The Jargon of Psychological Safety Kills It
Carlos M. is pressing the tines of a 1929 Waterman nib against a block of hard rubber, his eyes narrowed behind a set of magnifying spectacles that look like they belong in a Victorian laboratory. He doesn’t look up when I enter. He doesn’t offer a ‘safe space’ for my arrival. There are 9 precision tools laid out on his bench, and each one has a job that doesn’t involve euphemisms. If he slips, the gold bends. If he applies 19 grams of pressure instead of 9, the feed snaps. There is a terrifying, beautiful honesty in the way he works because the material doesn’t care about his intentions. It only cares about the physics of the friction.
This morning, I sent a project proposal to 29 stakeholders and realized, three minutes after hitting send, that I’d forgotten the attachment-a clumsy, human error that left me staring at the screen with a hollow heat in my chest. In a world of corporate gloss, we are taught to fear that heat, to wrap it in layers of linguistic cotton wool until we can’t even feel the burn anymore.
The Linguistic Inversion
That heat is exactly what Marcus tried to extinguish during the product review on Tuesday. Marcus is a director who wears his empathy like a high-visibility vest; you can see it from a mile away, but it’s mostly there for his own protection. When Sarah, a lead engineer with 19 years of experience, pointed out that the current project timeline was essentially a work of fiction that would lead to a system collapse by Q3, Marcus didn’t flinch. He didn’t even look at the data. He leaned back, steepled his fingers, and gave her a smile that was 99 percent teeth. ‘Thanks for that perspective, Sarah,’ he said, his voice dripping with a rehearsed, honeyed calm. ‘In the spirit of psychological safety, let’s not focus on problems right now. Let’s focus on the solutions. We want to keep this a safe environment for positive growth.’
REVELATION: The Weaponization
By using the jargon of psychological safety to silence a legitimate warning, Marcus performed a high-level linguistic inversion. He didn’t make the room safer; he made it dangerous to be honest. He turned a therapeutic concept designed to encourage the reporting of errors into a weapon of mass silencing.
It’s a sophisticated form of gaslighting that has become the default setting in modern management. When corporate culture co-opts the language of well-being, it doesn’t actually adopt the values; it simply replaces the old, blunt tools of authoritarianism with new, shiny, ’empathetic’ ones. You aren’t being told to shut up; you’re being told that your dissent is an affront to the collective ‘safety’ of the group. It is the most effective muzzle ever invented because it makes the victim feel like the aggressor.
Safety is a lack of consequences for the truth, not a lack of truth for the sake of comfort.
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KPIs vs. Reality
I watched Sarah’s face as she processed the dismissal. She had 49 lines of code-debt analysis ready to show, but she closed her laptop instead. Why bother? If the very language meant to protect your voice is being used to tune the frequency out, the only logical response is silence.
The Paradox Illustrated
Ways to Quantify Engagement
Ability to Speak the Truth
This is the paradox of the modern workplace: the more we talk about psychological safety, the less of it we actually have. We’ve turned it into a KPI. We’ve turned it into a poster in the breakroom. We’ve turned it into a 299-slide deck that explains how to be ‘vulnerable’ without actually risking anything.
Safety in Unvarnished Surfaces
There is a peculiar kind of relief in art that you never find in a boardroom. When an artist stands before a blank surface, there is no jargon to hide behind. You can’t ‘circle back’ on a bad brushstroke. You can’t ‘leverage’ a muddy color into a masterpiece through sheer force of buzzwords. An artist needs a foundation that doesn’t lie.
Tangible Safety: The Canvas
A quality canvas provides a tangible, physical safety that is more real than any HR initiative. It’s safe because it’s reliable. It’s safe because it allows for the mess. If you fail on a real canvas, the canvas doesn’t tell you to ‘reframe your failure as a solution-oriented pivot.’ It just sits there, ready for the next layer. It accepts the truth of the paint, however ugly that truth might be at first.
This is why many professional creators return to the basics, choosing a Phoenix Arts canvas as the literal ground for their work.
The Price of Smoothness
Carlos M. takes my $79 for the repair and goes back to his bench. He isn’t performing. He isn’t optimizing his ‘interpersonal safety metrics.’ He is just doing the work. If we want to save the concept of psychological safety from the people who are currently killing it with jargon, we have to stop talking about it and start practicing it.
We have to allow for the sharp edges. We have to stop using ‘positivity’ as a gag. We have to realize that the most dangerous thing you can do in a company is to make it impossible for people to say that things are going wrong.
The Path Back to Integrity
Seek the difficult conversations.
Consequences for falsehoods, not for facts.
Do the work; stop managing perception.