Start at the End: Knowing How to Address Being Browbeaten

Start at the End – Knowing How to Address Being Browbeaten

Just listening to the book “Start at the End”, and the author Matt Wallaert has captured and explains what I have been trying to achieve for the last 20 years.

In the modern workplace, psychological safety is widely considered an essential component of a healthy and productive work environment. Many organizations are now talking up a culture of openness and trust that fosters psychological safety and increases team members’ ability to speak up and collaborate.

The “End” that most psychological safety experts seem to be pushing is: “training leaders to get their team members to speak up and collaborate more?” At a glance, this appears to be fine, however I can see pretty obvious weakness in this “End”, and as Matt Wallaert points out, how we define our End will determine what we design.

The “End” that I started with some 20 years ago was focused on team members directly (and includes leaders as behavioral peers), getting them all to: “know how to address being browbeaten.” My younger brother was guilty of doing this, on occasion, when I would tell him a radical idea. “Erk!! That’ll never work!!”. At the time, it seemed we needed a way to address this browbeating behavior.

Some of you may already have your brow lowered and describe this as too simplistic a solution to psychological safety. You may be correct, but it is funny how so many become experts on a subject when they hear it for the very first time.

That aside, my job has been to intricately design a simple and usable real-time intervention toolkit to allow team members to address anyone, from the CEO to the janitor that browbeats them. I believe I have done just that, (I need to run a pilot) and you can see a demo video on my homepage, SpatzAI.com .

Our intervention toolkit consists of the following:

• SpatzAI Team Charter
  Manages team behavior by agreeing to use the intervention toolkit when members misbehave, rather than retaliate or backbite.
• SpatzAI 3-step Intervention App
  Moderates team behavior by documenting and holding infringing member’s misbehavior to account.
• SpatzAI Peer-review Network
  Mitigates team behavior with the knowledge their misbehavior can be posted on the network and reviewed by their peers.
• SpatzAI & ML Data
  Monitors team behavior by collating the real-world data, and training SpatzAI to compare team behavior/misbehavior with their over all team performance.

We hope to accomplish a pilot during 2023 and be commercially trading later in 2024. Check out our app demo and charter links above, for further explanation.