The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety

Hi,

Last week, emotions were running high.

One of my clients achieved something extraordinary. They have successfully operated a product for 10 years. Highly profitable.

But the project was not started by trained developers. It began as a side product. The initial developers were career changers. Highly interested, motivated, engaged, and experts in their domain.

And they accomplished something that fails in 9 out of 10 cases. Their product is actively used. Customers happily pay for it. It solves a real problem. In a niche that hardly any other company can occupy.

This is extraordinary!

But - as you can probably guess - after these 10 years and with this context, a fair amount of technical debt has accumulated.

The solution has many features. And it happens over and over. You touch one side of the project, and a completely different part breaks. There is no real connection.

The developers have gained experience with this situation over the years. They have become cautious. Very cautious. All their negative experiences have taught them this. It is simply too risky to “just” change something.

And that’s where it escalated.

I’m helping the team get out of this situation. But we can’t achieve this without changes. And many things are necessary. The team knows this without me. But I am too fast. I’ve just “done” some things.

And that goes against all the experience the team has gathered.

The Team Lacks Psychological Safety

— the fourth ideal, described by Gene Kim in The Unicorn Project.

Psychological safety enables us to be brave. It allows us to tackle things at all. Our environment must not punish us for our courage.

There can be so many reasons why this safety is lost. The technical uncertainty from my story is one of them. But much more contributes to psychological safety.

• How brave are you when you are personally held accountable for mistakes?
• How brave are you when a “git blame” is executed first in the event of a failure?
• How brave are you when you only get your change into production after months?

Think about this in your project. Eliminate everything that makes you and your colleagues feel insecure.

Your productivity will thank you.

Rule the Backend,

~ Marcus