In the magical wonderful world of organisational psychology, few concepts have gained as much traction as "psychological safety". It has become the workplace equivalent of a panacea: the answer to innovation stagnation, the solution to employee disengagement, the key to unlocking organisational potential. But what happens when we view this through The Fractured Lens? What do we see when we stop accepting the tidy definition and start interrogating the forces that shape what we call "safe"?

The Performance of Safety

The contemporary workplace is experiencing a renaissance of psychological safety initiatives. Employee resource groups, speak-up cultures, leadership training programmes designed to encourage vulnerability, all promising to create environments where people can "show up authentically" without fear of negative consequences. Yet beneath this well-intentioned surface lies a troubling contradiction.

What if psychological safety, as it's commonly implemented, has become another form of performance? What if the very act of creating "safe spaces" actually reinforces the power structures it claims to dismantle?

Consider this: an organisation announces its commitment to psychological safety. Workshops are conducted, surveys are distributed, and managers are trained to ask, "What do you really think?" But who defines what constitutes "appropriate" vulnerability? Who decides which perspectives are safe to share and which might be deemed "not constructive"? The invitation to be authentic often comes with invisible boundaries—speak your truth, but only if it doesn't challenge the fundamental assumptions that keep the system intact.

The Four Forces at Play

Unknowing: The Certainty of Safety

The pursuit of psychological safety often begins with the assumption that safety can be engineered, measured, and guaranteed. Leadership teams implement frameworks, track metrics, and create policies as if psychological safety were a technical problem awaiting a technical solution. But this certainty blinds us to the deeper complexities.

True psychological safety cannot exist without embracing unknowing, the recognition that human dynamics are irreducibly complex and that our attempts to create safety may themselves create new forms of unsafety. The executive who proudly displays their organisation's psychological safety scores may be entirely unaware of the conversations that happen in lifts after team meetings, where employees process what they couldn't say in the "safe" space.

The most psychologically unsafe thing an organisation can do is pretend it has achieved psychological safety. Because the moment we believe we've solved the problem, we stop listening for the ways our solutions create new problems.

Meaning: Whose Safety Are We Protecting?

The language of psychological safety carries powerful meaning, but meaning is never neutral. When organisations speak of creating "brave spaces" or "inclusive environments," they're not just describing physical or emotional conditions, they're constructing narratives about what matters, who belongs, and how power should operate.

But whose meaning of safety dominates? The employee who stays quiet because speaking up might jeopardise their visa status experiences "safety" differently than the tenured executive who encourages others to "lean into discomfort." The single mother who can't afford to be seen as "difficult" navigates psychological safety with different stakes than the well-connected team member whose family connections provide a professional safety net.

The meaning attached to psychological safety often reflects the perspectives of those who already feel relatively secure. It becomes a way for those with positional power to feel good about creating space for others to speak, without examining whether that space is genuinely accessible or whether the invitation itself carries hidden conditions.

Belonging: The Conditional Welcome

Psychological safety is frequently positioned as a pathway to belonging, the idea that when people feel safe, they'll naturally feel included. But this assumes belonging is something that can be granted from above, rather than something that emerges from genuine power-sharing and structural change.

What we often see instead is conditional belonging: you belong here as long as you express your difference in ways that are comfortable for the majority culture. You're welcome to bring your "authentic self" as long as that self fits within acceptable parameters. Speak up about microaggressions, but don't question the promotion processes that consistently overlook certain groups. Share your personal struggles, but don't suggest that the organisation's relentless pace contributes to those struggles.

This conditional belonging creates a particularly insidious form of psychological unsafety: the pressure to perform gratitude for being included while suppressing awareness of what remains excluded. It asks people to belong without challenging the very structures that made their exclusion necessary in the first place.

Power and Dynamics: The Elephant in the Safe Room

Perhaps most critically, discussions of psychological safety often sidestep questions of power. They focus on interpersonal dynamics, how team members treat each other, whether managers listen well, if meetings feel inclusive, whilst leaving structural dynamics largely unexamined.

But psychological safety cannot be divorced from material safety. The employee facing redundancy operates with different psychological constraints than the employee whose position is secure. The contractor worries about different consequences than the permanent staff member. The person whose career advancement depends on the goodwill of a particular leader experiences "safety" differently than someone with multiple pathways to progression.

Power shapes not just what people feel safe saying, but what they feel safe thinking. When organisations create psychological safety without addressing power imbalances, they risk creating elaborate feedback loops where people perform openness whilst carefully monitoring which truths are truly welcome.

The Hidden Costs of Safety Theatre

When psychological safety becomes a programme rather than a practice, when it becomes something we implement rather than something we continuously interrogate, it often transforms into what we might call "safety theatre", the appearance of safety without its substance.

Safety theatre manifests in organisations that celebrate employees who "speak truth to power" whilst quietly ensuring those employees don't advance. In cultures that prize "radical candour" whilst punishing those who are too radical or too candid. In leadership teams that talk about psychological safety whilst making decisions behind closed doors that directly impact their teams' sense of security.

This performative safety can actually increase psychological risk. When people are told they're in a safe environment but sense otherwise, they face a double bind: conform to the organisation's self-image as psychologically safe whilst managing the reality of whatever constraints actually exist.

Beyond Individual Resilience

Much of the psychological safety discourse focuses on individual skills, teaching people to speak up, helping managers listen better, encouraging team members to assume positive intent. But this individualisation obscures systemic issues.

When psychological safety is framed as a matter of individual courage or competence, it places responsibility on those with the least power to change the conditions that create unsafety in the first place. It asks people to be resilient within systems that are fundamentally unsustainable, rather than questioning whether those systems need to change.

True psychological safety isn't about teaching people to cope with dysfunctional dynamics, it's about examining why those dynamics exist and who benefits from their continuation.

Navigating the Paradox

This doesn't mean abandoning the pursuit of psychological safety, but rather approaching it with the kind of nuanced thinking that The Fractured Lens encourages.

What if psychological safety isn't a destination but a continuous practice of interrogation? What if the goal isn't to eliminate discomfort but to distinguish between the discomfort of growth and the distress of marginalisation? What if creating safety requires us to become comfortable with the very unsafety that comes from genuinely examining power?

Real psychological safety might look less like harmony and more like productive tension. Less like consensus and more like creative disagreement. Less like protection from difficult conversations and more like the courage to have them even when they're messy, inconclusive, or challenging to existing structures.

The Questions That Matter

Instead of asking "Do people feel psychologically safe?" we might ask:

• Safe to do what, exactly? And who gets to define what constitutes appropriate use of that safety?
• What forms of power remain unexamined whilst we focus on interpersonal safety?
• Whose version of belonging does our safety serve, and what alternative forms of belonging might it obscure?
• What are we not talking about when we talk about psychological safety?

These aren't comfortable questions. They don't lead to neat implementation plans or measurable outcomes. But they're the questions that might lead us toward something more substantial than safety theatre, toward organisations that can genuinely hold complexity, navigate difference, and create conditions where people can engage with the work that matters without sacrificing essential parts of themselves.

The Work Continues

Psychological safety, viewed through The Fractured Lens, becomes less about finding the right answers and more about sustaining the right questions. It becomes less about eliminating uncertainty and more about learning to work creatively within it. Less about managing people's responses to power and more about examining power itself.

The most psychologically safe thing we might do is admit we don't have psychological safety figured out and commit to the ongoing, imperfect, necessary work of creating organisations that can hold both safety and challenge, both belonging and difference, both structure and emergence.

Because in the end, the alternative to interrogating our assumptions about safety isn't actually safety at all. It's just a more comfortable form of blindness to the forces that continue to shape who feels safe, when, and at what cost to whom.

This exploration reflects The Fractured Lens's commitment to examining the forces of power, meaning, belonging, and unknowing that shape our organisational realities. For more insights on navigating complexity in leadership and culture, explore other articles in this series on meaning-making in uncertain times and the dynamics of organisational belonging.