Stable at 73: What the Fearless Report Says About the Silence on Your Programme

The programme board meeting is running well. Reports are structured, RAG status is predominantly green, and the satisfaction surveys are returning results that would satisfy most governance frameworks. The programme director presents the engagement metrics: strong team cohesion scores, clear communication channels, a culture that describes itself as open and collaborative. Nobody in the room challenges this description.

Which is, if you think about it, precisely the point worth sitting with.

Amy Edmondson’s Fearless Organization Scan published the Fearless Report 2025 last month: 5,530 respondents across 33 countries and 21 industries, applying the validated 7-item psychological safety scale that Edmondson developed in her original 1999 research and has since validated across hundreds of organisations. The median Psychological Safety Index across this year’s sample is 73. It was also 73 in the 2024 dataset, drawn from an entirely different respondent pool. The report’s authors note this consistency and ask, with admirable economy: “The question is whether or not stable is acceptable.”

In the report’s scoring framework, 73 sits in what the research describes as ‘the frustrating middle’ – not unsafe, but inconsistent, with teams operating in conditions that have not yet reached the threshold for reliable learning and honest conversation. The report is not describing organisations in crisis. It is describing organisations that have made a quiet, unspoken decision about what ‘safe enough’ means, without ever quite examining whether that decision is serving them or simply preserving the appearance that everything is fine.

The thing that goes unsaid in that board meeting is easy to miss precisely because nothing dramatic is happening. The meeting is well-organised, the scores are acceptable, and the programme director is presenting in good faith. But sitting in that room, and certainly in the conversations that happen outside it, most people carry a version of a sentence they haven’t raised: that the team is pleasant to work in, that the culture feels positive, and that there is a category of concern that would be very difficult to surface with any real confidence it would be received well. That unspoken sentence is doing a lot of work in delivery organisations, and the Fearless Report has now put numbers to it.

The Open Conversation item on the scale asks whether team members are able to raise problems and tough issues. When a team lead answers this item, they are rating the flow of communication that arrives at their desk – the issues they have been told about, the concerns brought forward, the escalations that reached them. Their direct reports are answering a different question: whether raising something difficult is actually possible for them, in this team, with the people around them. The median gap between those two answers is 13 points. Team leads rate Open Conversation at 86. Individual contributors on the same teams rate it at 71. The report is direct in its guidance: never show a team lead their Open Conversation score without also presenting the individual contributor score alongside it. One number describes how the communication system looks from above. The other describes how it is experienced from within.

This is not a criticism of team leads. It is a description of what positional authority does to perception. The more power you have to close a conversation – formally or informally, intentionally or not – the less accurately you can observe whether others feel free to open one. Senior leaders in the data show a similar but smaller gap, which suggests that positional distortion is structural rather than a feature of any particular level of management. It compounds most sharply at the first rung of people management, where authority has increased but the cultural conditions that moderate its impact have not yet developed alongside it.

Alongside this, the report identifies a pattern that appears in over 90% of measured segments. Teams score reasonably well on inclusion and on willingness to help each other, but Attitude to Risk and Failure drops to 71. The researchers describe what this actually looks like in practice: the engineer who notices the flaw in the design but waits for a more senior colleague to raise it first; the programme manager who has the more direct option but presents the incremental version instead; the new team member who sees a broken process on day three and decides, reasonably enough, that there must be a reason for it. These are rational responses to an environment that has not yet made it safe to be wrong. They are also, cumulatively, how programmes absorb the cost of things not being said until it is considerably harder and more expensive to address them.

What the data describes overall is an organisation that feels open, that describes its culture as collaborative, and in which the specific, high-stakes act of naming what is not working remains harder than the culture narrative would suggest. The comfort of the team and the safety of the team are not the same condition, and treating them as if they were is how the gap between 86 and 71 becomes invisible to the people who most need to see it.

Naming this clearly requires a degree of compassion alongside the directness, because the people sitting in that board meeting are not complacent. They are working within the measurement systems available to them, and those systems are measuring what people chose to say rather than what is actually happening. If the team lead is seeing 86 and the team is living 71, the risk data flowing upward through reporting structures is being filtered through a 13-point gap before it reaches the people with authority to act on it. That is not a culture problem requiring a culture programme. It is a diagnostic problem, and one that organisations are entirely capable of addressing once they decide that 73 – stable, pleasant, and consistently below the threshold for learning – is not, in fact, the target.

The Fearless Report will track whether the global median moves in 2026. That will be worth watching. But before the next dataset arrives, the more immediate question for any team currently in delivery: which number is your programme director seeing, and what is happening in the 13-point gap between that number and the one the team is actually living?

REFERENCES

Fearless Organization Scan (2025). The Fearless Report 2025: The Global State of Psychological Safety at Work. fearlessorganizationscan.com. Published April 2026. N = 5,530 respondents, 33 countries, 21 industries. All data points cited in this blog are drawn directly from this report.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. The original development and validation of the 7-item psychological safety scale.

Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley. Foundational work on the concept and its application in organisational settings.