The Question of Psychological Safety

Facilitated by Kerri Price – Founder, The Facilitators Network

As facilitators we can not make anyone feel anything, however we can create an environment where specific feelings have a good chance of showing up. Creating an environment where people feel safe is reasonable easy with a group of ‘positive strangers’ or a team that already feels safe together. However, if a team does not feel psychologically safe with each other before the workshop, what can we do in the workshop itself?

In this session we will explore questions like:

• What is psychological safety and how will we know if it exists within a group?
• What if we know the group lacks psychological safety before the workshop starts?
• Is it reasonable to expect a facilitator to create a ‘safe’ space for an ‘unsafe’ team, and if so, what does that look like?
• Are workshops the right vehicle for developing psychological safety within a team? If so, when and in what context? If not, what needs to happen first?

This session will be run as a series of small group discussions exploring deep questions in this context.