Unknown: 0:02

Music. Welcome to the scrum.org community podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast, we feature professional scrum trainers and other scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. This episode is a previous recording of our live ask a professional scrum trainer series where a live audience asks questions of professional scrum trainers. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Lindsay Velecina: 0:30

Welcome everyone to the scrum.org community Podcast. I'm Lindsay delicina, and I am stepping in as host today for a special ask a professional scrum trainer session. This episode is not live like these episodes traditionally are, but I have PST Joanna Plaskonka here from Poland, here to answer some leftover questions from her recent webinar on the importance of psychological safety in Scrum teams. And welcome to the podcast. You wanna

Joanna Plaskonka: 0:59

thank you. Thank you so much Lindsay for having me. I'm super excited that we have this opportunity to address any remaining questions. I'm

Lindsay Velecina: 1:09

excited too before we dive into these questions, you wanna do? You wanna just give the audience a little intro to yourself and tell us a little bit about you before we get started?

Joanna Plaskonka: 1:20

Of course, I'm happy to do that. So you already know my name. My name is Johanna posconca. I'm Polish. I I live in Poland. I tend to call myself a problem whisperer, so the person that will help you solve a variety of of your problems. And I wear different hats. I combine different techniques to make it possible for my customers, for the teams, individuals. So today I'm mostly wearing my PST hat, so professional scrum trainer hat, but I'm also a certified agile Cata trainer, a certified Action Learning Coach, certified practitioner when it comes to psychological safety. So I love having this huge portfolio to always pick the best solutions for the people who work with me.

Lindsay Velecina: 2:20

Awesome. Thank you so much. And I love that problem whisper, so let's dive in here and solve some problems. Yes, let's do that. All right. So let's go through these questions. I've grouped these leftover questions in some different categories, so we're going to start with diving into measuring and assessing psychological safety. So how do we measure psychological safety? You wanna

Joanna Plaskonka: 2:45

That's a fantastic question, and thanks to Professor Amy Edmondson, we have a certain model that is showing us psychological safety has different aspects, and we may have high results in one aspect, but low in in a totally different so if, if you are interested, there is an idea described in the book and in the papers created by Professor Amy Edmondson. So that will be my, my strong recommendation for you. It's a great idea because it can give you quite quick and easy tool to see those different aspects in numbers, right? So you will be able to see, how does it How does it look for your team? The other option, more professional and more advanced is to ask certified practitioner in psychological safety, because we have a professional survey and we can, we can help you go deeper into that, assess results and help you with focused efforts on improving those those aspects.

Lindsay Velecina: 4:05

Great. Thank you. So there's a follow up question here too. So are there any surveys to determine the performance zone in a team?

Joanna Plaskonka: 4:17

That's another amazing question. So if you participated in the webinar. You know that performance zone, it's an intersection of work that is challenging, right? It's not easy and high psychological safety. So as a result, we are looking here for two areas to aspects to measure. So if I were you I would in in the service, I would focus on two aspects. First one are our goals, challenging, interesting, but not overwhelming, right, right? And the other aspect will be assess the level of psychological safety if. You have quite high level of psychological safety and your challenges, the goals are exciting for the team, right? They bring this positive energy and don't make them feel overwhelmed. Most likely you are in this zone.

Lindsay Velecina: 5:20

Okay, awesome. Thank you. So what tools and metrics can you use to show a team has psychological safety, apart from observation?

Joanna Plaskonka: 5:35

So observation, by the way, can can bring some valuable insights. However, I think that the already mentioned methods model from Professor Amy Edmondson can bring you specific measurements, and I'm a big fan of behavioral questions, so if you have any knowledge when it comes to UX research, great UX researchers ask questions. For instance, how many times in the last month you did something right, or your team did something? So you can build a set of this kind of questions that will be connected to psychological safety, more specific example to give you an inspiration. So how many times in the last month or in the last sprint, you challenged presented idea in an open but still kind way?

Lindsay Velecina: 6:37

I love that. Thanks. Okay, so this next one here, assessing psychological safety can be tricky if it's not present in the first place. If surveys allow for anonymous inputs, they can provide insights, but real value comes from open sharing. Should a trusted spokesperson be elected to conduct one on one interviews?

Joanna Plaskonka: 6:59

I wouldn't say should, because there is no obligation to do that. Some of the companies just anonymous service, real anonymous service, right? Not we say it's anonymous, and later we, you know, assess people based on their answers. They can do a lot of work, and this is, this is how we typically conduct assessment of psychological safety. But you can do that. Definitely, I think you you can do that. So it's great if you can ask somebody in the organization that can do it the so everyone trust that person, and he or she can conduct some some deeper interviews. It's also a great place to mention why, in some of the cases, is great to ask for external consultant, because that person is unbiased and she does not have any any story with you, with your team, can also help you do that. I strongly believe that's, well, that's my personal way of working, but I also strongly believe that my colleagues here work in the same way, so we set clear boundaries, and if we say, Okay, we will help you with that, but we will maintain safe space for those conversations. This is what we will do as consultants.

Lindsay Velecina: 8:29

Okay, that makes sense. All right. So I like this next question, because sometimes I can be a naturally quiet person because I'm pretty introverted. So how do you determine when someone is naturally quiet versus not feeling safe to share? That's a

Joanna Plaskonka: 8:45

really good question, and actually that's one of the myths, like psychological safety is related to someone's character or preferences. It's not so generally speaking, I would love to remind us that we have different facilitation techniques, and as professionals, we should learn to pick technique that allows everyone to share their voice, right? We have different ideas coming from liberating structures. We have the whole course and free materials@scrum.org about facilitation. So if you want to assess whether there is a problem with psychological safety or it's just how a given person behaves, well, you can measure level of psychological safety in your team, because this group measurement always gives you some insights, right? And you will spot some of the important signals there. That's one side. Second point is that if the person is quiet, despite all the techniques that you use, and is very quiet. It even in one to one conversations, right? Maybe it's a problem with trust. Maybe it's a problem with psychological safety. I would also love to emphasize that we are humans, and when going to work, we still bring our luggage, our stories. Maybe this person is currently battling with some problems that are personal ones. So I would also love to remind you that we humans, by default, are complex creatures, and it's good to think broadly about each each person.

Lindsay Velecina: 10:41

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. All right, so moving right along here. So we're gonna kind of shift gears a little bit. So the next group of questions here are focused on psychological safety and leadership, and we actually are going to have a webinar on this topic coming up may 20. So we look forward to that with you. Yamana, so this first question here, so what do you do if the leadership in your organization does not act consistently in a way that promotes psychological safety but does not realize it sounds I love dangerous Yeah,

Joanna Plaskonka: 11:22

I love that question, and I always love to emphasize that. And I also teach leaders, when we have leadership courses, that the problem with being the leader that your perspective is changing, and sometimes leaders simply do not know, right? And it's not because they don't want to know, but nobody told them directly. And obviously they are not with us every single day. They are not attending a lot of our meetings, right? So my experience is that in some of the organizations creating conditions where leaders can get some improvement ideas, right? I even wouldn't call it like positive or negative feedback. I would even just say that's one of the technique that I used, idea box for the leader, right? Maybe this is something that can, yeah, give, give them some food for thought. Another idea, I always say that it's tough to be a professional. Sometimes it's even tougher to be a leader. Leaders need support. Leaders need mentors. Leader. Leaders needs those kind of how to say that intelligent rubber ducks, right? So I think that when they have an advisor, supporter, someone who can present different perspective on the things can can help them a lot, and in many cases, it's really, really tough to if you are working in that company, right inside, to tell your leader directly, because when we Say, tricky, yeah, low psychological safety. It means, by default, you struggle, right? So that's why I would look for safer safer places, or safer ideas like this box, or, generally speaking, HR experts can help. Maybe leaders will be open for some advisors that can start those conversations, and the leaders can can learn to leverage psychological safety as something that will help them create high performing teams. Yeah,

Lindsay Velecina: 13:55

those are good ideas there. And this next question is very different from that one. So this person's situation is a bit different. So recently, we've had a larger cultural change that devalues psychological safety. How should we work with leadership to turn this around?

Joanna Plaskonka: 14:15

I love that question, and I will answer. I will start actually, with the question why we should turn this around, right? Because, in the end of the day, it's not about psychological safety, right? So research from Professor Amy Edmondson and the same was up, was actually confirmed by Google. It's not about having psychological safety. It's because psychological safety enables great things, right? And one of the most important things from leaders perspective, we will talk deeper about that in the in the upcoming webinar, is performance. So trust me, I have never in my whole life met a manager or. Leader who reacts to how to improve performance. I don't care. Stupid topic, right? Silly things. So this is something that will bring their attention. So instead of emphasizing psychological safety, psychological safety, let's talk about performance. If you are able to to change this conversation into how to be more effective in delivering value, then maybe it will be this start for this conversation and psychological safety pops up naturally as a tool that will help you make it happen. Those are

Lindsay Velecina: 15:44

good ideas on other ways to get their attention. I like that. So this next one. So how do we deal with micromanagement from senior managers?

Joanna Plaskonka: 15:55

Very good question general, one to some extent connected with psychological safety too. My My piece of advice here is as follows, in really vast majority of cases, micromanagement is not because they are mean or they have bad intentions. It's actually the opposite. So if you observe micromanagement, it might be they don't know they can work differently, and there might be better ways of handling things. Second point, maybe there are some problems. You already have certain history, right? And they don't have evidence that they can trust people will do certain things. So I would actually reframe that to what was the reason of this micromanagement, how we can address underlying problems and reasons, and if you are looking for something more specific. Well, we could talk about it for hours, but one small piece of advice is as follows, try to identify one of the problems that those managers are thinking about, if you are able to help them with solving that problem. This small success can change everything,

Lindsay Velecina: 17:26

right? Cool. Thank you. Like another thing to think about with that question as a general question is just how much transparency is there between the developers and senior management too, because it's they. There isn't much transparency as to what's going on. Maybe that's where the micromanagement could be stemming from as well.

Unknown: 17:50

You're right. You're absolutely right,

Lindsay Velecina: 17:53

all right. So this next one here sounds rough. So if you work in an organization where there is a culture of punishment as a management technique, how do you incorporate psychological safety into the teams you lead?

Joanna Plaskonka: 18:12

Okay, good news is as follows, and we also mentioned that briefly during our past webinar, psychological safety, as recognized and defined by Professor Amy Edmondson, is on the team level. What does it mean? If the manager of the team and the team, this particular team, can introduce changes affecting the level of psychological safety, then better things, some good things will be happening inside that team. So a lot of a lot of things depend, in my view, on on the manager, on the leader they have, I would say this spider man superpower, right? So with great power comes enormous responsibility, right? So it's, it's a matter of what happens between you and and your manager. If your manager wants to do things differently, then you can start building your team culture, your team psychological safety, and who knows? Because if you achieve performance zone, maybe you will actually bring evidence for others, and you will inspire others. How cool is that?

Lindsay Velecina: 19:31

Yes, that's very cool. That's a really, really good idea there. So I hope that helps. So how do you handle so, quote, unquote red in the D, i, s, c, system. I'm not familiar with that managers who seldom inspire psychological safety.

Joanna Plaskonka: 19:52

I love that question, because I perceive myself as a leader, and I'm red in disc Okay, so actually. I think, how do you encourage Janna, right? So here, I would love to emphasize that no matter what are our results in those kind of tests, you know, psychological tests or some behavioral tests that show that we prefer certain things or we have certain preferences. So if you are not familiar with that, I'm not disc expert, but I can tell you that typically red color, color is associated with managers leaders, because it's a person focused a lot on results, person focused on acting, person that wants to see results, right? Person who wants to see decision making, right? That's that's not my personal preference, right? I don't like very long discussions, leading us to maybe, right. I would love to see actions. Now, at the same time, I'm psycho psychological safety expert, right? So what I believe is that you can take all the best from this preference, from this red color, right, and combine it with skills and knowledge that can help you become, become a great leader, because being red actually brings a lot of valuable things right when combined with knowledge from product discovery and validation, red manager will be pushing us. Let's conduct this experiment as quick as possible. So maybe it's just a matter of equipping that person, maybe through training, maybe through mentorship, maybe through leading by example. If there are other people in the company that possess this knowledge and understanding of of the importance of psychological safety, and actually, I strongly believe you can be a very good leader if you are red in this in this model, it makes a

Lindsay Velecina: 22:08

lot of sense. Thank you. All right, so we're going to shift categories again, so we've already covered measurement and diving into leadership. Now we're going to go back to the team. So psychological safety within the teams. So how can I encourage psychological safety as my team's product owner, when my team continuously chooses to ignore my risk mitigation suggestions and then suffers the consequences.

Joanna Plaskonka: 22:44

That's a really good question, and it actually triggers a lot of questions in my head, right? Because I would ask first with asking why those things are happening, right? Because maybe it is about psychological safety, at least to some extent, but maybe it's a matter of different things and different aspects that we have to we have to include that right, because ignoring suggestions from product owner might have many different reasons, right? And let me show you an example that is connected with psychological safety, okay, so imagine a very experienced product owner. She knows a lot you know about product discovery, right? So she knows a lot about prototyping. She joins a new team. Their knowledge is super small, and she assumes that they know right, because for her, is like, you know, daily meal and what if, because of lack of psychological safety, they are not open to tell her, you know what? We have no idea what you are speaking about when this risk mitigation strategies, when you speak about those techniques of prototyping, right, what if they simply don't understand what's happening? So, Lindsay, you mentioned beautiful, beautifully topic of transparency. Maybe we lack transparency here maybe so maybe we should talk. We should understand the reasons. In my experience, it might be more complex and psychological safety might affect the situation, in the sense that maybe we are not courageous to admit certain things, like, for instance, we don't understand you, or we don't know what you are speaking about,

Lindsay Velecina: 24:47

right? Yeah, that that's a lot to think about. So how do I motivate people to ask more questions, besides asking questions myself? Mm, hmm.

Joanna Plaskonka: 25:00

A very good question about questions. I love questions about questions. There are a few things here. Maybe I will reframe this question a little bit, because how do I motivate? Well, we know from the book drive, what truly motivates us, autonomy, mastery, purpose, right? So bring that to your work, right? Show them the purpose. Show them the meaning. Let them pick the questions. But, and this is my strong experience, from one of my heads, from from wearing one of my hats. So I've learned in the last few years that we are not used to asking questions. A lot of meetings consist consists of statement versus statement, adding statement, building on the top of statement, and the technique that absolutely changed everything for me is called Action Learning. And in that way of working, there is always a coach if you conduct fully, fully working action learning session, and this coach is actively teaching the group how to use questions. So this is a pretty intense experience for a lot of people, and at the same time, each action learning session is focused on a certain problem that we need to discuss. So I believe this makes this approach easier to sell. I don't like this vocabulary, but let's be honest, we have to, in many cases, convince people, because you can take one of the complex problems that you're currently facing, and instead of conducting a meeting with just sharing opinions, you can use action learning to to change it completely, and action learning coach will help you maximize this experience of practicing asking questions.

Lindsay Velecina: 27:15

Great advice. Thank you. All right, so here's another one. So a team member frequently interrupts or dismisses others ideas during daily scrums, causing some team members stop contributing. What steps can the scrum master take to address this behavior?

Joanna Plaskonka: 27:35

Oh, I love that question, and I would ask myself more questions if I were a scrum master in that scenario, the first one would be, is this person aware of what's happening? Right? Because maybe it's just a matter of one of my favorite techniques is to, let's invite this person for ice cream, meal, coffee, you know, let's have a let's have a normal kind conversation, and let's bring this perspective, right? So maybe, and in my experience, this is reality, right? We don't have, at least in Poland at school, subjects like how to communicate effectively, how to share different perspectives in a kind and supportive manner, right? So I had math, chemistry, biology, right? We were not taught, right? If we were not lucky to go through certain paths or had great mentors, we may not know or we may not realize, so my first action would be just to share my thoughts, my observations and my feelings with that person, to show him or her different perspective. And when I had similar situations, typically, the person was a bit shocked, but also curious, right? Can you help me spot that? So sometimes it's actually a start of building some kind of growth relationship, and I offer some safe feedback, so not during this meeting. Like I will point out with my finger that may not bring a lot of value, but instead, like, I help people better prepare for meeting. I share my feedback after the meeting, my observations, and it helps them change their their behaviors.

Lindsay Velecina: 29:41

That's great advice. But what happens when that person is not receptive? When you point it out to them, When are offended and on the defensive and not receptive to that advice? Yeah, that I. Of

Joanna Plaskonka: 30:00

course it can happen. So you can also ask for external help, especially if you are not working in a very small company in HR, there are great experts trained in conflict management, right? Because I can imagine that a lot of people would say, but I'm a Scrum Master, I'm responsible for helping with the conflicts, but maybe now you are a part of the conflict, right? Ask a colleague, maybe another scrum master, or a person trained in that, to help you facilitate that. Maybe this person who who used to interrupt and who used to present those behaviors during the meeting, maybe he or she needs more time, needs to hear some of the things from others presenting the different perspective, right? Worst case scenario, please remember you can ask people like leaders and others to help you solve that, right? You are not responsible for everything, right?

Lindsay Velecina: 31:06

All right, thank you. Just wanted to do a little bit of deviled advocate there, so that's good. Next question here. So teams often adopt unstated rules about what is acceptable to challenge. How do implicit cultural norms affect psychological safety, and how can we make these invisible rules explicit? A big question,

Joanna Plaskonka: 31:32

a big question, right? So a lot of questions. So let me go back to the definition of psychological safety and emphasize we say team psychological safety, right? So whether it's implicit or explicit, according to Professor Amy Edmondson, it is what happens inside of the team, right? So it's like this air that we breathe in when you want to make something implicit, explicit, make it like that. So it's about bringing transparency. What about writing it down? I love those kind of how to say that, workshops, activities, with the teams, and I think it's very powerful when you just say, what if, during this sprint retrospective, we will write down the most important roles for us, or what is the most important for us when working with within the Team? Right in my experience, it can bring those rules to this conversation, and when writing down, it's generally a great idea, because then words will be in front of everyone, and we can start discussing. But you said, good example, but you I thought that we think feedback is a gift, and I can say thank you and choose whether I act on it or not, and you say, embrace the feedback should be our team role, and I see it differently, because embrace feedback is pushing a little bit of pressure on me, right? I should always act on that feedback, right? So maybe just do an activity, especially writing down things and spotting out the differences in vocabulary even related to the same things, can help you make it visible, understood in the same way, and if there are some differences, you can spot them. Yeah, those

Lindsay Velecina: 33:48

are some good ideas, to put it down visually like that, to make that comparison, that makes a lot of sense. So this is a working with product owners question. So how do you work with product owners that constantly say we don't have time to try anything and focus only on efficiency.

Joanna Plaskonka: 34:07

Yes. So yes, this is was also my experience. But let me make it clear, are we speaking about efficiency or effectiveness? So my understanding is that efficiency is that we have to do a lot of stuff right, and we have to, in many of the situations, we have to keep people busy with the work right, because we are paying companies paying for their salaries, while effectiveness, in my vocabulary, means we are focused on delivering value, and generally speaking, in my view, being obsessive about delivering value. How we can do it better, is great, right? It's absolutely great. The problem with efficiency. Uh, too much focus on efficiency is that it can lead to so called feature factory or the cult of busyness. Let's put it that way, right? So that will be my first piece of advice. Please observe, is it about efficiency, or is it about effectiveness? If it is about effectiveness, actually it's good news, because we know that thanks to high psychological safety, we will become more effective in delivering value. So yes, we will find time for that. If our product owner is interested in improving effectiveness,

Lindsay Velecina: 35:42

that makes a lot of sense. All right, so this question, how would you recommend addressing the deeper fear that admitting a mistake may lower one's perceived competence?

Joanna Plaskonka: 35:55

That's an amazing question, and I think we will, we will definitely go deeper into our next webinar. Short answer is one of the strongest techniques that I observed is leaders admitting to their mistakes and telling it's okay, right, that we make mistakes, I'm also doing mistakes, right? Here is my latest mistake. So I know that there are some techniques we mentioned, celebration of intelligent errors, right? Great technique, wonderful technique practiced by big companies focused on innovation, to just make people feel it's fine. But in my experience, this technique is powerful. The strongest signal that can be sent, in my view, is the leader openly admitting regularly, what kind of mistakes they did, and sometimes it's just a matter of, I'm sorry I was wrong. This is my mistake. Blah, blah, blah. That can make tremendous right?

Lindsay Velecina: 37:16

You can. That makes a lot of sense. All right, so one more here on the team front, and then we will dive into another topic. So what do you do if you do not feel psychological safety in the organization, but are trying to create it for your team?

Joanna Plaskonka: 37:38

Another amazing question, again, according to Professor Amy Edmondson, we are speaking on on on this topic of psychological safety on the team level. So it means that it's absolutely normal that you are not feeling safe. Normally to speak, I made a mistake in the front of 5000 people. With some of them, you have very little relationship. Some of them are almost strangers, right? Because they work in totally different areas. So it's fine, right? Because what makes high performing team, High Team psychological safety can support that. So even if you are not feeling safe to do it on organizational level, it does not stop you from focusing on your team and building psychological psychological safety inside of your team.

Lindsay Velecina: 38:41

Great. All right, so we covered the team. Going to shift gears a little bit. I'm going to jump around to scaling psychological safety in organizations. So how do you create a psychological or psychologically safe environment at the organization level.

Joanna Plaskonka: 39:05

I was waiting for that question. It's a perfect moment for that question. Lindsay, you have picked the questions in the right order, so I will just build on the top of my previous answer, because it is on the team level, created on each team level, one team at a time. So don't expect, you know, doing like that, right? Something magic will happen, right? If you want to build Professor Amy Edmondson calls it the fearless organization. Then each team needs to build high psychological safety, right? So this is how you scale. Scale up.

Lindsay Velecina: 39:52

Makes sense. All right, cool. So some practical strategy and Brett. Perspective and some other things. Type of question, kind of a hodgepodge here, but what do you think about using powerful questions and sprint retrospectives?

Unknown: 40:14

Absolutely love them. I absolutely help foster psychological safety.

Joanna Plaskonka: 40:22

I think that sometimes people are afraid to ask this powerful question, and when the first person asks it out loud, it can actually open the door to building psychological, psychological safety. So this is, this is how I how I see that, and please remember you can learn more about it when you read about action learning or practice action learning, the way, how you ask a question can also build psychological safety. How to do that? Show with your question that you are interested, you are curious, you are open to hear someone perspective. You are not going to judge anything. It's just like human pure curiosity, you know. And if you practice asking questions in that way you are incorporating practices that can increase your psychological safety.

Lindsay Velecina: 41:29

Yes, totally, right. So, can you advise any retrospective examples to further advance psychological safety within teams, maybe beyond that one we just talked about,

Joanna Plaskonka: 41:46

well, you can, you can do a lot of things. Actually, one of the practices that my my colleague, is advocating for, especially when it comes to errors each in each sprint retrospective. What about having a short round? Everyone, everyone, absolutely, everyone brings an example of an error that they did during last sprint. So that's one of the thing, create a routine out out of that. And because, if it happens naturally, right? Every single sprint, people tend to, tend to create a habit in their own head. Okay, I will make a mistake. What's next? Follow up questions on errors. What have you learned from that error? How will it affect our future work? And then you have this improvement ideas also naturally incorporated

Lindsay Velecina: 42:53

awesome that makes total sense. So this next one here. So how do I address questioning that is not inquisitive, but rather leads to destructive conclusions and is disguised as curiosity. For example, I just want to understand. I'm

Joanna Plaskonka: 43:13

not sure, but this is my personal perception. If somebody asked me, you know, I want to understand your perspective, I don't feel like it's affecting me in a negative way, maybe intonation and the context will also affect right my perception. But generally, I think the question is really valid, and I was in such situation, what I did is I used paraphrasing. Why paraphrasing? Because it gives a person some kind of the mirror, right? And I ask, Did you mean that or your what is what your intention behind that question was, blah, blah, blah, right? And in many cases, people simply realize, hey, oh, so this is what she heard. Maybe this is not what I wanted to say, right? Interesting observation, right? So we don't know that we can ask it differently. The other thing is that sometimes I feel like people need to to hear this question from another person, because this will create reflection in their head, and maybe just using that technique, you help them realize, well, maybe this question was not the best one. Maybe I can do it differently. I also recall a conversation when a few people in the room were talking, and a part of the meeting was like me saying I understood from this that blah, blah, blah, and after a few of those rounds, people realized that, ah, maybe we can do it differently, right? So I I was. And needed any longer. But to some extent, I was a translated, translator from Polish to polish, right? So the language was the same, but the way have you used language was completely different.

Lindsay Velecina: 45:15

The interesting to think about. So these two questions here they they could possibly go hand in hand, so going to ask them sort of together. So could you give me an example of reactions or answers on how you would respond to someone subtly but condescendingly or mockingly reacting to a colleague? Maybe talk about how, like, the bad influence of unequal statuses maybe could play into this.

Joanna Plaskonka: 45:45

So it's a it's another, it's another good question, depending on what is my my situation, right? What is my position in that in that room, maybe my answers will be different, right? So the context would most likely lead my behaviors. Why it's so important? Because, generally speaking, what is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to building psychologically safe environment and a leader. And when I say leader, I mean both formal but also informal. Somebody may have higher status because they are longer in that team, right? That person was hiring me as potential future colleague in this hiring committee, right? So there might be different reasons why somebody has a higher status, and always a person who is a leader or has a higher status because of any reason can can affect the level of psychological safety significantly. So generally speaking, My piece of advice is to maybe ask a question with curiosity. Because if it's like, let's imagine this idea is stupid, right? Or worst, worst case scenario, you are stupid, then I would, I would say, Why do you think so? Yeah, right. Why do you think so? Let me understand that, or maybe you can rephrase that, real life example, by the way, okay, what I hear from you is that you don't like my idea, or you don't like the way, how I did it, or any other detail like that. Can you help me understand why what was, what was not effective, what was not the best for our context? Right? You might be surprised, because if you present a high leadership skills in that sense that you change the quality of that conversation, it may actually turn out to be something quite positive, but it requires a lot of courage and and skills. Last but not least, non violent communication can also inspire you. Please. Google for for the book, Google for materials. In that matter.

Lindsay Velecina: 48:22

Awesome. Thank you. All right, that makes a lot of sense in a tricky situation. So this next one, we have like two more questions we're gonna try to get to. We've gone through a lot in this session. Thank you so much to our listeners who submitted these. These are really great. So you're going to have to explain a little bit about the devil's advocate that you talked about in the webinar. But have you tried to use chat GPT to act as devil's advocate? So if you want to explain a little bit about what you talked about in the webinar with devil's advocate, and then yes, that answered the question. If you tried using some sort of AI to act as that.

Joanna Plaskonka: 49:05

Yes, yes, of course, I'm happy to do that. So devil's advocate is a situation when somebody is playing that. It means they are always in the opposite to the group. So the purpose of such acting, of such person, is to keep on challenging team, to find some holes, some weak points, find reasons why not to go into that direction, because it can boost creativity. It can also teach us in the context of psychological safety, it's okay to have totally different perspective. That's why it's a powerful technique. Now, have I used any large language model for that? Yes, yes, I used so definitely, if you create a prompt like, here is my context and I. Want you to act like a devious advocate. Yes, it helps. Do? I use it all the time in such a way? No, because I believe contact with human beings can bring totally different perspectives. I still love working with people whenever it's possible. And there is also a psychological effect. We as humans, we find a lot of value in meaningful connections with others, right? So please remember chatgpt or Claude or anything you use should never be a replacement of positive relationships with your colleagues?

Lindsay Velecina: 50:42

No, it should not, all right, so we have one closing question here we'll have to answer relatively quickly. We're at the end of the hour already. So why is psychological safety still a neglected topic and organizations, despite the scientific proof of its importance. Why do you think that? Or do you think that could just been listeners perspective? So what? What do you think?

Joanna Plaskonka: 51:13

I absolutely agree with that, with that point. This is consistent with my observation. I believe it's a lack of knowledge and a lot of myth myths around psychological safety. I strongly believe that if more and more people understand it's about achieving high performance, we can turn the ship around.

Lindsay Velecina: 51:37

That makes sense, all right. Well, thank you so much for your time, and this was a lot of questions here. So thank you, Joanna, for taking the time. There'll be more content coming from you wanna on this topic, so stay tuned for that. And like I mentioned, there's also going to be a webinar on May 20, so focused on leadership with psychological safety. So please be sure to check that out. And thank you so much to our listeners for submitting all these great questions during the last session. I'm glad we could incorporate it into an Ask a PSD. So thank you, you wanna. And thank you everyone. Scrum on,

Unknown: 52:18

thank you. Scrum on, you.