The trendy advice on psychological “safety” feels like an emotional bomb shelter from debate, emotional clash, and negativity. In reality, it’s a creative dead end where the truth stays buried. Ask creators. Ask science. Safety—creative safety—is a little countercultural, even counterintuitive.There are thousands of articles on expressing emotions at work. Silencing “negative” emotions outnumbers expressing them, three to one. The champions of the ratio? Coaches and consultants. And the rebel backing the underdog? Science. This episode is dedicated to rebels.At the right intensity and intent, negative emotions fix what’s broken, dig up the truth, ignite revolutions. They spark friendly friction and beneficial “battles.” It’s how creators and leaders turn teams around, shatter conventions, and shock people out of assumptions into the truth. All while building trust and unity without washing away individuality.Learn more about the work we do and the elements of gravity at https://schoolofgravity.com/our-work. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com.Steven Titus Smith, coauthor of I Am Gravity, presented this episode. You can read more about the authors here.Here’s the episode transcript:Teams that disrupt industries, create uncontested marketspace, or cure the disease of mediocrity have unorthodox communication habits. The kind that would make most soft-skill communication courses squirm. That’s because truth-telling, truth-hunting conversations are not soft:“Create dissension and disagreement rather than consensus. Decisions…are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views…It is…the only safeguard against the decision-maker’s becoming the prisoner of the organization.” Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker“You need storms…if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t even ever have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up.” Brad Bird, Pixar, via Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc.“You need executives …who argue and debate—sometimes violently—in pursuit of the best answers…Phrases like ‘loud debate, ‘heated discussions,’ and ‘healthy conflict’ peppered the articles and interview transcripts…The entire management team would lay itself open to searing questions and challenges.” Jim Collins, Good to Great“…[depart] from the conventional logic…robustly scrutinize every factor…” W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy“If your disruptive product or service is not yet good enough and your team seems enthralled…raise a big red flag. If your team assures you that you’ll succeed because a new venture fits your company’s core competence, tell them that you can’t deal in fuzzy concepts.” Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovators Solution[Emphases added.]Heating things up doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Culturally, we spend a lot of training time and educational ceremonies cooling down conversations and keeping things upbeat. No one wants to make waves in the “pool of shared meaning.” Sixty-one percent of the people in one of our surveys said they need a lightning rod to get a little debate started and a surge protector once it starts. The balance is hard to strike.Let’s be clear about psychological safety, which at first appears to be the haven from debate, conflict and emotional clash. Doesn’t true safety mean it’s okay to be annoyed with bureaucracy, bored by average products, frustrated when we fail, aggravated by bad policy, alarmed by contentment, uneasy with company politics or impatient with slow budget approval when an opportunity is slipping away—and to passionately express it? Aren’t those emotions sometimes precisely how broken things get fixed and revolutions start? Activists don’t march on Washington with picket signs of mild irritation. No one breaks the grip of good with a gentle tug. Going home at night unresolved and a little irritated with each other isn’t the end of the world if everyone knows it’s not the end of the conversation or the relationship. In the name of progress, the goal isn’t always to lower the tension. You may need to raise it. And yet it’s talked down.There are thousands of articles on emotion in the workplace. We randomly sampled 100. Eliminating negative emotions wins by a 3:1 margin. Who’s behind the three? Consultants and coaches. Who’s on the side of the one? Science. “Trying to impose happy thoughts is extremely difficult, if not impossible, because few people can just turn off negative thoughts and replace them with more pleasant ones. Also, this advice fails to consider an essential truth: Your so called ‘negative’ emotions are actually working in your favor,” wrote Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David. “In fact, negativity is normal. This is a fundamental fact. We are wired to ...
