How to Replace 'Yes, But' with 'Yes, And': Practicing Psychological Safety

“That’s a great idea. However…”

When this sentence comes up in a meeting, you can pretty much predict what follows. I have rarely seen a truly good story come after that. A newborn idea gets tripped up by a single conjunction, and the meeting just returns to the status quo.

When this scene is played out at the corporate level, it ends up in history books.

Blockbuster laughed off the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million, and Kodak kept the digital camera invented by its own engineer in a drawer. Both were companies that knew their industries better than anyone else. It wasn’t that they didn’t know; they knew, but the word “but” popped out first. If you examine what that conjunction does within an organization, you can also see how to insert “and” in its place.

Why ‘But’ Pops Out First: Status Quo Bias and Confirmation Bias

“But” isn’t a personality flaw; it’s a default reaction of the brain. Beneath the resistance to change lie three lines of defense.

The first line of defense is status quo bias.

According to the loss aversion principle identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, humans feel the pain of losing 1 million won about twice as intensely as the joy of gaining it. Since change involves letting go of what you currently have, the brain perceives it as a loss in itself.

The brain is also lazy. It walks familiar paths for almost free, but examining a new path requires burning expensive fuel called thought. Add to this the endowment effect, where we inflate the value of what we already own, and the conclusion to “stick to the current path” is essentially decided before the meeting even begins.

Just how strong this bias is can be seen in organ donation consent rates. If you ask, “Check here if you do NOT want to donate” (opt-out), most people leave it as is. If you change it to “Check here if you DO want to donate” (opt-in), the consent rate plummets. This is a study showing how a single default value significantly impacts consent rates. However, there is a counterargument that this gap only refers to paper consent rates, and the actual difference in transplant numbers is much smaller due to real-world procedures like family consent.

The second is confirmation bias. We embrace information that aligns with our thoughts with an “I knew it,” while pushing away conflicting information with, “That’s wrong.”

In 1941, the U.S. Pacific Fleet command was trapped in the judgment that Japan would never attack Pearl Harbor, ignoring repeated warnings from Washington. Korea also has a painful example. In the case of Yoon Sung-yeo, who served 20 years after being wrongly accused as the culprit of the Hwaseong serial murder case, investigation agencies decided on the conclusion first and only cherry-picked evidence that fit it. The habit of seeing only what we want to believe does not end with individual delusion.

The third is the fire alarm inside the brain: the amygdala.

This circuit, which evolved to help us avoid predators, sounds the same alarm even when someone says, “Let’s change our way of doing things.” The body then reflexively activates defense mechanisms: denial (“That technology won’t affect our industry”), rationalization (“It’ll cost more in training if we introduce it now”), and projection (“I’m fine with it, but the customers won’t like it”). Compressing these three layers into one sentence results in: “Yes, that’s a good idea, but…”

Why Continental Drift Waited Half a Century: Confirmation Bias Attacks Experts First

Science hasn’t been able to avoid this wall. In fact, the more expertise one accumulates, the more sophisticated the “but” becomes.

When German meteorologist Alfred Wegener published his book on continental drift in 1915, the logic the geological community used to reject him was this: the evidence is interesting, but it doesn’t explain what force could move those massive continents. Driven by a desire to protect decades of accumulated theory and reputation, and compounded by the fact that Wegener was an “outsider” and not a geologist, the defense became even more rigid.

Only after seafloor spreading and mantle convection were discovered did his theory return under the name plate tectonics. The geological community demonstrated through its own history that the more successful an expert group is, the more logic they have to push away new explanations. This is the same reason why the downfall of companies often begins with competence rather than incompetence.

Records of Innovation Crushed by a Single ‘But’: Blockbuster, Kodak, and Nokia

Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia, and Xerox missed the future not because they lacked technology, but because they couldn’t overcome “but.”

In 2000, founders of an unknown startup visited the headquarters of video rental giant Blockbuster and asked them to buy the company for $50 million.

CEO John Antioco scoffed. Loss aversion, which made them unwilling to let go of the certain profits from stores and late fees, and confirmation bias, which led them to dismiss the dot-com boom as a bubble while gathering only evidence to support that view, were all present in one place. Ten years later, Blockbuster went bankrupt, and that startup became Netflix.

Kodak’s case is even more ironic.

When young engineer Steve Sasson demonstrated the world’s first digital camera to management in 1975, Sasson recalls the reaction was closer to, “That’s cute, but don’t tell anyone.” Their identity as a company that sold film and photo paper caused them to lock the future he invented in a drawer. Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012.

Nokia is a slightly different story.

In the mid-2000s, they held over 40% of the global mobile phone market and had already released a smartphone-like ‘Communicator’ in 1996, long before the iPhone. Researchers from INSEAD and Aalto University interviewed 76 current and former executives and managers, finding that the core of the collapse was ‘organizational fear.’ Field engineers and middle managers knew Symbian was lagging behind iOS, but kept silent for fear of being labeled incompetent if they reported it. Management was disconnected from the field, pressured to promise a rosy future to investors. It was a silence created by two layers of fear: those below fearing for their jobs, and those above fearing for their reputation.

The most paradoxical case is Xerox.

In the 1970s, when the future of the copier business was uncertain, Xerox established the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where the personal computer, graphical user interface, mouse, and Ethernet were born. When Steve Jobs visited PARC in 1979, he saw the future as soon as he saw the GUI, and that idea led to the Macintosh. To Xerox executives, the PC was just a gadget that had “nothing to do with copiers.” The way past investments and time trap judgment is something I covered separately at an individual level in an article on the sunk cost fallacy.

Why Psychological Safety Isn’t About ‘Getting Along’

Psychological safety is not a friendly atmosphere, but a shared belief within a team that expressing dissenting opinions and mistakes will not lead to punishment. That is the definition provided by Professor Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School.

It is often misunderstood as “let’s all just be nice,” but it is quite the opposite. Only when there is safety can painful remarks like “I disagree with that opinion” be exchanged honestly and constructively. This is exactly what was missing at Nokia.

Looking back at the brain, the reason is clear. When we feel safe, the amygdala’s alarm quiets down, and the frontal lobe, which handles high-level judgment, takes over. When Google analyzed its own teams through ‘Project Aristotle,’ the first variable that distinguished high-performing teams was not the individual competence of team members, but this safety.

Five Phrases to Create Psychological Safety in Monday Meetings

What’s harder than the principles is what you say differently in a Monday morning meeting. The phrases a leader can change are narrowed down to five.

First, redefine the work. Instead of “We must do this without mistakes,” say, “We are in the process of finding the answer.” This shifts the task from perfect execution to a process of learning together. It has the same effect when a leader admits, “I am not sure about this part” first. It demonstrates through action, rather than words, that revealing what you don’t know is not punishable.

Turning instructions into questions is also a method. “Why do you think that?” or “Is there a perspective we missed?” sends a direct signal that your thoughts are needed. When a failure report comes in, ask “what” caused the result, not “who.” The moment the blame game begins, the meeting room goes silent. Finally, intentionally solicit dissenting opinions and publicly thank the person who brings them up.

If we put these differences in a table, the points where the two types of organizations diverge become clear.

Category	‘But’ Organization	‘And’ Organization
Core Emotion	Fear of failure	Psychological safety
Information Flow	Hides bad news	Shares honestly
Handling Failure	Finds who to blame	Analyzes the root cause
Representative Cases	Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia	Pixar, Google

I have summarized how to divide the ways of dealing with mistakes more structurally in an article on the E-R-I model for smart mistakes.

How Pixar’s Braintrust Institutionalized Psychological Safety

When these five phrases become solidified as meeting rules, they become Pixar’s ‘Braintrust.’ It is a meeting body where fellow directors watch films in production and exchange honest feedback.

As Ed Catmull explained in the Harvard Business Review, the principle is ‘Candor, Not Command.’ The Braintrust has the right to advise, but no authority to command. Final decisions and responsibility always remain with one person: the director. Therefore, the director can listen without needing to be defensive. When the shared belief that “all our films suck at first” is added, failure is no longer something to hide, but a stage to pass through.

When transferring this to personal speech habits, you can borrow the ‘cognitive restructuring’ from cognitive behavioral therapy. The principle is that it is not the event itself, but the interpretation of the event that determines emotions and actions. A leader’s job is to recognize thinking that flows into “but…” and redirect it to “and…"

• “We lack resources, but…” → “I agree that we lack resources. And what is the smallest experiment we can try with what we have now?”
• “That’s too risky, but…” → “You’re right that there are risks involved. And what can we do now to mitigate those risks?”

The phrase “Yes, and” comes from the stage of the Chicago improv troupe The Second City. The first rule of improvisation, where you have to continue a scene with a partner without a script, is not to deny the partner’s suggestion (No Buts), but to accept it (Yes) and add your own layer to it (And). Improv actors learn through their bodies that if they break this rule, the scene stops on the spot.

In our daily lives and at work, let’s strive to change the direction of our thought flow from “but…” to “and…”