In this episode recorded at QCon London 2019 Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, first spoke to Andrea Dobson on balancing risk and psychological safety and Katherine Kirk on escaping organisational hell.
Key Takeaways
- Where people work together we see behaviours that need coaching and that’s where organisational psychologists provide value
- Psychological safety is necessary in order to be able to mitigate risks
- Teams need to build habits that promote safety – ask more questions rather than blaming, and look for learning opportunities
- There is a lot to learn from Eastern philosophy about empowering people to solve their own problems rather than solving it for them
- One of the main reasons that organisation “transformations” don’t stick is due to the ingrained habits that haven’t been changed
- Frequently the issue is that the effort involved in changing habits wasn’t taken into account when the transition plan was established
- There are some common patterns which inhibit organisational change, these include: aversion, desire, restlessness (or busyness), dullness (exhaustion) and oscillating doubt
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Show Notes
- 01:00 Introduction to Andrea
- 01:28 Moving from clinical psychology to organisational psychology
- 02:10 Where people work we see behaviours that need coaching and that’s where organisational psychologists provide value
- 02:21 The technology industry is moving from focusing on computers to understanding and improving how humans communicate
- 03:10 The need for psychological safety in order to mitigate risks
- 03:35 Having a psychologically safe environment enables better risk assessment and overall decision making
- 04:02 Why psychological safety is crucial for innovation
- 04:31 Defining what we mean by psychological safety in the workplace
- 04:56 Psychological safety as a belief that we share as a group
- 05:10 It’s OK to take a risk because no one will humiliate you for doing so
- 05:55 What’s needed to create a safe environment
- 06:08 The importance of consistency of response
- 06:43 Referencing Kahneman’s System One and System Two thinking approaches
- 07:21 Build habits that promote safety – ask more questions rather than blaming, and looking for learning opportunities
- 08:03 It’s impossible to turn off reactive System One thinking which is responsible for habitual reactions
- 08:21 System Two thinking relates to problem-solving and coping with novelty
- 09:08 Getting into System Two thinking requires deliberate effort and a questioning focus
- 09:36 Psychological safety does not mean lowering the standards we hold ourselves to
- 10:18 The need to create an environment that is both safe and high-demand
- 10:26 It’s about holding each other accountable in a way that people feel they can still improve
- 10:52 Referencing Peter Senge’s work on the Learning Organization
- 11:21 Senge’s work lacked concrete steps on what is needed to actually get to the learning organisation
- 11:58 Factors that go beyond the theoretical research and impact the ability to create the environment needed
- 12:37 Psychological safety is one of the building blocks – there are others such as experimentation and leadership behaviour
- 13:01 Executives need to model the learning behaviour so others follow them
- 13:27 These are hard changes for organisations to make and they take a long time to happen
- 14:13 It’s hard work, but it’s worth it
- 14:28 Enumerating the benefits that organisations can get from being a learning organisation
- 15:08 A happy employee is a happy person
- 15:26 This is a critical survival tactic for organisations today
- 16:04 Introducing Katherine Kirk – “culture whisperer”
- 17:07 The impact of a deadly disease, and leaning on techniques from Eastern philosophy to survive
- 17:46 These techniques are effective in the work environment in turning difficulty into effectiveness
- 17:58 Becoming a student of difficulty
- 18:42 Comparing with medical trauma treatment where the responders need to cope with the situation at hand
- 18:56 Learning to change the reaction to the circumstances to manage the fear and channel it to being effective
- 19:35 The “invisible forces” that are identifiable patterns
- 19:50 The Buddhist approach that is about empowering people to solve their own problems rather than doing it for them
- 21:04 Identifying the patterns and enabling people to become empowered to solve the problems they find themselves in
- 21:31 Drawing on ideas from many different philosophies
- 22:09 Habits are an invisible force that confound us
- 21:02 Bad habits return, and habits take a lot of effort over time to change
- 23:16 One of the main reasons that organisation “transformations” don’t stick is due to the ingrained habits that haven’t been changed
- 23:47 What happens in the organisations as you roll out new practices
- 24:15 An example of hierarchy as an organisational habit – these changes take multiple years to become the new ways of working
- 24:32 The analogy to trying to change eating habits
- 25:30 Companies and teams have the same outcomes when they try to adopt new ways of working – they know the benefits, but the habits take a long time to overcome
- 26:10 Frequently the issue is that the effort involved in changing habits wasn’t taken into account when the transition plan was established
- 26:57 After the initial rollout the support scaffolding of the instructors and consultants is gone and the organisation is on its own
- 27:10 When the consultants go the change agent’s role gets harder as they support the people making the changes
- 27:31 Do they have both the capacity (available time) and capability (knowledge and skills) needed to support others through their transition
- 27:47 The capability for changing habits is about endurance and persistence
- 28:12 Many people in technology don’t build the endurance and persistence skills and are unable to support change that sticks
- 28:24 The lack of these skills results in burnout as the change leaders try to support change they don’t have the skills to endure
- 29:31 “Transforming culture” is a simplistic snapshot approach – the reality is that culture change takes a long time and consistent effort
- 30:01 Change the language to help understand the reality – it’s about changing deeply ingrained habits over a lengthy time
- 30:25 Helping teams transition habits takes a different set of skills and experience than dropping in new practices
- 31:15 Once people get the understanding and communicate around trying to change habits the changes can actually happen fairly quickly
- 31:52 The story of working with a leadership team and teaching them the patterns to look for
- 33:10 One of the gaps in the lean/agile community is that there are people who understand what’s needed, but the message remains too complex for most people to understand it
- 33:23 Katherine’s work identifying the patterns and making them accessible through simple techniques that can be taught to change agents
- 34:32 Drawing on the “5 hindrances” from Buddhism as the habitual reactions to look for
- 34:37 The five habits are: aversion, desire, restlessness (or busyness), dullness (exhaustion) and oscillating doubt
- 34:52 Showing how a habit can initially be a good thing, but it can become a problem in a different context
- 35:25 Habits on their own are not bad – the context in which it is exposed is the key factor
- 35:52 Showing how changing the viewpoint and recognising the habits for what they are, improves communication and collaboration
Mentioned:
- QCon London 2019
- Container Solutions
- Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow
- Peter Senge – Learning Organization
- Amy Edmundson
- Andrea on Twitter
- Katherine on Twitter
