About the Psychological Safety Field Guide

What kind of field guide this is

A field guide is the book that we carry into the terrain. It helps us identify what we’re looking at, understand how it relates to what grows near it, and notice things we'd otherwise walk past. It is a map of the psychological safety territory: the practice of it, the research underneath it, and the connections between the two.

What’s on the map

Two kinds of thing. The first is all our articles from psychsafety.com: years of practice, argument, and occasionally changing our minds in public. The second is the related papers, books and studies: research from Kahn and Edmondson, through safety science, cognitive and organisational psychology, literature on power, gender and equity, plus work on ecology and complexity. Between them run thousands of connections - our judgements about what links to or led to what: when the map puts a 1977 runway disaster next to a 1926 essay on power, it is because we think one illuminates the other. You are welcome to disagree, and if you do, please let us know!

Each paper carries a summary that says what it found, how solid the evidence is, and where the ideas led to or have been superseded. There are arguments against psychological safety on the map too, because a field guide should also show us the things to be critical or wary of.

How to read the Field Guide

Start with a landmark you know or one that seems interesting, and look at its neighbours: the interesting material often lives next to the thing you came for. The themes are the map's regions; the trails are guided walks with a narrative thread, and the most travelled runs through the disasters. If you would rather be dropped into a random spot on the map, there’s a button for that too.

The text version

Every node, trail, theme and author on the map also exists as a plain page: readable without JavaScript, navigable by screen reader, printable, and fast on slow hardware or connections. Maps should not only belong to people who can see them. The text version starts at the trails.

The Commons

It is free to use, and an MIT-licensed version exists to make your own maps, and it is still growing: most weeks something is added, corrected, or connected better. It is made by Tom Geraghty and Jade Garratt at psychsafety.com. If something on the map is wrong, thin, or missing, tell us: field guides improve through use.