Do You Have Psychological Safety? Of course, we do.

“Do you have psychological safety?” Most organisations do not hesitate when asked this question. The answer comes quickly and with confidence. Of course we do. We talk about it. We train for it. We measure it. It is part of how we describe ourselves. 

And usually, that answer is sincere. And yet, organisations are still surprised. By issues that were “never raised”, by disengagement that seems to come out of nowhere. Or by risks that, in hindsight, were visible long before they escalated.

This is not usually because leaders are disingenuous or uncaring. It is because psychological safety does not behave like a policy, a capability, or a value that can be installed and verified. When it becomes a concept that people nod at, organisations often end up relating to the idea of psychological safety rather than to what is actually happening in everyday work.

At that point, something important is lost. Psychological safety does not sit in declarations or survey scores. It emerges, or erodes, through countless small interactions: how uncertainty is received, how disagreement lands, how concerns are responded to in practice. These dynamics are situational, uneven, and highly sensitive to context. They cannot be meaningfully declared in advance, standardised, or enforced without distorting them. 

People still notice moments that feel slightly off. A hesitation before speaking. Laughing at that joke that wasn't funny. A concern that doesn’t quite have a name. A decision that is nodded ok rather than challenged. A toxic behaviour of a colleague that nobody talks about. None of this contradicts the official story. 

Psychological safety can only be recognised by looking at how the system behaves over time. This does not mean leaders must wait for failure to learn. It means the way organisations listen needs to change.

At this point, psychological safety has not disappeared. But the very issues the concept is meant to take care of have become harder to see.

 From “Do We Have It?” to “What Happens When Things Feel Off?”

Asking people whether they feel psychologically safe often produces reassuring answers. Especially in hierarchical systems, people are adept at reading what the organisation wants to hear. Agreement is not the same as insight — it's echo, confirming what the system already believes about itself, not signal telling it something new. (And: direct questions like this one rarely produce useful answers.)

A more useful question is quieter and more concrete: what do people do when something feels slightly off?

Do they raise it immediately, or do they hesitate? Do they test the waters, soften the message, or share it sideways with a colleague? Do they make a small adjustment and move on? These responses are rarely dramatic, they are adaptive. They reflect how people experience the conditions around them.

Psychological safety tends to thin out rather than announcing it's dissappearence. It becomes conditional to specific contexts while appearing intact elsewhere. By the time it shows up as silence, disengagement, or exit, the 'adaptive work' of the collective has already happened.

What is missing in many organisations is a way to notice these early adjustments while they are still small and recoverable.

Micro-Concerns

One way to get closer to this early signal is to pay attention to what we call micro-concerns.

A micro-concern is not a complaint and not a formal issue. It is something someone notices but cannot quite name. A moment that leaves a trace of discomfort, hesitation, or uncertainty, without rising to the level of “this was wrong” or “this felt unsafe”. There is often no clear language for it, and no obvious place to take it.

Most micro-concerns never surface. They are internally resolved, parked, or quietly worked around. Over time, these small, unnamed adjustments shape how people participate, what they share, and what they withhold. In hindsight, many of these moments could be described as early signs of eroding psychological safety — but at the time, they are simply experienced as ambiguity.

This is precisely why they matter. 

Micro-concerns sit below the threshold of most organisational listening mechanisms. They are too small for escalation, too vague for reporting, and too risky to attach one’s name to. Yet collectively, they shape the system’s behaviour long before anything becomes explicit. The challenge is not their absence, but our inability to see them.

Why Design Matters More Than Questions

When has it ever worked to simply ask people to speak up more? What is needed instead are conditions where these early signals can surface without forcing people to name them as problems, risks, or violations.

This is where narrative sense-making approaches such as SenseMaker become useful. Rather than running a psychological safety survey or creating a channel explicitly labelled for concerns, SenseMaker can be designed obliquely. People are invited to share short accounts of everyday experience: an idea they had, a decision they made, something that went well, or something that stayed with them without being fully resolved.

A micro-concern can sit naturally alongside these other stories, without being singled out or labelled as such.

This oblique design is intentional. When micro-concerns are hidden in plain sight, participation becomes easier. People are not asked to identify themselves as critics or whistleblowers. They are not required to name an experience as unsafe, inappropriate, or problematic. They can contribute without escalating, accusing, or exposing themselves. Genuine anonymity protects not only identity, but also meaning: the story does not have to be fully formed or justified.

From a complex adaptive systems perspective, this is what makes the signal usable. Individually, a micro-concern carries little weight. Collectively, patterns begin to emerge. Certain contexts repeatedly generate hesitation. Certain conditions correlate with stories that remain unresolved. Over time, this creates a landscape view of where the system is quietly asking people to adapt.

Seeing Patterns Without Singling People Out

What becomes visible through this kind of sense-making is neither individual complaint nor organisational consensus, but what might be called patterned experience. Leaders, HR partners, and decision-makers can see where psychological safety is thinning without having to identify individuals or force interpretation onto single stories.

This matters because any approach that exposes people in the name of safety risks producing the opposite effect. Psychological safety is undermined when people feel observed, categorised, or assessed. It is strengthened when the system learns without demanding personal risk.

Seen this way, micro-concerns are not things to be captured and fixed. They are early indicators of how the system is shaping behaviour before anyone feels able, or willing, to name psychological safety explicitly.

If organisations want to take psychological safety seriously, the task is not to declare it, measure it, or roll it out as a programme. The task is to develop the ability to notice how people respond to uncertainty while there is still room to act.

That begins by listening differently - for the small, unfinished signals that tell us where something is starting to drift. 

One proven way organisations are beginning to develop this kind of listening capability is through narrative sense-making approaches such as SenseMaker®. This is a software platform that collects large numbers of short, self-interpreted micro-narratives across an organisation. 

Used this way, SenseMaker is a form of distributed ethnography that makes patterns of lived experience visible without forcing people to speak up, take a stand, or put themselves at risk. It does not tell organisations whether psychological safety exists; it helps them notice where it is quietly thinning while there is still time to respond. 

In practice, psychological safety depends less on speaking up than on whether a system can notice what is already being sensed before it quietly adapts around it.

Postscript: This isn't only about psychological safety. The same thing happens with change, transformation, half the words we use in this field — people get fluent in them long before they're lived. The training happens, the vocabulary spreads, the organisation can talk about itself correctly. None of that tells you what's actually going on in the room.

Dave Snowden made a distinction in the fifth part of his Channel and Estuary series that I keep coming back to: resonance versus echo. "Resonance changes you, however slightly, in the process of receiving the other frequency. Echo returns you to yourself unchanged." A safety score, a well-run debrief, a room full of nods — that's echo. It confirms what the organisation already thought about itself and hands it back, untouched. A micro-concern that actually lands is resonance: something in how the system sees itself shifts, even slightly.

I chose pictures of deer for this piece: ecotone dwellers, estuarine, liminal beings, whose survival depends on sensing the slightest disturbance in the field before it has a name.