Executive Summary
Digital transformations (like ERP) often fail not because of technology, but because people stop talking. When employees, managers, or leaders don’t feel safe to speak up, learning shuts down and risk goes underground.
Psychological safety (the belief that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks) is what keeps teams learning, collaborating, and recovering when change gets messy. In a utility, where physical safety is already a core value, this is simply the next evolution: creating emotional and psychological safety around change.
When leaders model vulnerability, ask curious questions, and respond with empathy instead of judgment, they accelerate adoption more effectively than any training plan can. The fastest way to move a transformation forward is to make it safe to be honest about what’s hard.
Because progress doesn’t come from perfect plans. It comes from people who trust they can tell the truth.
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Most ERP project plans have timelines, milestones, and well-defined deliverables. What that rarely accounts for is fear.
Not the dramatic kind, but the everyday kind. The fear of looking unprepared in front peers. The fear of breaking something in a new system. The fear of asking a “dumb” question during a workshop or training.
In a utility company, where safety and reliability are everything, people take pride in knowing their job and doing it well. So when a large project (like ERP) implementation upends the tools, processes, and routines that define competence, it shakes something deeper than process. It touches identity.
And that’s where psychological safety becomes the single most important success factor no project plan can measure.
ERP Projects Don’t Fail Because of Systems…They Fail Because of Silence
When employees don’t feel safe enough to admit what they don’t know, they stay quiet. When managers don’t feel safe to say “this isn’t landing,” they sugarcoat progress. When sponsors don’t feel safe to ask for help, they disappear behind executive updates.
Silence is the biggest untracked risk in digital transformation.
On paper, everything looks green. In reality, people are quietly improvising, avoiding the new system, or discovering their own inefficient workarounds. And by the time someone says something, the damage is already baked in.
Safety Is Not Soft
There’s still a misconception that psychological safety is about being “nice.” It’s not. It’s about creating an environment where people can speak up, disagree, and take calculated risks without fear of punishment or embarrassment.
In other words, it’s the exact kind of environment we need to navigate complex ERP change.
Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a “shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” When people have that, they learn faster, collaborate more, and recover from setbacks quicker.
That’s not a skill. That’s a performance advantage.
In Many Orgs Safety Is Already a Core Value…We Just Need to Expand It
Utilities (and other organizations in industries like manufacturing and construction) already understand safety better than almost any industry. We hold safety meetings, track near misses, and pause work when something doesn’t look right. We know that silence kills and that speaking up saves lives.
Psychological safety is just that same principle, applied to change.
It’s saying:
- You won’t be judged for asking a question in training.
- You won’t be blamed for catching an issue early.
- You can tell us when something isn’t working, and we’ll actually listen.
When people know that, they engage differently. They lean in instead of leaning back.
How to Build Psychology Safety During a Digital Transformation (like ERP)
You can’t bolt this on with a communication plan. It has to show up in how leaders act every day. Here’s what it looks like in practice:
- Model vulnerability at the TOP. When senior leaders admit they’re learning too, it normalizes curiosity instead of perfection. “I’m still wrapping my head around the new workflow, too…let’s learn this together,” is a powerful statement.
- Ask curious questions instead of compliance checks. Swap, “Have you done the training?” for “What’s been most helpful so far, and what’s still confusing?” Curiosity signals respect.
- Respond, don’t react. When someone raises a concern or frustration, treat it as useful data, not resistance. “Thanks for flagging that. Let’s dig into why it feels that way.”
- Recognize truth-tellers. Celebrate the people who surface blind spots or bring up tough feedback. They’re accelerating success, not slowing it down.
- Protect space for learning. Digital transformation changes move fast. Give teams room to pause, reflect, and recalibrate. That’s not inefficiency…that’s risk mitigation.
Final Thought
Every change leader talks about “driving adoption,” but real adoption can’t be driven. It has to be earned.
When people feel safe, they engage sooner, experiment more, and recover faster when things go wrong. When they don’t feel sfae, they protect themselves instead of the mission.
If we want our digital transformations to move faster, we have to slow down long enough to make it save to speak up.
Because the real accelerator isn’t the technology. It’s trust.
