Creating psychological safety with psychological flexibility

What is psychological safety, and why is everyone talking about it?

In the past several years, psychological safety has become increasingly prominent in the public lexicon. Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, offered one of its simplest and most famous definitions. In a 1999 field study, she defined it as “a shared belief held by members of the team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” In other words, psychological safety is what happens when members of a team feel that they can voice their ideas and concerns without fear of retribution. 

It also gained some street cred, so to speak, around 2014, the period during which Google completed a two-year study on what separated its highly successful groups from the ones that floundered. The study, called Project Aristotle, identified psychological safety as one of the five core characteristics of successful teams—the most important one, in fact. 

That said, when it comes to the importance of psychological safety, a team’s success shouldn’t be the only concern. The pandemic saw the advent of the Great Resignation, and this mass employee exodus shows no signs of stopping. According to a 2021 study carried out by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the top three reasons employees cited for quitting their jobs were not feeling valued by their organizations, not feeling valued by their managers, and not feeling a sense of belonging. People want to be heard and valued, and this can’t happen unless they feel that they can speak up and engage with their teams without the risk of retaliation or ostracization. 

But in order to foster this psychological safety, we need something called psychological flexibility.

What is psychological flexibility, and why is it important for leaders?

Psychological flexibility is an individual’s ability to behave in a way that brings satisfaction, even when uncomfortable thoughts are showing up in them. In practice, it allows people to notice new behaviors. When you’re inflexible, you’re not noticing all the different things you could do in your current situation. Psychological flexibility, on the other hand, helps people derive new behaviors, even when they have all sorts of yucky thoughts and feelings. It lets people take that stuff with them and move towards what’s important. This is particularly important for leaders: when they can choose behaviors which work better in their current context, they set a valuable example for others to follow. 

To  help create psychological flexibility, we work from a particular point of view: the ACT Matrix. 

The ACT Matrix: an introduction

The Matrix is split up into two halves and four quadrants. The top half is for five-senses experience. Everything you can touch, taste, see, smell, and hear goes up in that half. The bottom half, on the other hand, is for internal experience. It encompasses our thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations. There’s also the right and left sides, which represent satisfaction and relief, respectively. Each quadrant contains a question, or category, and when we walk people through the Matrix, we take them through each one. 

How to create psychological flexibility with the ACT Matrix

We start in the lower right, where we ask the simplest of the four questions: who’s important to you? This question gets a lot of different answers. Some people say their spouse, others say their child(ren), others still say their colleagues, and more than a few people will put their pets down in the lower right. Basically, if someone is important to you, you’d put them down in that quadrant.

Once everyone has had a chance to put down their important people (and pets), we move to the lower left quadrant. Here, we ask about the yucky stuff that shows up—the feelings we want to get relief from. Fear is the classic example, and it’s the one we like to use to get people started. Boredom, anger, self-doubt, and nervousness are other great examples. 

When yucky stuff shows up, people often try to get relief. This brings us to the upper left quadrant, where we ask people to put down the things that they do to get relief from their yucky stuff. There’s nothing wrong with any of these moves; people do them all the time. For example, in groups that lack psychological safety, a common relief move is not speaking up in order to get relief from fear. 

Finally, we move to the upper right quadrant, and ask people what they do to get satisfaction with who’s important to them. Like relief moves, there’s no end to possible answers. You could talk with your spouse, have a meal with your family, or play with your pets. 

Noticing and the first loop

Once we’ve gone through all four quadrants, we like to ask people if, in the next week or so, they’ll have the opportunity to notice who’s important, yucky stuff that shows up, what they do to get relief, and what they do to get satisfaction. At this point, you’ve successfully helped them become more psychologically flexible. 

Going from the bottom right to the top right is called a loop, and there are two of them. We’ve just introduced the first one; the second loop is around the ProSocial Matrix, which helps leaders and other team members take their newfound psychological flexibility, and put it to work to create psychological safety within their group.

The second loop, shared purpose, and social context

For the second loop, the Matrix looks almost exactly the same as in the first loop, save for one question. Rather than asking who’s important in the lower right, we instead ask what the shared purpose is, immediately shifting the context away from the individual to the group. The shared purpose is most likely going to be the services that the organization provides for its users. 

Once we’ve set down the shared purpose uniting the group, then we can then move to the other three quadrants: yucky stuff that shows up, moves we do to get relief, and moves we do to get satisfaction. In the second loop, all these questions are reframed in the context of social situations. Instead of just asking about what yucky stuff shows up, we focus on yucky feelings that show up when we’re in social situations. Similarly, we reframe relief and satisfaction moves as taking place in a social context. 

When people are able to notice everything in this loop, there is naturally far more safety in risk taking because everyone is trying to achieve the group’s shared purpose.

What the Matrix does for psychological safety

As isolation and feelings of being undervalued continue to drive employees to leave their organizations, it’s incredibly important that organizations and leaders know how to create environments where people feel that they can speak and be heard, and be heard without judgment. In other words, psychological safety needs to be a priority for everyone looking to build successful and long-lasting teams whose members feel respected and are willing to take bold risks. The two loops around the Matrix are simple tools that anyone, anywhere can use to foster psychological safety. 

Interested in developing psychological flexibility and psychological safety within your team?

If so, I offer a complimentary call to discuss your requirements and how we might work together.