Ask people what they want from work and “psychological safety” tends to land somewhere near the top of every list. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is how unconditional the agreement is.

Looking at the early data from Kanso, 57% of respondents rated psychological safety “essential”, more people, more decisively, than for any other factor measured. Seventy-one percent rated it either “very important” or “essential.” Only 14% placed it on the lower end of the scale.

For comparison, most factors in the assessment produce a spread. People disagree about how much they need autonomy, or recognition, or flexibility, depending on where they are in their career or what kind of work they do. Psychological safety doesn’t produce that spread. It produces near-consensus.

Why that consensus might be misleading

When a value gets near-universal, unqualified support, it’s often because people are evaluating the upside without pricing in the cost. Everyone can picture what it feels like to be afraid to speak up in a meeting. Fewer people have thought through what it costs an organisation when everyone feels free to.

Amy Edmondson’s research, much of it conducted in hospital settings, found something that doesn’t fit the comfortable version of this story. The highest-performing teams she studied reported more errors than lower-performing teams, not fewer. Not because they made more mistakes. Because they felt safe enough to report the ones they made.

Psychological safety, in other words, doesn’t necessarily make a team calmer or more harmonious on the surface. It makes problems more visible. It makes disagreement more frequent. Google’s Project Aristotle study, which looked at over 180 teams, found psychological safety to be the strongest predictor of team effectiveness, ahead of factors like individual talent or team structure. But effectiveness here was measured over time, through learning and adaptation, not through the speed of any single decision.

The Missing Half of the Equation

Edmondson often points out that psychological safety must coexist with high accountability. High safety without accountability creates a “comfort zone” where performance stalls. High accountability without safety creates an “anxiety zone.” The goal is the “learning zone”—which is inherently demanding and noisy.

Where this factor lands differently

Consider two people.

The first works on a strategy team making decisions that are expensive to reverse. For them, the time spent surfacing dissent before a decision is made isn’t friction, it’s insurance. A team where junior people feel safe pointing out a flawed assumption before it becomes a six-month commitment is doing something genuinely valuable, even if it’s slower.

The second works in a high-tempo operational role, where decisions need to be made in seconds and the cost of deliberation is measured in real consequences. In that context, the value isn’t a roomful of people debating the call in real time. It’s one person making the call, and a culture that, afterward, makes it safe to say “that didn’t work, here’s what I saw.”

Both of these are psychological safety. They just show up at different points in the process, and they trade against different things.

What it costs

The tradeoff is rarely framed honestly. Psychological safety costs speed, because more voices in the room before a decision takes longer to reach consensus. It can also blur individual accountability, because decisions made collectively are harder to attribute, for better or worse, to any one person.

That’s not an argument against it. It’s an argument for being specific about where and when you need it, rather than treating it as a blanket good that more of is always better.

The question worth sitting with

If 57% of people call this “essential,” it’s worth asking what they’re picturing when they answer. Is it a culture where mistakes get surfaced and the team gets better? Or is it simply a culture where nobody feels bad?

Those aren’t the same thing, and they don’t cost the same.

If you want to know where psychological safety actually sits in your hierarchy, relative to the other eighteen factors that make up a working life, find out where this sits in your hierarchy.

References & Notes

• Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School research on hospital teams (ongoing since the 1990s): High-performing teams reported more errors than lower-performing teams, because psychological safety made it safe to disclose mistakes rather than conceal them.
• Google, Project Aristotle, 2016: Psychological safety was identified as the strongest predictor of team effectiveness across more than 180 teams studied, ranking above individual talent or team structure.
• Karl Weick, sensemaking research (paraphrased, not directly quoted): Groups under pressure often act first and make sense of it afterward, relevant to the idea that high-safety teams may spend more time in deliberation before acting, which trades against speed.