If digital transformation is to succeed, then psychological safety is a non-negotiable, says change management expert Bontle Senne
The path to digital transformation is paved with bad ideas, making it ironic that we still struggle to create spaces safe enough to let people share theirs. Indeed, Google’s 2012 Aristotle project highlighted how, counterintuitively, asking “stupid” questions and having worse ideas helps build high-performing teams.
The project found that the single greatest driver of team effectiveness is not tenure, team composition, individual expertise, productivity utilisation, or any of the other metrics we look for to better manage teams. It is psychological safety – a shared belief that it is safe to take risks without fear of negative consequences. Ultimately, in a culture where individuals feel safe to experiment, challenge, and indeed, ask stupid questions, good things happen.
Trust is the foundation from which you build psychological safety, accountability, innovation, and results. Without that foundation, you end up with people who are unwilling to risk enough to make the transformation work. They might believe that someone will be blamed or even fired if things go wrong. The lack of honesty, feedback, and transparency is very often what kills organisational transformation. Not because people don’t have ideas, but because they’ve learned it’s safer to keep those ideas to themselves.
“Trust is the foundation from which you build psychological safety”
Shifting power dynamics
Digital initiatives are often a trigger for change in relative power dynamics when organisational structures change, and delegated authorities adjust with them. Power shifts indirectly when sources of influence change. One example is data: when data governance and ownership changes, a new team now has control over analysis and interpretation of the data that drives decisions.
When people see these changes coming in their transformation, they align themselves with factions they believe will win. “Winning” means they believe they will have better access to resources required for them to be successful in their work and objectives. In doing this, they often alienate other groups and breed fear of change that quickly escalates. For example, implementing a new CRM system or AI data cleaning process leads to a change in power dynamics. That shift leads to fear surrounding their role or job uncertainty. Which, in turn, leads to increased stress, as the transformation alters more tools and ways of working. Stressed employees withdraw and try to limit their exposure to the change. Sometimes that means quiet quitting, and sometimes that leads to good employees leaving. Psychological safety is one of the most effective ways to short-circuit this leap from changes, to fear, to turnover.
To productively deal with the risk associated with making difficult-to-reverse decisions about an uncertain future, people need trust in the fairness and transparency of the transformation. They must understand that no one will be penalised for taking risks that don’t work out and that there is fairness in how the outcomes of that risk will be perceived.
When your organisation doesn’t have the psychological safety required to challenge reality without being penalised, its teams default to designing and supporting something that works on the surface, but won’t fix the messy fundamentals.
I have heard more than once a CEO ask which “heads needed to roll” when big investments in infrastructure and core systems hit problems. Project and change managers started glossing over things they knew they couldn’t fix in their report. Teams similarly focused their capacity on areas on where progress could be evidenced, and the metrics generally looked good. The results weren’t catastrophic, but often, they were fairly mediocre – you don’t get technical breakthroughs from teams optimising to keep their bosses happy. Leaders who want to reduce problems are those who actively ask to hear all about those challenges. They create pockets of psychological safety with specific forums or use anonymous feedback channels to get an unfiltered view of the organisation’s sentiment, bypassing the layers of hierarchy where false harmony is most prevalent.
Marrying challenge with opportunity
Luckily, the determinants of psychological safety are also the determinants of successful digital transformations. With the strong correlation between those goals, leaders can take action to hit two targets in one swing.
Take skills and expertise as an example. Digital transformation requires a level of technical competence in leaders and teams that often comes from cross-functional specialists coming together to build one thing. Something as interdisciplinary as integrating an internal AI solution to a client-facing product requires people from business, technology, data, design, risk, and product teams to collaborate. These teams need to be able to suggest approaches that might be wrong, challenge each other’s assumptions, and iterate through flawed ideas to reach good ones.
Recent studies in Human Resources Management have shown that psychological safety also impacts the ability of diverse expertise to lead to better outcomes.
Having different capabilities on the team has a positive impact on performance when there is psychological safety, but a negative impact without it. Geographic disbursement and diversity in nationality also have a negative impact unless there is sufficient psychological safety for people to believe that those differences will not affect them unfairly.
I worked on a global Agile transformation project in India where there was very little internal leadership. Most of the organisation’s newly formed, cross-functional Agile teams had leaders based in the US, the UK, Germany, or Singapore. Development issues needed to being raised on the ground in India, but this wasn’t possible due to clumsy reporting lines and conflict of interest, ultimately resulting in a lack of psychological safety. The engineers, designers, testers, and project managers in India quickly realised that without local, internal champions to argue for their effectiveness, their positions could be in jeopardy.
That created too much risk for innovation, experimentation, or self-management. They stuck with what they knew and how their bosses wanted things done. This applied even with conflicting or clearly unwise instructions. The internal leaders assumed that this was further proof that there was no one competent enough to promote in India. Only a CIO who saw beyond the performance to the mindsets that drove it realised that those teams were just trying to protect themselves. He started a massive internalisation and recruitment drive in three Indian offices and, within only a few weeks, the change was visible.
In organisations where the C-suite is surrounded by people too afraid of the consequences to tell the truth, the top team risks making decisions based on filtered, overly positive information. Without that filter, problems, such as not knowing how to get a diverse set of skills to work effectively in the same area, were resolved within months.
“Complaints are intelligence about what’s actually happening on the ground”
Healthy resistance
The journey to psychological safety also requires giving employees an invitation to (temporarily) resist change. People need to be able to complain about the transformation before they can embrace it. Complaints are intelligence about what’s actually happening on the ground and the best indicator of real levels of psychological safety. A team that can complain openly can also have difficult conversations about realistic expectations for solutions, and commit to fixes that may not initially work without fear of being blamed.
The critical question for leaders trying to understand their starting level of psychological safety is this: can team members speak up or ask for help if they feel they are failing? If they believe that failure will be met with personal sanctions or consequences, they’re not going to put anything on the line for that transformation. They know that, regardless of how invested they may be in it, the organisation is not similarly invested in them if they make the wrong call. It is safer just to stop making calls altogether.
Leaders need to ensure that the fear of potential failure gets replaced by the thrill of potential breakthroughs. And this will often only happen after several bad ideas are shared and rejected. We don’t just build psychological safety to ensure that everyone can have helpful opinions, good ideas, or clever solutions to bring to the table. We work to build safety to be wrong, because it is better to suggest something flawed than to wait for the “perfect” solution that doesn’t risk or gain anything. Perfect is the enemy of done, bad ideas are the catalyst for real change, and safe risk is the unassuming hero of any innovation.
About the author
Bontle Senne is a speaker, transformation leader
and author of Beyond Buy-In.
Further reading
This article was first published in Business 5.0.