# Google's Project Aristotle

- **Episode:** [15](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/15.md) (2022-12-06)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** google-project-aristotle, psychological-safety, team-effectiveness
- **Time:** 17:02–19:01 (start 1022s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/15?t=1022](https://truthliesandwork.com/15?t=1022)

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[17:02] Leanne Elliott: Absolutely. And if you're still not clear on how psychological safety can impact behavior and in turn organizational outcomes, Stephan has a great example
[17:13] Stephan Wiedner: I'm a nurse, and I see on the chart for this— in this case, it was in a neonatal intensive care unit. So there's a child, an infant, a baby, and on the chart it says, you know, administer this amount of drug, this type of drug, and this amount. And you think the dose is wrong. So it's 2 in the morning, you know, you're the midnight shift, and you think, I really got to call the doctor. So you call the doctor and says, stay in your lane, just follow the orders on the chart, and that's that. So the next time that comes around, what do you do? Do you notice the error on the chart or the potential mistake, and do you call that doctor again? No, because you got reamed out last time. So that's one case where psychological safety affected my ability to be able to pick up the phone and call you, and there's a potential life or death situation. And why that matters is because how often are there mistakes happening in your work environment where you wanna know about those mistakes because you can then do something about it? And another similar study looked at the number of errors that were being reported in hospitals. And what they found is that Teams that had the highest level of psychological safety reported more errors, not less. And that was counterintuitive, right? Amy, that was a study conducted by Amy Edmondson again, and she was expecting that the teams with the highest degree of psychological safety would have the fewest number of errors. And it was exactly the opposite. And it's because it's a reporting issue. If you have a high degree of psychological safety, you report the errors so you can fix them