Japan is using the wrong version of psychological safety.

The concept came from Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor. She was looking at hospital teams, and wondering why high performance teams reported more errors (not less).

Long story short, she found that teams where reporting errors carried less interpersonal risk were more willing to report and discuss problems, increasing their ability to learn together.

Although not explicitly stated, my interpretation is that psychological safety was mostly about creating an environment where mistakes and speaking up did not carry disproportionate consequences. Small mistakes get small consequences. Big mistakes may entail bigger consequences. But small mistakes don’t incur massive social consequences.

But that is not how psychological safety is taught in Japan.

The concept has completely drifted into something that doesn’t make sense anymore.

Original reason (Japan’s adaptation of Edmondson’s original work): reduce the interpersonal cost of taking risks (like saying what you actually think in meetings). 

Psychological Safety today: make everyone feel safe externally, so they can say what they are thinking.

These are not the same thing, and this new focus has unintended consequences! One is, in my own layman’s terms, telling me not to be mean-spirited about other people’s mistakes. The other is telling me to actively notice and manage someone’s fear for them. 

Fear is an internal state, not an ambient property of a meeting. Different people perceive the exact same room completely differently based on their past experiences, maturity, and mindset.

If the company has already created a reasonably safe environment but the person still feels afraid to speak, continuing to work on the environment won't necessarily solve their silence. 

This is especially true for someone who has learned at home, school, or work that saying the “wrong” thing can trigger an avalanche of social punishment. Even when a company lowers the temperature and creates reasonable external safety, an individual's internal fear response may still remain sky-high out of habit.

So who takes responsibility for that fear? If you expect leaders to manage 100% of people’s internal fear, some members become dependent on specific environments and facilitation styles. If people take more responsibility for what they do when they are afraid, they get stronger.

So it’s easy to improve safety initiatives – you just have to pull both levers at the same time:

Provide a baseline level of external safety AND simultaneously help people become more able to speak when they are afraid, handle mistakes, and recover when things go badly.

Psychological safety is, and should be, two things: some safety given to you from the outside environment, and a lot of safety created by yourself from the inside. That’s the healthiest approach!