The psychological margin of safety, perhaps call it PMOS. This way it comes as a safety margin, not a safe thing. Say you hear this:
“Hey your team is lacking in the progress report. The team, maybe it needs to increase its psychological margin of safety, so that more people will comment on each project.”
This is a better way. PMOS = Psychological Margin of Safety. Because we all know, safety is something we want to improve. Safety, it’s just a moving line, a margin record of how bad we did this year compared to last year. Phycological safety really does not exist. You can see it? Rarely, you might find it being tried to be done in some organizations, struggling to get people to talk about problems.
Can you fight this? Not really. People want security and so they do not want to bring up problems. You can only improve or make it worse. You can not fix it. My opinion. There is some hope, see my answers 😀 below!!
You can pay people for innovation. I know of a contractor organization, down the hall, I could hear them talk about innovation awards. This caught my attention and I had to discuss it with them, and yes, it was true, they paid people to innovate. Great idea, pay for innovation!
😀 Answer: Those innovations can solve problems. Create a new process to kill the problem process, and you may never have to discuss the problem.
Where is their no PMOS? The worst example of this is military organizations, pick any country, go to their military projects. What do you see in those failing projects or those projects that are completely useless? You will see PMOS levels undetectable. No margin of safety can be seen regarding speaking up. No one will dare speak up or discuss the problems. Sometimes, they only discuss the options. The peer pressure in military ordered organization is incredible and creates high risk. Yet there is a way! Discussing options, this is convenient way to hide the fact that we need to speak up about problems.
😀 Answer: Discussing options does work in some scenarios. I led a group to discuss options about various technologies, without focusing on the difficult problems some of those technologies inherited.
Copyright 2026 Rod Deluhery
crypto_voyage 