Joshua Kerievsky and Heidi Helfand on High Performance via Psychological Safety

1:45 You cannot have a high performing team unless you have psychological safety
1:55 Describing elements of psychological safety – the ability to be wrong, to ask questions, to question and challenge a superior, to be yourself
2:30 Ways to facilitate psychological safety
2:40 Changing the ways we run meetings and events
3:10 The importance of self-awareness and knowing how our own behaviours impact others
3:25 The danger of unintentional impacts from leader’s communications
3:40 Psychological safety is tied to other forms of safety – eg financial safety (you can’t be psychologically safe if you are in fear of your income disappearing)
4:10 The Modern Agile principle of Make Safety a Prerequisite
4:25 Creating a safe environment is hard, and it must go beyond just lip service (“you’re safe to tell me what you think” then getting into trouble for doing so)
5:25 The importance of being aware and having a deeper form of listening so you can really create the safe environment
5:55 The message comes from more than words – being aware of body language and non-verbal communications that are happening around you, the role of silence, how comfortable are people to speak up
6:35 This takes considered effort and an open mind from a leader, and developing this level of awareness can be hard but is absolutely necessary
7:00 Describing one practical technique – the Cycle of Mistrust model from the book Driving Fear Out of the Workplace
8:10 Self-awareness of when you might be in a cycle of mistrust is necessary to be able to break the cycle
8:20 When you become self-aware you are able to make choices about how you respond
8:25 Telling a story of lost trust, how easily it can happen and an example of getting out of the cycle by discussing a blog post on the topic
10:10 Helping people have challenging conversations is another technique which can be used
10:30 Take the time to have crucial conversations early rather than later. Quoting Joseph Grenny: The health of an organisation is determined by the time lag between noticing an issue and talking about it
10:55 Coaching to help people prepare to have the crucial conversations rather than leaving them to muddle through
11:32 Ways to have non-judgemental conversations, building empathy and putting yourself in the other person’s shoes.
12:20 The importance of preparing people to have healthy conversations and ensure there is no unresolved conflict
12:25 A possible new agile metric – MTTCR: "mean time to conflict resolution"
13:15 Referencing Google’s Project Aristotle where they observed that psychological safety is the number one ingredient for forming and sustaining high performing teams
13:35 The impact of poor relationships on the nature of the products teams build (Conway’s law)
13:45 The quality of the products we produce is a direct reflection of the quality of the conversations we have in our teams
14:10 There is a huge amount of information available on ways to build psychological safety
14:25 If senior leadership doesn’t create a safe environment from the top down then the teams will not be able to be safe for themselves
14:55 Leaders need to admit fallibility and vulnerability, model the behaviours they want to see in the organisation
15:08 Referencing vulnerability based trust that starts with the leader and why it is so important. The leader acknowledging their own mistakes gives implicit permission for others to do so
15:33 Referencing Jeff Bezos about Amazon as the “best place to fail”
15:40 Being safe to fail while still valuing operational excellence – it’s the experimentation mindset
16:00 If people are criticized for failing they are afraid to ever fail again and will no longer take any risks
16:35 This starts with techniques and tools at the executive level and cascades down through the teams with different tools and techniques
17:05 Use tools to poll the teams and get honest feedback on how safe the environment actually is
17:35 Experiment and learn rapidly – look for the tools that are out there and apply them, measure the results and adapt
18:00 Executives will care when they realize this is a doorway to high performing teams
18:10 Talking about how this shows up in Joshua’s company
18:50s Lots of interest in Modern Agile, lots of companies starting to adopt the four principles and pull-based training
20:00 Describing the ideas which contributed to Modern Agile – agile, lean startup, extreme programming, lean and others
20:25 The four principles are present in many successful organisations, without necessarily being explicit
20:36 Make Safety a Prerequisite is the hardest of the principles to achieve but is the foundation on which everything else rests, without it the other principles are unattainable
21:20 The thriving Slack community for Modern Agile
21:40 Teaching workshops around the principles of Modern Agile
22:05 The philosophy of modern agile is strongly principles based, practices are secondary and pull-based
22:47 Challenging oneself every day on applying the principles in action
23:30 Talking about the content on modernagile.org

Mentioned

Agile 2017
Industrial Logic
Procore Technologies
Book: Dynamic Reteaming
Modern Agile
Book: Driving Fear Out of the Workplace
Joshua’s blog post on the Cycle of Mistrust
Book: Crucial Conversations
Google Project Aristotle
Conway’s Law
Patrick Lencioni on Vulnerability Based Trust
Jeff Bezoz on Amazon as the Best Place to Fail