If your team feels comfortable all the time, you might have a problem.
That’s how Ben Swire reframes one of the most misunderstood ideas in leadership today: the difference between creating psychological safety and designing for comfort.
On a recent live recording of the Creative Confidence Podcast, host Mina Seetharaman sat down with Ben, co-founder of Make Believe Works, author of Safe Danger, and former Design Lead at IDEO, to explore what actually builds trust, creative collaboration, and innovation inside real teams.
Ben works with organizations ranging from Google and Spotify to early-stage startups, helping leaders move beyond performative team building toward meaningful behavior change. His core idea? Teams need what he calls “safe danger”—the emotional sweet spot where people feel secure enough to take risks, but stretched enough to grow.
If you’re leading a team and want to encourage more creative ideas, healthier debate, and stronger trust, this conversation offers both mindset shifts and practical tools.
Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Article Summary
Psychological Safety Is Not the Same as Comfort
Good Facilitation Is About Making Space, Not Performing
Why Most Team Building Fails
Team building can feel like a necessary evil. Leaders know it matters. They’ve read the research on trust and performance. They’ve seen the impact of strong teams. And yet, planning something meaningful often feels overwhelming, or worse, cheesy.
Ben jokes that many people find Make Believe Works by searching for “team building that doesn’t suck.”
“Most team building optimizes either for fun or for instruction,” Ben notes. “And neither of those actually build the team.”
Fun matters. But fun alone doesn’t create trust. And lectures don’t change behavior.
Ben sees three common traps in most team building:
1. Competition
Competition fires people up, but it also divides them. If the goal is lowering defenses and building trust, pitting teammates against each other works against you.
2. Passivity
Cooking classes and paint-and-sips may be pleasant. But if participants don’t offer anything personal, nothing meaningful shifts.
3. “Old News” Socializing
Happy hours and escape rooms often reinforce existing power dynamics. The loud stay loud. The quiet stay quiet.
“If nothing new gets revealed about who we are,” Ben explains, “then we didn’t build a team. We just filled a time slot.”
Real team building isn’t a perk. It’s infrastructure. It’s where teams practice the behaviors they’ll need when the stakes are high.
Turn team friction into shared forward motion by learning how to tap into diverse perspectives, build trust, and co-create solutions that stick with our online course Cultivating Creative Collaboration.
Psychological Safety Is Not the Same as Comfort
Psychological safety is everywhere in leadership conversations. But it’s often misunderstood.
“One of the biggest mistakes that businesses—and even friends and families—make is confusing safety with comfort,” Ben says.
Designing for comfort means avoiding tension and minimizing disagreement. It makes things feel easy. Psychological safety is something different entirely.
“Comfort is about making it easy for everyone to fit in. But safety is when people can stand out and still belong.”
That distinction changes how we think about innovation culture. Creativity requires friction. Innovation requires critique. Growth requires uncertainty. Some tension and friction is a good, necessary thing.
Psychological safety doesn’t mean removing disagreement. It means removing retribution.
“True safety gets revealed by what happens after someone takes a risk,” Ben explains. Leaders can say “it’s safe to speak up.” But if someone raises a concern and gets dismissed, the room learns fast. Safety isn’t declared. It’s demonstrated.
Ben also cautions against performative vulnerability. “Vulnerability isn’t a confession,” he says. “It’s exposure with intention. It's showing a piece of yourself that helps others show a piece of themselves.”
When leaders treat vulnerability as a checkbox—oversharing without context, declaring safe spaces without modeling new behavior—trust erodes instead of deepens.
The real goal should be creating a team culture where it’s safe enough to take risks. Ask: Are we optimizing this moment for comfort or for learning?
Risk-Taking Is a Muscle
Many teams only encounter real risk when the stakes are already high—a big client pitch, a product launch, a strategic pivot.
That’s a problem, Ben says. “Risk-taking is a muscle. It has to be flexed, stretched, and challenged.”
If a team’s first encounter with risk is a high-stakes moment, “it’s a little bit like trying to run a marathon before you’ve gone jogging.”
When people haven’t practiced risk in lower-stakes settings, they default to fear. They protect themselves. They go quiet. They choose the safest option.
This is where Ben’s concept of safe danger comes in.
During the live podcast recording, he led a simple exercise: participants drew someone who shaped them and wrote a short phrase capturing that person’s impact. On the surface, it felt light. Underneath, it revealed identity and values.
“People aren’t sharing facts,” Ben explains. “They’re sharing their values and their priorities.”
Safe danger activities create just enough emotional stretch to build connection without overwhelming people.
Leaders don’t need a formal offsite to apply this thinking. In everyday meetings, you can ask: What does this activity ask people to risk or reveal?
“Risk-taking is a muscle. It has to be flexed, stretched, and challenged.”
Ben Swire, author of Safe Danger
Why Change Efforts Stall
Organizations invest heavily in innovation frameworks, design thinking tools, and transformation initiatives. And yet, change often stalls.
Ben offers a sharp metaphor: “A recipe doesn’t make you a chef.”
Frameworks don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because trust isn’t there to support them. If people are afraid of looking foolish, no framework will produce bold ideas. If incentives reward short-term delivery over long-term learning, risk-taking dies quietly.
“Change doesn’t happen when there’s a sword dangling overhead,” Ben says of nurturing change instead of mandating it.
Good risk looks like:
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Clear ownership with real autonomy
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Leaders staying engaged and supportive
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Failure being shared and examined
Bad risk looks like:
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Responsibility without authority
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Leaders insulating themselves from consequences
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Individuals blamed when things go wrong
Before asking teams to innovate together, leaders should ask: Does our team know how to fail together?
Good Facilitation Is About Making Space, Not Performing
Many leaders end up facilitating team experiences out of necessity. Or maybe you’re not running a formal workshop at all. You’re leading a brainstorm, a project kickoff, or a work session.
The good news? Facilitation isn’t about charisma.
“Good facilitation doesn’t have to be about being the center of attention,” Ben says, noting that he identifies as an introvert himself. “You don’t have to perform. It’s about creating a space for other people to show up.”
One practical shift he suggests: Curiosity beats compliments. Compliments feel good, but they can shut conversations down. “The minute you say, ‘That’s amazing!’ people think that’s enough,” Ben explains.
Instead, ask questions, like “I noticed you used all blue. What made you choose that?”
Questions signal that someone’s thinking matters. They open space and invite contribution.
This approach works whether you’re leading a formal team-building session or a 30-minute brainstorm. Facilitation becomes less about being entertaining or sharing the most insightful points, and more about creating the conditions for shared ownership.
The next time you’re facilitating a workshop or work session, take a moment to recenter on your role. Ask yourself: Am I trying to impress the room or invite participation?
Resources to Learn More
Learn More from Ben Swire
Schedule a Make Believe Works Workshop
Explore Ben’s workshops and approach to building trust, connection, and creative collaboration at makebelieveworks.com. Make Believe Works partners with organizations to design team experiences that build what Ben calls “safe danger”—the emotional sweet spot between comfort and fear where innovation thrives.
Special IDEO U Community Offer
Ben is offering a special discount exclusively for the IDEO U community. Get $1,000 off a Make Believe Works session for groups of 50 or more. This offer expires May 31, 2026. To redeem it, simply reach out to Make Believe Works and tell them you heard about them through the Creative Confidence Podcast.
Get Ben’s Book: Safe Danger
Safe Danger dives deeper into the ideas from this conversation, with practical exercises and reflections for leaders who want to build psychological safety without sacrificing performance.
Continue Learning with IDEO U
Cultivating Creative Collaboration
If you want to build psychological safety while maintaining healthy friction and strong results, explore our online course Cultivating Creative Collaboration, taught by IDEO CEO Mike Peng.
Related Blog Posts
How Great Teams Leverage Tension as a Source for Innovation
How to Improve Team Collaboration and Inspire Creativity: A Leader’s Guide
How a Playful Mindset Leads to Better Work
What Is the Facilitative Leadership Style? 5 Behaviors That Bring it to Life
Listen to More Episodes
Subscribe to the Creative Confidence Podcast to hear conversations with today’s most thoughtful creative leaders and explore past episodes at ideou.com/podcast.
About the Speaker
Ben Swire
Co-Founder of Make Believe Works & Author of Safe Danger
Ben Swire is an award-winning designer, writer, and speaker who helps teams build trust, reconnect as humans, and work better together. He is the founder of Make Believe Works and the author of Safe Danger, a book about how creativity, psychological safety, and shared emotional risk fuel collaboration and innovation at work. Ben’s work sits at the intersection of team building, organizational culture, creativity, and human behavior. He is known for designing experiences that help people lower their guard, engage honestly, and practice the kind of trust and curiosity that real work requires—but most workplaces struggle to create.
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