Ben Swire: Author of "Safe Danger" on the hidden reason team building efforts fail

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Nov 5, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Ben Swire, an award-winning designer and former Design Lead at IDEO, shares insights from his book, *Safe Danger*. He explores the delicate balance between safety and risk in team dynamics, emphasizing the necessity of psychological safety for fostering creativity and trust. Ben reveals how playful activities can rebuild team culture, why vulnerability leads to stronger relationships, and offers strategies for effective collaboration. His unique approach transforms fear into growth, helping teams embrace both success and failure.

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INSIGHT

Safe Danger Is A Practice Not A State

Safe Danger is the emotional sweet spot where people feel secure enough to leave comfort and take growthful risks.
Ben Swire says practicing this balance builds the muscle memory for vulnerability and creative collaboration.

ANECDOTE

From 60 Eyes To One Trusted Voice

At Morgan Stanley Ben described 60 pairs of eyes reviewing a postcard before it shipped, illustrating bureaucratic distrust.
At IDEO he was told, "your voice is IDEO's voice," showing trust and empowerment instead.

INSIGHT

Comfort Can Mask Unsafe Cultures

Comfort is not the same as safety; comfort can hide problems and silence dissent.
True safety lets people speak truth, challenge ideas, and surface friction that fuels innovation.

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As educators, we’ve grown wary of the term “safe spaces,” especially when what many students really need is a space to engage with “dangerous” ideas. But true dialogue doesn’t begin with risk—it starts with trust. Our guest today, Ben Swire, wrote the book Safe Danger, which offers a thoughtful, practical approach to building the psychological safety that allows curiosity, connection, and even productive disagreement to flourish.

Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ben-swire-former-ideo-design-lead

Ben’s career took him from the buttoned-up world of financial marketing to IDEO—a shift he describes as going “from Kansas into Oz.” At IDEO, he discovered that world-class work could be fueled by something radically different than what he’d experienced everywhere else. That discovery led him to spend years exploring a deceptively simple question: How do you get people to fail but enjoy doing it?

The answer became the foundation of his book and his work—a concept he calls “Safe Danger,” that sweet spot where people feel safe enough to leave safety behind, but challenged enough to grow. In this conversation, we’ll explore why team building desperately needs reclaiming, how an introvert ended up running a team building company, and why the quality of your relationships at work matters way more than you think.

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Bio

Ben Swire is an award-winning designer and writer, and former Design Lead at IDEO. His work spans design thinking, philosophy, cinema, and psychoanalytic theory, driven by curiosity about the hidden factors that shape our lives.

At IDEO, Ben created Make Believe Time, a bi-weekly creative play date where colleagues learned, created, and meaningfully connected. When interest spread beyond IDEO, Make Believe Works was born—now helping organizations from Fortune 500 companies to startups build the creative and emotional muscle memory that leads to healthy, innovative, collaborative cultures.

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