When it comes to the way of working, there's one small difference that can make a huge impact on your teams and organization

With Pull Requests you see just a polished and thought-through end result.

With co-creation, you see every single mistake made while navigating the solution space and incrementally solving a problem. It demands acceptance and vulnerability (involves risk of rejection) of people co-creating and these are absolutely necessary for building trust and psychological safety in the team.

If you’re able to see me make mistakes and accept me as such, that makes you more likely to accept yourself being seen making mistakes, which helps me in turn.

Teams that have higher levels of psychological safety tend to co-create more, but what I find even more important is that teams that co-create tend to have higher levels of psychological safety driving that reinforcing feedback loop.

It’s funny how by looking for ways to continuously shorten the feedback loop in order to minimize lead times (a very mechanistic driver) we arrive at a point with way more empathy and acceptance for others and ourselves.

Effects of this? Results from Google’s Project Aristotle research have the answer.

Spoiler: Psychological Safety was identified as the most important driver of what makes a team high-performing.