Why Innovation Needs More Than Psychological Safety — The Missing Ingredient on Your Team Might Be Honest Disagreement
We’ve all heard the advice: if you want an innovative team, create psychological safety. Let people speak up. Make them feel comfortable sharing concerns without fear of embarrassment or retribution.
And that advice isn’t wrong.
In fact, Harvard professor Amy Edmondson has shown that psychological safety is critical for learning, collaboration, and performance. But what if it’s only half the equation?
According to an article in MIT Sloan Management Review, innovation truly flourishes when psychological safety is balanced with intellectual honesty — the ability (and willingness) to speak candidly, challenge assumptions, and even disagree with leaders when necessary.
That balance isn’t easy to strike. But it’s essential.
The Risk of Prioritizing Comfort Over Candor
Teams often default to safety and cohesion. They want to be respectful, inclusive, collaborative — and they should be. But when that culture becomes too comfortable, something critical is lost: the drive to question, challenge, and improve.
In these “comfortable” cultures, people may feel safe, but they rarely speak up. Candor fades, and so does ambition. Feedback is softened. Tough conversations are avoided. Innovation stalls — not because people are afraid, but because they’re too polite.
On the flip side, we’ve all seen the “brutally honest” cultures — where feedback is raw, performance is everything, and emotions take a back seat. These “anxious” cultures can spark brilliant ideas but often burn people out. High turnover, low trust.
So what’s the sweet spot?
Where Innovation Thrives: The Balance of Safety and Honesty
The most successful, innovative teams do both:
They feel safe to speak up
They feel responsible to speak the truth
This doesn’t happen by accident. It takes emotional intelligence, strong leadership, and a shared commitment to the mission.
Take Amazon’s Jeff Wilke, who challenged Jeff Bezos in a board meeting over the decision to launch the Kindle. He believed the company lacked the hardware expertise to succeed. Bezos listened. He acknowledged the risks — and decided to move forward anyway.
The outcome? The Kindle was a success, and Amazon developed new capabilities that opened even more doors. Both leaders were right, and the debate was what made the decision stronger.
How to Build a Culture of Safe Candor
Here are four principles to help leaders and teams strike that crucial balance:
Foster Emotional Intelligence
Empathy, self-awareness, humility — these are the glue that binds honesty and safety. Leaders must create space for people to disagree respectfully.Hire and Develop Proactive People
Intellectual honesty comes from initiative. People who care deeply, take ownership, and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo.Normalize Honest Debate
Make it clear that speaking up isn’t just allowed — it’s expected. Encourage dissent. Separate task conflict (productive) from relationship conflict (destructive).Unite Around a Shared Mission
When people care about the why, they become more courageous about the what and how. The mission must matter more than anyone’s ego.
Final Thoughts: The Courage to Be Candid
Creating psychological safety is necessary, but not sufficient. It’s when teams combine psychological safety with intellectual honesty that the real breakthroughs happen.
Encourage your team to be candid. Invite them to challenge your thinking. Celebrate when someone says, “I see it differently.”
Because real innovation doesn’t just come from feeling safe.
It comes from being safely challenged.