This is one of those questions I hear very often: does psychological safety create a space that encourages behaviors harmful to the organization? After all, repeated avoidable mistakes potentially come with costs, reduced effectiveness, and the need to correct the outcomes of our work. The answer to this question is, in fact, short and simple: absolutely not. So how does making mistakes relate to building psychological safety? Let’s take a closer look.
According to Professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Interpersonal risk-taking means doing or saying something in front of others that could make you feel exposed, judged, or vulnerable — but doing it anyway because it serves learning, collaboration, and transparency. This definition doesn’t explicitly mention making mistakes, but if we think about it longer, the connection becomes very clear.
First, people generally make mistakes. For a wide range of reasons — and the vast majority of them are not rooted in bad intentions. I personally don’t know any organization in which no one has ever made a mistake. And once a mistake appears, is talking about it among the most pleasant conversations? In my experience, not really. Psychological safety helps us first and foremost ensure transparency around the mistake, because that is the very first step toward taking any meaningful action. Interestingly, Professor Edmondson discovered psychological safety while trying to understand why some medical teams made more mistakes than others. To her surprise, the teams that performed better were those making more mistakes (or... reported more mistakes, I should say).
Second, we can approach mistakes in different ways. Usually, one of the worst strategies is sweeping them under the rug and pretending nothing happened. Meanwhile, one of the most effective strategies seems to be drawing conclusions and implementing improvements that minimize the risk of the same mistake happening again. So we consciously work against repeated avoidable mistakes — and responsible teams of professionals with high psychological safety level approach mistakes exactly this way. Low psychological safety, on the other hand, may lead to mistakes being carefully hidden in the deepest, darkest corners of the office.
Third, not all mistakes are created equal. Some mistakes result from a lack of focus on quality or carelessness — and we should not agree to those. Psychological safety does not mean accepting such mistakes or brushing them off. But there are also mistakes that occur because we operate in a complex environment with lots of unknowns, exploring unfamiliar areas, experimenting. Very often, during such exploration, we return with results like: “this doesn’t work,” “this doesn’t help,” or “this isn’t a valuable direction.” Sometimes we face a problem we’ve never encountered before, and only after the fact are we able to assess our actions and understand where the mistake was made. These mistakes are often called intelligent errors, and I like to describe them as a learning tax. And these are precisely the kinds of mistakes psychological safety may encourage us to make. But these are mistakes inherent in complex work — and we have tools, approaches, and ideas for minimizing risks and maximizing learning in such situations. An intelligent error is not a failure. It’s simply a First Attempt In Learning.
Psychological Safety does not encourage Scrum Teams to forget about professionalism at work. Nor is it an invitation to set ourselves up for failure. It is an invitation to be brave enough to explore and to make the kinds of mistakes we can learn from.
If this perspective resonates with you, I invite you to reflect on how psychological safety shows up in your own team and reach out if you’d like support cultivating it.