When I posted last week about new research showing the brain categorises a room as safe or not safe before you are consciously aware of anything in it, the most interesting part happened in the comments rather than the post itself.
Lester Clark, who works with leaders on decision clarity and alignment, put it more sharply than I had. If the category and the bodily response really do arrive bundled, as Barrett and Miller’s research suggests, then most safety interventions are aimed at the wrong stage. You cannot reason someone out of a state they were never consciously in.
Justin McKeown, a keynote speaker who works with leadership teams, took it further again. He pointed out that the invitation to speak candidly in a meeting is rarely the first intervention a person’s brain receives. People walk in carrying predictions built from the accumulated history of the leader, the hierarchy, and what has happened before to anyone who questioned, disagreed, or delivered bad news. Telling someone please be candid in the room cannot immediately outweigh that evidence. The leadership task, as he described it, is to create repeated prediction errors over time. Dissent is welcomed. Bad news is received calmly. Uncertainty is admitted. Challenge is rewarded, and there is no retaliation afterwards. Slowly, people acquire different evidence about what this kind of room will hold.
However this raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who has run a training program, a workshop, or a single well-intentioned meeting aimed at making people feel safe to speak. If the category was already built before anyone walked in, the room was never where the work needed to happen.
Think about the last time you tried to create safety inside a single meeting, a genuine invitation to speak up, a round of no bad ideas here. Did it actually change anything, or did the room simply confirm whatever prediction people had already brought in with them?
We have built entire programs on the assumption that safety gets created in the moment, through the right words, the right tone, the right facilitation. Apparently not. The moment only ever confirms or slowly revises a prediction that was assembled somewhere else, over many prior moments, long before the meeting invite went out.
Credit to Lester Clark and Justin McKeown for pushing this further than my original post did.
Where would you actually go looking, if you wanted to find the moment a prediction like that first got built?
#Neuroscience #PsychologicalSafety #SocialSafety #Leadership #NeuroscienceOfLeadership
