Rafael Chiusi

Nobody listened.

And almost a year later, more than 300 people died in two separate 737 MAX accidents.

That also mentioned later on how stifling the culture was, and it was silencing most of the concerned employees.

When working with a client a few years ago, I remember seeing on the wall an impeccable record of health and safety awards.

I saw four years in a row they won the award, but nothing after that.

So I asked the COO what happened, to which he only replied, oh, we learned a lesson.

So his management team became so obsessed with winning the award that the most important thing they could do was to check all the boxes.

So the following year, many employees were incapacitated or even died as a consequence of several workplace accidents.

When talking to the employees, many of them said they could not report nonconformities to the managers,

Otherwise, they would be ostracized or labeled as inefficient.

So they took the only route possible, faked the numbers to win the award.

See, these stories, they all have something in common.

Like me, as a kid, these people were afraid of speaking up.

And this is a clear symptom of a workplace lacking what scientists call psychological safety.

Psychological safety, as Professor Amy Edmondson very well puts it, is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, suggestions, concerns, even mistakes.

So as an organizational psychologist, it fascinates me the science behind this concept and how easy it is to notice the importance of it.

As a professor in higher education, I am constantly concerned with creating an environment where curiosity has a free flow and my students have a safe space to be creative.

And as a consultant working with large scale organizational transformation, I constantly try to be the voice advocating towards more psychologically safe workplaces.

Now I want you to try and imagining working in a team where everyone has a voice.

your colleagues take their turn speaking, and more importantly, people actually listen to one another.