CCL Psychological Safety
This model plots teams on psychological safety against performance standards, so 'we need higher standards' and 'we need more safety' stop being competing demands and become two axes you manage at once.
Two axes cross to carve out four zones, and a team sits somewhere inside one of them.
Reach for this when…
- People hide mistakes until they become expensive.
- Standards are high but nobody raises a concern before it's too late.
- A blame culture is quietly training people to say less, not more.
How to run it
- Introduce the four zones: Comfort, Anxiety, Apathy, Learning.
- Survey or observe where the team currently sits.
- Name which zone you're actually in, not the one you'd like to claim.
- If safety is low, address the specific leader behaviours creating threat.
- Build norms that make it safe to flag risk, admit error, and ask for help.
A worked example
Situation. Nour Khalil ran Khalil Vineyards, a wine export business in Beirut, Lebanon, where shipment problems only surfaced once customs had already flagged them.
Applied. The team sat squarely in the Anxiety Zone: high standards, low safety. Nour stopped publicly naming who'd made a given error and built a standing rule that flagging a problem early earned credit, not blame.
Result. Within two shipping seasons, problems were getting caught four to five days earlier on average, before they hit a customs deadline instead of after.
The catch
The model is easy to use as a slogan - 'we need more safety' - without anyone naming the specific behaviour creating the threat. And high safety with low standards isn't the goal either; that's Comfort, not Learning, and it feels pleasant right up until quality drops.
If the leader is the main source of threat, the leader has to change first - a team exercise won't fix it.
Origin: Amy Edmondson