by Ffion Jones and Jo Carter

Let’s be honest, who doesn’t want high performing, happier teams and better outcomes? Well, the answer might well be out there in the form of psychological safety. The virtues of building fear-free teams are quoted as too irresistible to be ignored and only the foolish would consider themselves above building it into their leadership practice.

So, is psychological safety a game-changer that can transform your team, organisation and life or is it just another buzzword? And what on earth has it got to do with service design?

I’m among many who believe that psychological safety is one of the most powerful collaboration tools you can employ.

Three women and two men sat on comfortable office chairs, talking with each other. There are post-it's on the wall behind and a bookshelf and other office furniture — Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash.

Where did this idea come from?

William Kahn

Psychological safety was first brought to us by William Kahn in 1990 as:

‘being able to show and employ one's self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career’.

Patrick Lencioni

My first discovery of the idea of personal safety in a business performance context was through Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team -

‘Dysfunction #1: Absence of Trust, The fear of being vulnerable with team members prevents the building of trust within the team.’

Lencioni doesn’t talk about psychological safety specifically but his Absence of Trust is similar in that it describes how being able to be vulnerable (speaking up about concerns, mistakes, crazy ideas, problems) builds trust which results in better results for the team. Trust is a key tenet of psychological safety.

Amy Edmondson

My personal hero, Harvard’s Amy Edmondson has led much of the more recent research and writing on psychological safety (see recommended resources below), providing many robust case studies from diverse industries where psychological safety has saved lives and made millions.

In Edmondson’s definition,

‘Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.’

She also quotes the widely used Google research data outlined in the New York Times article “What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team". The findings indicate that:

‘psychological safety is the single greatest correlate between a team and its success.’

Powerful data.

So again we ask - what has all that got to do with Service Design?

Adopting the mindsets for service design

Service design is more than just a set of tools and methods or simply a process. It requires practitioners to adopt the right mindsets, which are variously described (see resources below) - summarised in the image below:

Icons representing the six mindsets with text descriptions below. The mindsets are: empathy, optimistic, embrace ambiguity, creative and experimental, question assumptions and collaborative. — The mindsets for service design.

Applying this way of thinking and working becomes easier and more successful by building psychological safety for you and your team.

Demonstrates EMPATHY

To empathise we need to be able to listen intently and understand someone else’s point of view. Places where people can speak up freely breed empathy and mutual understanding of each other’s needs and preferences.

Operates with OPTIMISM

The opposite of psychological safety is impression management (more on this later): not speaking up for fear of appearing ignorant, incompetent, intrusive or negative. One of the most incisive statements Edmondson makes about ‘safe to speak up’ environments is that, while you can mitigate for things people say or do, you can’t mitigate for what is not said or heard. Wanting to hear from people and remove that fear comes with optimism built in. An optimism that they have something of value to give and it will help us arrive at better outcomes.

Embraces AMBIGUITY

Vulnerability is a powerful tool in building psychological safety and in embracing ambiguity. Being courageous enough to say openly, ‘I don’t know the answers but let’s explore the options’, is the kind of language we hear in psychologically safe projects, teams and conversations.

Actively EXPERIMENTS

The most successful teams have been found to be the ones where the leader frames projects as a learning opportunity, recognising everyone’s contribution and voice equally and welcoming failure as part of experimentation. Building, testing and learning, with increasing confidence as you go. These are also three of the tools in the Leader's Toolkit for Building Psychological Safety.

CREATIVELY confident

Creativity isn’t just about the arts. It is defined as ‘the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas’. It is taking all the ideas and knowledge you have and putting it together with those of other people to create novel ideas and solutions to problems. We need psychological safety so we can be sure that the rest of the team isn't judging us to be able to do this.

Effectively COLLABORATES

Returning to Google for a moment - remember, they found that:

‘psychological safety is the single greatest correlate between a team and it’s success.’

In service design, we need to create collaborative teams with users (both staff and people with lived experience) so they will speak candidly about their experiences and ideas. Psychological safety is key here.

Key moments for psychological safety in service design

This leads me on to explore the moments when you will need to have built psychological safety for a service design project to succeed:

Building multi-disciplinary teams

Service design usually involves working in multi-disciplinary teams. This is where a team is brought together with all the required skills and capability and are focused on achieving a particluar mission. Sometimes these teams are set up from scratch and are suddenly expected to work together. It’s foolish to believe that trust will automatically seed itself in the new team. Attention must be paid to deliberately building trust and psychological safety within the team (see the Leader’s Toolkit above). If you are bringing people on board individually, do the same.

Testing your assumptions

In service design, we’re always surfacing and questioning our assumptions - scary stuff! But congratulations, you’ve already taken the courageous step of making yourself vulnerable in not just relying on what you think you know already.

This requires you to say, ‘I don’t know’, or to ask what might seem like silly questions - and bring others along on the journey with you. Overcoming impression management and some of the fears that might stop you from taking this step, as shown in the image:

User research

You’ve already gone through that process of leaving your comfort zone and testing your assumptions. For many, especially those who are new to service design, speaking to people with lived experience of your service is a surprising barrier. We’ve been conditioned in many organisations to seek feedback through impersonal surveys. Knowing that research with service users needn’t be perfect in answering all the questions you might ever have about the subject is critical in helping people to take the first, low-risk step to engage with people in a new and different way. User research is iterative, developing and improving your research and interview questions as you go.

Secondly, and critical to uncovering valuable insights - making your research participants feel safe is important here. Making it more about them than you is your goal and will help with any nerves you are feeling too. Your users need to know:

how their responses will be used,
how safe they are to voice their real opinions and
that they can trust you and
withdraw consent at any time during or after the research activity.

Say (and document) all of these things, be it in observation, interviews, workshops, phone calls or any of the research methods you use.

Be mindful of power dynamics in the way that you dress, the language you use, choice of venue and the way you layout the space. Do it in a way that is non-threatening and doesn't reinforce power imbalances. What about paying participants to go some way to equaling the relationship? Then you are giving yourself the best chance of getting all the challenges, crazy ideas and brutal insights you really need!

Idea generation

Psychological safety unlocks people’s innovative capabilities according to Google’s research on Psychological Safety which says

‘It is only by bringing people together that we get the best ideas.’

This is brought to life at Pixar, where many of our most beloved family films are created. Their Brains Trust meetings are deliberately constructed to stimulate and encourage candid feedback regarding issues during a film’s production or optimisation.

The environment created is so safe that people come together to critique production at all the most important stages and no (respectful and non-personal) comment or idea is off the table. As Ed Catmull says,

‘Early on, all our movies suck!’

Experimentation and failure

Spectrum of reasons for failure. From blameworthy towards praiseworthy failure: Deviance / Inattention / Lack of ability / Process inadequacy / Task challenge / Process complexity / Uncertainty / Hypothesis testing /Exploratory testing (praiseworthy) — Spectrum of reasons for failure

And finally, where would we be without mentioning the F-word?

I often find people in organisations confusing the different types of failure. They might say things like - ‘we can’t afford to fail’, or, ‘failure’s OK for those start-ups, but we’re an important / well established / well-respected organisation, we can’t do that’. Or something similar!

However, when designing services for us unpredictable humans, experimentation, in order to discover if something is likely to work or not, is not a blameworthy failure. It is a praiseworthy failure (see A Spectrum of Reasons for Failure below), which takes you closer to the intended outcome. That is - as long as you’re honest about what you’re doing and make plans to critique and learn from what you do. Ultimately getting you closer to the intended outcome.

This is where the need for psychological safety comes in once again.

To conclude

Without psychological safety, people wouldn’t be prepared to be vulnerable, offer ideas, ask questions and admit they were wrong.

Many of the tools and methods we use in service design can be unfamiliar and feel uncomfortable, especially to those who are new to this way of working. This is especially so when we fully expect there to be some failure and learning along the way.

Psychological safety is an important, but perhaps often overlooked ingredient to running successful service design teams and projects. That’s why we include a good dose of practice in creating the space for psychological safety in Service Design in Practice learning and development programme.

Next time you start a service design project, or pull together a new team, what will you do to make the time and space for psychological safety?