This is a really powerful (and fun!) exercise that helps participants learn and understand psychological safety, as well as an opportunity to qualitatively measure psychological safety and plot a way forward for the team.
The exercise has four main steps:
Discussion of psychological safety and what it’s like to be in a team in each quadrant. For this, facilitate a discussion and introduce psychological safety as a concept to everyone present or reaffirm if the team already understand it. Surface and discuss the definition of psychological safety.
Make it relevant. Starting as the bottom left, in the “Apathy” zone, ask everyone to contribute post-its or virtual stickies with words that describe that zone. Time box contributions and then discuss the words that have been put on the board. Move through each zone, and end with the top-right, the high performance or “learning” zone.
Measure psychological safety. Using different colour notes (blank, so they’re anonymous) for each stage, ask people to first put a note on the board to show where they felt they were a year ago. Your context may suit a different time period of 6 months, two years, or whatever works: essentially, you’re looking for “past state”. Discuss any clusters, any reasons why, and what that was like. Then move on to put a note where each person feels they are at present in their team, on average (given that we move around this matrix all the time, hour by hour). Discuss the present state, and ask for contributions about what it’s like on the team.
Look to the future. Finally, move to a different colour for the future state – “where do we want to be?“. This will likely be somewhere in the performance zone, but might be towards the comfort zone, and that’s ok. Use this stage to discuss what everyone can do on the team to help everyone get to that place.
It’s worth noting a few things about the Psychological Safety Quadrants:
It’s ok to be in the comfort zone, both individually and as a team. Sometimes we just need a breather from the hustle of work, maybe the team needs to heal from a loss or change, maybe someone on the team has had a baby and isn’t getting any sleep at the moment, or maybe they’re supporting a sick relative. The highest performing teams don’t simply live in the high performance zone – they openly discuss moving between comfort and performance. Sprinters take rests between races!
Make particular note of outliers.A team is only as safe as the least safe person. We may have 9 members of the team in performance, with one in anxiety; in this case, it’s the person in anxiety that we need to address. Maybe they’re the lynchpin in the team, feeling under a lot of pressure, or maybe they’re the only LGBTQ person in the team, and feeling excluded – either way, it’s critical to ensure everyone feels psychologically safe and included.
