the opposite of psychological safety isn't being challenged or being chirped at or risking insult, it's the manipulative environments with a zero sum attrition games where everyone tries to align while the narratives shift. can't fix it. the way to avoid this is to be good enough at what you do so that you can afford to leave when the org turns negative-sum.<p>in kindergarten there were the kids who built forts and the kids who played musical chairs. if you were a creative builder, the conformity, deception, and attrition games were a demented hellscape. These games produce the conflict-averse neurotic west coast passive aggression culture whose failure mode is the constant threat of not a confrontation, but of inconsolable histrionics and mob formation.<p>the dynamic is that someone with authority tells a lie (commitments, roadmaps, features, etc) and then everyone tries to get in behind it. the ones who can't sustain the dissonance don't get group protection, so they get blamed and scapegoated for the failure everyone else was trying to avoid taking responsibility for and cast out. it's called "being managed out," and the rules around PIPs mean managers are forced to gaslight and torture people to get rid of them. Sometimes they're legit negative people who need to go, but without a culture where you can set adult boundaries, you're going to show up one day and wonder if your co-workers have been replaced with impostors, where really you've just missed a cue, failed to read a room, been cut out, and everyones just
"being nice."