Open ten organizational culture surveys and you'll find the same phrase in all of them: psychological safety. And I don't know a single company that can prove it has it.
What they do have is the good intention declared as a corporate value, repeated during onboarding, and measured with a question like "I feel safe expressing my opinion on my team." That doesn't measure psychological safety. It measures whether that person, on that day, decided to answer yes.
The Answer Is Already Shaped by the System
And that answer doesn't depend on their attitude. It depends on whether they've ever seen someone pay a real price for speaking up. On who holds the power to retaliate. On what happened to the last person who made a mistake in public.
Asking people whether they have psychological safety is like asking the thermometer if it's hot outside: the answer is already shaped by the system you're trying to measure, not by the person.
Schein Made This Clear Forty Years Ago
This isn't a new discovery. Edgar Schein made it clear almost forty years ago: culture operates in layers, and at the top there are only visible behaviors. Below, where nobody measures, are the assumptions that actually decide what can and can't be done.
HR has had that theory available since the eighties. What it did over four decades wasn't update the model. It updated the survey: it added engagement in the 2000s, agility in the 2010s, wellbeing after the pandemic. It's still the same top layer, with more rows added.
It's Not an Attribute of People — It's an Effect of Design
Psychological safety isn't something people have or don't have. It's the effect of organizational design decisions that almost never get audited: who holds power, what happens when someone makes a mistake, whether the reporting channel is real or just a form nobody reads.
As long as we keep asking people how they feel instead of auditing what in the system makes that feeling possible, we'll keep updating the survey every five years and calling it cultural transformation.
Learn how we work with culture as a system, not as a declaration. Discover our approach to cultural transformation.
By Yoel Kluk, Partner at Olivia Mexico.