Create Psychological Safety
Occasionally, either in a school setting or a work meeting, we are told that we are in a “safe space.” In other words, we can express our opinions and ideas freely without fear of ridicule or even retaliation if we criticize those in authority. In that environment we have the ability to ask or act in a safe environment with no judgement.
This is called creating Psychological Safety, and it has been shown to increase learning and innovation exponentially. When we are able to table all of our ideas, regardless of how ridiculous some of them seem, it opens up our creativity, not just with ourselves, but with the other people we are doing the exercise with.
Psychological safety has also been shown to increase the information we learn from mistakes, both ours AND others. If we propose an idea and another team member has already tried it or something very similar, there are learnings from that that can be built on rather than starting from the beginning. Using the previous learnings as a steppingstone, innovation can be made at a higher level.
This stacking of learnings improves the likelihood that that a new process or idea will be successful, which is the ultimate goal of the exercise. It also leads to more team engagement and innovation as the process begins to produce results and success breeds more success.
The legendary example of the idea of psychological safety is Google with their “20% project”, however most people will be much more aware of the “mistake” that went around the world. American company 3M famously created the slogan “innovate or die” as part of their company culture after World War 2. They wanted to stay relevant and created “15% time” where their employees would dedicate 15% of their work week to innovating. This was a safe environment where they could work on almost anything that 3M could eventually turn into a product or service.
This program was wildly successfully and produced many products we still use today. The creation of a product from a polymer that did not work properly as glue has been touted as one of the greatest and most successful mistakes of the 20th century. One of 3Ms employees, during 15% time, found that this product stuck to paper just enough to hold, but could easily be removed without causing any damage to the paper. Of course, we are referring to Post-It Notes which are used by the millions by people around the world and are a brand of their own.
Google created their 20% project as a way to increase innovation through psychological safety and it has worked extraordinarily well. The project has notably produced Gmail, Google News and AdSense, three huge product lines responsible for billions of dollars in revenue per year.
There is no doubt that the process works, and the idea of a safe space is very appealing from the standpoint of idea creation and brainstorming or process improvement. However, most people would probably still not be totally comfortable expressing their raw ideas or opinions for fear that there would be repercussions, even if they have been reassured that there would not be. Unless a company has safe spaces clearly ingrained in its culture and processes, there may be hesitation from its employees to fully participate. That is an issue that a company has to address head on if they wish to implement the process and its leaders need to clearly demonstrate their commitment to protecting the integrity of the process by supporting its employees.
If you want to use psychological safety but your company does not support it, or you want to do it personally, you will have to create it for yourself.
One effective method to do this is to create a safe space where you can be alone with your thoughts without distraction. Ideally you would isolate yourself with a pen and paper and think about ideas related to one thing. It is much less effective if you just “brainstorm” for the sake of creating ideas. You want to have a goal for the session, whether it is ways to make more money, find a new job or learn a new skill, for example.
When you decide what the subject will be, you begin to write ideas quickly and without editing or over thinking. The idea is to get the ideas flowing, not to worry about feasibility or even logic. In the case of Post-It notes, the idea of using glue as a re-usable product for small, yellow pieces of paper would probably have seemed silly if approached with logic and we know how that turned out.
If you want to take advantage of psychological safety, begin practicing by yourself, and hopefully you will be able to expand it to family members and friends and create a mastermind group with like-minded people where you can create ideas that will change your life.