Universal Vulnerability: Why AI Is Reviving Psychological Safety

Six years after The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety was published, organizations are coming back to psychological safety with a different problem statement. In this episode, Junior and Dr. Tim Clark introduce “universal vulnerability” — the new layer of vulnerability AI has painted across every role, every industry, and every level of the organization — and walk through the AI readiness hierarchy and the LIVE model leaders can use to respond.

Key takeaways

• Psychological safety used to be an individual journey. Your level of psychological safety was set by your own experience of rewarded or punished vulnerability. AI adds a universal layer on top that everyone must now contend with.
• This wave touches everyone. Past technological disruptions hit the tip of the spear — one industry, one niche. AI disrupts from the top, bottom, and middle of the value chain at once, and its end state is unpredictable for most roles.
• It’s an identity disruption, not just a technical one. The core fear isn’t “what will I do tomorrow?” but “who am I tomorrow?” — and most organizations have no formal place for that conversation.
• Psychological safety is the cultural precondition for AI adoption. In the AI readiness hierarchy, it’s the foundation beneath willingness, understanding, skill, and identity. Every layer depends on a person’s willingness to be honest.
• Use the LIVE model. Look, identify, validate, and encourage. Vulnerability is guaranteed to be present, so leaders should operate on that assumption and go reward it.
• This isn’t a one-time transition. The ground shifts week by week, and leaders have to move through the readiness hierarchy themselves while helping their people do the same.

Transcript

[00:00:22] Junior: Welcome back everyone to the LeaderFactor podcast. I’m Junior, back with my co-host, Dr. Tim Clark.

Tim: Good to be with you. And today we’ve got a pretty interesting topic on our hands.

Junior: We do. We have universal vulnerability. We’re gonna talk about psychological safety, the RIF culture, AI.

Tim: The RIF culture — that’s a new term, Junior, that’s come into the lexicon in recent days. Interesting.

Junior: Yeah, reductions in force are getting increasingly common.

[00:00:53] Tim: Yeah, but a RIF—

Junior: There’s a cultural tidal wave that’s following.

Tim: Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. So when did The 4 Stages come out? 2020? So it’s been six years.

Junior: Since the publication of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. And that has become much of what LeaderFactor is known for. At ATD, if someone knew about LeaderFactor, their mind almost immediately goes to The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety.

[00:01:26] Junior: We’ve got a whole bunch of other solutions, skill areas, that we’ve been doing for a really long time. But at that point, there was an inflection point, culturally, organizationally, about this idea of rewarded vulnerability and its relationship to innovation, its relationship to inclusion. And that’s matured over the last six years. In recent months, there’s an even greater wave coming that has to do with psychological safety.

[00:01:58] Tim: So the world’s changed again.

Junior: It’s changed yet again. And the motivation for organizations to bring in the four stages was different in 2020 than it now is in 2026.

Tim: It was a different driver.

Junior: We’re seeing this from organizations who are coming with, let’s call them, different problem statements than before. And so we wanna talk about why that is. Why are we getting this influx of organizations who are newly interested in psychological safety?

Tim: A resurgence, really. Because of the way that the landscape has shifted.

[00:02:32] Junior: And you mentioned this in a meeting a few weeks ago, this idea of universal vulnerability. And that lies at the heart of what we think the reason is that psychological safety is having this resurgence. So maybe we could set the groundwork a little bit to be able to think about how we’re using that term and why we’re using that term, universal vulnerability.

Tim: Well, Junior, historically, and most of the time, we think about psychological safety as an individual journey. It’s based on your own experience, it’s based on your own perceptions. And you’re the boss of the level of psychological safety [00:03:19] based on the level and the consistency of rewarded vulnerability that you experience. When you engage in acts of vulnerability, what happens? Are you consistently rewarded? Are you consistently punished, or are you a little bit of both? And that determines the level of psychological safety that you feel. So it’s an individual journey. You could have a team of 10 people and each member of that team feels a little bit different level of psychological safety.

[00:03:50] Tim: What we’re saying now is that with the advent of AI and the imperative for AI integration and AI adoption, there is a new layer of vulnerability that is universal, that we all have to confront and deal with. It doesn’t matter who you are. So you had your own individual journey and your own experience with psychological safety, but now we’re gonna layer that on top of everything else, and it’s not unique to you. Now, the way that you [00:04:23] experience it, it will be, but it’s something that we’re all contending with. That’s what we’re saying. That’s why we’re saying it’s a universal vulnerability. It’s a layer that has been, I think, painted across society with AI.

Junior: Another way to put that might be that the average vulnerability experienced by a professional every day has gone up. And that’s happened in aggregate. So not just on average, but every single instance of human vulnerability [00:04:56] has gone up because of the threat that AI is presenting — or the perception of a threat that AI is presenting — to each of those professionals. So technological disruption has always created vulnerability. This is an important point to consider. But if you look at the tip of the spear when that technology is introduced, usually it’s just the tip of the spear that affects a unique niche group of individuals. So in textiles, if you had a sewing machine, that’s not going to [00:05:36] affect the entire market. It’s going to affect that industry.

Tim: Certain people in that industry.

Junior: Take any technological advancement. Another reason we’re using the word universal is because this technological wave touches every single person. Every person.

Tim: Not in the same way and not with the same timing, but it still does.

Junior: And that’s partly what makes it so disruptive, because its disruption is not predictable to every single person. You can’t take every role and know exactly what the end state will be. If you can see a sewing machine, it’s pretty easy to see [00:06:19] what’s on the other side. You don’t know what’s on the other side necessarily for the majority of roles, the majority of organizations. And so there’s this angst that people are feeling. So you can already see all the way through the logical train of why people would come to us. Why would you come back to us for The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety? You’re recognizing the need for psychological safety as you go through this transition. You’re seeing that without it, you’re gonna be in a world of hurt. With it, it’s going to be more navigable than it would be otherwise.

[00:06:59] Tim: That makes me think of my old copy of “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith. You start reading it — I think it’s really chapter one — and you start reading about the pin factory. Most all of us who read “The Wealth of Nations” know about the pin factory. What is that an example of? The division of labor. So you do this little thing and you do this little thing, we’re gonna divide up all the tasks. So there’s specialization and division of labor, and all of these skills and this huge complex division of labor produces a little pin. What is the threat of AI? The threat of AI, we don’t understand it completely, because it changes every day and every week, but the disruption — it’s upending jobs.

[00:07:49] Tim: Let’s tie it back to Joseph Schumpeter: creative destruction. Let’s tie it back to Clayton Christensen: disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation, in the classical example, would come up the bottom of the value chain and disrupt from the bottom up. And then we saw examples of top down, right? Tesla came in top down, moved from the premium market down to the mainstream market. What is AI doing? All of the above, and it’s even more unpredictable [00:08:26] than anything that we’ve ever seen. So when people think about the prospect of AI, they don’t know what to think, because it’s coming in at the top of the value chain, at the bottom of the value chain, in the middle of the value chain. We’ve never seen anything like it.

Junior: Part of what we talk about in Leading Through AI — the whole crux of the issue — is that it’s more than a technical disruption, it’s an identity disruption. And that’s a lot of the vulnerability that people are experiencing, because they experience themselves as whatever their role is, whatever they do every day. [00:09:00] They’re attached to that, probably have been for many decades. And when suddenly that rug is pulled from underneath them, it’s not just a matter of, well, what am I gonna do tomorrow? It’s a question of, who am I exactly tomorrow? Because so much of our identity is tied to what we do. So if that’s the core fear, then we have to combat that somehow. In organizations, there’s not a formal place for that conversation to happen. People are having this battle individually. And that’s one of the things that we’ve seen with leaders around the world. This is not something that’s culturally specific or industry specific — it’s, as we say, universal. Each person’s fighting their own battle of, who am I now [00:09:46] that these machines can think? Who am I now that my job is fundamentally different? What am I supposed to do in terms of value creation when this thing is doing what it’s doing?

Tim: Yeah — who am I now that what I do is no longer scarce? So it may be touching you today modestly, it may be touching you today acutely. You may not even be feeling it yet, but it’s coming.

Junior: So inside chapter five of the book, we have what’s called the AI readiness hierarchy. And we started putting together this readiness hierarchy before this latest influx of demand for psychological safety. What do we have as the first layer [00:10:32] of the readiness hierarchy? Psychological safety. It’s the very foundation. It’s table stakes for an organization to be able to make it through this transition. Why did we put it at the very bottom? Why is it necessary that psychological safety be present in an organization to make it through AI disruption?

Tim: How can you even have a conversation about the disruption, the impact of AI, without psychological safety? You can’t get to first base. So it is table stakes. It is the foundation.

[00:11:09] Junior: If you look at what rests on top of it: willingness, understanding, skill, and identity, in that order. As organizations are coming to us, one of the first things that we do in any engagement is measure. We use the PSindex instrument, we look at the population, and we quantify the vulnerability that people are feeling and how that’s being responded to, which is a function of cultural health. And if you do that, you’ll see that people are experiencing universal vulnerability, [00:11:42] but its experience isn’t uniform. Every single person is experiencing it in a slightly different way. So it’s not something that you can go and deploy organizationally from the top down and say, this is now a safe place, we can now speak up and have conversations about AI. It’s born out at the human interface, one-to-one, in a managerial fashion. If I’m coming to you, am I going to say, hey, how’s my role gonna change? Have we thought about the implications of what this is gonna do for my team? [00:12:17] If we can’t have that conversation, I’m gonna suffer in silence. If you overtly punish my vulnerability by asking a question like that, certainly that’s going to reverberate through the organization. I’m never gonna speak up again. So all of those things that were true individually, when we were talking about psychological safety in 2020, are multiplied, amplified. The surface area is expanded because of the universality of the threat.

Tim: No one is untouched with this one. So it’s both universal and personal. That’s very true.

[00:12:50] Junior: We say in the book, psychological safety is the cultural precondition for AI adoption. Every layer above this one depends on a person’s willingness to be honest. And that willingness is governed by whether vulnerability is rewarded or punished. So it’s important that we think about the cultural implications first of AI transformation. A lot of people are preoccupied with its technical implications. What technical impact are we going to have? What technical adaptation do we have to give [00:13:22] the organization? What types of skills do we need to build in this new era? — while missing that the very premise of any of that development rests on whether or not psychological safety is present.

Tim: Junior, it makes me think of the way the conversation goes in many organizations — they jump right to workflow. The conversation is about workflow. Let’s talk about this workflow. Let’s talk about redesigning this workflow. Let’s talk about either automating or augmenting this workflow. So we leapfrog straight to workflow. Whoa — look what we passed over. The culture, the impact at an individual level, the disruption. That’s what happens.

[00:14:12] Junior: So in response to the threat, what’s one of the things that we can do to positively reward the vulnerability of another person? We use what we call the LIVE model: look, identify, validate, and encourage. As a leader, one of our responsibilities is to be constantly on the lookout for acts of vulnerability, environments where vulnerability is high. You don’t have to guess if there’s vulnerability in the environment today. We know that, because it is universal.

[00:14:43] Junior: So if you take that as your operating assumption—

Tim: It’s now incumbent upon you, the leader, to go and have those conversations with people.

Junior: Identify, validate, and encourage.

Tim: If you can do that, you’ll have a better chance of working through this with your people, coming out of the other side better for it. And I think it bears repeating that this is an emergent process for all of us. We don’t know where it’s going. We don’t know what it’s gonna be like. We’re learning as we go. No one knows the answers. We’re learning our way through.

[00:15:18] Junior: We don’t presume to know exactly what’s going to happen either. We just know the precondition must be cultural health if we’re going to stand a chance.

Tim: Very true.

Junior: Any other points you wanna make, things you wanna share before we wrap up?

Tim: Well, I’ll just go back through this readiness hierarchy, Junior, because I think the sequence matters, right? So psychological safety becomes the foundation. And then we layer on top of that willingness. Now, there’s a question that goes with this. [00:15:48] Am I willing to try? And then we go to understanding. What’s the question? Do I grasp what’s being asked? And that’s often not obvious with the AI incursion. And then we go to the next level, skill. Can I execute? Chances are that you didn’t know how to execute before. You are learning how to execute. And then finally, identity. Does this change who I am? So we go through that readiness hierarchy. And then let’s just talk a little bit about what happens after we do that.

[00:16:31] Junior: We’re done. Forever. It happens over and over and over again, because the ground’s shifting. So there are new implications for how your job’s done every single day. There’s a new frontier model drop a week ago that fundamentally changed the way we approach engineering. The software development that we could do with that model change was fundamentally different than what we were doing just the day before.

Tim: This is your world.

[00:17:02] Junior: And so you have to be on your toes, and you have to be going through this personally as well. It’s another thing to understand that you as a leader have to go through this same readiness hierarchy individually and help your people through it. It’s one of the first times that you’ve been asked to lead through something that you do not understand yourself. And so what does that mean? It means that all of these things must be true for you. You’re asking all of these same questions all the time. Am I willing to try? Do we have a step change in model intelligence, or do we have some new application — am I willing to try it? If not, we can’t pass go. If we get that far, do I understand what’s being asked of me? In this new world, has my objective changed? [00:17:46] Is the organization asking me to do something different now? You have to be able to ask and answer that question. Can I execute? Maybe you have new tools in your toolkit. Maybe the organization’s provided something for you. Maybe it’s incumbent upon you to go and grab some new resource. Can you use that thing to create new value? And, does this change who I am? You have to grapple with your own identity as a leader. And so I would say lean on that AI readiness hierarchy. It’s in chapter five. If you don’t have a copy of this yet, go pick one up. They’re on Amazon. That gives you a playbook that you can follow, not only to grapple with this yourself, [00:18:26] but with which to lead other people. So that would be my parting invitation: think about this as it applies to you, as it applies to others. Understand that every single person is in this boat. We work with some of the biggest organizations on planet Earth. Tim’s been with executive teams recently, just in the last few weeks, observing that this is true at every level of the organization. Executive teams are not immune. The executive team of whatever organization you are in [00:18:57] does not have it figured out. They stay up at night thinking about the implications for the organization, for themselves. They’re feeling identity threat, because the way that they created value for the last 30 years is not the way that they’re going to be creating value tomorrow.

Tim: That’s right. And so we are all in this boat, which is why it’s so important that for a universal threat, we have a universal response. The intervention has to happen across the entire organization. And I think, Junior, we have to acknowledge that it’s exhausting to do this over and over again. Some people still feel untouched. Others have displacement fear today, and then everything in between. [00:19:41] And that changes week by week. It’s not month by month, it’s week by week, given the pace of AI development. That’s the world that we’re living in right now.

Junior: And I can relate to those of you who are feeling that sort of tiredness. Part of my responsibility at LeaderFactor as COO is to stay apprised of everything that’s going on in this world and take advantage of it. And that’s a tiring thing to do, for each of us, staying on top of it. So I think that can also give us a little bit of respite — just understanding that no one is immune from the effort that it takes to continue creating value in new ways [00:20:22] as we go through this. Appreciate your attention and your listenership. If you’re not subscribed, please subscribe. I’m sure that we’ll have some downloadables coming out of this episode. And as we mentioned, Leading Through AI — available now. Go grab it. And also sign up for the training.

Tim: There are a few articles in here that point to the training.

Junior: I’m actually gonna plug that, because we went to ATD, and frankly, we were not impressed with the AI content that’s being put out by suppliers. The vendors that are there incorporating AI have done it cheaply, and I’ll say that honestly. [00:21:05] I believe that because I know what’s in ours and I know what’s in theirs. So if you would like to see what I think is the best application of AI in learning and development, go try out the course. If you’re in L&D and you wanna explore it for your team, join our course previews. We do free sessions once a week, going through all of our core solutions. Leading Through AI is coming up. If it’s past when you see this episode, there’s probably another one up. So go ahead and check those out, bring it to your organization, and we’ll help you go through this.

[00:21:36] Tim: Yeah, we do trial experiences, right, Junior? Come try it out for yourself.

Junior: All right, everybody. We’ll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.