David Anderson has published a book called The Value Flywheel Effect. It’s about creating adaptive organizations to drive business results and modernize technical practices and cloud adoption. In his talk at DOES22 Vegas, he shared the Serverless adoption story at Liberty Mutual using Wardley Maps. 

In one map titled “creating space for innovation”, I was stunned (perhaps shocked) to see “Psychological Safety” sitting on the cusp of the commodity column of the Wardley Map. I thought, “Wait! what? How can psychological safety be a commodity? You can’t buy it. It’s like trust – it has to be custom built.”

Luckily, I have The Value Flywheel Effect book – fresh off the press. Autographed by David no less! And there in chapter nine (Environment for Success) is a section on “Mapping Psychological Safety”, where a couple of characters in the book explore how far their organization has come and where they still need to work to better create a psychologically safe environment.

The dependencies listed in the map include trust (which requires leadership), and a safe to fail environment (which requires space to learn). These dependencies reside in the custom built column of the sample Wardley Map – which is where I would have thought to map them – and likely why I was so stunned to see the map above with Psychological Safety positioned on the cusp of commodity. 

As David says, “Wardley mapping is a super power for building situational awareness.” If Psychological Safety is seen as a commodity, then the organization has a supportive environment for success. If the attributes that Psychological Safety is dependent on appear in custom built, then the organization has a ways to go to lay the groundwork for success. They will need to move those components to the right. It sounds so obvious, but seeing it on a Wardley Map accelerates a whole new level of awareness previously difficult to articulate verbally.

Assessing psychological safety can be made visible (via mapping)! Teams can show that a successful environment – one where people can challenge one another responsibly – is dependent on psychological safety – which in turn is dependent on trust, space and time. Wow – this is a game changer for my coaching sessions with customers – especially the ones afraid to challenge their boss.