Psychological safety: is good science even possible without it?

​Science is a creative endeavour: without ideas there is no science. So why do our best ideas come in the shower? Or while out for a walk or staring into space? Long train journeys once had the same effect, before we had smartphones. What is it about these environments that allows our thoughts to flow freely and can we replicate this elsewhere?
 
My personal favourite is seminars where the speaker has completely lost me. Confined to my seat by the embarrassment of leaving, I feel desperate to occupy my mind. I’m drawn to random words from the talk, or any small fragment I can follow, before heading off at a tangent to wherever my thoughts take me. Perhaps I should be more grateful for these presentations!
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​What do all these circumstances have in common that allows ideas to flow? How does this process work? And how can we use this knowledge to optimise our working style and research culture?

​Safety first
A key common feature in all of the above is safety. Not just the absence of physical threat but of psychological threat too.
 
Threat, and the fear it feeds, has the immediate effect of demanding all our mental resources. If we are walking along a street chatting with a friend and suddenly hear a scream, there is nothing that could make us continue with the same conversation. If we see some interesting new data and then learn about our paper rejection, we immediately stop thinking about the data. And if we are discussing our work with colleagues when one shouts in an accusatory tone: “What’s the point in doing that?” or “But it’s just not finished!”, any thoughts of brainstorming our next experiments with the others are gone. Moreover, such brainstorming will become impossible anytime this same person is in the room.

We evolved to focus on threat
Threat demands focus, a focus on survival. The aggressive colleague is not a threat to our physical survival of course but their approach sparks powerful instincts driven by millions of years of evolution. Even before humans appeared, animals that spotted predators and focussed on avoiding them had better chances of surviving and passing on their genes. And in tribal times, which is most of human history, it was equally vital for us to maintain the respect of our tribe.  For our ancestors, intense criticism was a threat to survival if it risked being thrown out to fend for themselves. We inherited the genes of those who focussed on their defence and justification.
 
As a consequence, irrational as it may seem, our brains today are wired to treat psychological threat almost as seriously as physical threat. Blue sky thinking evaporates in the face of excessive criticism and defence and justification take over. Such a culture extracts a very heavy cost on our science.

​Creative by default
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) helps to explain what happens. This technique measures blood flow to indicate which brain regions are most active. An intricate mechanism couples the amount of blood flow to neural activity in each region of our brain, delivering vital glucose and oxygen to feed the high energy demand.

​Studies of which brain regions control which activities showed a surprising result. Some brain regions actually stop working when we focus on a specific task. These regions became known as the default mode network. Subjects with these regions active report mind wandering, imagination and creative thought. Their bodies may be inside a giant magnet, but their minds are in the shower, the bus or the boring seminar. Threat is likely to impair this process, demanding extreme focus on the perceived problem and literally starving our creativity of the energy it needs to thrive.

​Psychological safety and psychological peril
Amy Edmonson, who popularised the phrase psychological safety, defines it as: “the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes and that the team is safe for risk taking”.
 
Elon Musk, we are led to believe, has a different view. Whether driven by ‘the bottom line’ or by an ideological view of the purpose of his companies, he appears intolerant of conflicting views. While we know this approach degrades autonomy and wellbeing, breeding toxicity, it has brought him business success, at least for now and by some people’s definition of success. It does, however, come at the expense of many burned out former employees.
 
We don’t have to look far in research to see similar examples. It is not just in academia either. John Carreyrou sums up the shocking workplace culture at the company Theranos in his book Bad Blood with: “You cannot run a company through fear and intimidation. It will only work for a period of time before it collapses.” And collapse it did because no-one could speak the truth and survive there.

​Finding balance
Creative ideas are essential for good science but so is critical review to help identify which ideas hold up and which don't. And here lies the challenge. However hard we try to stress test our own ideas and conclusions, or give feedback to immediate colleagues, it is impossible to do so as objectively as someone whose career does not depend on them. This is why science needs peer review and open debate. When it works well (which sadly is not always the case) it has an essential role.
 
Balance, however, is essential. A reviewer who hides behind anonymity to make a personal attack, or to hold back reliable work from a competitor, degrades the functioning of peer review. So does an excessively aggressive questioner at a conference. Others may hide behind the phrase ‘Devil’s advocate’. This can be a very useful technique but needs great care to get it right: there is a crucial difference between ‘critical friend’ and ‘just another critic’. The clues lie in body language (smiling or frowning), where it is done (in public or in private), what is criticised (this specific work, the person or their wider scientific ability) and in whether any positive comments accompany the criticism. We also need to be particularly careful when we are remote reviewers of papers and grants, when body language and tone of voice are absent. It becomes an important skill to provide a robust critique of the science while being mindful that someone’s wellbeing is on the other end of how we phrase it.
 
Finding the right balance matters a lot for effective team dynamics. Clear signs that team members value their colleagues and strive to support their careers and wellbeing make it far easier to provide the critical feedback needed without it being misinterpreted. Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor describes this balance well with its central concept of: “Care personally, challenge directly”.

​Hybrid working
For all the tragedies and stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has brought an important new dynamic to our working lives. One of my lasting memories of lockdown was realising just how much my motivation depends on the presence of other people. This means physical presence not just a Zoom screen! Nonverbal cues, and the motivation they feed, play powerful, usually unconscious roles in stimulating our ideas. The ‘energy in the room’ just cannot be replaced with a screen.

​My other lockdown observation, however, was that for me at least focussed work – writing a paper or grant, reading, blue sky thinking – was hugely more effective at home. Even a private workplace office where I can close the door doesn’t match this. The mere possibility that someone could knock at any second, requiring me to switch to any conversation across a wide range of topics, is something I find prevents me from giving my full attention to focussed work. These blog posts themselves are examples of what I could not possibly write inside my normal workplace.  

 
​What works for you?
What works for me then is a combination of absolute support for my team, conveying psychological safety, while constantly challenging the science and developing ideas together and respecting everyone’s input to them. It is also a near 50:50 hybrid working pattern that helps me optimise both in person engagement and deep work.
 
But everyone is different. Extroverts in particular tend to thrive more with bouncing ideas off other people. Others may prefer to develop ideas further themselves before sharing them for final refinement. The world needs both of these personality types, and we all have to find our own spot on this spectrum. Neither too much company nor too much isolation will ever get the best from us, and neither will too much criticism nor too much comfort.
 
Showers may be great for ideas but if we spent all day there none would ever get refined or acted on.