Sep 29 2024 17 mins 2
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Ila and Charles sit down with Tom Geraghty of Psych Safety - a group that works with organizations around the world to achieve improved innovation, better error-handling and prevention, and more resilience by creating and maintaining an environment of psychological safety.
Tom starts by diving into the differences between trust and psychological safety, then takes a second, deeper dive into the value of experimentation, failure, and learning. He describes how organizations and industries that have a high cost of failure and those that require extreme safety sensitivity have experienced failure (and it hurt!), as well as the learning that comes from failure and how to mitigate or prevent future failures. Organizations and industries that don’t have the same degree of failure consequence haven’t necessarily experienced the benefit of learning from things that don’t go as planned.
Tom shares what it means to be an experimentalist and describes the huge value of focusing the outcome of work on the learning rather than the execution, being less focused on achieving perfection and more concerned with what we can learn.
This is the perfect trio to have a very human conversation about how trust intersects with psychological safety in our every day, and they don’t shy away from discussing the psychological safety “baggage” we all carry, and how it impacts how we experience new situations.
This is Part 1 of a 2 part series with Tom Geraghty. Come back for Part 2 in two weeks, when Tom explains how leaders can achieve psychological safety, taking into account the baggage we all have on our backs.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
