At ClearSpan Systems, a routine product review turns into a micro-conflict (spat) when Katya cuts short Keith’s explanation by calling it “basic.” What follows is not a debate about the product, but a live test of how a team handles dismissive communication in real-time, using the Spatz process to move from verbal caution to formal review and resolution....
Psychological Safety and 3 Levels of Accountability
Psychological safety without accountability is like an intersection without traffic lights: everyone can enter, but right-of-way is unclear, and outcomes depend on assertiveness, timing, and luck rather than agreed rules.
Real-time Psychosocial Hazard Reduction
I think most workplace “psychosocial risk” programs fail at the moment that matters most: the moment an interaction goes sideways - real-time. Surveys and six-month retrospectives are useful, but they are often conducted too late. They tell you what happened, long after the tone, wording, or power move has already shaped trust, participation, and decision quality.
Accountability Before Authority
Accountability is the principle that distinguishes leadership from governing behavior and ultimately makes it more credible. It is the counterbalance to psychological safety, the yang if safety is the yin. Psychological safety protects and encourages people to speak up. Accountability protects the standard at which speaking up occurs. Together, they make fairness more tangible.
Successful Teams Resolve the Small Stuff
Successful design teams do not avoid minor spats. They address and resolve them, and that tends to reduce uncertainty and make the next steps clearer. Unsuccessful design teams also have minor spats, but they often do not address or resolve them. After that, uncertainty tends to increase, and the next steps become less clear.
Standardising Behavioural Accountability with SpatzChat by SpatzAI
At a workplace team meeting, eight colleagues are present. Mark makes a joke with an explicit innuendo that does not match a professional workspace. The room goes silent. Sara raises her palm calmly and issues a short verbal caution....
Find the Fault, but Blaming Someone Gets a Caution
Faults are neutral events or conditions. I believe that blame begins when language assigns agency to a person or a collective actor (“Brian’s fault,” “managers are to blame”). In a charter-bound team (Spatz Team Charter), any personal attribution is treated as a correctable rule breach by the speaker, not an identity claim about the target.
One Loose Cannon and Three Wood Ducks
In 2005, two co-founders and their advisor were preparing for a decisive investor meeting. The investors were well-capitalised, having launched a major Australian car rental company, while the advisor had previously built a widely used travel and tour platform...
Cautioning “I Am Right, You Are Wrong” Thinking, Beyond Reasonable Doubt
Workplace conflict is expensive, measured in the billions of Euros annually. Most organisational conflicts begin as minor, one-off micro-conflicts, moments where at least one participant treats their interpretation as beyond reasonable doubt. That’s the crossing point, the instant a conversation stops converging and starts defending certainty and a minor spat is born.
The SpatzAI Self-Managed Accountability & Moderating System
SpatzAI is a self-managed accountability and moderating system for workplace teams. It works inside the SpatzChat app, when needed, staying lightweight and proportionate, while keeping a structured 3-step sequence in the background to address one-off behavioral breaches before they expand into larger disputes.
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