The Seductive Lies of Psychological Safety

As a serial civic innovator and a lifelong creative, I’ve spent years thinking and talking about how to create an environment where innovation can truly thrive. While there are certainly things we can do to support innovation, I’m sick of hearing about the need for organizations to create psychological safety for people in order to generate great ideas. Frankly, it’s nonsense.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to create a framework that allows risk to be shared so that it’s not ONLY an individual burden. But the idea that psychological safety is necessary or a pre-requisite for innovation is just an excuse to avoid taking risks. It’s a way to protect ourselves from failure, and failure is a necessary part of the innovation process. Because if I’m able to say I don’t innovate or try new ideas because the environment isn’t exactly right, then I’m building in the excuse to not try in the first place.

Innovation requires risk, personal risk. It does. It means trying out ideas that might not work, being misunderstood, judged, and even ridiculed for these ideas. But that’s part of the game. That’s part of the process. Not everyone will get it. If we’re only willing to innovate when we feel “safe,” our ideas will be less daring, less interesting, and ultimately, less viable.

The risk we take on as individuals is what motivates us to push forward on a wild idea. It’s what makes being an innovator exciting. The possibility of failure creates a sense of personal urgency that drives us to succeed. Without that risk, we’re just going through the motions. In my localgov career, my success rate on pilot projects was 83%--or 5 out of 6, which was way too high. I should have failed more. But my willingness to try ideas out, and fail publicly, inspired others to try out new ideas.

In fact, I’d argue that organizations that focus too much on creating psychological safety for their employees are actually doing them a huge disservice. They’re creating an environment where people are too afraid to take risks and make mistakes, which ultimately leads to stagnation and complacency. It’s like saying I’m only going go hiking if the weather is 68 and sunny. That’s a mistake. The weather is unpredictable, just like the implications of a wild idea coming to life. We may have some idea of what it will look like if things go well, but if you wait for the perfect situation, you’ll be waiting a long time and likely never move. Half of the battle of great innovation is the actual DOING of making your idea come to life. It is testing and piloting an idea to find out what works and what doesn’t. And owning the results—good or bad.

So instead of focusing on creating a culture of psychological safety as a starting condition for innovation, we should be focused on creating a culture of experimentation. We need to encourage people to take risks, to try out new ideas, and to learn from their failures. By doing this, people will see from others that taking risks and failing didn’t mean the end of the road—instead that it was a bump on the road. It sends a signal to others that they can (and should) try and they will be okay. That’s true psychological safety: the belief in yourself that no matter whether you succeed or fail, you’re still a winner. Your risk will inspire others to take risks.

We know we’re winning as an organization when people brag about their “failures” with the same level of enthusiasm as their “successes.”

To create this culture of experimentation, we can redefine what it means to be successful. Instead of focusing on short-term wins and measurable outcomes, we should be valuing the process of experimentation and learning. We need to celebrate failure as a necessary part of the innovation process, and encourage people to take risks even when they know they might fail. We can establish a “risk profile” for a given project and create an aggregate risk score for our organization based on innovation criteria we set. In essence, we can share risk as an organization, helping to reduce (not eliminate) the burden of individual risk. By creating an organizational risk profile, we can determine our risk tolerance as an organization while maintaining a level of individual accountability to push the boundaries.

So let me say it again: psychological safety is not the key to an innovative culture. If we want to create a culture of true innovation, we need to embrace risk, failure, and experimentation—and learn to get better at taking personal risk. We need to create a culture where it’s okay to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from them. We need to share risk, not eliminate it. Innovation is about pushing boundaries and taking risks, and we can’t do that if we’re too afraid to fail. So let’s stop talking about psychological safety as a cultural panacea and start embracing the wild thrill of taking personal risks and pushing boundaries.