I have defined psychological safety as the belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. 6 The concept refers to the experience of feeling able to speak up with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able – even obligated – to be candid.

Working in a psychologically safe environment does not mean that people always agree with one another for the sake of being nice. It also does not mean that people offer unequivocal praise or unconditional support for everything you have to say. In fact, you could say it’s the opposite. Psychological safety is about candor, about making it possible for productive disagreement and free exchange of ideas. It goes without saying that these are vital to learning and innovation. Conflict inevitably arises in any workplace. Psychological safety enables people on different sides of a conflict to speak candidly about what’s bothering them.

In these studies, psychological safety acts (using statistical language) as a moderator that makes other relationships weaker or stronger. Psychological safety has been found to help teams overcome the challenges of geographic dispersion, put conflict to good use, and leverage diversity.

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.

The problem with Perrow’s idea that organizations could not safely function with interactive complexity and tight coupling was that so many such organizations did in fact function without mishap for years, even decades. Nuclear power plants operated without incident nearly all the time. So did air traffic control systems, nuclear aircraft carriers, and a host of other inherently risky operations. A small group of researchers led by Karlene Roberts at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to study how they did it. What they discovered was more behavioral than technical. The term high reliability organization, or HRO, captures the essence of the theory. HROs are reliably safe because of how they make everyone in them feel accountable to one another for practices that consistently catch and correct

deviations to prevent major harm. Vigilance is one word for it. But it’s more than that. To me the most interesting part of HRO research is the observation that rather than downplaying failure, people in HROs are obsessed with failure. My colleagues Karl Weick, Kathie Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld wrote a seminal paper highlighting the culture of HROs as preoccupied with failure, reluctant to simplify, acutely sensitive to ongoing operations (quick to detect subtle unexpected changes), committed to resilience (catching and correcting error,

rather than expecting error-free operations), and valuing expertise over rank. In other words, HROs are weird places. Rather than holding back to see what the boss is thinking, people there don’t hesitate to speak up immediately. A frontline associate, to avert a crisis, can tell the CEO what to do. Failure is clearly seen as an ever-present risk that can nonetheless be consistently averted.