MANAGEMENT SPECIAL .........................Corporations need plasticity to remain relevant and succeed in the long term: Laurent Chevreux

Corporations need plasticity to remain relevant and succeed in the long term: Laurent Chevreux

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was a popular painter during the Italian Renaissance, well known for painting portraits, albeit with a twist. Rather than painting faces as they were, he would paint a mix of fruits and vegetables, arranged such that it resembled that person's face. "The fruits and vegetables by themselves were certainly not exemplary, they were fairly standard, but they came together to create a powerful and harmonious image. It's the same for corporations," says Laurent Chevreux, a partner in A.T. Kearney's Strategic Operations Practice. Corporations are made up of many individual units, whether different departments, countries, product categories or business units. While a CEO may want all of the individual units to excel, the trick lies in taking a strategic perspective and ensuring that the different departments come together and excel as a whole. This is the first dimension of 'corporate plasticity', a term coined by Chevreux and his colleagues who recently published a book, Corporate Plasticity: How to Change, Adapt and Excel, on this concept.

Having studied the business performance of the Top 500 companies across the different economies and geographies, Chevreux noticed that many of these top companies often completely disappeared over a period of time. They realised that most executive teams spent their time on two dimensions of the business—strategy and functional excellence. To this now, they propose to add a third dimension, corporate plasticity. Chevreux presents a two-fold definition. 'Corporate plasticity is the ability of individual agents— whether individuals, departments or business units — to work together and collaborate in pursuit of a common objective. The second aspect is for these agents to reconfigure themselves to face a so far unknown challenge or to reach a new state.' The development of the human brain is a demonstration of the second aspect of plasticity, he says. Humans' brains are not fully developed at birth and as they interact with their surroundings and environment, they continue to develop which makes humans more intelligent than other animals, he explains. The same applies to corporations.

The right combination of strategy and functional excellence can at best provide a business with a competitive advantage, which, while crucial, is often not enough for long term survival. When corporate plasticity combines with functional excellence, it provides the company operational excellence and when it combines with strategy, it gives the company the ability to be versatile and reinvent itself. "The third dimension of corporate plasticity is crucial to the survival and success of the company in the long run, says Chevreux.

There are seven characteristics which can serve as markers of the ability of an organization to be plastic. These are: purpose, focus, culture, spirit, network, knowledge and leadership. It's not necessary for a plastic organization to have each of these characteristics, but a company that has corporate plasticity would exhibit one or more of these. Explaining how purpose can make an organization more plastic, Chevreux says: You operate in a world where there is competition and it's very important that a company understands what it stands for and why it is different. Whether you are an apparel manufacturer or an auto company, your purpose shouldn't talk about technical things; rather state the reason why your company exists. This then has an impact both internally and externally. Apple, for instance, has a purpose and distinctiveness so strong that not only does it have a positive impact on employees, it also results in people queueing up, ready to buy their new products without even seeing it up close.

Chevreaux admits that leaders won't find too much advice in the book, no set of best practices that they can pick up and apply to their company. Even when explaining the different aspects of plasticity, the book tends to steer away from business examples, preferring to rely on subjects as varied as as The Beatles, the Roman military and NATO to make their point. "The trick is to get into the book, think about it and digest the two aspects of plasticity —how to make people work together and how to reconfigure themselves. Infuse this in the things you do on a daily basis depending on what is relevant for your corporation," he says. It is important though to rely on people and give them the freedom to do certain things their way. Google's policy of allowing employees to spend 20% of their time working on projects of their choice is a great example of how a plastic organization behaves.

Kaushika Madhavan, partner, A.T. Kearney India uses modern retail in India to illustrate how plastic organizations would function. While modern trade is still only 5-6% of the total market, the big disrupter today is the rise of ecommerce. The retailer has to contend with other traditional retailers as well as ecommerce companies for the same share of the consumers' wallet. "As a CEO it is important to cast your vision beyond traditional competitors and look at disruptors and innovators who can fundamentally undermine your business model. This may not be something that's part of your regular strategy planning but it is essential for you to look at it and see whether you need to change your strategy or capabilities to deal with this" says Madhavan.

Plasticity encourages people to look beyond the traditional paradigms in which they operate. So a retailer might then look at how changing his strategy or using an existing value proposition might give him an advantage over an ecommerce player.

Kodak, on the other hand, is the archetype of how an organization doesn't demonstrate plasticity. For the longest time, the company controlled over 90% of the photography market and even though they were challenged by Fuji, they still had a significant market share. When digital photography started gaining popularity, Kodak already had the capability to leap right in. However, the board and senior management felt that digital photography was unlikely to progress beyond the geeks; besides the company had invested billions of dollars in the film production line. The rest, as they say, is history and the company eventually had to file for bankruptcy.

Another example of how a plastic organization does things differently is Amazon. While the company is growing rapidly and has a huge turnover, the company doesn't make money. "This is because they don't amortise their investments. They consider all investments expenditure so that if something changes in the future, it is easy for them to kill it. A traditional company wouldn't do that. This is just one of the ways in which organizations display plasticity," he says.

He adds that plasticity can work for countries as well, not just companies. One element of plasticity is the ability of different agents to work together to meet new challenges and this is where India is poised at present. Just the way the human brains develop based on their interaction with the environment, India has a young population and if this develops by interacting with the world around it, it will imbibe the key tenets of plasticity and can end up being a high performing country.

Magic Seven

The key abilities that enable an organization to be plastic:
Purpose: Has the company discovered, selected and expressed what it is meant for?

Focus: Does the company have the courage to deselect and ignore everything that is not in line with its purpose and see it through

Culture: Does the company create the conditions that allow people to work and excel across boundaries and outside predefi ned roles?

Spirit: Does the company inspire people to feel part of a cause that is bigger than themselves?

Network: Does the company provide the means, freedom and encouragement for people to continually nurture and grow their internal and external networks?Knowledge: Does the company encourage experts to provide their knowledge and others to use expert knowledge and how readily is it available?

Leadership: Do the company's leaders personify each of these principles?
5 points to ponder

5. Strategy and functional excellence aren't enough to survive in the long term.

4.Corporate plasticity is the ability of individual agents to collaborate towards a common objectivity.
3. It is also the ability to reconfigure themselves to reach a new state.
2. Corporate plasticity combined with strategy makes the organisation versatile.
1. Corporate plasticity combined with functional excellence gives the business operational excellence.

By Priyanka Sangani, ET CD 21 Nov, 2014

HEALTH SPECIAL ........................ How the world could better fight obesity

How the world could better fight obesity

Obesity is a critical global issue that requires a comprehensive, international intervention strategy. More than 2.1 billion people—nearly 30 percent of the global population—are overweight or obese.That’s almost two and a half times the number of adults and children who are undernourished. Obesity is responsible for about 5 percent of all deaths a year worldwide, and its global economic impact amounts to roughly $2 trillion annually, or 2.8 percent of global GDP—nearly equivalent to the global impact of smoking or of armed violence, war, and terrorism.

And the problem—which is preventable—is rapidly getting worse. If the prevalence of obesity continues on its current trajectory, almost half of the world’s adult population will be overweight or obese by 2030.

Much of the global debate on this issue has become polarized and sometimes deeply antagonistic. Obesity is a complex, systemic issue with no single or simple solution. The global discord surrounding how to move forward underscores the need for integrated assessments of potential solutions. Lack of progress on these fronts is obstructing efforts to address rising rates of obesity.

A new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) discussion paper,Overcoming obesity: An initial economic analysis, seeks to overcome these hurdles by offering an independent view on the components of a potential strategy. MGI has studied 74 interventions (in 18 areas) that are being discussed or piloted somewhere around the world to address obesity, including subsidized school meals for all, calorie and nutrition labeling, restrictions on advertising high-calorie food and drinks, and public-health campaigns. We found sufficient data on 44 of these interventions, in 16 areas.

Although the research offers an initial economic analysis of obesity, our analysis is by no means complete. Rather, we see our work on a potential program to address obesity as the equivalent of the maps used by 16th-century navigators. Some islands were missing and some continents misshapen in these maps, but they were still helpful to the sailors of that era. We are sure that we have missed some interventions and over- or underestimated the impact of others. But we hope that our work will be a useful guide and a starting point for efforts in the years to come, as we and others develop this analysis and gradually compile a more comprehensive evidence base on this topic.

We have focused on understanding what it takes to address obesity by changing the energy balance of individuals through adjustments in eating habits or physical activity. However, some important questions we have not yet addressed require considerable further research. These questions include the role of different nutrients in affecting satiety hormones and metabolism, as well as the relationship between the gut microbiome and obesity. As more clarity develops in these research areas, we look forward to the emergence of important insights about which interventions are likely to work and how to integrate them into an antiobesity drive.

The main findings of this discussion paper include:

• Existing evidence indicates that no single intervention is likely to have a significant overall impact. A systemic, sustained portfolio of initiatives, delivered at scale, is needed to reverse the health burden. Almost all the identified interventions (exhibit) are cost effective for society—savings on healthcare costs and higher productivity could outweigh the direct investment required by the intervention when assessed over the full lifetime of the target population. In the United Kingdom, for instance, such a program could reverse rising obesity, saving the National Health Service about $1.2 billion a year.
• Education and personal responsibility are critical elements of any program aiming to reduce obesity, but they are not sufficient on their own. Other required interventions rely less on conscious choices by individuals and more on changes to the environment and societal norms. They include reducing default portion sizes, changing marketing practices, and restructuring urban and education environments to facilitate physical activities.
• No individual sector in society can address obesity on its own—not governments, retailers, consumer-goods companies, restaurants, employers, media organizations, educators, healthcare providers, or individuals. Capturing the full potential impact requires engagement from as many sectors as possible. Successful precedents suggest that a combination of top-down corporate and government interventions, together with bottom-up community-led ones, will be required to change public-health outcomes. Moreover, some kind of coordination will probably be required to capture potentially high-impact industry interventions, since any first mover faces market-share risks.
• Implementing an obesity-abatement program on the required scale will not be easy. We see four imperatives: (1) as many interventions as possible should be deployed at scale and delivered effectively by the full range of sectors in society; (2) understanding how to align incentives and build cooperation will be critical to success; (3) there should not be an undue focus on prioritizing interventions, as this can hamper constructive action; and (4) while investment in research should continue, society should also engage in trial and error, particularly where risks are low.

The evidence base on the clinical and behavioral interventions to reduce obesity is far from complete, and ongoing investment in research is an imperative. However, in many cases this requirement is proving a barrier to action. It need not be so. Rather than wait for perfect proof of what works, we should experiment with solutions, especially in the many areas where interventions are low risk. We have enough knowledge to do more.

byRichard Dobbs, Corinne Sawers, Fraser Thompson, James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel, Peter Child, Sorcha McKenna, and Angela Spatharou

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Economic_Studies/How_the_world_could_better_fight_obesity?cid=other-eml-alt-mgi-mck-oth-1411

BUSINESS SPECIAL .................................. Digital business technologies are changing the nature of change

Digital business technologies are changing the nature of change

IT leaders have been challenged to keep up with the demand for change from their businesses. Digital business is exacerbating this situation. We have lived with occasional disruptions for decades in everything from the way we collaborate, and how products and services are delivered, to the markets that we depend on. However, disruption has become something different. It has become fluid because of digital business technologies —it's nonstop, unpredictable and is spreading everywhere.

The question that needs to be answered is, "What is fluidic about digital disruptions and why does that change the ways that change happens"? The answer is that digital business is based on the manipulation of digital representations of virtual or physical assets, channels and capabilities. Because they are in digital form, they are easier, and often faster, to manipulate.

The possibilities are limited only by the imagination. And these assets, channels and capabilities can be used in a wider variety of ways than their analog counterparts.

As a result, change in the digital age is happening at such a high frequency, often in unexpected ways, that it seems like a stream of interconnected disruptions that are difficult to identify, let alone react to. We have postulated that the nature of change is shifting.

One of the reasons for this is because of the types of technologies we must use when transitioning to a digital business. However, we must also examine the characteristics of the technologies that support the fluidity that digital business creates. The "era of analog machines," in which machines were designed around fixed mathematical or physical relationships, has been a long one.

For example, typewriters as analog machines depended on pressing the key to move a lever that pressed ink onto a page. This is an excellent way to create repetitive behaviors; however, it also tends to create rigidity in the use of the machine. When a new capability is required (such as adding pictures to documents), the typewriter cannot handle the change and must be replaced.
The time it takes to create the new machine is long. The second era (the "era of data processing") began with the introduction of digital machines, which processed information in structured digital formats. This allowed for many ways to manipulate or process the information; however, it still lacked the adaptability needed to keep processes in the virtual world in sync with real-world physical activities in an agile way.

In digital processing, it is common for data entry to be manual and errorprone or to have a built-in latency to updates. Anyone who has been involved with the picking and packing of inventory has run into this problem on an annual basis. Moving forward, the era of digital and autonomous machines is underway. In this period, everything has a digital connection or representation.

Physical objects are now active participants in business interactions, and machines are beginning to operate in an autonomous mode that doesn't require human intervention. This finally gets us to a point at which almost any virtual or real-world process can be altered with a minimum of overhead and setup time.

For example, digital and autonomous machines enable us to virtually hail a taxi, or allow a warehousing robot to autonomously find a palette of goods, deliver it to a packer and simultaneously update inventory in real time.

In digital business, every resource, asset or capability has been made digitally accessible or changeable. The technologies now support the emergence of different types of business models, which depend increasingly on the technologies used.

The use of such technologies increases the need to handle change in an adaptive (or fluid) way. This is necessary because fluidic disruption is spreading, like water, across people and business. Each disruption often overlaps with other disruptions and leads to more disruptions.

Each disruption can be unexpected, like water seeping into a building's foundation. One of the advantages of fluids is that they are pliable and can take on the shape of whatever contains them. Digital technologies open the door to increasingly fluidic disruptions.

A proper response to these disruptions will not be just to buy new technologies. It will also require a cultural and organizational commitment to understanding how change happens and what kind of change is needed to support digital business. Adaptive technologies will help, but they are not a "silver bullet." They must also be aligned with appropriate methodologies, such as agile methods and DevOps.

TThe successful IT leader will embrace more-adaptive technologies in the context of building a more adaptive business. In that way, they will apply just enough new technology to deliver agile outcomes and capitalize on business moments, despite the fluidic disruption of digitalization.

By Daryl C Plummer(The author is a VP & Gartner Fellow) CDET141121

TIME's Best Inventions of 2014 ............................ 12. The Ring that Alerts You in Style

TIME's Best Inventions of 2014

12. The Ring that Alerts You in Style


Ringly / $195+Available at ringly.com
Like many professional women, Christina Mercando keeps her smartphone in her purse, which meant she was constantly digging it out to check for important notifications. But what if she could get that info from something she was already wearing, much as pants-wearing men can feel a phone buzz in their pocket? That’s the thinking behind Ringly, a line of rings that can be programmed to glow when wearers get an email from their boss, a text from their Uber driver or any number of other can’t-miss communications. Mercando, a former product and design manager at eBay, raised more than $1 million to realize her vision. So far, the concept is working: the first 1,000 Ringly rings, which debuted in June, sold out within 24 hours.

APPS SPECIAL...................... 10 best Android launchers: amazing ways to supercharge your phone

 10 best Android launchers: amazing ways to supercharge your phone

Surrender unto the mods

Spend more than three minutes with any Android fanboy, and you'll quickly learn that the real beauty of Google's operating system lies in the potential to customise it.

Any problem can be solved by downloading enough apps. Nowhere is that more true than for Android's homescreen - so we've rounded up the best alternative Android launchers for your modding pleasure.

On an Android phone, the launcher is the app responsible for the home screen, the app 'grid', and launching the aforementioned apps. Phones generally come with either the stock Google launcher, or more commonly, a launcher whacked on top by a hardware manufacturer like Samsung.

But, if you don't get on with your phone's default launcher, installing a new one just takes a quick visit to the Google Play Store.

1. Google Now Launcher

Google's very own stock Android launcher strips thing down to the basics, but just because it's the Android standard, doesn't mean it's boring. For your money (well, actually, it's free), you get easy access to Google Now, button-free voice controls, and enough transparent window-bars to make you think you're back in Windows Vista.

It's compatible straight out of the box with all Nexus and Google Play Edition devices, and two minutes with a computer will get it running on all Android 4.x handsets. Just be careful what you say around it - the Big G's always listening, probably.

2. Yahoo Aviate Launcher

Yahoo snapped up Aviate in the early stages of its development, and it's turned into one of the best contextually-aware launchers available. Aviate collects apps together based on different activities, and will then suggest items that you're likely to use.

By telling Aviate your home and work location it'll know which apps to offer when you're in those locations. Heading to the office? The moment you leave the house, Aviate will offer navigation apps and anything else you regularly use on your journey, such as Spotify. Another example: at night, Aviate will give you shortcuts to set an alarm, see the next day's weather forecast, or put your phone into 'do not disturb' mode. It's not the most customisable launcher out there, but Aviate is a smart, simple and effective personal assistant.

3. Nokia Z Launcher

Nokia's own Z Launcher is another one that helps you get to your most used-apps and sites more quickly. By learning your habits and taking into account your location and the time of day, the Z Launcher will surface what it believes to be the most appropriate items. Plus, the more you use it, the better it gets, as the app learns more about your habits over time.

Another neat trick lets you get to an app faster by simply drawing the first letter of its name in order to produce a narrow list of results. And the more often you use a certain app, the Z Launcher will remember. It also has a pleasingly simple, unobtrusive interface, with apps arranged in a neat line.

4. Buzz Launcher

Buzz Launcher packs the standard set of customisation options, but with a killer advantage: a user-created library of thousands of themes and widgets you can browse, download and tinker with. Whereas other launchers feel like masterpieces of efficiency - trying to find you the app you want, with minimum hassle - Buzz is all about the aesthetics.

There are certainly more powerful launchers out there, but if you're all about matching the colour of your shoelaces to your cravat (and don't have an iPhone), then this is probably the launcher for you.

5. Nova Launcher

Nova and Apex (below) are the two standout Android launchers - both strike an excellent balance between having enough features to customise things, without bogging you down with unfeasibly long options lists and 17 levels of sub-menu hell.

Nova's arguably the better of the two, with a few more options available in the free version (there is also a Prime version), and slightly better performance - but really, we're splitting tiny Android hairs trying to find a difference between the two.

6. Apex

Apex Launcher, just like Nova, blends smooth performance and ease-of-use with a good level of customisation to create a genuinely appealing alternative to most standard Android launchers.

Standout features on Apex include a superb tablet mode (finally allowing Nexus 7 owners to rotate the home screen); and the Pro version has the fantastic Apex Notifier service, which pushes notifications to a widget on your home screen. (Although, Notifier requires running an extra app in the background, which is a small drain on battery life.) Once again, the Pro version does cost money, so it's worth downloading the free version first.

7. Action Launcher Pro

YouTube :

Action Launcher has some nifty, unique features - stuff like a quick-access set of shortcuts (all customisable, of course), special gestures for launching apps from within folders, and a cool one-touch method of creating widgets from apps.

Sadly, you have to pay the requisite couple of quid for the premium version if you want to get your hands on the goodies.

8. ADW Launcher

ADW's probably the ultimate modder's launcher - anything you want to tweak is tweakable, from the particular shade of Gmail red, to the precise gesture needed to open an app.

Sadly, it all comes at a price - ADW is complicated to use and sluggish compared to other offerings. More worryingly, development has ground to a halt, with no new releases to support versions of Android after 4.1.

9. Next Launcher

Some will consider Next Launcher jaw-droppingly cool - a 3D launcher that's completely different to the standard grid-with-some-widgets-whacked-on-top. Of course, it's insanely impractical and a complete battery hog, but it might just impress a girl at the bar on Friday night.

However, it costs more than a Blu-ray, which is money that could be better spent buying drinks at the aforementioned bar instead.

10. Zeam

Zeam is at the other end of the spectrum to the rest of these launchers - all the developers seem to care about is speed. It's the stripped-out racing version, ditching pretty much all the customisation options or swanky floating menus of the other versions, in favour of a minimalist code-base.

The upside of course is super-smooth performance, even on the oldest, crummiest phones around. If you're looking for a speed boost for a handset running Gingerbread (that's Android 2.x to you and us), Zeam fits the bill pretty well, and it's also free.

CREATIVITY SPECIAL ................Awesome New Ideas For A Better Tomorrow (2) - Wasteplus.in

Awesome New Ideas For A Better Tomorrow (2) - Wasteplus.in

Life-saving gadgets, safer ways to travel, solutions for sanitation and cost-effective answers to everyday problems… India has a host of good ideas just waiting to explode. See what’s bubbling under

We scouted the length and breadth of the country to find the brightest innovations. The list continues

2. A Site That Rewards You For Your Trash

IDEA: Wasteplus.in

BRAINCHILD OF: Shahbaz Shamsi

Architecture student Shahbaz Shamsi knew that if he had to get people to care about their trash, he had to offer them a reward. “It’s all about motivation,” he says, laughing. And so he started Wasteplus.in.

The premise is simple: for every two kgs of trash you give the Wasteplus employees who come to your doorstep to collect it, you earn 1 point. Collect points, exchange them for gifts. 100 points can get you a mixer-grinder, and other incentives include hot plates and groceries.

Shamsi then recycles the trash – 500 plastic bottles are turned into yarn, mixed with polyester and sold to cloth companies. The profit made from the recycling process is then used to fund the rewards for Wasteplus. Shamsi has also employed ragpickers from the streets to segregate the waste collected, and says, “This is a way to empower the ragpickers, as they now have a legitimate job.”

Since their pilot project launched in Mumbai in October this year, Shamsi has 1,000 families onboard and has collected 4,000 kilos of waste. That’s a whole lot of garbage not being tossed out the window into the street.

STATUS:

“We are funding this through the profits we get after recycling the waste and we plan to cover all of Mumbai,” says Shamsi. You can check out the rewards and enroll for the programme on their website, Wasteplus.in.

HTBR141130 TO CONTINUE

MANAGEMENT SPECIAL............... Is Your Team A Safe Place?

 Is Your Team A Safe Place?

The Scene.

A recent team offsite of a coaching client. The facilitator is skillfully working the leadership team through the findings of a team effectiveness assessment. She eases the team into a guided reflection on their practices around trust and managing conflict. As various team members weigh in on their experiences within the team, she reinforces the openness being exhibited and gently probes for more.

Then that moment arrives - another random encounter with a blog-worthy topic.

As the facilitator weaves the thread of meaning in and out of the team members' offerings, she pauses for a moment. "Here's a question," she muses aloud. "Is this team your safe place?"

Silence falls among the team members - one of those deep, pure silences you hope for as a facilitator of team process. One of those silences that challenges whomever breaks it to speak truth.

Enrichment.

I don't often get the opportunity to be an observer of other team facilitators' work, so my presence in that room was a real pleasure. As a consultant for team development myself, I paid close attention to both my client and the facilitator's impact on the process. (I'm grateful to both of them for their permission to discuss this event in this article.)

Here's one aspect of the facilitator's work that grabbed my attention and held it: in asking that question, she introduced a standard, a mental model, for the participants to try on: namely, that their team should be a safe place. This particular team grabbed onto the mental model and ran with it in a very productive fashion. Her choice to use it enriched their process.

Spreading the Wealth.

Her choice to use it also enriched my process. I've spent hours since then puzzling over the generalizability of that mental model. I keep turning the following proposition over and over in my mind:

Does "effective team" = "safe place"?

And now I offer it to you: Is your team, the one you lead or the one you belong to, a safe place? Do you feel it is important for it to be?

Before you or I answer our question, this inquiry seems to need some grounding in relevant literature. Let's go take a look, shall we?

Defining the Currency.

The construct of team psychological safety, which is what we are talking about here, borrows from the thinking of psychologist Edgar Schein and affiliated others that dates back to the 1960's. Schein's contributions to the study of human systems are numerous so I won't attempt to summarize them here. One relevant contribution emanated from his deep interest in change - most notably, in how change occurs as an interaction between individual psychological forces and human/organizational system dynamics.

In an article that serves as an overview of his 50 years of research in human systems, he describes change as "intrinsically difficult and somewhat painful" due to the way it inherently requires upsetting some sort of "quasi-stationary equilibrium" that we've established in the current state. Motivation to change does not arise, then, until individuals feel "secure enough" to accept the signals that change is needed. That security, he further posits, is dependent upon the individual feeling "psychologically safe" in the human system so that "he or she can accept a new attitude or value without complete loss of self."

Heady stuff. Put more simply, Schein is saying that human beings, alone and together, have a marked tendency to perpetuate their current ways of being and doing things. Even when those ways aren't working optimally for us, we tend to maintain status quo and resist change or new learning. We get comfortable and settle in, even if the chair is a little too hard or too soft. Breaking out of this "quasi-stationary equilibrium" (what a great phrase!) requires both information that alerts us to the need to change AND that we feel safe enough from threats to our self-identity/esteem that we can risk trying to make the change. Then, like Goldilocks, we go in search of the chair that feels "just right."

What kind of threats to our self-identity are important enough to qualify as "psychologically unsafe" and therefore as reasons our team may not feel like our safe place?

Paid Back with Interest.

Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School provides valuable insight on this additional inquiry. She defines team psychological safety as a "belief that it's absolutely okay (in fact, it's expected) to speak up with concerns, questions, ideas or mistakes." She then goes on to catalogue the major threats to team psychological safety as the following: concerns with coming across as either ignorant, incompetent, intrusive or negative. Each concern leads to a distinctive defensive strategy:

When we feel less than psychologically safe in our team, we default into well-learned practices of impression management. We act "as if": as if we know what we're doing at all times, as if we possess whatever knowledge is needed, as if we've added all thoughts we have on a matter and as if the way things are going is just fine with us. We withhold our truth. To do otherwise, we fear, would threaten our belonging and status in the team.

Safety versus Trust.

I expect that some of you who have read this far are now wondering: "Well, hmmm, this is kind of interesting stuff. But isn't this just another article about the importance of trust in teams?" I asked that question, too, as I formulated this blog.

Is there a difference between safety and trust in teams? Was it meaningful that the facilitator in the opening scene asked the team members if the team was their "safe place," not their "trust place"?

Turns out it was. While the two constructs share some conceptual space, a Venn diagram of "trust" and "safety" in teams would show some degree of unique space on either side of the shared space. Back to Amy Edmondson one more time: she, among others, distinguishes team psychological safety from interpersonal trust. The former, as referenced earlier, may be defined as "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking." Interpersonal trust, in contrast, may be defined as "the expectation that others' future actions will be favorable to one's interests."

The shared space in our Venn diagram? Both concepts involve internalized evaluations of vulnerability. In addition, they each evoke decision-making regarding how to minimize the potential consequences of that vulnerability. Last, both psychological safety and interpersonal trust, when present, contribute to the possibility of team effectiveness.

The unique space? According to some of the research in this arena, team psychological safety operates in a more immediate timeframe, as a moment-by-moment calculation of the risk of speaking out, of asking a question, of making a mistake, etc. Trust, in contrast, describes more of a long-term consideration based on assessments of others' trustworthiness. Secondly, team psychological safety is thought to be reflective of what the team gives to the individual (e.g. "do I feel safe speaking up about our product quality or will I be branded a 'troublemaker'?") while interpersonal trust is thought to be something that the individual gives to others (e.g. "I know and trust Mike so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here.")

This part of the exploration may feel a little dense about now, so here's a simple way of describing the difference: while I may trust many of my teammates based on a series of interactions with them over time, I still may not feel safe about speaking up on a sensitive issue or asking a question I'm afraid may come across as uninformed, too negative or pushy. I bet if you sit with that distinction for a few minutes and play it out against situations in your own work life, you'll find its relevance. I know I did.

Is Safety a Gold Standard for Team Efficacy?

So if team psychological safety isn't the same as trust, should it join trust as an additional sine qua non of team effectiveness? Intriguingly, some qualifying conditions exist, based on some of the research on this topic...and on personal preferences.

While I suspect many of us would prefer to work on teams that have higher psychological safety, I am reminded of a scene from much earlier in my career. The team I belonged to completed a team building session in which we were asked to describe what we wanted our experience in the team to look like. When my turn came, all of my youthful zeal rushed forth in a stream of ambitious attributes: "I want to work in a team where we challenge each other to constantly get better, where we can say anything to each other without fear of looking stupid, and where we are safe to truly be our full selves at work every day." A respected older male colleague of mine looked at me and said, carefully, "Deb, some of us don't look to get those kinds of things from the people we work with. I mean, I'm all for having a friendly and supportive work place. But you're describing the kinds of relationships I have in my personal life."

Backing up my former colleague's view of the issue, several studies suggest that psychological safety isn't necessarily the gold standard for every team. It doesn't guarantee team effectiveness, in and of itself. Its effect on team efficacy is moderated by two additional variables: whether uncertainty is present and interdependency is important to success.

The Silver Standard

While psychological safety may not be the gold standard for every team, the more teams have to navigate together through conditions of uncertainty, the more important it becomes. Why is that? Because those conditions are characterized by a higher need for learning and change. And, back to Edgar Schein, most of us are status quo-loving machines who are not naturally eager for change and new learning, despite our protests to the contrary.

Also, we can't just disappear into our offices or behind our laptops and work this kind of change out on our own. We have to figure it out with others...which makes it messier, less predictable and more rife with those pesky interpersonal dynamics. In conditions like that, psychological safety is worth its weight in...silver.

Netting Out the Value.

So back to the opening scene. What's the value of being able to answer that facilitator's question with: "Yes, my team is a safe place. I feel I can speak up on issues outside my direct statement of work without fear of looking ridiculous. I feel I can admit to mistakes without being ostracized. I feel I can ask tough questions and be taken seriously"?

If you're in a team that needs to learn together, to try novel solutions, to explore various ways of solving problems in an uncertain environment, turns out an affirmative answer is pretty darn valuable.

For the rest of us, perhaps we should strive to build teams that are at least "safe-ish."

Given the increasing complexity of the challenges our human systems face every day, a commitment to building some measure of team psychological safety with each other seems like a wise investment. What's the opportunity cost if we don't? Borrowing from Amy Edmondson one last time: "Every time we withhold, we rob ourselves and our colleagues of small moments of learning...and we don't innovate, we don't come up with new ideas...we are so busy managing impressions, that we don't contribute to creating a better organization."

Change is stymied or superficial; transformation doesn't occur. The "same old" stays the same old. And Goldilocks never gets up from her slightly uncomfortable seat to find the one that fits just right.

Deb Loftus, Ph.D.https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141119134920-2617162-is-your-team-a-safe-place