What does it mean that psychological safety enables team cognition?

People will only contribute their best thinking if they feel safe to be wrong, to disagree, and to surface uncomfortable truths.

Example: Google's Project Aristotle studied 180 teams across the company to determine what made some teams dramatically more effective than others. They tested every plausible hypothesis: did the best teams have the smartest members? The most experienced? The most balanced personality profiles? The most senior leaders? None of these variables predicted team effectiveness. After two years of analysis, the researchers found that the single strongest predictor of team performance was psychological safety — the shared belief that the team was a safe environment for interpersonal risk-taking. On psychologically safe teams, members asked questions that might seem naive, admitted mistakes before they compounded, challenged senior colleagues when they saw a better approach, and volunteered half-formed ideas that others could build on. On psychologically unsafe teams, members hoarded information, concealed errors, deferred to authority even when authority was wrong, and only shared ideas that were fully polished and defensible. The psychologically safe teams did not produce fewer errors. They caught errors faster, learned from them more effectively, and produced more innovative solutions — because the full cognitive capacity of every member was available to the collective thinking process (Edmondson, 2019; Duhigg, 2016).

Try this: Assess your team's psychological safety using Edmondson's seven-item scale. Ask each team member to anonymously rate their agreement (1-5) with these statements: (1) If I make a mistake on this team, it is held against me. (2) Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues. (3) People on this team sometimes reject others for being different. (4) It is safe to take a risk on this team. (5) It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help. (6) No one on this team would deliberately act to undermine my efforts. (7) Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized. Average the scores (reverse-scoring items 1, 3, and 5). Scores above 4.0 suggest strong psychological safety. Scores below 3.0 suggest a team where significant cognitive capacity is being suppressed by interpersonal risk. Share the aggregate results (not individual responses) with the team and discuss: 'What specific behaviors would increase our score by one point?'