The Importance of Psychological Safety in Software Teams

Psychological safety may not be something you’ve thought much about but if you’ve sat through a long team meeting where your boss talks and everyone else just listens you may have experienced it. If people feel it’s either a waste of time speaking up or potentially risky to challenge a colleges ideas then useful collaboration will be lost. A situation is psychologically unsafe if team members feel that could be mocked, ridiculed, ignored or, in extreme cases, made to feel there job or position could be in jeopardy.

John Le Drew collected sixty hours of interview recordings from some of the software industries most notable thinkers to ask the question – “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”. He came to speak at Agile Yorkshire to share some of his findings and insight.