Spotlight Session - Creating psychological safety in IT

Understand the crucial role that psychological safety plays in IT and knowledge work. Learn about the damaging impact that a lack of psychological safety can cause. Identify some practical techniques for building psychological safety in your organization.

Price: 15000 GBP

Creating psychological safety in IT

3x 2 hour online sessions

Product code: P641e

Product details

• Product name: Creating psychological safety in IT

• Product code: P651e

• Product type: Spotlight session

• Format: online session

• Schedule: 3x 2-hour sessions

• Suggested attendees: Engineering leadership team, Agile coaches and delivery managers, team leaders 

• Number of attendees: up to 15 people

Price: 15000 GBP

All sessions from Conflux are co-designed with Matthew Skelton, co-author of the book Team Topologies.

What the Spotlight session is about

Psychological safety is an essential requirement for organizations looking to achieve, navigate, and sustain a fast flow of change. But how do you go about creating psychological safety in your organization? And whose responsibility is it? How do you even begin a conversation about psychological safety if people don’t feel psychologically safe?

This Spotlight session highlights the critical role that psychological safety plays in teams and the wider IT organization, and key success factors in creating an environment where psychological safety can thrive.

Who the Spotlight session is for 

This Spotlight session is for those in engineering leadership and coaching roles - for example, heads of department, team leads, Agile coaches and delivery managers - anyone who is concerned with team process, engineering productivity, and team health.

This session can be run in two ways: as an introductory session or as a longer ‘See-Do-Teach’ program where we guide and coach your Enabling teams to use the new knowledge and techniques with their peers inside your organization. Discover more about our See, Do, Teach programs.

What benefits to expect

• Gain a shared understanding of what psychological safety is (and isn’t)

• Learn about the crucial role that psychological safety plays in IT and knowledge work

• Learn about safety culture practices

• Identify ways to build psychological safety in your teams

Problems that this Spotlight session solves

Are your teams having robust and open discussions about technical decisions and direction? Are your post-incident reviews really focused on ‘what’ rather than ‘who’? When something doesn’t go quite to plan, how do people feel when they have to break the bad news to their boss? How is failure regarded at your organization?

Schedule: what’s covered and when

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Screenshot of part of the Miro board used for this Spotlight session.

The Spotlight session takes place over three 2-hour sessions, making it easy to schedule in busy calendars across multiple time zones. These sessions can be run in the same week or spread across two or three weeks. 

• Session 1: Defining Psychological Safety

• We begin by taking a short but sobering look at the financial cost that IT organizations can incur when psychological safety is absent.

• We then some stories that illustrate the positive benefits of people feeling psychologically safe, and the negative consequences when they don’t. 

• We take a deep dive into what the term psychological safety actually means and examine the impact of people not feeling psychologically safe at work.

• We then consider the idea and practice of an ‘Andon cord’: what its purpose is, its origins at Toyota, and how we might implement such a practice in IT.

• We finish session 1 with a fun ‘anti-problem’ exercise, in which we explore how we would make our workplace the most psychologically unsafe place it could possibly be!

• Session 2: Creating psychological safety

• We begin by thinking about who we see as leaders in our organizations, and what actions these leaders can take to help build psychological safety.

• We examine why it is so important for psychological safety to exist within teams and then take a look at some of the techniques and practices that can be used within a team setting to foster psychological safety.

• We then explore two of these techniques in more detail as we try them out for ourselves. First, we introduce the Performance Quadrant, and then together we will hold a retrospective on the Spotlight session itself.

• We finish session 2 by giving you a short task to complete as homework before the next session - to read an article about the Volkswagen ‘Dieselgate’ scandal.

• Session 3: Psychological safety in IT, plus Q&A

• We begin with a discussion about the Volkswagen ‘Dieselgate’ scandal and the concept of ‘root causes’ when problems occur in complex systems.

• We take a closer look at the role that psychological safety plays in IT, including some of the tools and practices commonly used in the industry.

• In our final hands-on exercise, we explore what actions we are empowered to take to begin to build psychological safety in our teams and wider organizations. 

• We finish session 3 by collectively exploring any questions that have been raised throughout the Spotlight session.

Prerequisites

Attendees will get the most benefit from the Spotlight session by completing the prerequisite activities. The ‘Essential’ activities will only take around 15 minutes to complete. The ‘Recommended’ activities may take a few days to complete in total but will enable a deeper, more valuable learning experience. 

Essential

• Watch this short video (approximately 10 minutes) of Dr Amy Edmondson giving a talk about psychologically safe workplaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhoLuui9gX8

• At Conflux, we use Miro for our online workshops. If you’re not already familiar with using Miro, you can quickly learn the basics with this short course from Miro: https://academy.miro.com/courses/participant-onboarding

Recommended

• Watch this video (approximately 50 minutes) of Dr Amy Edmondson speaking about the importance of psychological safety for learning, innovation, and growth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Ub1xfSQ1s

• Read ‘The Fearless Organization by Dr Amy Edmondson: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fearless-Organization-Psychological-Workplace-Innovation/dp/1119477247/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ULLFTTU62GGA

We also recommend

• Insight sessions: https://confluxhq.com/live-sessions#insight

• 4-week peer learning sessions: https://confluxhq.com/live-sessions#peer

• Online talk with Q&A: https://confluxhq.com/live-sessions#talks

How to buy

Price: 18000 GBP (plus applicable taxes)

We have flexible contract and payment terms. Contact our Sales team to begin the purchase process, quoting workshop code “P651e”.

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