When I was a kid, I thought adults knew everything there was to know. When I was a junior developer, I thought the senior developers knew everything there was to know about software.

As anyone who has made some progression in life knows, nobody gives you the big manual with all the answers when you level up. You’ll still be you. Just with more responsibility and more experience. But the experience does not come from age, it comes from actually having to try. It’s okay to have no idea what you’re doing and try anyway. It will make you better.

This wasn’t going to be the topic of this post. I wanted to write about an exercise we did at Posten Bring that we had stolen from gov.uk. I’ve repeated the “It’s okay to…” exercise in two different settings at Sikt after I got contracted there, and I think it’s just a wonderful exercise for building psychological safety in a team. I wanted to write about it, so I reviewed the list of “It’s okay to…” statements from the Posten Bring blog post. It was then that I realized just how strongly this one statement has become part of my thinking over the last 7-10 years.

It’s okay to build psychological safety in a team

I would encourage doing this exercise in a team. The point is to write down acceptable behaviors within your team. The gov.uk blog post has an angle about preparing the ground for newcomers to the team, but I also think this exercise is great for blessing behavior that some people in the team may feel insecure about already. Someone should facilitate, and I think the process works best when that person can get the ball rolling by writing and presenting a few notes first. For example:

  • It’s okay to ask for help
  • It’s okay to change your mind
  • It’s okay to make mistakes
  • It’s okay to take breaks from chat and email to have focus time
  • It’s okay to disagree and say so

Talk about why the behavior is okay, or even important. If someone disagrees, have a discussion. My experience has been that people get in a mode for making this kind of statement about their team very quickly. Someone usually gets surprised that something they think is a character flaw of theirs is totally fine within the team. It may be luck of the draw, but in the teams where I’ve worked, people are generous with each other, and doing this exercise is a great way to let everyone see that generosity.

Knowing your team is generous with you makes it easier to try things you’re unsure you can achieve, and to step outside your comfort zone. That’s a great way to stretch and learn new things. This is one way the team can gain new capabilities and increased capacity over time, without adding people to it.

It’s okay to have cultural propaganda posters

Time passes, people move in and out of teams. It should be the goal to preserve what is good about the culture in a team even so. I think propaganda works for this. If the team has made a good collection of statements, it is worth preserving. Tape it on the wall near the coffee machine, whiteboard or a break area. Or make a Slack bot that can remind people about what’s okay. Or find a different way to preserve it, somewhere people will see it.

The initial exercise can get the team into a mindset where they realize they are generous with each other. The propaganda is all about reminding them about that mindset. It should be safe to let your team know you’re not at your best today, because of a toothache, a roof leak, or a sleepless night. And it should be a reflex from the team to show acceptance and understanding.

It’s okay to revise what’s okay over time, but it’s not okay to forget what’s okay.

It’s okay to be new

Knowing what’s okay may have an especially high impact on young or inexperienced workers. It’s important that they know. As a senior developer, I see one of my most important responsibilities as helping to build a good team culture where people feel safe. Creating an environment where people feel comfortable experimenting and learning on their own is often even more powerful — and more scalable — than relying solely on mentoring and direct training. I benefit directly when someone in my team finds a better way to do something that I already knew how to do. But they’re not going to do that if they don’t know that it’s okay to research and experiment at work, or if they think they’ll be treading on my toes by not asking me. Which brings me back to the title of this post.

It’s okay to have no idea what you’re doing and try anyway. And it’s okay to ask for help if you can’t figure it out.