Below is a great visual provided by Dr. Amy Edmondson that links psychological safety to performance standards. In the visual, she identifies four zones that people within organizations reside based on the relationship between psychological safety and performance.
Great leaders understand the importance of psychological safety in the workplace. There is no doubt that it is essential, especially given the last number of years living through the pandemic. But for the purpose of this blog post, I want to assume a high level of psychological safety is already present and identify the four zones as: Apathy, Uncomfortable, Comfortable, and Innovative.
Let’s begin with the comfort zone, a place where most of us to want to live. Why not, as it suggests it is comfortable and usually, “good” resides there. This zone might be also categorized as the norm. With the disruption in education due to COVID these past couple of years, there has been a strong desire to return to the norm. But…
My concern with the comfort zone is not in getting there after significant turmoil but staying there for too long. The pandemic, with all of it’s negatives, moved us along the innovation continuum in record time. We were forced to see how we might be able to teach differently, to meet differently and to provide professional learning differently. Prior to the pandemic, every school division had pockets of innovation but for the vast majority, the comfort zone existed. That shouldn’t be taken as an insult but rather a matter of fact. We crave the known, the expected and when it produces good results, there is little impotence to change.
Unfortunately staying in the comfort zone too long can lead one into the apathy zone pretty quickly and most often unknowingly. It is not that far of slide from comfort to apathy. It is a cycle that can become prevalent without some sort of jolt.
I think it would be unfair to suggest that educators should not find some aspect of normality in their practice. With so many changes, that were out of their own control, the need to find some level ground is expected. Anxiousness is understandable. However, anxiety is certainly not a place where people want to live for an extended period of time.
Anxiety, especially when it is diagnosed, should not be confused with being uncomfortable. Learning is uncomfortable as it takes us on a journey of incompetence to competence. That is the “jolt” required to move us from the comfort zone to the innovative zone. The cycle always begins in the comfort zone where we feel most confident. We then decide to try something different which leads to being uncomfortable. The practice put in, the resources required, the time and energy allows us to get our feet under us and then move to an innovative zone. That is learning and once we incorporate that new practice into our everyday work, we find ourselves back in the comfort zone. It is not innovative anymore, it is simply what we do!
The cycle is not constant and it is certainly messy. We need time to celebrate when we achieve some new learning. We need time to take our breath. And sometimes, we need the ability to revert back to our comfort zone because what we were trying was not pedagogically strong or didn’t meet our needs. However, WE CAN’T STAY IN THE COMFORT ZONE for long periods of time because improvement does not exist there.
When psychological safety is high the status quo is no longer be acceptable. Continuous improvement occurs from the pursuit of the cycle of comfortable to uncomfortable to innovative and then back to the comfort zone.
