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A few years ago I was asked to facilitate a multi-team retrospective across a department. It had been previously noted that there seemed to be a psychological safety problem across this department and I was asked to address that specifically, so I did. I introduced the topic, provided some context around psychological safety, and we started to explore what people were noticing and how they felt.
Within about twenty minutes, I and my co-facilitators were receiving panicked messages from managers who had not been invited to the retrospective. They were telling me to stop the conversation and leave it alone. It turned out that people inside the retrospective had felt so uncomfortable just talking about this subject that they had reached out to their own management to get it shut down.
An interesting point is that by the end of the retrospective, everyone inside the room was calm and feeling good about the outcome of the meeting.
Outside the room however, the panic continued for weeks. Various levels of management pulled me into meetings to discuss what had happened. What could have been a clean two-hour retrospective became a weeks-long organizational disruption, triggered not by anything that happened in the room, only by the alarm signals that had spread outward from it.
So what was actually happening?
Continued on my blog: https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/05/14/neuroception/