:
“…feeling able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career.”
And Google defines it as:
“Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.”
So, how can comedy and writing jokes help teams to develop more psychological safety?
Well, jokes are serious business.
See those chaps above. They are thinking hard about writing jokes. We just challenged them to write a joke about their organisation, or their team, or their boss! They had around 40 mins to do it, and then perform it to the rest of their team.
You see, jokes are actually pretty serious. Most comedians use their humour to poke fun at the world. They highlight things that are strange, wrong, or weird about their environment. They comment on political matters or human rights issues.
Jokes are an amazing tool for talking about serious things, under the guise of fun. Check out our pal Nish Kumar here, with some bits (comedy terminology for a short routine on a specific theme) about racism and slavery.
In our Com4Com sessions, we challenge people to write jokes about things that are important to them in the workplace. We’ve actually had some people write jokes about racism and sexism in their teams. The format of the joke allowed them to talk about these big, important topics in a way that they ordinarily wouldn’t have been able to. They were real, honest, and vulnerable.
When they are at their most crucial and influential, comedians and satirists are speaking truth to power and helping people to see the hypocrisy or absurdity present in a specific system.
This is crucial inside organisations too. For teams to function effectively they need to be in psychologically safe places. People need to feel like they can take risks, be vulnerable, and be themselves in front of each other.
Psychological safe-YAY
In our experience, writing and telling jokes about a team or organisation can open up amazing conversations. It can help team members to say things that they might not ordinarily say, and for their peers to hear things they might not ordinarily hear.
We always make sure that there is time to process these jokes after they have been told. Often, the conversations they open up can help to transform the way a team works.
I’ve worked with people and groups for over 10 years and I’ve been shocked at the speed with which people get to ‘something real’ by just writing jokes.
It feels like we’ve landed on something pretty special here.
