Whether or not knowledge workers are safe to learn is a canary in the coal mine for innovation. Just as whether or not children are safe to learn is a canary in the coal mine for whether a society cares about advancing.
Something that made an indelible impression on me way back in college was the Sartre notion of bad faith: our ability to unmake the consequences of our choices to such an extent that we negate choice, we abdicate as agents.
We are holding bad faith with human innovation.
Which meaning of safe do you refer to? (Not risking some form of ostracism, having resources to do so without sacrificing more basic needs, not being prevented from seeing outcomes of your choices, or something still different?)
@robryk ... That makes people feel like mistakes are not ok, they're isolated from each other and disposable vs having a shared communal identity and sense of longitudinal agency and ownership of their work, and it's fundamentally not what we'd call a "learning culture."
@robryk you also hear this talked about as avoidance orientation. In an environment where I have good reason to believe that others will misunderstand and also be unfair to me, genuine relationships, disclosure of work in progress, triage of problems and risks, and genuine trust all suffer. People continually scan their environments to ask (psychologically speaking) what the "rules" are of this place, and pervasive experiences of seeing learning punished as a rule have long term consequences.
@robryk so, I'm thinking about my particular reason of research which talks about the psychological state in which people feel safe to learn. All things you mention could impede that state (being threatened, generally speaking), but in this case I am thinking mostly about work environments that have what we like to call a "performance orientation" where "performing" is elevated and normal necessary cycles of learning go undercover. Think about the chilling effect of punitive leadership...