Why Psychological Safety Is Widely Discussed, and Rarely Designed For
- 22 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Written by David Bovis, Founder of Duxinaroe Ltd.
David Bovis is a leadership strategist and founder of Duxinaroe, specialising in the neuroscience of decision-making, behaviour, and performance. Creator of the BTFA (Believe-Think-Feel-Act) framework, he works with senior leaders to address the neurological root causes of misalignment, disengagement, and failed change.
Psychological safety has become one of the most frequently cited ideas in modern leadership. It appears in strategy documents, leadership programmes, culture initiatives, and executive conversations across industries. Leaders increasingly acknowledge that people perform better when they feel safe to speak up, challenge assumptions, and admit uncertainty.
The language is now familiar. The results, far less so. Despite widespread endorsement of psychological safety, many organisations still experience disengagement, silence, defensive behaviour, and resistance to change, particularly under pressure. Leaders believe they are creating supportive environments, yet teams hesitate to speak honestly. Well-intended transformation programmes continue to provoke anxiety rather than energy.
This gap is not caused by bad leadership or a lack of care. It exists because psychological safety is usually discussed as a behavioural aspiration, rather than understood as a neurological condition that must be deliberately designed for.
The problem with talking about safety
Much of the current conversation around psychological safety can be traced back to influential team research, including Google’s Project Aristotle and the subsequent popularisation of the concept through academic and leadership circles, particularly the work of Amy Edmondson.
The core insight was sound. Teams perform better when people believe they can take interpersonal risks without fear of embarrassment, punishment, or exclusion.
What rarely followed was an explanation of why this matters at a biological level, or how everyday organisational systems continuously influence whether safety is genuinely felt or quietly undermined.
As a result, psychological safety is often framed as:
A leadership mindset
A set of conversational norms
A behavioural expectation
Meanwhile, the operating environment remains unchanged. Targets continue to escalate. Time pressure intensifies. Mistakes are still quietly (or not so quietly) punished. Performance systems reward compliance more than learning. Technology increasingly monitors activity rather than supporting judgement or providing agency. Teams are asked to feel safe in conditions their brains interpret as threatening.
Safety is not a feeling, it is a signal
From a neuroscientific perspective, safety is not a vague emotional state or a cultural slogan. It is the brain’s continuous assessment of risk.
Human brains evolved to prioritise survival long before performance. When the brain detects threat, whether through uncertainty, loss of control, fear of judgement, or social exclusion, it reallocates energy away from learning and exploration toward protection. This shift is automatic. It is not chosen, and it is not mitigated by good intentions or well-considered rhetoric.
Under these conditions:
Curiosity narrows
Challenge feels risky
Silence becomes adaptive
Compliance masquerades as engagement (while global disengagement figures remain at all-time high)
No amount of encouragement, town-hall messaging, or leadership training can override this if the underlying signals remain unchanged.
This is why leaders can sincerely invite challenge while unintentionally discouraging it. The invitation is verbal. The threat is structural. The reaction is neurological, described in ambiguous and often confusing terms: Traits, Bias, Attitude.
Why systems matter more than statements
Most organisations underestimate the neurological impact of their systems. Scorecards, escalation paths, [subjective] performance reviews, meeting/power dynamics, email tone, a raised voice from an angry face and decision rights all communicate what is truly valued. They train the brain faster and more consistently than overt leadership and policy statements ever can.
In environments where:
Errors carry disproportionate and often unfair consequences
Time pressure dominates decision-making, often due to detached decisions made at the very top
Status and reputation feel fragile, where a re-org to cut costs on consulting advice often kills culture &
Technology is used primarily to control rather than enable
Psychological safety cannot be wished into existence. It has to be designed. This is where the disconnect between intention and impact becomes most visible. Leaders may genuinely want openness and challenge. All the while, the systems they specify and introduce, which they are then impacted by and oversee, continue to signal risk for doing exactly what is asked and expected.
Safety collapses under pressure, by design
One of the least discussed aspects of psychological safety is how quickly it disappears when pressure rises. Under normal conditions, teams may appear collaborative, open, and engaged. Under deadline pressure, cost constraints, or external scrutiny, behaviour shifts. Words are clipped. Tone shifts. Authority hardens, and learning gives way to compliance driven by fear-based control mechanisms.
It sounds like hypocrisy. The truth is, it’s biology. When organisations face uncertainty, leaders’ brains are often operating under threat themselves, reacting just as brains are designed to. The brain seeks predictability and a sense of control (for self above others), not because it produces better outcomes, but because it feels safer in the moment.
This helps explain why:
Empowerment collapses during pressure and disappears altogether in crises
Change initiatives become command-and-control and ‘a process’ to be followed to comply with a project management framework
Psychological safety is referenced most when it is least present
Without an understanding of the neurological mechanisms at play, leaders (at all levels of society, from parents and sports coaches to teachers, corporate leaders, and ministers) unintentionally design environments that suppress the very behaviours they say they want.
The hidden cost of misunderstanding safety
Longitudinal research into workplace stress, incivility, and micro-management consistently shows that chronic threat does not remain contained at work. It follows people home. It affects health, relationships, and long-term well-being. At organisational scale, the cost is equally significant.
When brains spend energy protecting themselves, that energy is not available for:
Problem-solving
Collaboration
Innovation
Adaptation
Over time, people stop offering ideas. They stop challenging assumptions. They stop caring. What remains looks orderly, but functionally, progress stagnates, the culture is described as toxic and sickness, quiet quitting and attrition rates soar.
Leaders often label this as a “culture problem”, without having a language that allows them to see, let alone describe, cause and effect.
Designing for safety changes everything
When leaders understand psychological safety as a neurological requirement rather than a cultural aspiration, their focus shifts.
They stop asking how to motivate people and start asking:
What do our systems reward under pressure?
Where do people lose control, status, or predictability?
How do mistakes get interpreted and discussed?
What assumptions are we reinforcing about value and performance?
These questions do not soften leadership. They sharpen it. Designing for safety does not remove standards, accountability, or ambition. It removes unnecessary threats, allowing human capability to surface.
This distinction matters. Safety is not about comfort. It is about creating the conditions in which the brain can allocate energy to thinking rather than defending.
Where BTFA fits into the conversation
This is the gap the BTFA™ (Believe–Think–Feel–Act) framework helps leaders see. Rather than starting with behaviour, BTFA starts with belief. What leaders believe about people influences how systems are designed. Those systems shape how work is experienced. That experience drives emotional responses, which determine behaviour and performance.
Psychological safety cannot be bolted on through workshops or values statements. It emerges when the beliefs embedded in leadership decisions align with how the human brain actually functions.
When leaders see this chain clearly, psychological safety stops being something they talk about and becomes something they engineer.
A quiet but important shift
We are entering a period where organisations are under increasing pressure to adapt, digitise, and perform. In that context, psychological safety will either become a genuine competitive advantage or another well-intentioned idea that collapses under stress.
The difference will not be commitment or capability. It will be understood as an emergent property of brains continuing to function, just as they are designed to and already do.
Once leaders recognise safety and threat as biological signals rather than cultural preferences, many of the contradictions they face begin to resolve. Performance stops being something that must be forced and starts to become something that can be enabled.
Psychological safety, properly understood, is not soft. It is foundational. The failure of leaders to connect cause and effect at the level of the brain leaves human output treated as if it were disconnected from biology. Until that assumption changes, the future will continue to resemble the past.
Read more from David Bovis
David Bovis, Founder of Duxinaroe Ltd.
David Bovis is a leadership strategist and founder of Duxinaroe, specialising in the neuroscience of belief, decision-making, and performance under pressure. He is the creator of the BTFA (Believe-Think-Feel-Act) framework, a practical model that helps leaders understand why change, culture, and strategy often fail despite good intent. David works globally with senior leaders to address the neurological root causes of misalignment, disengagement, and stalled performance. His work bridges neuroscience, leadership, and systems thinking to enable sustainable behavioural change where traditional approaches fall short.
