Living in multiple languages and navigating different worlds is a tremendous gift. It allows me to encounter diverse of ways of thinking and seeing. I, in turn — like a diligent little Hermes — try to carry these messages between worlds.
Having worked across countries and languages, I’ve always been fascinated by how concepts travel — and how their meanings evolve along the way. I remember the early 1990s in Central Europe, during the time of political transition, when translating terms like policy or (public) accountability into local languages posed a real challenge. There were no words for them because the concepts themselves had not arrived yet. Existing words carried different meanings. True translation required more than linguistic equivalence — it demanded that new ideas to take root beyond the circle of internationally educated experts. It was a slow, transformative process.
Today, I observe something similar with the concept of psychological safety — though this time, translation appears much easier. The term spreads rapidly because the words translate smoothly into many languages. It sounds right. No suprise it gets widely used. But here’s the catch: just because words translate smoothly doesn’t mean that the underlying concept travels with them.
Because much of my work focuses on helping leaders, teams, and organizations build psychological safety, I often find myself needing to explain what it really means. Outside circles familiar with English-language professional literature, people nod and say, yes, we get it ‘We call it ‘Safe Space’”.
But that’s a trap. The translation feels so self-evident that people unconsciously fill the new term with concepts they already know. In doing so, they stop exploring what this concept truely introduces.
Safe Space and Psychological Safety are not the same
The term Safe Space emerged from the civil rights movement and is often used in mediation and dialogue processes. It refers to an intentionally created environment where people can speak freely and be themselves without fear of judgment, attack, or dismissal. It is a space of listening, understanding, and connection — often supporting healing, reconciliation, or connecting across differences. Safe Spaces are usually temporary, value-neutral and carefully facilitated to enable exchange between opposing perspectives, to integrate fragmented knowledge, and bridge diverging positions.
Psychological safety, by contrast, describes a sustained relational climate within teams and organizations. A quality of interaction that allows people to raise issues, admit fears and vulnerability, and openly discuss them. It means a candid, constructive value-creating environment grounded in collaboration, learning and innovation.
Psychological Safety as a driver of performance
The concept gained prominence through the work of Amy Edmondson. It refers to a workplace condition where people feel safe to take risks — such as asking difficult questions, challenging assumptions, offering bold ideas or admitting mistakes — without fear of negative consequences.
Over the past decade, extensive rerearcher has shown that psychological safety is one of the strongest predictors of team effectiveness. Among these effeorts, the Google’s Project Aristotle stands out: a multi-year study of 180 teams aimed at understanding what drives high performance.
Psychological Saftey goes beyond Safe Space
The concept was developed for the context of work — to support active, candid, and creative engagement: asking real questions without pretense, voicing doubt, expressing curiosity, contributing ideas and understanding failures — and learning from all of it constructively.
A psychologically safe environment does not eliminate tension — it makes productive use of it. Disagreement, friction, and even confrontation can be part of it. What matters is that differing perspectives are not avoided, but transformed into constructive energy.
It’s not about comfort or protection — it’s about a continuous learning, about curiosity, critical thinking, and creative use of tension.
It is neither a value-neutral space, rather, it is grounded in shared values, purpose and commitment. At its core lies shared responsibility, engagement, productive collaboration, and a deliberate approach to effective co-creation. Where respect and ethics don’t mean passive acceptence or politeness, but rather showing up with courage, enduring tension, and use it in service of shared goals.
Psychological safety makes room for friction, sharp edges, and strong opinions — not despite them, but because they enable deeper insight and more creative collaboration. It allows new ideas, products, and ways of thinking to emerge — even when it feels uncomfortable.
Creating such a climate is difficult. It takes time. It requires dismantling walls. In my work, I aim to guide groups toward it — and somtimes the miracle happens. The moment when presence becomes real, listening becomes curiousity, understanding turns into deep connection. In those momnets, a new world opens. Those who have experienced it, are moved – and they remeber it.
But beyond the inspiring quality of such moments, we must also see that in our rapidly and often diruptively changing world, we urgently need such spaces. Places where we can have candid discussions about the core questions of our time. Where we’re empowered to challenge outdated assumptions and positions. Where progressive thinking can move beyond convention and status quo — to find real, meaningful responses to the nbew challenges.
