No Innovation Without Psychological Safety

Some interviews for my book confirmed things I'd seen over 36 years of organizational change work. A few reframed them entirely. My conversation with Rabbi Irwin Kula was the second kind.

We were talking about why innovation initiatives stall, why brilliant strategies with committed leaders and real budgets still hit a wall of resistance. And Rabbi Kula said something I've been carrying ever since:

"There is no possibility of having innovation without loss."

For him, deep listening isn't a communication tactic, it's a psycho-spiritual practice. The goal is to move beneath the surface problem and uncover the real, often unarticulated, "job to be done." He gave me an example I love: institutions routinely mistake their own problems for their customers' problems. A synagogue worries about declining attendance, but no one wakes up in the morning feeling their problem is a "lack of church." The real problems are loneliness. The need for meaning. The challenge of raising children in a complex world.

Every organization has its version of this mistake. The company worries about "innovation metrics" while its people are quietly carrying something else entirely.

And what they're carrying, most often, is loss. Every change, even a good one, even a necessary one, asks people to give something up. A skill they spent a decade mastering. A team that felt like home. A story about their future that no longer fits. Rabbi Kula, drawing on his psychoanalytic lens, argues that when organizations offer no language and no structured way to process that loss, even the most promising ideas trigger unconscious resistance, stalls, silos, outright failure.

Then he said the thing that changes how you run your next meeting: the resistors are not obstacles to be overcome. They are carriers of crucial information. They intuitively sense the emotional costs of change, and listening deeply to them reveals the partial truths you need to refine and strengthen the innovation itself.

Read that again. The loudest skeptic in your organization may understand something about your initiative that your steering committee doesn't.

And notice what all of this requires. People can only process loss where it's safe to name it. No one tells you what they're grieving, the expertise that's now obsolete, the team being reorganized away, the future that no longer fits, in a room where vulnerability gets punished. Without psychological safety, the loss doesn't disappear. It goes underground. And underground loss surfaces as the resistance that kills initiatives. That is why psychological safety isn't a wellness perk. It is the precondition for innovation itself, the soil in which everything else either grows or doesn't.

Rabbi Kula practices what he calls "relational holding", listening in which the listener is willing to be changed by the relationship itself. Not listening to respond. Not listening to confirm. Listening that leaves you different than it found you. He calls the dialogue that follows "wandering together", and in his view, the next leap in human progress won't be measured by the sophistication of our technologies but by our ability to integrate humility, curiosity, and self-awareness into how we work together.

That may be the truest sentence in my entire book, and I didn't write it. One of the 35 remarkable people who trusted me with their wisdom did.

One more thought before I close. This matters more now than it did a generation ago, because the paradigm of business has shifted. Change is no longer an occasional event that organizations endure and recover from, it's the permanent condition of work. In the old paradigm, helping people process loss was a kindness. In the new one, it's a core leadership capability. Continuous change means continuous loss, and only organizations safe enough to metabolize loss can move.

Worth considering: in your last change initiative, did anyone make space for what people were losing, or only enthusiasm for what they were gaining?