This is a transcript of episode 365 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel.
Balancing psychological safety and high standards is crucial for high performance in your tech team.
Listen to the episode on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.
Management Study Group
Listen to this section at 00:14
Squirrel: Welcome back to Troubleshooting Agile. Hi there, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Hi, Squirrel.
Squirrel: So for a long time, including all the way back to when you and I started working together, you’ve been running something called a management study group. And I think you’re talking about something really relevant to our listeners this week in your management study group. So maybe you could tell us a bit about what that is and that topic that you were telling me about, which I said, don’t tell me more, tell our listeners!
Jeffrey: Yeah. Happy to do that. The management group is something we started in, if I remember correctly, December of 2011. So we’ve been doing this for a very long time. And the way it works, I mean, well. First of all, the reason we did it was so that we could bring more theoretical knowledge into practice, right? We wanted the people in the company to have a better understanding about how the bigger world in research, in organizational dynamics, how that was getting on so that we could make sure that we were essentially following the latest research recommendations. And that continues to this day. So it’s been now kind of the third company through some acquisitions and still going on. And I was especially excited about doing this topic this week because we’re going to be having a meeting on Friday, and I’m not sure if I can be there! So I thought it’d be great to have our podcast as my contribution to the study group this week and the article—
Squirrel: So all our listeners, you’re members of the management study group, I don’t know whether Jeffrey’s going to give you homework, but certainly he’s going to expect you to study something. And I thought it was fascinating. So I’m sure you will, too. What’s the study topic this week in the Troubleshooting Agile Management study group?
Jeffrey: Hahaha. The topic is an article that says psychological safety versus high standards, a misunderstood dynamic. And that’s the way the study group works, is there’s always some sort of video or reading that people do, not too long, and then we have a discussion that covers three parts.
Jeffrey: The parts are number one: what does the material say? Number two: do we agree with it? And number three: if we agree, what do we do? And then after discussion we give ‘Aha! Moments’. And so that’s the structure. And I think this would be a good topic for listeners. It’s going to cover things we talked about before. So it’s a nice review.
Jeffrey: I would love to have our listeners contribute homework in the form of especially the last one. If you agree with this, what do you do? How do you put it into practice? But we’ll come back to that later. So the article starts with the observation around Elon Musk and the biography of Walter Isaacson, and he’s talking to Musk and the term psychological safety comes up and apparently Musk cringes. The context here is the Twitter acquisition, and Twitter was seen as a very comfortable place to work. They wanted to make sure that everyone was comfortable. They had a mental health day they could take every month, they were permanently work from home. Elon Musk had the view that this was too much of a coddling environment, and they needed people to be hard core. And that’s the juxtaposition this article centers around, is the feeling that psychological safety somehow is the opposite of hard core. And the point of the article is, it goes on to say that this is misunderstanding what psychological safety is.
Squirrel: And my memory is that Amy Edmondson, who came up with the term, doesn’t like the term anymore, partly for this reason, that it sounds too nice, it sounds like a perk, like, ‘oh, we’ll give you a pool to swim in and free lunch. And oh, yeah, we’ll give you a good dose of psychological safety,’ and that’s not what it’s for. It should be uncomfortable, not comfortable! It should make you feel more on the edge and more risk taking. That’s the feeling you want from an effective, psychologically safe team. Is that right?
Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s 100% right. And I think it’s worth venturing into that for a minute because I think there was a trend for a while where companies believed that they needed to really compete to bring in developers. And there was a competition on sort of perks. You know, do we have onsite massage? Can you order free lunch every day or free dinner? Do you have a beer taps? Do you have a pool table?
Squirrel: I remember the Google London office had one of the telephone booths from Doctor Who, and it had Douglas Adams’s Bath, in which he had composed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Jeffrey: Oh wow!
Squirrel: So it was just kind of wacky stuff that they bought in order to say, ‘look, you can hang out here and have ideas that are as good as these people.’ Didn’t actually work out that way, I recall.
Jeffrey: Yeah. So I would say quite apart from the psychological safety, there was a trend where there was a lot of emphasis on perks and that actually did have a really negative impact. I remember talking to some people in Sydney who worked at Atlassian, and this is probably five years ago, seven years ago, and we were talking about this, and they said that they stopped advertising all of their perks in their job ads for engineers. And the reason was, it was attracting the wrong people. They had people showing up who were much more interested in the pool table and the beer and the massage, rather than actually solving problems and delivering customer value. So they wanted to put an emphasis back on performance. So there is, and has been, a kind of idea that in some companies, not just perception but reality that people ended up with their focus on the wrong place. They ended up with the focus on the perks rather than performance.
Felt Permission for Candor
Listen to this section at 06:06
Jeffrey: I think, related to that, is the idea of when people hear psychological safety. And as you said, like Amy Edmondson herself said, ‘darn, that was the wrong name,’ and which she prefers instead rather than psychological safety, which sounds like it’s about softness and comfort is ‘felt permission for candor’, meaning when you see something that you think is wrong, when you see something you think could be better, that you feel like you can speak up! And that you believe that what you say, which might otherwise come across as critical, will in fact be looked at as trying to contribute to the best possible outcome. And that’s really very, very different, right? Essentially what you’re saying is that it’s almost like permission for everyone to have high standards. It’s permission for everyone to speak up and say, ‘you know what? Actually, I think we could be doing better. Here are some problems that I see,’ and that people would be excited about discovering problems, finding ways to improve.
Squirrel: And that includes themselves. And I think that’s the point that Musk might have missed, and the name doesn’t help you with–
Jeffrey: Gah!
Squirrel: –It’s not just feeling good in yourself, like I feel safe, I can criticize Jeffrey and tell him all the things he’s doing wrong. I don’t feel like I’ll get in trouble for telling Jeffrey what he’s doing wrong, but it’s saying, hang on, I have been screwing up, and I’m not going to get fired for saying, ‘hey, you know the problem we have here?’ I go back to Edmonson’s original example with nurses. You know, ‘the problem we have here is that the red pills are right next to the blue pills, and it’s easy to pick up the wrong pills. And sometimes we’re going to give somebody the blue pill who should get the red pill, and we’re going to kill them. So, you know, I’ve done that. You’ve done that. We should move the pills somewhere separate and really make it clear which ones people should take.’
Jeffrey: Exactly! And I think there is a real example that was like the yellow box and the yellow box that are totally different things should not be together, right? Red and blue would be a big improvement. Exactly right. And for me, the center of this article is a graphic which is a classic kind of two by two matrix. And it has high psychological safety to low psychological safety. Up and down and then left and right. Left is low standards and to the right is high standards. And I think what they’re saying here is that if you know, Musk wants high performance, he wants high standards. And then what they say in their matrix is you’re only going to get that if you also have high psychological safety. And I think if you look at the different sections of the matrix… Okay, so if you’re high standards and high safety then what you get is, and I think this is very important, you get learning, which then results in high performance. And I want to come back to that because I think this is the key thing, is that the high performance is ultimately rooted in learning. But if you’re lacking that, if you have, say, high standards, but you have low psychological safety, what you end up with is anxiety. So people are being told that they need to meet high standards, demanding, high performance. But if you’re not able to fix the system, well, then you have limited control in your ability to improve performance, and that leads to anxiety.
Squirrel: And when we hear from listeners, we hear a lot of that. People saying, ‘well, you know, I can’t change things at my company. I can’t find the person who’s responsible for setting the budget and firing the only person in my team who knew how to do a particular task.’ And they feel they can’t take action. And one of our very frequent pieces of advice is to go and take a risk, to sort of move in the higher psychological safety direction by finding a person who might be responsible for that and saying, ‘hang on, the emperor has no clothes around here. We just fired the person who knows how to take care of our most important customer. We’re going to lose a lot of money. We should do something about that. And here’s what we should do.’ Now, that might get you fired, but that would indicate that you’re at the wrong organization. And if it doesn’t get you fired, it increases your psychological safety and reduces your anxiety. Have I understood correctly what the argument is?
Jeffrey: Yeah, 100%. The word that I would use there is that we argue for people to be high agency. And we do that by essentially claiming psychological safety, making it, getting to that point for yourself and then testing, and usually people end up with a lot more ability to create change than they might feel otherwise. But let’s go look at the other deficits here in the other quadrants. And I think if we go back to that kind of negative stereotype that people might have from high psychological safety is when that’s combined with low standards. And then the diagram here has the term ‘comfort’. So you’re very comfortable because the work is not very demanding. There’s high psychological safety, but there’s also very low demands. And that is being very comfortable but not necessarily high performance. I would say almost definitely not high performance. And then if you get the low, low category, low psychological safety, low standards, then you have apathy and people checked out. So that completes the four quadrants.
900-Seconds and 15-Minute Rules
Listen to this section at 11:16
Squirrel: Beautiful. Well I have an example that you were reminding me of recently, Jeffrey, which I thought I’d bring in here. And that is that long ago I had two kind of mirroring rules. They were rules that I had for the technology team that you joined many years ago at the company we both worked at. And those rules kind of complemented each other and sort of helped people to move to the right quadrant here. The first one was the 15-minute rule and the other one was the 900-second rule. And the way they were mirrors is, if you might notice, 900 seconds is 15 minutes. So the rule was that if you were stuck on something for more than 15 minutes, then you should put your hand up and get some help. And that was designed to create psychological safety, so people would feel comfortable saying, ‘I just don’t understand this!’
Squirrel: Because if someone is stuck trying to do a task, that they should be able to do that. We’ve assigned them that, we’ve worked on, that we should have in their skill set. Then there’s some organizational problem. I haven’t trained them well. You haven’t brought them into the right role. We haven’t given them the right specifications or requirements or demands or limitations on their work. There’s something that’s missing, and we should fix that. And I wanted to encourage that kind of rapid feedback for anybody who felt that they were just stuck. And that could be stuck on a coding problem, stuck on a customer request, stuck on a bug, whatever it was, I wanted nobody to be stuck for more than 15 minutes.
Squirrel: But! In order to create high standards and help people to challenge themselves more, we had the 900-second rule, and that rule said that you should try something for at least 900 seconds before you ask for help. The result of these two rules, of course, is that after exactly 15 minutes you should actually go and get some help. But up to then you should struggle with it. You should bang your head against it. You should get a little frustrated. And what that creates is this higher sense of agency and increased learning. Because of course, there are some folks who will just ask for help for everything, and they don’t learn as rapidly. I’d rather somebody tried it for a while, creating high standards, and then if they’re stuck, there’s a greater problem. But I don’t want it to last very long and that increases the psychological safety. So I was aiming for that learning and high performance quadrant.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I really liked that because it shows that you are asking people to be demanding. Of course, one thing that happens is sometimes people solve the problem in that 900 seconds.
Squirrel: Which is perfect, that’s what we want, yeah!
Jeffrey: Exactly. Right. And then you know that, if that happens, they actually feel better, right? That reinforces their sense of confidence because if it was encouraged, they might have sought help after 30s or a minute or five minutes. But then by putting a little bit more effort, they solve it. Then they’ve actually, you know, really solidified their knowledge and built more confidence for the future. And at the same time, they’re not just wandering, stuck, lost for days, which actually I know has happened!
Squirrel: Oh, yeah!
Jeffrey: I’ve been at companies where I will follow up with people and find out they’ve been stuck for two days at something. This is one of the things that stand ups in modern software projects are supposed to help catch is when someone is there, you know, after a couple of days saying, yeah, ‘I’m still stuck on this thing.’ It’s like, ‘well, let’s get you some help.’ You shouldn’t be stuck on this for multiple days, but it definitely happens.
Squirrel: And I want people, of course, to be even faster than that. I don’t want to wait days. I want to wait minutes.
Jeffrey: Yes.
Squirrel: But I do want them to struggle with it a bit, to work hard on it, to get a strong sense of what the problem is. So then when the solution comes in from someone who knows more, it’ll have someplace to go, and they can hang on to it and therefore improve their standards. So, yeah. For example, here’s a symptom that our listeners might be familiar with. You go to stand up, and it sounds the same every day. ‘I worked on ticket 13794. I’m still working on it. My plan for today is to work on it some more.’ If you’re hearing that kind of stuff and everybody’s going to sleep, that means your stand up is failing! That means you are not creating the psychological safety and high standards, and pretty much anything you could do to break that up would be helpful. For example, to outlaw saying, ‘I’m continuing on the same thing as I did yesterday.’ If you are about to say that, then you just replace that with, ‘I’m going to get some help with this thing so that I’m not working on it again tomorrow.’
Squirrel: If you did that, then that would create, first of all, the norm that it’s psychologically safe to say ‘I’m stuck,’ right? ‘I’m not making progress. I need help, and I’m going to get it.’ And that creates it. That makes it easier for people to say that often when you have those boring standups, it’s because the people who are doing it are afraid to say, ‘I’m stuck.’ They say, ‘oh, I’m still working on it. It’s okay. It’s fine. (I’m really stuck. I really don’t know what’s going on. I’m lost. But I ain’t going to say that because I’ll get in trouble. Maybe I’ll get fired!)’ Instead, you make it a valuable thing to say, ‘I need some help. I need to learn more about this. We probably screwed up somewhere as a company.’ And then that allows people to be psychologically safe to improve. And you also improve the standards because you get people learning from each other, rather than just banging away in silence and hoping that they get something done.
Jeffrey: Yeah. Fantastic. And so in terms of the discussions that the study group cover, you know, a few different pieces. First, what does the article say? I think we’ve covered that. Second, do we agree? You and I, I think very much agree with what it says. What do we do? I think you’ve given some good examples, you know, about the stand up, but also the rules, the 900-second rule, the 15-minute rule. And also I think the framing for learning this is actually from the article as well. You know, we both talked about this in terms of the system and how could we improve the system that we’re not looking to blame people, but to say, ‘look, if you’re stuck, there’s something here about the system that’s failed. How do we fix the system?’ So those are all good.
What’s Wrong with Comfort?
Listen to this section at 17:04
Jeffrey: There’s one more point I’d like to bring in, because I think some people listening to what I said earlier when I was talking about the different quadrants, might have heard me talking about the low standard, high psychological safety, the section of comfort and saying, ‘but wait, what’s wrong with comfort? Like being comfortable? Isn’t that nice?’ And I think that’s a fair question. However, at the same time, I have a good answer for it, one that works for me personally.
Jeffrey: And this is going to be the second link in our show notes is going to be talking about flow. And there’s the, I believe he’s Hungarian, the researcher who brought up and he wrote the book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. And the flow state happens when you have a balance between someone’s ability and the challenge. In the link that we’ll give, you’ll see another sort of two by two matrix. And this one left and right is low to high skill and top to bottom is low to high challenge. Now what’s interesting to me about this is you end up with something that mirrors exactly the quadrant given before, in that in the bottom left you have apathy in both in the upper right, whereas the one on psychological safety has learning in high performance. In the flow diagram you have flow. And so I wanted to bring this in because what the claim is, is that flow state is the optimal experience. This is the state that people most prefer to be in that when people are in flow, they described it as peak experiences in their life. And it happens–
Squirrel: And it’s not easy!
Jeffrey: That’s right. It’s because you’re challenged. You’re challenging yourself at the limit of your ability.
Squirrel: Think of rock climbing, because a really great way to be very successful at rock climbing is to find yourself a rock that’s one foot tall, and I guarantee I can climb a rock that’s one foot tall. I can do it every time. I’m never going to fail. I won’t fall off. If I do fall off, it won’t hurt, and I’ll do really well. But you know, if I told you that you were going to do that as your rock climbing experience, you probably would not be too thrilled. If I give you a rock face that’s sheer and you have no protections and there’s no handholds or footholds, that would be too hard, I think, for almost all of us. And you would fall off it a lot and you’d be very unhappy. But somewhere in between is something that’s an appropriate level of challenge and is not comfortable, but does allow you to raise your standards to find mistakes that you’re making and improve them. And that’s what satisfies people the most. It’s better than comfort because it’s not so easy as climbing a one foot wall.
Jeffrey: Exactly. And I think, and I will say, this is fair enough, this is people’s personal preference. If people prefer to be comfortable, if they prefer to be in the flow diagram, the equivalent quadrant is relaxation, right? I mean, I think I’d agree that anxiety and apathy are bad, which are common across both diagrams. And then if you look at the different labels of relaxation and comfort, like if you want to choose that, that’s fine. But I really think most people get more enjoyment. They get more satisfaction out of an environment where they get to experience flow because they’re continually learning, because their performance is continually improving. In my experience, the people who get to have that experience, they talk about how great it was.
Jeffrey: And this goes back to a really old quote from, Brian Marick, one of those early people at agile, and he said, ‘people deserve to work on projects that they brag about at cocktail parties.’ Now, I don’t know how many software developers are going to cocktail parties, but I like the idea. His point at that time was he was talking about the attributes, the four forgotten values of agile, and that it was skill and discipline, ease and joy. And these things go together and I think that’s kind of for me what the idea of high standards and high psychological safety, why it’s a choice that I recommend people consider is because it ends up being more fun. Let’s go do this, and not only will we be developing our skills, not only will we be producing better output, but personally, in my experience, it’s more fun. It’s more enjoyable. These are the best projects that I’ve ever been part of. The best teams, the ones I’ve enjoyed the most, are ones that have this attribute. And so in the end, that’s actually, for me, my personal reason to drive it. Even if it didn’t give the best output to the company, I’d still be tempted to do it because it’s just much more fun. And so that’s, I think, in terms of why we would do this, why I agree with the article. That’s what my personal motivation is, and that’s also why, you know, this study group is still going over a decade later is because it’s more fun to go have these conversations, talk about these ideas, talk about how we’re going to apply them. What are we going to change about our environment to apply this to make us better in the future? And that’s the kind of teams and environment I like to be in.
Squirrel: And if we go back to Elon Musk, it would be really easy to build a rocket that didn’t go anywhere or just went to low Earth orbit and just worked the same way as rockets have worked for 50 years or more. But Musk is trying to build rockets, last time I checked, that get to Mars. And that’s hard because not many rockets have ever gotten to Mars. So I think he’s trying to operate in this model. He’s not trying to climb one foot walls. And that’s something that I think might satisfy him. Although my mission in life is not to satisfy Mr. Musk, I hope when he gets to Mars, he stays there. But that’s another story. There are many folks who don’t have as many challenges as Mr. Musk, who really would like to challenge their employees. And I hope we’ve given them some thoughts for doing that in today’s management study group.
Squirrel: So, listeners, if you would like to get to Mars and you’re working in that direction and you have some ideas about how to apply the kinds of combination of challenge and high standards and psychological safety that we’re talking about.
Squirrel: We’d love to hear from you. If you disagree with us and you say, ‘hey, wait a minute, comfort is great and here’s why.’ We’d sure like to hear that as well. We get really wonderful emails from many of you. We don’t get a chance to respond to all, but they really do inspire us to come up with better topics, to research more and to come up with things that might be exciting to you. So please do get in touch. The way to do that is to head on over to Agile Conversations. Of course, the other way to keep in touch, as always, is to come back next week when we’ll have another episode of Troubleshooting Agile. Thanks, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Thanks, Squirrel.