Psychological Safety within BCG

Challenge

CoCreate was asked to support BCG, one of the world’s ‘Big Three’ Strategy Consulting firms, to find ways to build psychological safety for their people. The nature of their work was changing, requiring multi-disciplinary teams to quickly come together and hit their strides on increasingly complex briefs. This was set against a backdrop of a culture that aims to progress only the most talented people through the organisation. The risk is that debate is frequently stifled, with team members fearing getting it wrong or showing weakness in front of their leaders.

Programme

CoCreate Consultants started out by recruiting 6 of the client’s ‘case teams’ to participate in a series of experiments designed to increase psychological safety and improve team performance. These experiments blended better meeting practices with agile principles, regular team check-ins, feedback for senior leaders, and a series of ‘rituals’ or regular practices designed to accelerate psychological safety within the teams.

From discussion and feedback we understood that many leaders find Psychological Safety a compelling but abstract concept. We therefore developed a Psychological Safety framework and supporting tools, as a way of making the topic tangible. We discovered that this approach also equipped leaders and teams with simple and replicable ways to build Psychological Safety at pace, accelerating trust and driving performance. We call this framework ‘The Four Domains of Psych Safety’, and it’s now developed into a key element of the client’s global learning and development offer.

Impact

After 6 weeks CoCreate evaluated the impact of the psychological safety experiments with each Case Team. The data demonstrated tangible and direct:

• Improvement in communication and knowledge sharing
• Increase in the frequency behaviours associated with learning agility
• Boost in team performance

Our work has seen CoCreate Founder Andy Caldwell invited to be the keynote speaker at a BCG Global Learning Summit in London, and as of January 2025 we have delivered Psychological Safety training for over 1000 participants across four continents and for every level of seniority across the organisation. We have also run the workshop for BCG client teams, such has been the demand and the recognition of the impact of client relationships on psychological safety and performance. We are currently focused on the most senior populations across Europe.

Client experience