TL;DR: Psychological safety isn’t about comfort—it’s about creating the conditions where people can speak up, solve problems, and improve systems.
Psychological safety is the foundation of learning, quality, and continuous improvement. When people fear blame, embarrassment, or punishment, problems stay hidden and improvement stalls. When people feel safe to speak up, organizations learn faster and perform better.
These posts explore psychological safety through a Lean leadership lens—connecting daily behaviors, system design, mistake response, and respect for people. Drawing from healthcare, manufacturing, aviation, and executive leadership, this archive focuses on how leaders create (or destroy) the conditions for honest dialogue, problem solving, and sustainable improvement.
The second revised (and expanded) edition of Timothy R. Clark’s The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety came out this week. My copy showed up yesterday, and I’ve been working through it. I’ve learned a lot from Tim over the years.…
Somebody on the r/nursing subreddit asked what the worst medication error was that people had seen or heard about. Almost six hundred replies came in. I’ve read the whole thing, and there are a few ideas I want to come…
Sean Dow was on the 22nd floor of a Manhattan high-rise last week, working on the building’s sprinkler system, when he noticed something wrong with the concrete slab: cracks where cracks don’t belong. The building is Pfizer’s former headquarters on…
I was reading The Birth of Lean, the Lean Enterprise Institute’s collection of interviews with the people who built the Toyota Production System, and one answer from Eiji Toyoda is worth quoting in full. This is Eiji Toyoda on mistakes,…
Picture your best week as a leader. Every meeting ran on time. Every status update was green. You walked the floor and people smiled and told you things were going great. Your open-door policy was working beautifully, because employees kept…
If you’ve read much of my work, you know I keep circling the same question: why do smart, capable people hold back what they know? Sometimes they stay quiet because they tried speaking up once and got burned. Sometimes a…
TL;DR: Burger King, T-Mobile, and Domino’s have all built ad campaigns around the same confession: our product was bad, but it’s better now. The marketing is interesting. The leadership lesson is better. In each case, the harsh verdict comes from…
“Challengers” A college friend of mine sent me a photo from Oslo recently. He’d spotted a display about IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad and his “challengers” just outside the Nobel Peace Prize Center and the National Museum, and sent the translation…
I haven’t said much about this here yet, so consider this the announcement. I’m writing a new book. It’s a practical guide for Lean leaders, continuous improvement professionals, and anyone who’s ever wondered why their problem-solving training didn’t produce more…
A Florida surgeon, Thomas Shaknovsky, was indicted on a second-degree manslaughter charge on April 13. The charge followed the death of William Bryan, a 70-year-old Alabama man, during what was supposed to be a laparoscopic splenectomy in August 2024. Instead…
I’m happy to announce that the first seven chapters of my new book are now available through Leanpub.com. The book is called The Silence Tax: How Lean Leaders Drive Out Fear and Futility. It was originally called “Psychological Safety for…
Every organization has a small number of people who will speak up no matter what. They’ll raise the uncomfortable issue in the meeting. They’ll flag the problem everyone else has learned to walk past. They’ll push back on the plan…