Safe enough to play with work
In the 1950s, Dr Donald Winnicott studied how parents cared for children that supported them to develop in to healthy, happy children. He found that constant attention was not as effective as those parents who gave sensitive care to their baby just 30% of the time. They could tolerate some distress within a safe, caring environment. Those ‘good enough’ parents were far more likely to raise healthy and resilient children, and possessed vital coping mechanisms for the uncertainty of life. “Good enough” parents did not compromise their babies’ wellbeing, but by providing some distance, they helped their children tolerate the uncertainty of learning and growing.
“Good enough” parenting is great parenting. The concept of being “perfect” or “right all the time” in a world with conflicting advice, changing conditions and human emotions is impossible.
This concept has been applied in other places, like medical disciplines and management theories. Good enough Leadership highlights the power of facilitation and empowerment to build effective teams, and high performing individuals, over micro-management and perfectionism. We’ve taken this concept and applied it to psychological safety. It’s a leader’s job to create an environment where it is ‘safe enough’ to work with people.
Psychological safety in groups is awesome for supporting people to be able to take the risks required to learn, admit their mistakes and create awesome things. But, expecting leaders to be able to create an environment of absolute psychological safety is unattainable, and can result in more anxiety in the group. A leader’s job is to make work ‘safe enough’ for people to work together.
How to do that? Boundaries that tell the organisation who they are and how they work create the conditions where it’s safe enough to play with work.
The boundaries on the Play State Peach can help you out 👇 People working together need to know what they’re working towards (task clarity), how decisions are made (authority), how to contribute to work (management), that their emotional experience of work is contained for the work to progress (containment & holding) and that they’re part of the organisation with values they resonate with (organisation in the mind).
The Play State Peach (the 3Rs is what we help you do in your organisation 😉)
But, the nature of boundaries is they need to be balanced. Writing policy, after policy and sticking to them to the letter can help people feel safe enough to work with people because they know what and how to work, but that can result in a never-ending list of things to do. And, in a world of ever-changing market conditions, human unpredictability and uncertainty, a far more practical, and effective way to support your teams to feel ‘safe enough’ to work with other people, focus on the 3Rs: relationships, rituals and reflective practice. When humans know and trust each other, they are far more likely to take the risks required to learn and work well with others (or, play with their work 🎉)
