Before psychological safety became a corporate buzzword, it was an operational discipline.
Amy Edmondson’s original research at Harvard didn’t ask “do people feel comfortable?” It asked what enabled teams to function under pressure — what made some teams capable of sensing problems early, learning from mistakes, and coordinating effectively when others fell apart.
That is a very different question from the one most organisations are now asking, which is: “do people feel safe to be their authentic selves at work?”
The first question is about collective intelligence. The second is about individual comfort. They are not the same thing.
There is a lot of crap about psychological safety. The correlations between leadership behaviours and psychological safety are not as strong as most consultants would have you believe. The concept has been stretched to cover everything from emotional wellbeing to diversity to employee engagement to meeting etiquette. It now means whatever the speaker needs it to mean, which means it means very little.
The original insight was precise and powerful: teams that can surface problems early perform better than teams that hide them. That is an information-flow argument, not a feelings argument.
The drift from operational discipline to therapeutic performance is not accidental. It happened because comfort is easier to deliver than truth. You can run a workshop on psychological safety in an afternoon. You can teach people the language, the check-ins, the phrases. Creating an environment where a junior engineer can tell a senior vice president that the project is going to fail — and be heard — takes years of deliberate structural work.
Most organisations chose the workshop.
The psychological safety plateau is the predictable consequence. Organisations build comfort and call it safety. Teams feel “safe” in the sense that nobody is being shouted at. But challenge has disappeared. Standards have dropped. Nobody is pushing anyone because pushing feels “unsafe.”
Safety without growth is stagnation with better vocabulary.
The interesting question was never “are we safe?” It was “are we using that safety to do something difficult?” Most organisations have never asked the second question. They are still congratulating themselves for arriving at the first.
A culture where people are happy but silent is not a growth culture. It’s a plateau. And plateaus feel comfortable, which is exactly why nobody notices.