Psychological Safety: The Soil and The Seed

General Al Kramer: Wait a minute. What is the potential casualty rate for a single rocket armed with VX poison gas, General Peterson?

General Peterson: Sixty or seventy...

Chief of Staff Hayden Sinclair: Well, that's-that's not so bad.

General Peterson: ...thousand. Seventy *thousand* dead.

Chief of Staff Hayden Sinclair: Oh.

General Peterson: One teaspoon of this hits the floor, it's lethal up to... a hundred feet. One teaspoon of this shit detonated in the atmosphere... will kill every living organism in an eight-block radius. Get the point?

The Rock (1996)

The central challenge in delivering a psychologically safe environment is its fragility. Since the Enlightenment, humans have been trained to feel comfort in certainty. Enlightenment’s promise was that through rational endeavour it would end the ‘nasty, brutish and short’ existence of the Hobbesian human and deliver a predictable and durable future in which humans could live ‘nice, cultivated and long’ lives. All our Western modern institutions were founded on that promise and belief. Their influence has been so great, these ideas have crept insidiously into Eastern institutions as well. 

The volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity and relentless, exponential change of contemporary organisation and society came as a bit of a shock. We are mentally unprepared for such conditions. 

Such conditions unravel certainty and engender doubt. But we crave certainty and strive to eliminate doubt. That’s what makes psychological safety so fragile. All it takes is for an alpha-voice to impose a “one best way” through overly-assertive behaviours and our emotional cravings for certainty overpower our cognitive methods for negotiating complexity. 

This is compounded by a problem of leadership. Traditionally, we have associated great leadership with self-confidence, assertiveness and a drive to achieve. People with such qualities are often picked out for promotion. For some, as promotions impact ego, self-confidence shifts into arrogance, assertiveness to aggression, and the drive to achieve to a demand for perfection. A ‘one best way’ determined by a leader with these qualities, often dangerously simplistic, can get imposed across teams and infect the wider organisational environment, dismantling all efforts to generate psychological safety across the workforce. 

In such organisations, whereas once the leader’s aggressive self-confidence enforcing an unsuitable solution or methodology was a tablespoon of VX gas hitting the floor and hurting one team, it’s now detonating in the atmosphere, killing psychological safety everywhere. 

Is this avoidable? It is, but only if we begin to see psychological safety as a quality of the environment and psychological unsafety as a quality of the individual. That means we have to turn much management thought upside down. Instead of focusing on the 3-5% of the supposed superstars identified in texts such as The War for Talent, we need to focus on the people who destabilize collaboration and poison its potential. By doing that, we can begin to deliver a higher percentage of collaborative workers and add more value as a result. 

Toxicity: The Soil and The Seed

To make this clearer, we’ll look at one of the oldest metaphors in the study of cancer - the soil and the seed. 

If you get a cancer, it is generally not the primary cancer that kills you. It is the secondary cancers. For example, if you have breast cancer, the initial malignant lump can usually be cut out completely. A scan reveals no visible cancer and no evidence of disease. Yet, for some women, secondary, or metastatic, cancers in numerous parts of the body can appear mere months after the all clear. For others, nothing cancerous grows again. 

In 1889, an English doctor named Stephen Paget tried to make sense of this through a soil and seed metaphor. Siddhartha Mukherjee of The New Yorker explains his theory thus:

The seed was the cancer cell; the soil was the local ecosystem where it flourished, or failed to. Paget’s study concentrated on patterns of metastasis within a person’s body. The propensity of one organ to become colonized while another was spared seemed to depend on the nature or the location of the organ—on local ecologies. Yet the logic of the seed-and-soil model ultimately raises the question of global ecologies: why does one person’s body have susceptible niches and not another’s?

In organisational terms, the poison that brings psychological unsafety can spread in two ways. 

• Firstly, there might be team or departmental susceptibilities. In the human body, some organs, such as the liver, are highly susceptible to secondary cancers, whereas others, such as the kidney, are not. Whereas in the human body, this is reasonably consistent and predictable, there is no research available that can help us predict which organisational functions might be most vulnerable to the spread of psychological unsafety. Reasons might be related to the work they are doing, the people who work in them, the average age of the team, the manager or team leader in charge, or numerous other factors. 
• Secondly, there is organisational spread. Why do some organisations become toxic hellholes, rated as terrible places to work by Glassdoor, whereas others do not? Why do some stagnate and die, whereas others survive and thrive? 

The key seems to lie in the soil. Every organisation risks hiring a toxic person. One of the qualities of the psychopath is how urbane and charming he appears at first glance. Comfortable in talking about himself in an assertive and relaxed manner, he is going to shine at interviews. He’s easy to hire. 

The question is, once hired, whether his poison then spreads. Can he be disarmed before he explodes in the atmosphere? Can he be cut out before he infects multiple parts of the organisation? Will the organisation’s soil resist his seed and stop it spreading like weeds throughout its ecosystem, or will it get choked to death by his poisonous vines?

Read More: Psychological Safety: The Essence of High-Performing Teams