Guidelines Framework
Welcome back Humantific readers. This week a brief follow-up post on the super relevant subject of Strategic Psychological Safety, sharing Humantific guidelines for its real-world construction in organizations.
Seeing an avalanche of postings on the subject of psychological safety in the last 12 months or so we have often been perplexed at some of the assumptions being made. The foremost, disconnect assumption is that teaching etiquette is somehow going to enable psychological safety in the context of humans working together in challenging organizational situations.
Among the avalanche, we noted that there are key differences between what we consider now to be the Conventional Psychological Safety appearing in Harvard Business Review, etc., often based in recently executed academic research and the Strategic Psychological Safety that we utilize in Humantific practice, working with organizations.?
The former tends to present general, often dumbed-down etiquette guidelines with the primary goal of avoiding errors. In contrast the later connects directly to stated strategic goals, change-making objectives, diversity goals, how innovation gets defined, cognitive preference recognition, adaptive innovation process and the human-centered nuances of inclusive culture building.?
While conventional approaches encourage better manners and good behavior, Strategic Psychological Safety reflects recognition of often seen built-in power dynamics that may be present in direct conflict with the organizations stated objectives.?
Without the recognition of table-top power dynamics, in the form of bad-habits rooted in by-gone eras, that are killing innovation seeds, the building of Strategic Psychological Safety and inclusive culture is simply not possible today.?
Since its enabling is vital to the survival of the organization, we help leaders make Strategic Psychological Safety as bullet-proof as possible. This requires more than asking people to be polite. Difficult lift.
[ *See: Untold Secret of Psychological Safety at the end of this post. ]
“?1. Encourage teams to bond through day-to-day tasks.
2. Normalize opportunities to learn from mistakes.
3. Ensure all people are seen.?
4. Seek input humility and openness.”
HUMANTIFIC: Strategic Psychological Safety: Guidelines Framework:
ONE:?Clarify need for organizational adaptive capacity in a continuously changing world with rising complexity of challenges.
Organizational Translation: Heads up, we are going to get our butts kicked if we don’t wake up to external change and get moving.
TWO:?Define what adaptive capacity is in organizational contexts and how it connects to the building of Strategic Psychological Safety.
Organizational Translation: With the complexities facing us understood, it is clear that we are going to need all the help we can get.
THREE:?Show the architecture/structure for organizational adaptive capacity, how the parts are interconnected, big picture/strategic and small picture/tactical views.
Organizational Translation: It’s a system connecting team dynamics to process tools, technologies, your physical work environment and stated strategic goals.
FOUR:?Articulate benefits and challenges of having diverse thinking styles present in the context of rising uncertainty and complexity of challenges.
Organizational Translation: It’s not going to be a walk in the park like adopting “mindsets”.
FIVE:?Surface and externalize cognitive differences on all teams including leadership.
Organizational Translation: Now I understand why Fred is always converging, regardless of task.
SIX:?Explain the connections between cognitive differences and adaptive innovation cycle.?
Organizational Translation: Each thinking style has a roll to play in the innovation cycle.?None are more important than others.?
SEVEN:?Describe key behaviors that link adaptive capacity, Think Balance and cognitive inclusion.?
Organizational Translation: We have vast imbalanced, over-capacity for narrowing, ie convergent thinking while stating our goal is innovation.
EIGHT: Adopt simple, cross-disciplinary collaboration guidelines and norms. ?
Organizational Translation: Time to provide tools that empower participants to reconfigure and overcome old table-top power dynamics.
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NINE:?Connect adaptive capacity to inclusive culture building.
Organizational Translation: Organizational ambidexterity is our goal. Ambidexterity is collective us.
TEN: Integrate Strategic Psychological Safety skills into innovation skill-building across the organization.?
Organizational Translation: We need the actual heavy-lift skills, not just light weight mindsets and introductory workshops.
Next Steps: After Strategic?Psychological Safety:
Another assumption hic-up seen;?Some postings about psychological safety seem to imply that mastering collaboration etiquette is the heavy lift equivalent to mastering advanced changemaking skills, that they are one in the same. Seasoned practitioners already know they are not.?
In the context of organizations, we want to be clear that Strategic?Psychological Safety is not an end-in-itself, is not advanced skill-building but rather a fundamental building block of adaptive capacity.?It becomes the foundation on which you build all your other innovation related skills, tools and capabilities. Much work remains to be done on the other side of Strategic Psychological Safety enabling.
Foundation Not Driving Engine
Working with organizational leaders, what we build on the foundation is introductory and advanced Complexity Navigation skills that contain an adaptive changemaking language sharable across the organization and used in many kinds of internal and external intervention contexts.?
Strategic?Psychological Safety itself is not a driving engine of sensemaking or changemaking.
Stepping outside the often convoluted complicated/complexity debate we assume that all organizational and societal challenge constellations contain complexity, relative to that organization. Most often it is complexity that the organization is unfamiliar with and is not skilled up to navigate. Often the on-the-ground methods and skills in place are not a good fit with the fuzzy nature of the new emerging context. That’s part of the complexity realization and acknowledgement.?
Roots & Underlying Purpose
Unlike the more recently arriving conventional approaches,?Strategic?Psychological Safety has roots in the **CPS community of practice, where the notion that everyone has the capacity to participate in innovation and changemaking has a long history. (Roots not found in design or design thinking historical literature.)
The?purpose of?Strategic?Psychological Safety is not simply to intercept potential errors in design or production but rather to proactively maximize collective brain power in the quest to become a continuously adaptive organization. This difference cascades into how inclusive culture is explained and built.?
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While the boomer generation was/is accustomed to tolerating often imbalanced, table-top power dynamics, it’s no secret that the arriving generations expect much less political bullshit and much more authenticity, transparency and inclusion.?
All good news for folks working to enable?Strategic?Psychological Safety.
To begin your journey to building Strategic?Psychological Safety, aka: Cognitive Inclusion inside your organization send us an email: kickitup (at) humantific (dot) com.
End.
*Untold Secret of Psychological Safety: Our readers who have been around the block more than once and are seasoned veterans of organizational changemaking will recognize that the error-avoiding version of “psychological safety” is a rather thin slice late arrival into the already existing broader subjects, known as Cognitive Diversity, Cognitive Inclusion, Inclusive Culture Building, Think Balance, Behavioral Ambidexterity and Adaptive Enterprise. These terms already had/have a much broader interpretation of what is involved in inclusive innovation and inclusive culture construction than the narrower interpretation of avoiding “errors”. The error avoidance / mind your manners approach is a much narrower prism aimed at the same dynamics. Humantific has a long history in these subjects, bringing this knowledge into adaptive capacity building in organizations.?
**CPS (Creative Problem Solving) is one of numerous global communities of practice that we participate in and contribute to. With deep roots, aspects of its knowledge can be found inside many other innovation approaches. It is one aspect of the Humantific hybrid approach. As all organizations face growing complexity in a continuously VUCA world more advanced human-centered innovation skills and methods are already needed. Hybrid methods allow for tapping into useful knowledge from multiple communities of practice.?Most leading innovation enabling practices including Humantific operate with hybrid approaches.
Images Credit: Journey to Inclusive Innovation: Humantific 2020-2023.
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1 年GK VanPatter This is amazing. I learnt something new. "Cognitive Inclusion" - makes so much sense. And is much more than change or sense making. The principles you outline are very relevant to emerging leaders and also future generations, who perhaps are more vulnerable from psychological safety. Your suggestions can, IMO, extend to current societies and apply to human machine (AI) interactions. The emphasis on technology based safety is emerging as equally important (like the Asimov's 3 laws) besides human to human interactions. I was reading this paper https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/governance-things-challenge-regulation-law where the authors observe that "structural shift are characterized in this article, for instance regarding its self-executing character and the imperfection of technology. Finally, the authors draw the conclusion that the ‘Governance by Things’ calls for a second-order regulation." My enthusiasm for your critical approach and maybe naive, but it could be extended to larger arena 4 as you mention in 1,2,3,4 model. More so, designers and researchers should be able to contribute to this important aspect - cognitive inclusion, and also bring attention.