The Fearless Organization

Like Volkswagen, Wells Fargo's avoidable failure was not the result of one bad apple but of a system that demanded hitting targets so ambitious they could only be met by deceit.

What they had discovered was that even the extremely smart, high-powered employees at Google needed a psychologically safe work environment to contribute the talents they had to offer. The team also found four other factors that helped explain team performance – clear goals, dependable colleagues, personally meaningful work, and a belief that the work has impact. As Rozovsky put it, however, reiterating the quote at the start of Chapter 1, “psychological safety was by far the most important…it was the underpinning of the other

Workarounds,” a phenomenon identified by Anita Tucker in her remarkable ethnographic study of nurses in the early 2000s, are shortcuts that people take at work when they confront a problem that disrupts their ability to carry out a required task

two distinct sets of learning behavior, which we called learn-what and learn-how. Learn-what described largely independent activities like reading the medical literature to get caught up with the latest research findings. Learn-how, in contrast, was team-based learning that included sharing knowledge, offering suggestions, and brainstorming better approaches

Although trust and psychological safety have much in common, they are not interchangeable concepts. A key difference is that psychological safety is experienced at a group level. People working together tend to have similar perceptions of whether or not the climate is psychologically safe. Trust, on the other hand, refers to interactions between two individuals or parties

And then came the eureka moment. What if the better teams had a climate of openness that made it easier to report and discuss error? The good teams, I suddenly thought, don't make more mistakes; they report more

psychological safety as the belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking

Today's employees, at all levels, spend 50% more time collaborating than they did 20 years ago