Why Psychological Safety Is Not Enough — And How to Practice What Comes Next
Most leadership teams that claim psychological safety have actually achieved something far less interesting: they have achieved comfort.
People speak up — but only about safe topics. Ideas get challenged — but only the ones that don't threaten anyone's position. Meetings feel open — but somehow never produce the decisions that actually matter.
If this sounds familiar, you are probably in what I call the Cruising Zone: high trust, high comfort, zero growth.
In a new article, The Fifth Stage: Why Psychological Safety Is Not Enough, I argue that Timothy Clark's four stages of psychological safety — Inclusion, Learner, Contributor, and Challenger Safety — are necessary but not sufficient. There is a fifth stage that most teams never reach. And reaching it requires doing something that feels deeply counterintuitive: deliberately making things less comfortable.
The Distinction Most Leaders Miss
The framework rests on a simple distinction that has significant consequences: relational safety and environmental safety are not the same thing.
Relational safety is genuine interpersonal trust. It is the confidence that the person across from you will not punish you for honesty, vulnerability, or disagreement. It is built through repeated acts of earned trust between individuals.
Environmental safety is something else entirely. It is the comfort provided by familiar surroundings, predictable routines, established roles, and polite norms. It is the warm conference room, the structured agenda, the unspoken agreement to keep things civil.
Most organisations have optimised for environmental safety and mistaken it for the real thing. The result is Pseudo Safety — comfortable but not honest. Teams operating in this zone can look psychologically safe from the outside while actually avoiding every conversation that matters.
Four Zones, One That Changes Everything
Crossing relational safety with environmental safety produces four zones:
- Danger Zone (low relational, low environmental): Neither safe nor comfortable. Survival mode.
- Pseudo Safety Zone (low relational, high environmental): Comfortable surroundings mask the absence of genuine trust. Where most organisations live.
- Cruising Zone (high relational, high environmental): Clark's four stages achieved. The team functions well but is not being stretched.
- Growth Zone (high relational, low environmental): The Fifth Stage. Teams temporarily sacrifice comfort to confront the truths that comfortable settings allow them to avoid.
The critical insight: you cannot skip from Pseudo Safety to the Growth Zone. You must build the Cruising Zone first — genuine relational trust is the foundation. And the Growth Zone is not a permanent state. It is activated deliberately, for the moments that demand it, and then the team returns to the Cruising Zone to recover and consolidate.
The three practices that enable this transition are asking existential questions (not "what should we do?" but "what are we afraid of losing?"), auditing false safety (distinguishing genuine trust from comfortable avoidance), and designing for discomfort (creating structures that make it harder to avoid difficult truths).
The Problem with Reading About It
Here is the uncomfortable truth about leadership development: understanding a framework and being able to execute it under pressure are completely different things.
Every executive who reads about the Fifth Stage will nod along. Yes, of course we need to have harder conversations. Yes, obviously we should ask deeper questions. Yes, absolutely we should sit with discomfort instead of rushing to resolution.
Then they walk into their next leadership meeting, someone raises a difficult topic, and the impulse kicks in: fill the silence, offer reassurance, steer the conversation back to safe ground, wrap things up with a plan. The framework evaporates the moment it is needed most.
This is why we built "The Offsite" on RolePlays.ai.
The Offsite: Practising the Fifth Stage
The scenario puts you in the chair of Dr. Martin Schreiber, CEO of a German software company facing strategic disruption. It is the morning of Day 2 of a leadership offsite. Day 1 was collegial, professional, and completely unproductive — the team agreed on everything and decided nothing.
Before the group session begins, you have 12–15 minutes for 1:1 conversations with six members of your leadership team. Each person represents a different position on the safety zone spectrum. Each tests a different aspect of your capacity to lead in the Fifth Stage.
The 29-year-old Head of AI who treats corporate language with thinly veiled contempt — and who might be the most important person in the room, if you can earn his respect without pulling rank.
The veteran Sales Director who will agree with everything you say, tell you a warm client story, shake your hand, and walk away having committed to absolutely nothing. Most people will think this conversation went well. That is the trap.
The Head of International who has a complete strategic plan she has not shared with anyone — because she is not sure you have the courage to back her.
The Head of Consulting who manages 200 people and whose resistance to change is not stubbornness but something far deeper — something that only surfaces if you ask the right question and then have the discipline to sit with the answer.
The CFO whose financial analysis is devastating and correct — but whose approach to restructuring would destroy the very thing she came to build, if she could admit that is why she came.
The Board Chairman who will start the conversation as a warm mentor and end it by questioning whether you should keep your job. Three escalating stages. Each tests whether you can hold your ground without becoming defensive or capitulating.
What the Scenario Actually Tests
The Offsite does not test whether you know the Fifth Stage framework. It tests whether you can do four things under pressure:
Diagnose safety zones in real time. Can you tell the difference between someone who genuinely trusts you and someone who is merely comfortable? Between someone who is resisting because they are afraid and someone who is resisting because they see something you do not?
Hold discomfort without fleeing. Can you sit with silence after someone says something painful? Can you resist the impulse to fix, reassure, or change the subject? Can you name what is happening in the room instead of working around it?
Ask existential questions. Can you move beyond "what should we do about AI?" to "what are you afraid of losing?" Can you connect a strategic decision to a personal stake without being manipulative?
Exercise activation judgment. Can you tell who is ready for the Growth Zone and who needs more relational investment first? Can you push harder when someone signals readiness — even when it makes you uncomfortable — and pull back when pushing would break trust rather than test it?
Every persona in the scenario creates at least one moment where these capacities are tested simultaneously. What you do in those moments is more honest than any self-assessment.
Read the Concept. Then Practice It.
The full article lays out the theoretical framework, the research that informs it, and the three practices that enable the Fifth Stage. It is the thinking.
The Offsite is the doing.
The gap between those two is where the real learning lives.
Bernhard Kerres is the founder of RolePlays.ai and author of "The Fifth Stage: Why Psychological Safety Is Not Enough." He works with business schools, corporate L&D teams, and executive programmes to build AI-powered practice environments for the conversations that matter most.