PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
How to Create a Safe-To-Fail Environment?
Is failure celebration a way to go?
What does failure mean?
Does it mean that something did not turn out the way you wanted it to? Is trying and failing a failure? What about not trying at all?
They say that to be innovative you need to actively celebrate risk-taking and failure. Laura Garnett explains in INC “Why failing can be a critical stepping stone to success” and describes the failures of Elon Musk. It is inspiring indeed!
Could it be that every experience, failed or succeeded, is actually a success?
But is failure celebration a way to go? I see a lot of articles emerging about, so-called, failure porn, like the one written by Geoff Lewis “Failure porn: There’s too much celebration of failure and too little fear.” He explains that the celebration has gone too far. There is even an annual conference of failed start-ups, called FailCon.
The key is to find a balance, fear failure enough to try very hard to succeed, yet not so much that we don’t try new things.
Today, I would like to explain how to help the teams and organizations create a safe-to-fail Agile environment. From my experience, the teams still feel vulnerable and fear being judged. Let’s see how we can convert failures into learning opportunities that will help the teams inspect and adapt with a more positive outlook.
Different environments
I worked in two companies that took a completely different stance on failure. In one company we practiced failure avoidance and in the other, it was OK to admit a mistake.
In the first company, you could only learn about great successes during the monthly meetings. When asked a “How’s it going”, the managers on different levels would usually reply that everything was going great. And from time to time there would be a new enemy to blame for any misfortunes.
In the second company, on the monthly meetings, the lead would share his failures along with the findings. And he encouraged everyone to do so. We even created a failure wall where we would paste stickies with a short description of what happened and the lessons learned.
Consequences of fearing to fail
The outcome was that in the first company, there was a strong division between “us” and “them”. Our team versus the rest. Individual heroes emerged who acted as lone wolves. Since the company was only promoting successes, it seemed to be in the wrong tone to admit mistakes and ask for help. As a result, there was little trust and little collaboration.
Benefits of a “safe-to-fail” environment
In the second company the team members were not afraid to admit their mistakes or that they didn’t know something. They were not afraid to ask for help, it was even actively encouraged. As a result, team members from the same and different teams were collaborating and helping one another.
Psychological safety
The extended study on high performing teams at Google showed that there are five traits to a successful team. The first and fundamental trait is psychological safety. It is the underpinning of the other four traits, which is why we will take a closer look at it.
“Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?” — asks the author of the re:Work article.
“There’s no team without trust,” says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google in the HBR High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety article. “In Google’s fast-paced, highly demanding environment, our success hinges on the ability to take risks and be vulnerable in front of peers.” That also means, being able to admit you don’t know or understand something without getting ridicule. This allows the teams to take moderate risks, speak their mind, and challenge the status quo. Basically to stick out your head without fear of getting it cut off.
Interestingly, one of the key conclusions from the aforementioned research was that for a team to succeed, it didn’t matter who was on the team. The personalities or skill sets weren’t of much importance. What mattered was the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Moreover, the team members could count on each other, had clear goals, and believed their contribution mattered.
How can we help create psychological safety for our teams?
How can we liberate the teams from the fear of failure? Here are some methods on how to put the theory into practice:
- Elaborate working agreements — start from brainstorming with the team what they need for a good atmosphere and collaboration. Let the team define how to keep their interactions and conversations productive and positive.
- Get to know each other — it is easier to establish a safe environment for people who know each other. They know what others like and what’s hard for them to deal with. I once did a great exercise with fellow Scrum Masters to better understand each other. It was called “Washing machine instructions” and it consisted of each person making a list of what to do and what not to do with them. Just like on the label of our piece of clothing.
3. Measure psychological safety — send recurrent surveys to measure how safe the teams feel within the team and in the organization. There are many examples on the Internet, the one Google uses is linked here.
All in all, what matters here is to see human beings. Coach the team to see the other team members not as obstacles to overcome but as people with hopes, dreams, fears, and aspirations as themselves. It makes a lot of difference especially in the face of conflict. This comes from the “Coaching Agile Teams” book by Lyssa Adkins and it played a big role for me in changing my attitude towards others.
How do we help the teams to learn from failure?
Once we are mindful of creating psychological safety in our organization, we can move on to encourage the teams to take moderate risks. And in case of failure, share the findings.
I really like two outcomes we get through a failure: getting better at solving problems, and that failing gives us perspective. We realize it is not the end of the world and it helps us change our attitude towards risk-taking.
Here are some tips on how to help the teams create a safe environment:
- Lead by example—be the first to share your failures. Show the teams that it is OK to admit you have failed provided that you can share lessons from your mistake. Ask everyone to share failures, create a “failure wall” and review it during the monthly update.
- Run recurrent Retrospectives and Agile Postmortems — both are great tools to strengthen transparency and growth for the teams. We need to stop and think about why something went wrong and reinforce what went well. Inspect the failure and think about how to prevent it from happening in the future. The 12th principle of the Agile Manifesto says:
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”
You can learn more about Agile Retrospectives and Postmortems from my article and video here. - Schedule Hacking Days — any form of Hackathons sponsored by the company ignites the spark of creativity among the teams. Not to mention how enjoyable of a team-building event it can be. This way the teams have an almost laboratory-like environment for trying new things without consequences for the live product. They can develop what they always wanted to implement and see if it actually works out.
- Kill ideas — Steve Jobs said, “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”. Take the risk of discontinuing some of the ideas you are postponing for months. This brings the focus to what matters. If some functionality is not bringing any value it’s better to kill it directly rather than putting effort into resurrecting it, just because of all the time invested in it already.
Don’t blame, focus on what you learned and what needs changing.
Make sure a Retrospective or your Failure Celebration does not change into a blaming exercise. If someone wants to admit they made a mistake, encourage them but never point fingers. Encourage people to help each other and work together towards a shared goal instead.
Creating psychological safety at work has so many benefits that it should be high on the agenda of every leader and Agile Coach. It is a foundation for successful teams, as proven by Google. It fosters an environment where people can be authentic, creative, and ultimately innovative.
