Tools for Transitioning into Hybrid Workplaces

As offices reopen after a year of remote work and offer their people options for where and how to work going forward, I keep recommending “What Psychological Safety Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace,” by Amy Edmondson and Mark Mortensen to help navigate the transitions. To work through a whole range of anticipated mixed messages and new anxieties, the authors are clear that coworkers must believe they can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation—in other words, that managers create an environment of psychological safety. With that in place, people can sort out the next normal with minimal pain on reentry.

Whether you’re new to Edmondson’s exceptional work on psychological safety or already a fan, I think you’ll appreciate this illustration from a recent MIT Sloan Executive Education program where we highlighted key ideas from her book, The Fearless Organization:

Question Bursts Continue to Unlock Creative Solutions

It was fun this month working with a team at MIT on an animation sequence to get across the basic method and value of my Question Burst exercise during disruptive transitions. The method works well in psychologically safe places (at work or home), and it helps strengthen psychological safety in places where it's weak. Check the Question Burst out – both to learn about the method and to get inspired about doing animations like this for your own ideas. Many thanks to Marsha Dunn for the illustrating and Ricky Valadez for the music.

And for more cartooning around questioning, see the embedded animation in Courtney Hohne’s recent post “How to Think in Questions, Not Answers.”  Hohne helps the people at X, the “moonshot factory” at Google, convey their wildly ambitious ideas in the forms of compelling stories. Here, she shares that group’s “tips for entering the what-if zone.”

Work and Life in Transition

• Navigating Transitions During Disruptive Change has been a thread through much of my own work, from researching the expat experience to studying hyper-innovative organizations, but the topic has taken on whole new urgency in a time of digital transformation and widespread uncertainty about the future of work. If you are responsible for leading a team through the coming year and would like the opportunity to spend two days really preparing for that challenge, join Roger Lehman and me – and a global group of your peers – in a live, online program May 20-21.  

To read my full April newsletter, please check it out at “Thanks for Asking.”