Psychological Safety & Adaptive Leadership
I’ve been reflecting on why Psychological Safety and Adaptive Leadership go hand-in-hand in my work, and why this matters now more than ever.
On the surface, they seem like odd bed-fellows. One is about creating ‘safe‘ environments where people can speak openly. The other is a robust, often provocative approach to navigating complexity and driving change. How can ‘safe’ sit in the same sentence as provocative?
The thing is Psychological Safety is much edgier than people think.
The Misconception About Psychological Safety
When most people hear “psychological safety,” they think of comfort zones, niceness, or wellbeing initiatives. I see this misunderstanding constantly – leaders conflating psychological safety with being comfortable or avoiding difficult conversations.
This misconception is actually dangerous – it risks encouraging organisations to create environments that feel pleasant but lack the honest dialogue needed to tackle real challenges. Teams become polite but ineffective, avoiding the very conversations that could drive progress.
My experience working with teams points to something quite different. Real psychological safety isn’t about comfort – it’s about creating the conditions for productive discomfort.
Genuine psychological safety is about creating spaces where:
You Can Share Contrarian Views Without Being Shut Down
This means people can challenge the prevailing thinking, question strategic decisions, or offer perspectives that run counter to senior leadership – without fear of being marginalised or dismissed. It’s not about being contrary for the sake of it; it’s about ensuring diverse perspectives surface when they’re needed most.
Discussing Failures Is Welcomed, Not Hidden
In psychologically safe environments, when something goes wrong, the first question isn’t “who’s to blame?” but “what can we learn?” Mistakes and failures become data points for improvement rather than career-limiting events. This requires active work to counteract our natural instinct to hide our errors.
Questions Are Invited Without Fear of Looking Stupid
People can ask “Why are we doing it this way?” or “I don’t understand – can you explain?” without worrying that they’ll be seen as incompetent. The ability to admit uncertainty or confusion is actually a sign of a healthy team dynamic.
This is edgy work. It pushes against everything we’re wired to do.
Why This Is So Hard: The Human Challenge
Our primal need to belong can silence our contrarian view. We’re hardwired to stay connected to our tribe, and throughout human evolution, being cast out meant danger. So when we have a perspective that differs from the group, our nervous system sends warning signals: “Don’t rock the boat.”
Our fear of judgment may stop us from admitting mistakes or exploring failures. Shame is a powerful emotion, and the prospect of being exposed as wrong or incompetent can trigger real psychological threat. It’s not weakness – it’s biology.
This is why cultivating psychological safety requires intentional, sustained effort. It’s experimental work that requires practice. We’re asking people to override deeply embedded survival instincts. We’re stretching what feels possible over time, building new patterns of interaction through repetition and reinforcement.
Yet this is exactly what we need to navigate complexity.
Enter Adaptive Leadership: Navigating Messy Challenges
Adaptive leadership, developed at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, provides a framework for tackling challenges that don’t have technical solutions. These are the problems that can’t be solved by expertise alone – they require learning, experimentation, and often uncomfortable change.
Adaptive challenges are characterised by:
- Unclear problem definitions
- No existing solutions
- Requiring shifts in values, beliefs, or behaviours
- Involving loss and difficult trade-offs
Think about organisational culture change, digital transformation, or navigating strategic uncertainty. These aren’t problems you can delegate to experts to solve. They require the whole system to engage, learn, and adapt.
Adaptive leadership gives us the tools to:
- Diagnose whether a challenge is technical or adaptive
- Regulate the level of disequilibrium (not too much chaos, not too much comfort)
- Direct attention to the hard questions
- Give the work back to the people who need to learn
- Protect voices of dissent and diversity
It’s robust, often provocative work. It asks hard questions. It surfaces conflicts. It makes people uncomfortable in service of progress.
Why These Two Approaches Need Each Other
Psychological Safety creates the conditions. Adaptive Leadership provides the capacity. Together, they enable teams to navigate mess challenges.
Without psychological safety, adaptive leadership work is unlikely to happen. If people don’t feel safe to voice concerns, challenge assumptions, or admit uncertainty, you can’t surface the diverse perspectives needed for adaptive challenges. The difficult conversations that adaptive work requires – about values, trade-offs, competing commitments – need psychological safety as their foundation.
Without adaptive leadership skills, even psychologically safe teams can struggle to make progress on their toughest challenges. Safety alone doesn’t give you the frameworks to diagnose complex situations, regulate the productive tension needed for learning, or mobilise people toward difficult change. You end up with teams that are comfortable sharing but lack the structure to turn dialogue into action.
The integration is what matters. Psychological safety enables the honest conversations complexity requires. Adaptive leadership gives structure to navigate the ambiguity those conversations reveal.
A Data-Led Approach: The Fearless Organisation Scan
In my work, I use the Fearless Organisation Scan to bring data into this process. The scan measures psychological safety across four research-backed domains:
Open Conversations: Can people speak up with concerns, questions, and ideas?
Attitude to Risk and Failure: How does the team respond when things go wrong?
Inclusion and Diversity: Are different perspectives actively welcomed and leveraged?
Willingness to Help: Do people support each other, especially across boundaries?
The data becomes the starting point for real conversations about what needs to shift. Rather than relying on assumptions or the loudest voices in the room, we have objective information about where the team stands.
This data-led approach is powerful because:
- It surfaces patterns that people sense but struggle to articulate
- It gives permission to discuss difficult dynamics
- It creates a shared baseline for the work ahead
- It allows us to measure progress over time
In this recently published case study of my work with a client, we used the scan to ground leadership development work in real team dynamics. The data revealed specific opportunities for building both psychological safety and adaptive capacity.
What This Looks Like in Practice
The work is experimental and requires practice. Here’s what the process typically involves:
We start with the Fearless Organisation Scan to understand the current state. The data debrief becomes the first exercise in psychological safety – can we look honestly at where we are without defensiveness?
From there, we design workshops and interventions tailored to what the data reveals. If “Open Conversations” is low, we might explore what makes it hard to speak up in this specific context. If “Attitude to Risk and Failure” needs attention, we might examine how the team currently responds to setbacks and practice new patterns.
Throughout, we’re also building adaptive leadership capacity. We’re helping people diagnose their challenges more accurately. We’re teaching them to regulate their own responses to uncertainty. We’re developing their ability to surface and work with competing values.
The work is iterative. Teams practice new behaviours, reflect on what happens, and adjust. Over time, what felt risky or uncomfortable becomes normal. The range of what’s possible expands.
The Results: When Teams Enter With Curiosity
When teams engage this work with genuine curiosity – the results are evident.
In recent work with a team of scientists and engineers, we achieved a 20.5% improvement in “Open Conversations” over six months through carefully curated workshops grounded in team data. This improvement was maintained twelve months later, and the change in team dynamics was palpable.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. The real shift is in how teams operate:
- Difficult conversations that were previously avoided start happening
- Mistakes become learning opportunities rather than sources of blame
- Strategic discussions include more diverse perspectives
- Teams move faster because they’re not wasting energy on organisational politics
- Innovation increases because people feel safe to experiment
The integration of psychological safety and adaptive leadership creates the conditions and capacity for teams to navigate messy challenges – the kind that don’t have clear answers but require collective learning and adaptation.
Moving Forward
If you’re facing adaptive challenges in your organisation – culture change, strategic uncertainty, transformation work – consider whether you have both the conditions and the capacity to navigate them effectively.
Do people feel safe enough to voice the difficult truths? And do they have the frameworks to make sense of complexity and mobilise collective action?
The work is rich and interesting. When entered into with curiosity, it transforms not just team performance but how people experience their work.
Related Resources
Case Study: Fearless Organisation – Cultivating a Culture of Excellence – Data-driven leadership development with Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency (2025)
Psychological Safety Toolkits – Resources developed for the Law Society of Ireland (2025)
The Resonate Leadership Podcast – Five-part series on psychological safety in practice with Dr. Geoff Pelham (2023)
Curious about how psychological safety and adaptive leadership could work in your team or organisation?
I work with individuals, teams, and organisations across Ireland and internationally to create the conditions and capacity needed to navigate complexity. If you’d like to explore what this might look like in your context, let’s have a conversation.
Based in Dublin | Working internationally | www.resonateleadership.com