How MOD is creating psychologically safe environments to enable project success

Mayanthie Wijesuriya is the MoD’s Culture and Behaviours Campaign Assistant Head and Psychological Safety lead for Project Delivery. Since 2016, she has worked in five government departments, focusing on national-defining issues including the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Brexit, Covid-19 and most recently Ukraine.

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is all about sharing ideas, offering positive challenges and asking questions without fear of being punished or humiliated. Its goal is to create an environment where team members feel safe to take risks without fear of negative consequences.

A report was published a few years ago on a Ministry of Defence (MoD) study that sought to understand the extent to which psychological safety exists in major projects and the factors that hinder or support it.

Why is this important?

Evidence shows that psychologically safe teams are more productive, innovative, and better at exposing and managing risk—conditions we at the MOD are keen to foster within our project and programme teams.

What are we doing to create psychologically safe teams?

To achieve this, we have designed a comprehensive and innovative Psychological Safety Assessment Service, which measures how psychologically safe project and programme team environments are. The service provides a high-quality and tailored service through diverse civil servants’ skills and knowledge as the bedrock. The service provides long-term tailored support and insight to liberate teams to take risks, empower them to be high performers, and, most importantly, feel safe to make positive challenges.

At the heart of the MoD journey towards psychologically safe project and programme teams is the desire to drive innovation for better delivery and ongoing improvement. We consider psychological safety as key to innovation because it encourages open sharing of ideas, promotes learning from mistakes, fosters diverse perspectives, enhances collaboration, increases engagement, facilitates constructive feedback, and supports experimentation.

How is it going?

Since summer, we have embarked on an effective journey, swiftly conducting assessments on a carefully selected subset of the MoD’s 49 programmes within the Government Major Projects Portfolio.

These programmes were particularly important to assess from the outset, as they are at the forefront of delivering the department’s purpose to protect our nation and enhance public security. These teams face intense scrutiny and pressure to deliver the government’s key objectives – as such, team members can feel vulnerable when challenging the status-quo.

The team has received great support from across the department and government, and they hope to expand the service to all of MoD’s projects and programmes. Research will be shared across the government through departmental presentations, engagement with senior leadership networks, and cross-government communications and working groups.

Rob Vining, SRO Land Mobility Programme, and Head of Support Group reflections is just a taste of the positive feedback we have received so far:

“I can only commend the Psychological Safety Assessment Service; a truly professional and independent service that has enabled my team to develop a greater understanding of Psychological Safety. It studies how it impacts our work, and develops credible actions that will build our Psychological Safety, ultimately enhancing our ability to deliver excellent outcomes for Defence”.