Laws of Software Engineering · Principle
Principle
Psychological Safety
The shared belief that you can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and disagree without being punished or humiliated.
How to use it. Leaders build it by how they react when bad news arrives. What they say in all-hands meetings counts for little. Reward the person who raised the problem. Treat questions as a sign of engagement.
How it gets misused. Confused with comfort or low standards. Psychological safety means trusting that a challenge will be heard fairly. Teams with high safety have more conflict, and the conflict is productive.
Related
- Pattern Westrum's Typology Three kinds of organisational culture, distinguished by how information flows. Pathological hoards it. Bureaucratic routes it. Generative shares it.
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Principle
Blameless Retrospectives
When something goes wrong, look at the system that allowed it, not the person who triggered it.
- Saying Just Culture A culture that holds people accountable for the work they did, while looking honestly at the system that shaped the choices they had.
Clusters
- The Culture and Incidents cluster - How organisations learn, or fail to, from what goes wrong.