When life isn’t on the line, does psychological safety create new problems?

We know there can be serious costs when people don't speak up, especially when the stakes are high. Imagine a nurse who thinks the wrong medication is about to be given.

A false alarm might waste thirty seconds. A missed alarm might kill someone.

And usually, the question can be settled quickly. Check the medication. Check the chart. Check the dosage. Either the nurse was right or not, and everyone can move on.

It's the logic of a smoke detector. We tolerate it going off when someone burns toast because a false alarm is a small price to pay for not missing a real fire.

When the stakes are life and death, there is a strong reason to bias the system toward sensitivity.

However, in ordinary business, biasing the system toward sensitivity can produce unwanted and unexpected outcomes.

Years ago, I was in a big team meeting. The leader had some bad customer results to share, so he gathered everyone together to discuss what to do.

Most of us understood the problem fairly well and were eager to work on solutions. The leader opened the meeting in textbook psychological-safety fashion: share whatever you're thinking, there are no bad ideas, don't hesitate to say something that might sound dumb.

Within minutes, the meeting was hijacked by a few inexperienced yet oddly confident members. They took the invitation seriously and launched into solutions that the more experienced people knew didn't address the real, underlying problem.

That's normal. When you don't understand a system very well yet, you come up with ideas that sound much better than they really are. We've all done it.

The problem was what happened next. Nobody wanted to be the insensitive person who said, “That's not really the issue,” or, “We already know that won't work. We need to move on.”

So nobody did.

An hour later, the meeting ended. We accomplished almost nothing. We had turned our emotional sensitivity detectors to high and our “wasted-time detectors” to mute.

I believe something is missing from many conversations about psychological safety:

Speaking up requires judgment, not just freedom from unfair consequences.

As professionals, we all have to decide which thoughts are worth sharing, which questions deserve everyone else's attention, and which ideas we should think about a little longer.

That matters even more in ordinary business because, unlike the medication example, we often can't quickly prove why a certain line of thought will waste time … until time gets wasted.

Of course, experienced people can be wrong. Sometimes the new person sees exactly what everyone else has missed. Judgement is required of everyone. Not just leaders.

But if I flood a meeting with interesting distractions, but everyone else feels uncomfortable stopping me, we have not created a healthier team. We have simply created a different problem.

And if nobody ever tells me, I might never learn the difference.