Seaside chats: Psychological safety

What is a seaside chat?

The idea is encouraging a community to have a regularly scheduled session for safe, self-facilitated discussion with a limited agenda. These discussions often focus on technical, organizational, or interpersonal challenges. For example, exploring challenges with data visualization, open science, or psychological safety.

The chat would start with a topic, and participants would lead with facilitators playing a role of ensuring the space is safe and that diverse voices are heard rather than leading the discussion.

Structure

  • Check-in / icebreaker (word cloud / survey / prompt): 5 minutes
  • Discussion on experiences / challenges: 25 minutes
  • Discussion on what we can do about it: 25 minutes
  • Wrap-up / prep next meeting: 5 minutes

Cadence

Note

TODO: We haven’t yet decided on a cadence. Should we meet monthly to provide a long-term supportive space?

Discussion format

  • Gather ideas people want to talk about in some shared space, e.g. Google Doc, Etherpad, Hedgedoc. Ideally, our tool can also allow voting.
  • Anyone can start talking about something
  • Use “raise hand” when others are talking to request to speak next
  • When discussion slows down, refer to the shared space with ideas to find the next topic.

What is psychological safety?

Openscapes defines psychological safety as a shared belief that team members will not be rejected or embarrassed for speaking up with their ideas, questions, or concerns.

For example, many of us have experienced traumatic hyper-critical environments (academia, high pressured meetings and presentations) that have resulted in low levels of psychological safety. Often, we feel uncomfortable or self-conscious speaking up because we’re worried about how people will respond.

Our goal is to help people become more comfortable sharing their work by discussing psychological safety, our experiences, and how we can all do better.

What can we do about it?

Good and bad interactions can be self-reinforcing or contagious. Our actions can establish virtuous cycles. Let’s talk about what we want to see.

Reference