What is a Check-In routine and how does it build psychological safety?
A psychological safety study released this year, spanning 47 countries, reached a conclusion that will surprise no-one who has ever sat through a badly run meeting: psychological safety is the bedrock of high-performing teams. The figures attached to that study are worth pausing on — meaningful lifts in productivity and innovation, and retention rates several times higher for the people who have historically had the least room to speak. And yet, by most measures, only about a quarter of leaders are actually creating it. That gap interests me far more than the statistics do. Because almost every leader I work with already believes in psychological safety. They can define it. They've read the research. What they don't have is a practice — something that happens on an ordinary day, in a real meeting, under real time pressure, which actually builds the thing rather than merely endorsing it.
Adaptive Leadership for Hybrid Human-AI Teams (Part 2 of 3): Why the Framework Must Evolve
In Part 1 of this series, I revisited Ronald Heifetz's foundational distinction between technical and adaptive challenges, and argued that most AI rollouts are being managed as if they were entirely technical when what's actually being asked of people is adaptive. This piece goes a step further: hybrid human-AI teams introduce conditions the original Adaptive Leadership framework was never built to handle, and the framework itself now needs to evolve.
For more than three decades, Adaptive Leadership has offered one of the most influential frameworks for navigating complexity and change. Ronald Heifetz introduced the distinction between technical and adaptive work in Leadership Without Easy Answers (Heifetz, 1994), and later extended it into a practical toolkit with Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Heifetz et al., 2009). Heifetz has argued that a leader can operate with little more than a well-placed question (Heifetz, 1994). The work was never about having the answer. It was about helping a system find its own.