Psychological safety is not immunity from consequences, nor is it a state of high self-regard. In psychologically safe workplaces, people know they might fail, they might receive performance feedback that says they're not meeting expectations, and they might lose their jobs due to changes in the industry environment or even to a lack of competence in their role. These attributes of the modern workplace are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. But in a psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea. The fearless organization is one in which interpersonal fear is minimized so that team and organizational performance can be maximized in a knowledge intensive world. It is not one devoid of anxiety about the future!

Rather than informing an appropriate course of action, the more immediate, visceral, intensely powerful, emotional - possibly blunter - response can overwhelm the slower, more elaborately calibrated, evaluative system. We become paralysed by fear. We lose a sense of control and panic ensues. Our thoughts are distorted and we become disorganised by fear. In this frenzied state of mind we cannot respond to reason.

First, fear inhibits learning. Research shows that fear consumes physiologic resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. In a word, learning. And that includes learning from failure. It is hard for people to do their best work when they’re afraid. It’s especially hard to learn from failure because doing so is a cognitively demanding task. Second, fear impedes talking about our failures. Today’s never-ending chore of self-presentation has exacerbated this ancient human tendency. The pressure to look successful has never been greater than in this age of social media. Studies find today’s teens, in particular, are obsessed with putting forward a sanitized version of their lives, endlessly checking for “likes” and suffering emotionally from comparisons and slights, real or perceived. Our emotional reaction to a perceived rejection is the same as to an actual one, because it’s how we interpret a situation that shapes our emotional response. And it’s not just the kids who worry. Whether in professional accomplishment, attractiveness, or social inclusion, keeping up appearances can feel as necessary as breathing to full-grown adults. The real failure, I’ve found, is believing that others will like us more if we are failure-free. In reality, we appreciate and like people who are genuine and interested in us, not those who present a flawless exterior.

I’d go so far as to say that insisting on high standards without psychological safety is a recipe for failure—and not the good kind. People are more likely to mess up (even for things they know how to do well) when they’re stressed. Similarly, when you have a question about how to do something but don’t feel able to ask someone, you’re at risk of running headlong into a basic failure. Also, when people encounter intelligent failures, they need to feel safe enough to tell other people about them. These useful failures are no longer “intelligent” when they happen a second time.

Slow (high road) processing is thoughtful, rational, and accurate, while fast (low road) processing is instinctive and automatic. Why are these distinctions important? It’s easy and natural for us to process a failure through fast, instinctive, automatic low road pathways in our brain. The problem is that low road cognition triggers an immediate response to failure in the brain’s amygdala (that fear module for self-protection that in today’s world sometimes holds us back from risk-taking). As we have already seen, how we interpret events affects our emotional responses to them. Fortunately, we can learn how to reinterpret events in our lives to avoid persevering in unproductive negative feelings. To do that, you must override the amygdala, with its superfast pathway from perceived threat to fear, to challenge its automaticity with information and reasoning.