Measuring PS

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The practical guide to running a psychological safety survey, and the article that routes readers to the free measurement platform. It opens with why rather than how: establishing a baseline, building a case for change for senior leadership or funding, raising understanding, getting people talking about team dynamics, or beginning to disrupt established norms. Measuring is described as doing four things at once, surfacing the issues, educating people about what psychological safety is, making it safe to talk about, and making explicit the very behaviours it is trying to encourage. Before anything formal, the advice is to talk to people first and find out whether they have even heard the term.

The warnings are given more weight than the method. Sampling bias runs both ways, since a survey can be answered only by those who feel safe enough or only by the most aggrieved. Campbell's Law applies the moment decisions follow from scores, because that is an incentive to alter the answers. And the governing rule is that you should only measure if you have a plan for what to do afterwards: measuring and then doing nothing actively harms psychological safety, and the piece asks the reader to imagine making themselves vulnerable in a survey and then watching the results be discarded.

On method it is even-handed about surveys. They give quantitative information that highlights strengths as well as weak spots, a baseline to repeat against, and something to show data-inclined people. What they cannot do is say why a score is low or what to do next, which is where qualitative work is needed, whether through open text boxes, a team performance workshop, or using the questions as prompts in one-to-ones. Surveying is said to suit long-lived teams with established habits; short-lived or brand new teams are pointed to the team performance exercise instead. Ten sample questions are offered, adapted from The Fearless Organization and explicitly meant to be modified for context, on the argument that relevance to your own team matters more than replicability across organisations. Edmondson's original seven statements are given separately for anyone who wants them unmodified.

Reading the results is where the argument sharpens. A perfect score is treated as a warning rather than a triumph, since it more likely means people feel unable to answer honestly. The aggregate matters less than the detail: the instruction is to find the statements with the lowest scores and the widest range of responses, because a team is only as safe as its least safe member. Afterwards, look to the qualitative data first, then work through the rationale behind each statement and the actions it suggests, from making expectations explicit and inviting half-baked ideas, through the Local Rationality Principle and looking for all the causes of an incident rather than the root cause, to remembering to look for the causes of success too.

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Read the full article on psychsafety.com →