The Missing “Roll” in Psychological Safety

Attention all systems thinkers.
I’d love your take on all the talk about psychological safety, and just how scientific it really is, especially here on LinkedIn. Even from leading experts, I find plenty of claims but little verifiable science. Don’t get me wrong, achieving genuine psychological safety would be the holy grail of behavioral psychology. But when I search for “the system of achieving psychological safety,” I find a lot of rhetoric and platitudes, but almost no mechanics.

Take this popular example:

“Communication: Encourage open and candid conversations, and create an environment where it is safe to give and receive feedback, including negative feedback to leaders.”

That sounds inspiring, but it doesn’t explain how to achieve it. It’s like telling the Wright brothers to “just stay balanced” while flying.

Over a century ago, their greatest challenge wasn’t building a plane that could lift off, it was learning how to control it once airborne. The missing piece was roll control, the ability to tilt the wings and steer with precision. Their breakthrough came not from more talk about lift, but from inventing a real system (wing-warping) which later evolved into the flaps (ailerons) we still use today.

To me, most psychological safety advice describes what it looks like, not how to control it in real time. If we want truly safe teams, we’ll need our own equivalent of the Wright brothers’ discovery: ie. a repeatable system of behavioral control that helps us course-correct interactions mid-flight or on-the-fly.

Until then, we’re just gliding on theory.