Psychological Safety & Social Justice

Redefining safety for would-be revolutionaries

If you ask a room full of people to talk about what safety means to them, it’s likely that you’ll get a wide spectrum of answers, some of which are directly contradictory to one another - I know because a significant part of my job as an organizational consultant and facilitator involves asking people this question. “Safety” is a fraught concept, particularly in the social justice culture of the Global Northern Left. In a decade and half of working within social justice culture as a practitioner of trauma healing and facilitation, some of the most intense conflicts I have seen - and participated in - have been about the meaning of safety and its felt presence or absence in a given space.

In this piece, I provide: some arguments regarding how “safety” should and should not be operationalized within social movement spaces, a specific definition of the term “psychological safety” drawn from organizational psychology, sand some practice-focused strategies for facilitators and organizers on the cultivation of psychological safety. Regular readers of my work will likely find this article complementary to my earlier piece on “The Wisdom of the Divergent Voice,” in which there are some overlapping themes and concepts. Allow me to be clear that I do intend to debate against some aspects of orthodoxy that I perceive within social justice culture around the idea of safety, as I believe this conversation is urgently needed at the present moment in which fascism has captured the most powerful institutions in the West. It is my fervent wish that as the Left reformulates itself in response, that we adopt a new set of cultural practices through which we pursue a better - and safer, freer - society.

The Trouble With Safety & Social Justice

The notion of the safe space or safer space as it became a dominant concept within the social justice Left during the late 2000s and throughout the 2010s is one that, in my experience, frequently (and somewhat paradoxically) contributes to confusion and conflict about safety in our movements today. Not being a historian on the issue, my own awareness of the practice of “safe(r) space” language came through activism, as a college student, and my work in health and social services.

Safe(r) space, broadly defined, refers to the attempt to create a sort of social bubble within which the day-to-day effects of various types of oppression - such as sexism and misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, racism, ableism, and so on, are negated or suppressed. The methodology through which this is accomplished relies significantly on the transformation of language and communication norms so that oppressive or harmful speech either does not occur or is called out as such when it does. Harmful speech is usually defined subjectively, but tends to encompass everything from explicit hate speech to the expression of prejudiced ideas to off-colour jokes to micro-aggressions (speech habits that make individuals feel othered from the dominant culture, such as asking a person of colour “where are you from?” or asking a trans person “so have you had the surgery?”).

The safe(r) space concept is obviously rooted in good intentions and does in fact have some helpful applications - as a queer teenager and trans adult, I find great benefit in being able to join a meeting, participate in a community event, and receive healthcare knowing that I am entering a place where the cultural norms are explicitly counter to a transphobic mainstream culture. The underlying wisdom of the safe(r) space idea is groups and societies do generally benefit from a baseline agreement that diversity is welcome and bigotry is bad - a simple idea in theory, but clearly not intuitive in practice, as demonstrated by watching an episode of almost any 90s TV show or by simple glance at today’s political world.

Yet there are many limitations to social justice’s culture’s notion of the safe(r) space, many of which form the basis of common debates within the Left’s struggle to redefine itself. Some critiques of safe(r) space from within the Left are outlined with Frances Lee’s popular published article “Excommunicate Me From the Church of Social Justice,” and adrienne maree brown’s short book We Will Not Cancel Us. I also made a bit of name for myself in the 2010s writing about this topic for the short-lived online magazine Everyday Feminism and in my book, I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE.

I will mostly leave it to the reader to explore the critiques of safe(r) in greater detail on their own, but will briefly outline two of this paradigm’s most significant flaws here:

1) When the limit does not exist: Sorry, I had to get that Mean Girls reference in there. When the practical application of “safety” in a group is preventing individuals from feeling othered or marginalized in any way at any time, the group is prone to becoming non-functional on both a psychological and operational level. The list of potential gaffes grows ever larger, and the correct way of speaking ever more narrow and the emotional atmosphere ever more tense. Identity-based oppression and trauma become a strange form of group status in a sort of reversal of dominant culture norms, granting one the right to speak and dictate others’ speech.

2) Safety for who? The safe(r) space concept is perhaps most flawed in that it rarely meaningfully addresses the dynamics of power and class that shape the world outside of supposed safe(r) spaces. Perhaps because so much of safe space culture was formed inside college campuses, their dynamics are largely centered around middle and upper class concerns and tend to unintentionally reinforce middle and upper class interests. Poor people inside a safe(r) space remain poor and rich people within it remain rich. People who can’t or won’t follow the norms of manners and language to be considered “safe” for others - often because of lack of educational access, developmental or mental disability, differences in class and cultural perspective, or other experiences of marginalization - are punished or pushed out of such spaces. Safety thus becomes a tool for people who already have power to consolidate their power and justify the punishment of the powerless.

Defining Psychological Safety

In the field of organizational psychology, psychological safety is most often defined as the shared feeling within a group that there is space to raise concerns and disagreement, ask questions, and make mistakes without the fear of punishment, a definition first developed and researched by psychologist Amy Edmondson. This definition has since been expanded and further developed by other researchers, theorists, and practitioners in the fields of psychology, human systems, business management, and others. Where psychological safety is present, it has been found to increase physical safety, as group members are more likely to report risks and hazards early on, and to significantly increase organizational efficacy.

This definition of psychological safety has powerful implications for social movements - primary among them that, counter to many popular conceptions of the “safe(r) space,” psychological safety cannot be achieved by setting rigid standards for behavior and performance within a group, but rather by normalizing divergence and dissent, encouraging innovation, practicing a culture of learning through experimentation, and transparently yet compassionately discussing mistakes. Developing clear, consistent, and fair practices that help group members access belonging, share both positive and negative feedback, and address problems is also key to creating psychological safety.

In nearly twenty years of living and working in Leftist movement spaces, I’ve come to the opinion that it is essential that we rework our cultural frameworks on safety - not only to make being a part of the Left a more joyful and life-giving experience, but also to our ability to accomplish meaningful long-term transformation of our social systems. The Left is currently deeply fractured, unable to build coalitions large enough or sustainable enough to overturn the current dominance of the fascist Right - which, interestingly enough, is at the moment comprised of a powerful coalition of its own between religious evangelists, the corrupt political class, and billionaire oligarchs.

If we are to defeat the Right and step into the governance needed to create a better world, we will need to vastly expand our capacity to create psychologically safe organizations and movement spaces at scale - spaces where people are able to connect, contribute, innovate, and learn without the expectation of perfect adherence to any one ideology. We will need to step beyond the notion of safety as a utopian bubble where nothing bad is allowed to happen and into the embodiment of safety as a living practice and dynamic process - something that we are all responsible for and deserving of. We will need to conceive of safety not as the end goal of leftist organizing, but rather a tool we need to make our organizations strong: Strong enough to be dangerous to the oppressive regime in which we live, and strong enough to give birth to another world.

Practices for Developing Psychological Safety In Organizations

Some basic practices to start exploring psychological safety follow below, please note that this is a non-exhaustive list:

1) Develop and clarify shared goals - Perfect individual safety is not the end point in and of itself for social movements; political organizing is not an individual therapeutic process or a replacement for families of origin. Psychological safety is clearer and more easily practiced when the shared goal (“the Big Why”) of a group or coalition is decided together and made explicitly clear.

2) Encourage and promote the wisdom of the divergent voice - Normalize and celebrate disagreement on issues as an opportunity to deepen relationship and build wisdom. Leaders should remember to frequently ask: Does anyone have a different idea? Does anyone disagree? And model receiving dissent and divergence with grace. More on the “divergent voice” concept here.

3) Explicitly discuss and re-evaluate group norms, power dynamics (rank) and roles, and pathways to belonging - Creating clarity around how one can “succeed” and access belonging in a group often lowers anxiety and softens competitive dynamics. Getting clear about power hierarchies and roles within groups has a similar effect. People most often yearn for belonging and status within groups, which needs to be discussed so they can pursue them in a healthy, prosocial way.

4) Develop shared processes for sharing positive and negative feedback - It is equally important to share praise and celebration as well as critique. The Left is frequently strong on critique and weak on praise and celebration. Delivering feedback, whether positive or negative, in a way that feels constructive and helpful rather than threatening or overly vague, is a skill that can be taught and strengthened with practice. There are many models for sharing feedback, but in short: Feedback should be delivered with a constructive and prosocial goal (to strengthen an organization and to support the individual receiving feedback to grow), grounded in specific observations, reasonably open for discussion, and come with concrete suggestions for improvement.

5) Practice rituals of belonging: Rituals are important for group cohesion and supporting individuals to feel cared about while also remaining on the overall goal. Rituals should be contextually appropriate and meaningful within the group’s culture. For example: Check-ins at the start of meetings, sharing food in times of celebration, acknowledging birthdays and holidays, practicing somatic grounding or singing together are all ways that groups can strengthen collective bonds.

6) Normalize mistakes and learning from them: It is an inevitable and deeply human occurrence that group members will make mistakes of various kinds. Psychological safety deepens when mistakes are normalized to a reasonable extent (this does not include deliberate abuse or severe harm such as physical violence or sexual exploitation, harassment, etc) and the process of naming mistakes and learning from them is made transparent. Leaders in particular play a significant role in modeling the acknowledgement of mistakes and harvesting insights from them with compassion and care.