Brave Spaces
The seeds of what I now call Brave Spaces were planted at Harvard Kennedy School in 2012. Attending an Adaptive Leadership programme there was an incredibly valuable and also a raw experience – both intellectually and experientially. Systemic patterns in the room were named, with everything up for examination. The fact that I attended shortly after a family bereavement added to that rawness.
‘Safety’ in a group context like that wasn’t something I was aware I needed back then, but I recall a comment being made by faculty saying that if safety was a value we held dear, we might want to reflect on whether that actually served us well. A valid question to ask, as safety can lead us to avoid uncomfortable truths. That comment stayed with me.
Brave Spaces & Psychological Safety
Roll forward a decade. Through my leadership development work with clients, I started noticing how some people retreated in certain contexts and this wasn’t confined to those in junior positions. I would hear comments like ‘they just need to speak up – they are a senior leader’. Yet something in the environment prevented them from doing so. Not speaking up meant issues going unaddressed, affecting both the individual and the organisation. I realised that alongside individual courage, there was something about the system that needed attention.
That was when I started to fully understand psychological safety – which describes an environment where people don’t fear judgement or consequences for speaking up with questions, concerns or ideas. In other words, they have permission for candour. People sometimes interpret it incorrectly as a ‘comfortable’ environment, whereas in practice it is about creating a context where uncomfortable topics can be discussed openly.
Conflicting Approaches?
For a while, I saw Adaptive Leadership and Psychological Safety as being at odds with each other. One was a robust, challenging framework that called for naming difficult truths and exposing systemic patterns – a world where safety as a value was questioned. The other felt gentler, focused on creating the conditions for people to speak up. I wasn’t sure how they belonged in the same room but I knew there was value in both.
What followed was a journey of curiosity. I began to notice that when I was running programmes on psychological safety, I kept borrowing from adaptive leadership and vice versa. There was far more connecting them than separating them, even if on the surface they seemed to pull in different directions.
The Overlap
When I had the good fortune to meet Prof. Amy Edmondson last September, I asked her about the disconnect I perceived. What followed was a nuanced conversation about language and what struck me most was the idea that psychological safety creates the holding environment which makes the work of adaptive leadership possible. How I now see it is that psychological safety creates the conditions. Adaptive Leadership gives you the tools for progress to be possible.
In practice, psychological safety creates a frame for us by (1) ‘setting the stage’ (being clear on purpose, roles, what’s at stake, …), (2) inviting participation (including contrary perspectives) and (3) responding productively (including how we handle those different perspectives respectfully and holding people to account).
Both approaches value curiosity (what adaptive leadership calls “listening to unusual voices”). Both treat experimentation as a source of learning rather than a risk to be managed, and both are concerned with creating a container in which the real work can happen.
This is what I mean by a Brave Space. Not a comfortable space. Not a chaotic one. A space where honest conversations about things that matter become possible – where complexity and uncertainty can be navigated and lead to considered action.
If you’re navigating change or complexity and would value that kind of space (whether 1-1, group or in a team) I’d love to connect.
Eadine Hickey