Generative Team Design

Innovation, Psychological Safety, and Empathy

There is a lot of talk recently about the importance of psychological safety in relation to teams and innovation. This talk is largely stemming, it seems, from this NYTimes article covering new research from a team at Google. While I think it is wonderful that people are starting to think and talk about the importance of psychological safety and indeed empathy, there is more to these cultural practices than meets the eye. I think about it like this:

Okay, this sketch is a simplification (for example, it doesn’t address the cognitive complexity aspects of the work that needs to get accomplished), but the simplification is in service of a greater point: innovation, psychological safety, and empathy are not actions or things you can simply ‘do’. They aren’t even ‘things’ in and of themselves.

Rather these experiences or outcomes of behaviors are both ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ of complex, dynamic human systems. Systems of people working, thinking, feeling, interacting, reacting, and developing together. Consider, for example, if you swap out empathy for sympathy (which doesn’t require vulnerability) you cut off your ability to foster psychological safety, and also everything else that comes after it. These are delicate matters (and humans typically have pretty solid detectors for…