More candour and honesty, better reflection and learning
Less Theatre. More Reality.
YOUR SAFETY JESTER
Guardian Angel of Reality & Resilience in your organisation. The Jester helps leaders and teams see what is really going on, speak truth to power and turn uncomfortable insights into action.
The Jester creates a lighter route into serious conversations. The role is to make blind spots discussable, bridge power dynamics and help leadership see observed and felt reality.
Why a Safety Jester?
Every organisation needs someone who can hold up the mirror.
People often know more than formal systems reveal.
They see friction, workarounds, contradictions, risks and missed opportunities. Yet hierarchy, habit and fear can make those realities difficult to discuss.
The Jester helps to:
- expose blind spots playfully;
2. make difficult conversations more approachable;
3. bridge the distance between leadership and the work floor;
4. strengthen psychological safety;
5. give different perspectives a voice;
6. turn reflection into action.
The mirror does not create the problem. It reveals what was already there.
How it works
An outsider on the inside
The Safety Jester moves across the organisation, observes everyday work, attends meetings, asks questions and listens to different perspectives.
He does not arrive with a standard programme or a bag of predetermined answers.
Observe
Explore work-as-done and understand what people actually experience.
Question
Ask what people notice, need, avoid and find difficult to discuss.
Reflect
Mirror patterns, assumptions and contradictions without taking over decisions.
Connect
Bring different perspectives from the work floor to leadership. And back again.
Embed
Leave behind stronger practices for reflection, dialogue and learning.
Services
Keynotes & Lectures: Provocative and accessible sessions on organisational resilience, psychological safety, candour, HOP, reality-based safety and the Corporate Jester.
Workshops: Interactive sessions that help teams explore assumptions, expectations, communication and the gap between intended and experienced reality.
Be Your Safety Jester: Intervention, a longer-term intervention in which the Jester observes, questions, reflects and connects insights across organisational levels.
Training: Training in resilience, HOP, Learning Teams, High Reliability Organising, communication and reflection.
Learning Teams: Facilitated learning from everyday work, including the things that normally go well as well as difficulties, surprises and variation.
How well do you know what’s really going on in your organisation?
Triggering questions:
What is happening when nothing is happening? In other words: what happens when nothing goes wrong?
Do people have permission to think differently? How candid are they really to speak up?
What is the perceived reality in your organisation? Does it match with the intended reality?
Do you and your team listen to respond or to understand?
Do your meetings create reflection and understanding? Or merely produce actions?
Why it works
Find out eight reasons why the scientifically-proven method of the Safety Jester works!
Independency
To start with: the Safety Jester sits in an independent position. There is no line of authority between the Jester and the lines of power in an organisation. The Safety Jester therefor has no boundaries to speaking up candidly.
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” — Christopher Hitchens
Prevention versus curation
The Safety Jester above all has a role in preventing things from going wrong. Unlike Confidentiality Persons and Whistleblowers arrangements, the Safety Jester operates before things are going wrong.
An important credo is: ‘you do not have to be ill to become better.’
Honest Insights & Truth-telling
Delivers candid, honestry, integrity and vulnerability. reliable information free from hierarchy or office politics—no spin, no sugar-coating.
“Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” — Mahatma Gandhi
360° Organizational Access
The Safety Jester moves freely across hierarchy levels, engaging with everyone—from leadership to front-line teams, from all organisational perspectives.
“A 360-degree perspective isn’t just seeing more—it’s seeing differently, again and again, until judgment gives way to understanding.” — Unknown
Humorous and Light-hearted
The Safety Jester uses playful interventions to ease tensions and open minds—humor becomes the tool to lower defenses and highlight uncomfortable realities.
“The basis of humor is not laughter, but surprise; and surprise means a sudden shift of perspective.” — Wayne C. Booth
Independent & Unbiased
The Safety Jester has no internal, external, or financial agenda—fully impartial in role and with no operarional duties, thus not taking part in the line of command.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard P. Feynman
Durable Cultural Impact
The Safety Jester integrates reflective practices into your organisation’s daily routines, leaving behind tools and methods so the effect lasts beyond the Jester’s tenure.
We want to set up people for success. That is not the same as preventing them from failure. — Todd Conklin
Scientifically-proven method
The Safety Jester follows the award-winning Hofnarmethode®, based on an award-winning academic research and a validated 16-role framework by Juri Hoedemakers, Chief Jester Officer at Het NarrenGilde. Find out more about it here.
