Hello Friends!
Greetings from Barcelona. ☀️
If you are joining The Quest for the first time, welcome to our weekly exploration of creativity, facilitation, and learning. 🙌
🤔Why is it that in some groups you feel comfortable putting yourself out there and speaking up? And in others, you hold back? In some groups, you bond quickly with the other group members. And in others, you don’t?
I decided to dive a little deeper into the research.
Studies on high-functioning teams find that the single most important ingredient to making a team work boiled down to one thing:
Psychological safety.
The same is true for learning in groups. We learn best when we feel safe to take risks, when we can speak our minds, and when we feel supported by others.
So what exactly is psychological safety, and how can you create the conditions where it takes root and flourishes in your groups?
That’s our Quest for this week.
In this week’s edition 🔎
The 4 stages of psychological safety
Facilitation Tips for creating psychological safety in your groups
Let’s jump right in.
🪜The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety
A book by Timothy Clark where he connects psychological safety to our basic human needs. Clark defines psychological safety in 4 stages:
A condition in which human beings feel (1) included, (2) safe to learn, (3) safe to contribute, and (4) safe to challenge the status quo – all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way.
Clark argues that if we can’t do these 4 things fear shuts us down. But when the environment nurtures psychological safety, there’s an “explosion of confidence, engagement, and performance.”
Watch a short video here. You can download a free summary of the book here.
🤝10 Facilitation Tips for Creating Psychological Safety
Everything that I have learned about building psychological safety in groups comes from the 10 years I spent working with Partners for Youth Empowerment. PYE facilitators are seasoned experts in building group psychological safety quickly. They pay special attention to the beginning of programs where the conditions for psychological safety take root and grow.
Here are 10 tips that I use for building psychological safety that I learned from PYE.
Check out the Twitter thread or read the full article here.
What would you include in your top tips?
💻How to Foster Psychological Safety in Virtual Meetings
A Harvard Business Review article by Amy Edmondson, one of the pioneers of psychological safety research, and Gene Daley. They write about psychological safety in a business context. But many of the tips also apply to group learning. Zoom gives us a bunch of new tools like chat, breakout rooms, reactions, and more that can help build psychological safety. Thanks to Romy Solomon for sharing this link. Read the full article here.
🕸️The Complexities of Psychological Safety
Building psychological safety is vast and complex. A participant’s ability to feel safe can be influenced by a number of factors: race, ethnicity, gender, ability, and more. What do we need to learn when facilitating groups that acknowledges the complexities of group interactions? This is one of my facilitation learning edges.
If you are exploring this too, check out the free resources on Facilitating XYZ.
What resources and practices have you found helpful?
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Until next week!
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