Amy Edmondson’s model of psychological safety has transformed how we think about team dynamics. Her work shows that teams thrive when members feel safe to speak up, make mistakes, and challenge one another without fear of punishment. It’s a brilliant and necessary foundation, however……
There seems to be a hole in the boat.
The model offers no structured response when someone behaves badly and refuses to engage. It assumes that culture, leadership, and curiosity will suffice—but real life tells us otherwise:
- What if someone ignores your respectful and reasonably stated concern?
- What if your pausing before answering and reframing an insult doesn’t work?
- What if their behavior persists despite your carefully thought-out feedback?
- What if the team member has more power, or less self-awareness or an ego too big for her boots?
In these moments, Edmondson’s model falls short. It provides no step-by-step mechanism for addressing objectionable behavior in real-time, leaving teams adrift when the ideals of safety break down.
This flaw leaves the door open to a dangerous illusion:
A team may claim psychological safety, but without a fair and transparent procedure for handling the real possibility of breakdowns, the safety is shallow or selective. Like a boat with a leak, fine in calm waters, doomed in a storm.
The Opportunity
SpatzAI fills this gap (or hole).
It provides a lightweight 3-step structure of Cautioning, Objecting, and finally Stopping spats, disputes and conflicts when teams are stressed by difficult disagreements. With the final Spatz Team and AI Review platform, that teams can use not just to build psychological safety, but, when needed, transparently protect team members and managers if and when, on occasion they are under duress by recalcitrant egos.
It’s time we moved from aspirational psychological safety to operational psychological protection.
Because true safety isn’t just how we start, it’s how we recover when things go wrong, and they WILL go wrong, on occasion.
Object123 
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