An Exploration of Psychological Safety Long Before I Knew The Term

My first published academic work was in 2015. It was the capstone project for my master’s degree in organizational leadership, with a concentration in organizational training and instructional design. The thirty-two-page paper examined the leadership and training methods that encourage people to think for themselves, especially when those thoughts may deviate from the norm or the way they’ve been conditioned to think.

At the time, I was studying why individuals from rigid operational systems faced challenges when transitioning to workplaces that relied on judgment and flexible thinking. These environments often lacked explicit guidance and constraints, making it difficult for them to adapt.

I had just come out of the military and stepped into what remains to this day the most fanatically empowered workplace I have ever experienced. It was a dramatic and uncomfortable shift that exposed every flaw in my own conditioning. I felt this work could define some best practices to support the transformation of folks like me into empowered leaders at every level in the organization. In other words, I was doing “mesearch.” 

Looking back, I now realize it was the first time I was exploring the workplace conditions required for psychological safety: the belief it’s safe to speak up with ideas, challenges, or mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation.

The Phenomenon of “Trained Incapacity”

It was during that writing process when I learned about something that has become one of my favorite terms: “trained incapacity.” Despite being coined in 1914, I’ve found it still isn’t well known today. Trained incapacity describes what happens in the brain when an individual becomes so good at their job that they lose the ability to adapt their thinking when conditions change. 

Essentially, those who become really good at what they do tend to stick with what they know because sometimes they’ve lost the ability to think any other way. It typically happens to individuals who have isolated their expertise, such as an accountant in a rigid bureaucracy or an academic with a very narrow field of study.

In my paper, I used the term “formerly disenfranchised workers” to describe individuals who were free to think outside the box but remained stuck in the very small one they’d previously been put in. Cambridge dictionary defines disenfranchised as “having no power to make people listen to your opinion or to affect the society you live in.” I considered the idea that my own trained incapacity came from a lifetime of being quite good at doing one thing—whatever I’d been told.

When I later wrote about trained incapacity for Quartz at Work, I was in the midst of developing a training solution with Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson, the pioneering researcher who helped make psychological safety a common workplace term. It was then that I made the connection from trained incapacity to psychological safety as a way to get the %^$# out of the box, and be intentional about staying out of it.

The Foundation of My Expanding Work

That 2015 paper influenced everything that followed. It guided not only my own lattice career, but also my doctoral research in the conditions required for creative thinking (TL;DR it starts with explicit permission), my approach to high-stakes simulation training, organizational change, instructional design, and leadership development.

Even before psychological safety became part of my conversations, the core questions were already there:

• What makes individuals feel empowered to speak and act in a way that aligns with the mission, even if it goes against the norm?

• What leadership and learning conditions make that possible?

• What organizational or cultural structures interfere with it?

Finding the conditions for creativity and empowered thinking—and the behaviors that follow— remains the center of my work at JVP Creative Solutions. Whether I’m writing or presenting about behavioral science, designing training, or evaluating learning systems, I’m looking for the practical environment where individuals can learn, decide, and contribute without being undermined by fear. 

Because being authentic in life is hard enough.