Follow-Up to Work in Progress with The Ready, Vol. 2

Making experimentation “safe to try”

This article is in response to the scenario described in Work in Progress with The Ready, Vol. 2: Safe to Try? Before reading the article below, we recommend you take a few minutes to first read the original prompt and the responses it garnered from others.

The basic premise of “Work in Progress, Vol. 2: Safe to Try?” was that we were working with a client where traumatic events in their history had made them extremely allergic to any idea of experimentation. Because they had failed in preserving their employees’ safety in the past they had reinvented themselves (mostly successfully) as having an extremely robust “safety culture.” There were artifacts of this culture everywhere. You heard people talking about it all the time and you could see how almost every decision went through a safety lens first. In many ways it was impressive to see an organization learn from its past and fundamentally change its culture.

For all the benefits this renewed focus on safety gave our client, it was starting to get in the way of our work together. They felt stifled under bureaucracy and were craving new and better ways of working but they were incredibly resistant to trying anything outside of their comfort zone. In their mind it seemed that discomfort equaled unsafe. Anybody, at any time, could wield the “Safety Hammer” (as we started calling it) to end a discussion about trying something new. Since our change methodology is fundamentally about helping organizations identify the pain points in their current operating system and conducting experiments to find their way into a new operating system, we had a problem on our hands.

Here’s what we did to help break the logjam and get the project back on the rails:

1. We honored our client’s commitment to safety and made sure they understood that we were taking it just as seriously as they were. We spent a lot of time asking questions and learning about the events that caused the need for the new safety culture. We asked them to teach us about why they do things in certain ways and we played by the same rules they did (to this day the project team has a hard time jaywalking because we had a member of our client team chew us out for doing it early in the project).
2. We opened a conversation about the nature of safety and risk. We noticed that people wielded the Safety Hammer in a way that treated all risks as the same. That’s obviously an oversimplification of the world we live in considering the stark difference between trying a new meeting structure and operating a piece of dangerous machinery carelessly, for example. If someone wanted to swing the Safety Hammer then we were going to ask them to clearly explain how and why they were doing so. Not only did this require people to think harder about what they were actually feeling and noticing, but we helped them understand that if you start to treat everything that’s uncomfortable or scary as a safety risk then you inherently start to under appreciate the real risks. If everything is a safety risk than nothing is.
3. We started talking about how adopting new ways of working to better match their environment was inherently safer than staying static in a world that’s constantly changing around them. If they used safety as an excuse to never grow or learn then they were going to find themselves ill-prepared for their current reality — a truly unsafe situation to be in.
4. We encouraged experimentation in areas of the organization that were the furthest away from the most physical risk. We weren’t asking workers in the field who were doing dangerous jobs to start experimenting willy-nilly. We were working with IT professionals and software developers who were more insulated from physical risk. Their work was important, but they were unlikely to be physically harmed by trying something new.
5. Finally, while we noticed many outward artifacts and rituals around physical safety, we started to realize there was a profound lack of psychological safety in this organization. Without psychological safety people were loathe to speak up when they noticed truly unsafe situations. Once we started this conversation with leaders and members of the organization it became very apparent that the safety culture had a long way to go. We started analyzing the nature of incentives, how failure was treated, and how leadership showed up in challenging times. Each of these areas was ripe for experimentation and that helped guide the nature of our work together moving forward.

Ultimately, we were successful in helping the organization see that the only way to honor and improve their culture of safety was to make experimentation a central part of their identity and a core capability that they took seriously. A culture of experimentation entails people paying attention and thinking — exactly the type of behavior you want to encourage if you’re trying to keep people physically safe.

What do you think about how we approached this challenge? What would you have done differently? What do you like about how we approached it? Please share your answers in the Response section below!

We’ll be back with a new scenario for you to respond to soon!

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