Gary P. Pisano

“Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid: We all love the freedom to speak our minds without fear—we all want to be heard—but psychological safety is a two-way street. If it is safe for me to criticize your ideas, it must also be safe for you to criticize mine. Most of us feel much more comfortable being on the giving rather than the receiving end of critical feedback. I have experienced the “joys” of tough feedback firsthand. As an academic for the past thirty years, I have presented my work in many seminars and scholarly conferences. The norm in these events is for the audience to poke holes in the presenter’s work. Their job is to be skeptical about the data, methods, logic, and conclusions. We all know that such feedback is essential to improving our scholarly work. As academics, we could not succeed without it. But anyone who tells you that they enjoy getting utterly hammered in front of a room full of their peers is either disingenuous or has a warped sense of pleasure.”
― Gary P. Pisano, Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation