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Amy Edmondson: The Bold Approach to Failure · The Bold Lounge

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge Podcast.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: My name is Lee Burgess and I will be your host.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: If you're anything like me, you love hearing inspiring stories of people who have gone on bold journeys and made a positive impact in the world.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: This podcast is all about those kinds of stories.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Every week, we'll hear from someone who has taken a leap or embarked on an extraordinary journey.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: In addition to hearing their stories, we'll also learn about their bold growth mindset that they use to make things happen.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Whether they face challenges or douse along the way, they persisted and ultimately achieved their goals.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: These impactful stories will leave you feeling motivated and inspired to pursue your own bold journey.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I believe everyone has a bold story waiting to be freed.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Tune in and get ready to be inspired.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Today I have Amy Edmondson.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: She is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Edmondson has been recognized by the biannuals Thinkers 50 Global Ranking of Management Thinkers since 2011 and most recently was ranked number one in 2021.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: And congratulations for 2023.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: She also received that organization's Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019 and the Talent Award in 2017.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: She studies teaming, psychological safety and organizational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Her latest book, the Right Kind of Wrong, which we're going to talk about today, built on her prior work on psychological safety and teaming to provide a framework for thinking about, discussing and practicing the science of failing.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Well, welcome to the Bold Lounge, amy.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: All right, we're going to start off by digging into some bold definitions.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: So what does bold look like in your world?
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: What is your definition of bold?
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Definition of bold is doing something that scares you a little but that you believe to be on purpose, in support of your own purpose or growth.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Right, okay, so not fearless, but stepping forward even though you might have a little fear.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: It's in pursuit of something that matters.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Okay, so, based on your definition, what's a moment of boldness that you remember?
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: You mentioned books.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: That got me thinking, I think, a moment of boldness.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: For me and ultimately, looking back, it was career changing.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: It was when I was 25 years old and decided very boldly that I was going to write a book to clarify Buckminster Fuller's mathematical work for a lay audience.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: And I wasn't a writer, I was nobody.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: I had no reason to think that that was something that I either could do or that anyone should want to read, but it seemed important enough to do and I declared I was going to do it.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: And so then I was stuck.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you kind of put it out of the universe and you couldn't go back right.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: Exactly, that was a book taking very, very complex ideas, algorithms, calculations, math I mean whatever you do find math as and helping someone understand it at the layman's level.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: So when you jumped into that, what were some of the things that you had to do to actually take something so complex and simplify?
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Because sometimes, as leaders, we don't simplify, we actually complexify, Right.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: I had to.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: You know, I had to get a publisher.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: I had to sort of convince someone that this was a project they should support simultaneously, really had to figure out how was I going to do this?
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: And the answer to how manifests itself as an outline and ultimately an incredibly detailed outline.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: Right, but by the time I was done outlining it was probably six months of outlining.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: I didn't even really notice what I was doing, but I got so into the weeds.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: Outline was probably 15 pages long and I finally realized what I was doing was procrastinating actually writing because I was scared of writing.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: So when you're, when you're kind of going through that process and you've written so many, you know several books since then does it get easier when you're starting out?
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Obviously the type of book is different.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: And I'm writing my first book and I'm just at the point where yesterday handed in manuscript which goes to the copy editor.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: Congratulations.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm excited about that, but it's very, very unknown.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: How's it going to go and people going to like it, is it going to resonate?
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: And one of the things I kept doing was tweaking it and tuning in and tweaking and tuning it and it was like is it good enough?
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: When you're writing a book, it's extremely vulnerable, right.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: At least that feels like that to me and it's never good enough.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: Does it get easier?
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, and no right.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: So the good news is like writing a book for me is no longer new territory, and each new book is new territory.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: New territory is scary and if you don't know if it will work, you don't know if you'll be able to conquer the uncertainty of the domain and saying something new, and saying something new in a way that is useful and compelling and, yeah, very hard thing to do.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: And when you say you, you know, just kept tweaking, that's what I do.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the hardest part for me were the stories, even though, like, I can talk very easily the stories or examples.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: But it was hard to like put it down into, into writing, so kind of as you think about your own story.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: I'm starting off where you wrote this book at 25, which you know, you.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: You knew it was needed but you weren't sure who would receive it, who would support it, and you had to find a publisher to do that kind of moving forward.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Did that bold move lead to another bold move?
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: How do you think that linked up to the next bold move?
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: Yes, well, it absolutely did, because, first of all, I got away with it.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: You know, I wrote and published the book.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to say it was a best seller, because it never was, of course, but it did come out in three different editions.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: It is a kind of classic for its little niche audience.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: People cared about it.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: But I think the very boldness of it is probably the best legacy because it gave me the experience, which you no doubt have had, that you go out on a limb and it works out okay and it's like, well, I guess I should do that again.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: And I've gone on many, many limbs since that time and most of the time the branches haven't cracked and I've landed on my feet, sort of rewarded for the boldness of those moves, I guess.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: And it also did, let me know, at a deep level.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: I didn't write another book for many years, but it let me know I could do it.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: But more importantly, I think it gave me the sort of courage to keep going, the credibility that I could keep going.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: I suspect it played a crucial role in my being admitted to the PhD program in organizational behavior that I much, much later joined, because, if nothing else, they had evidence that I could start something and finish it.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: And you joined that program later in your selection it wasn't your first selection, right as kind of where you wanted to go.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, I started at 31.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: So that's bold in itself making that move.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: Very, no, I mean, that's that was a very bold because it's, you know, it's a real career shift and it was.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: You know there was no.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: I had no background in my new field, really.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: No, no, no academic background, no psychology background, no business background.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: So I was going out on a limb to join a PhD program where others had far better preparation, with no certainty of even getting through it, let alone getting an actual academic job on the other end.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and at Harvard, yeah, so like not the easiest place for folks to get in from that perspective.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: So you know, swinging for the fences and you're in, and even though you're in and you're doing it I think that's one of the things around.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Being bold is like we don't even realize like wow, I got to keep going.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: I'll be some focused on what I'm doing and what's next, but that that was a bold move to move into that new career path to get to Harvard.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: And I'm assuming there's still doubts that come up for someone.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Even though they're in, they're successful in anyone else's eyes.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: You know, maybe it's time to say this, but being bold means, by definition, I think, accepting the very real possibility of failure.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: Right, that if something is genuinely bold it means it might succeed as you hope it's, on on path, on purpose.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: But of course it might not right, it might not have been possible to write that book about, about Fuller's work, might not have been possible to succeed in the PhD program to get a job.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: And so probably the most recent being bold is writing this new book of right kind of wrong, which is new in every way, but especially new as a trade book is, as not just not just a management book, but a book for a broader audience.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: And I did not know for sure that I could write for that audience in a way that would be meaningful and compelling and that too could fall flat on its face.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: And the topic you know, I believe the topic of failure to be very, very important, but it could be a big yawn or a bit sensitive, like it could be a sensitive especially in academia, like it isn't something we're like hey, we failed today at Duke or wherever you're working, or at Harvard, like.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: But at the same time I think it is celebrated in a way of like we learned that didn't work, so now we can go a different way.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: And I'm always, you know and you know, failed faster that you know.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: That's even a book, but I mean in the sense of how you figure things out.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: But one of the things you said in the book, which I underline as one of the statements I enjoyed, is if you are not failing, you are not journeyed into a new territory.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Yes, you're kind of staying in comfort zone, playing, playing not to lose yeah.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's that's boring.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: In bold means playing to win right, and playing to win means you might lose, but you also might win big Right.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: You know, I think the biggest worry I had about failure, about the topic of failure other than the irony and failing at writing about failure was that I think people can be forgiven for thinking they know everything about it already.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: Now, someone told me recently and I took it as a compliment that there's nothing in the book that isn't obvious.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: And I agree and I thought that was a big compliment because it's once you, once you say it it's.
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: You know, it's not like nah, that's not true, it's like it's it's obviously right, obviously true.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: But the problem is people don't think about failure the right way and then they do all of that holding back that you were just describing.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, do you think we don't think about it because we can't openly actually talk about it like we should, or that's a big general losing point?
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: It depends on what it is.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: Like you just.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: You said a couple of minutes ago that you know places like Duke and Harvard.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: We don't.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: You know failure, you can't have it there.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: Well, actually, every success in academia, in any realm of research, was preceded by many failures.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: It's the whole idea of academic pursuit is that you're in new territory, that you're making what's called a contribution to some field, and when you're making a contribution, that means it's something new that didn't exist before you made.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: You know that that that piece of knowledge or that piece of certainty about that knowledge didn't exist before, and so along the way to those kinds of results are many missteps, or you know hypotheses that didn't get supported.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: Right, I just remember one time in my career and there's several, obviously learnings for myself of like what I was doing and learning and I was very open about that didn't work and that actually had a ripple effect on my team, right, so they knew it was okay.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: They need to just say that stuff.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because that leads to psychological safety, obviously, something you know a lot about as an expert in that.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: But I think it led to just feeling okay, like permission to fail but learn from it, like just don't fail, you know, aimlessly but you know, fail in a way that it can actually contribute to the next thing.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: I mean you don't, we don't, we don't celebrate failure from just sloppiness or mailing in.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: It's, yeah, failing to be bold.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: It's going to failure when you go for it and you had good reason to believe it would work.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: But it didn't right and that's okay.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: Right, it's okay, it's part of the process.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then I think it's also how someone receives failure, so like as we're working with others and we realize that failure is just part of the process, how can we help others?
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Maybe turn that a little bit.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: In a way.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: I mean maybe this would help.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: Strategy 101 is you've got to pick and choose.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: So, for instance, I am happy.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: In fact, I would love to be average at golf, right?
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: I mean, that would be like a huge up from where I am.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: I'm below mediocre, and yet does that mean I should just throw away my clubs?
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: You know, sell them on eBay?
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Of course not.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: I mean it's still worth doing, right, it's worth doing.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: It's worth doing for the little bit of pleasure of getting better.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: It's worth doing for the lovely walk in a scenic environment.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: It's worth doing to keep my husband or son's company.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know, there's all sorts of good reasons to do some things not well, yeah, either because they give you pleasure, or because you're really dedicating yourself to the things that matter, or your work, your life, your life's contributions.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sometimes I think we keep trying to like be good at everything, spend every late the right level and I don't know for me.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: As I got older, I realized that I just can't, and it's okay.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: It's similar to that sound and that is not as this.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: It's not rocket science here for anyone listening, but it is this moment of like okay, I can't do it.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: Like, for example, I had to put my dissertation on hold while I was writing my book.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: What I was finding when I was trying to do both is that one is very different writing the other.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: This is not academic enough.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Well, this is too academic.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: I can't do both well, and so it's okay.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: Like to accept it.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: So I think one of the things you talk about the three types of failure so basic, complex and intelligent.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: So can you tell the audience a little bit more about those types of failure?
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and this and this is, you know, another way to help think so.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: Basic failures are in familiar territory, where there is enough knowledge about how to get the results you want.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: There's enough knowledge and enough ability to get the result you want.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: You know, just follow the recipe, you'll get there.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: The basic failure exists when you make a mistake or you don't.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: You know you don't follow the recipe, maybe because you're not paying attention, maybe because you're, you know, forgot to read the recipe, what have you?
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: So basic failures, by definition, are preventable, and they can be small, they can be large, but when we're at our best, we're sort of we're paying attention and we can prevent them.
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: And organizations can.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: Hospitals, for example, can and should be set up in ways to help us prevent nearly all the basic failures that would otherwise come our way.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: And complex failures are multi-causal.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately these are epidemic in hospitals, but they are the undesired results, also in familiar territory, of a complex set of interacting factors, any one of which on its own would not lead to the failure, but the confluence of the factors.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: You know, you had a tired nurse, you had a mislabeled drug, you had a dark corner.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: You know the sort of the four or five things that happened at once.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: You sometimes call it the Swiss cheese model, where the where the factors just line up and allow an undesired result to come through.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: Again, we aspire to catch and correct and not let those come through.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: The third kind, the intelligent failures, are still undesired, but they are the thoughtful foray in new territories that didn't work out the way we had hoped, right.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: So they're in pursuit of a goal.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: They're hypothesis driven You've done your homework, you have good reason to believe it might work.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: And they are as small as possible, no bigger, no bigger than they need to be to get the new knowledge that we need.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: And so those are, of course, classically a hypothesis.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: Formal hypothesis in a laboratory that isn't supported by data is an intelligent failure.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: Or you know in your own life, you go on, you know a blind date that you had good reason to believe might work and it doesn't.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: That's an intelligent failure.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: No big deal, right?
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: More knowledge is good.
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: We move forward toward that life goal.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, do you have a particular failure that you cherish so far?
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I opened the book with my second year research project in the PhD program, which was a hypothesis in a medical context, a hypothesis that was not supported by data, which, of course, felt devastating at the time, and it was, without going into, you know, enormous detail.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: Read the prologue to get the gory details.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: The fact of my being wrong, or at least of the hypothesis not being supported by data, ended up taking me in a far more interesting research direction than I had been in on with that first project.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: So you know it's one of those blessing in disguise or you know it's one of those intelligent failures that brought new knowledge that was so much better than the knowledge I had been seeking to produce, and so, even though it feels badly at first, it ends up being really probably the best thing that ever happened to me in a research sense.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's a vulnerability, yeah For sure, in the sense of one like you don't want to get in that situation, you know, in your PhD, where you don't have your hypothesis backed up by data.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: You know you owned it, you kind of stepped into it, you didn't wallow in it and you're like, okay, onward, like what am I doing next?
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: Now what?
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's always the question Now what?
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: I look backwards but like let's look forward and figure out what this means.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Right and some of it and I've used this word a lot but it is this connection between your personal growth, a sense of vulnerability, and then your ability to whether it's pivot or kind of move forward like take action.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: You know, like it is all those combined which help you understand how to use that failure right.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: Utilization of the failure is important, right?
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: Absolutely yeah.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: So what are some of the things that someone can do based on what you shared in the book, and I want to talk about just a second the spectrum and the causes of failure.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: But how do they utilize failure?
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: How do they know?
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: That's something I can use this data to inform me versus that one.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: I just need to let it go.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, first of all, it's intelligent failures, as I've defined them, and I'm sort of saying these are the heart and soul, discovery and progress in any field.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: Intelligent failures are not sort of they're rarely things that just happened to you, because, by definition, there are things that you were testing on purpose.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: You knew, in a sense, you knew you were experimenting, whether it was a blind date or a formal lab study, and so the then the answer to your question becomes how do you deliberately take more risks?
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: Which, of course, brings us back to being bold.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: How do you, how do you deliberately take more risks?
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: Well, you don't just oh well, I'll take more risks.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: No, you have.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: The risk should be thoughtful, right, they should be in pursuit of a goal.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: You should have done your homework, you have a hypothesis and they're you know they're going to be as small as they can be to be useful, going forward, so that becomes the ingredients for Good experimental design or what you're following in your life, right, I mean, if you're quite sure you know whether you should go, move to a new city and, you know, restart your life somewhere else, like you might go visit it first, right, and it's just kind of obvious, but there's so many ways in our life where I think we erroneously think it's all or nothing rather than think, okay, what could I?
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: What could I do to learn more and get get a little of the uncertainty reduced?
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: Right, yeah, I say there's a continuum of boldness.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: The lower end is the quiet end, like Thinking about something, actually taking a step or doing something.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: That is just an extra version of understanding.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: Right, and not on social media.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: It's not, you don't, don't even share it someone, and it doesn't even have to make any noise at all literally A new clothing style.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: I mean, it can be something, just that you're not quite sure, is you, but you can.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna try this out.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: Oops, I didn't work, or it's like, oh, it did, and no one even needs to know.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: Like you thought that was bold, right, who knew like we're hot pink?
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, exactly, I bet you can.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: So when you think about, like, taking that and you have the causes of failure spectrum which on one end is blame worthy, on the other end is crazy, yeah, so kind of walk the listeners through that to understand the causes you know the purpose of that model which, as you say, it just sort of identifies as a hypothetical set of causes of some consequential failure your life, in your company.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: The purpose of the model is really to do one thing, which is to say that imagine this spectrum right from from genuinely blame worthy.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: You know someone deliberately sabotages something.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: You know it's their mischief maker.
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: They deliberately put salt in the sugar jar, right then that causes a failure.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: This is not something you know, this is not part of science, right, this is just sabotage and or mischief.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: And then the very other end of the spectrum is a thoughtful experiment, right, where I'm trying to make progress in my life in science, and I try something and it fails.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: Right, and in between is everything from, you know, in attention to inability and I get trained in it to just genuine uncertainty that makes it impossible to get a reliable result every time.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: But the point, so you know it just goes gradually from blame worthy to more and more sort of praise worthy causes of failure.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: The purpose is simply to make the point that we tend to react to all failure as if it was caused by a blame or the act.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: But we don't do a good job of discerning, you know, sort of like oh, that bad thing happened, ok, let's take a look.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: Let's take a careful, thoughtful look at what happened, versus a kind of OK, who's the culprit, you know who did it, who should we blame?
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: And my argument is that, you know, the lion's share of failures are not caused by blame or the acts.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: But when we respond to them as if there's someone or something to blame in there somewhere, we inhibit the very learning processes that we must do To gain the new knowledge that every failure has.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and sometimes your failures have a higher impact, like, obviously, the field I'm in, clinical research.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: Like someone could get hurt.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: Mistakes can't happen.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: Well, and I want to make a very careful distinction between mistake and failure.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: Failure is a broader category.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: Failure includes business.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: But yeah, a mistake by definition is a deviation from a known practice.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: You know, we have the knowledge.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: So, yes, so if you're doing a clinical trial, you absolutely want to minimize mistakes to zero.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: You know, to close to zero.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: But that does not mean you can make no failures, because failures happen in new territory and, by definition, a clinical trial is new territory.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: For sure, you hope that the drug will show efficacy, but it might not, and it's designed to answer that question accurately, right?
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: And so there's no question we will be disappointed when the answer is no, but it's an we have to accept.
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: The answer is no because we designed it in such a way and we won't get a clear answer unless we avoid mistakes, right.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: So let's avoid mistakes, but let's accept intelligent failures in new territory.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: Okay, I love that distinction because I think sometimes people connect them together.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: But they do.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: And then they say you know?
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: And then they get confused again, right, because then they say, yeah, I'm going to be okay, right, but then like, wait a minute, what do you mean?
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: Mistakes are okay, like mistakes aren't okay.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: I mean we'll all make mistakes, right, that's to air as that's a given.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: That's the title of chapter three.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: But interestingly, especially in healthcare, just because we, the human, will make mistakes does not mean we can't catch and correct them in a timely way, like before real harm is created most of the time.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: So but I think when we start, when we mix up the two terms, then people get confused because they sort of go they're saying, oh yeah, mistakes are fine, but then they think, no, mistakes aren't fine and they're right, mistakes aren't fine.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: Like mistakes are to be avoided through training, through teamwork, you know, through speaking up all of the things that we best practices for complex, uncertain organizations to make sure that we don't cause preventable harm.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: Exactly, so one of the things that you write about in the book is that there are barriers to failing.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: Well, right, so there's a version, there's confusion and there's fear of failure.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: So each of these kind of has a like a tip of how you can counteract it.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: Like so, when we think of a version like, what can we do?
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: Confusion and then fear, and some people do actually fear failing because how they were taught or how they think mistakes equal failure and both are bad.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah fix mine yeah exactly.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: That's just not where you want to live.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: So how can you help describe some of those barriers and kind of what the counterweight of those would be?
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: So it's a pretty simple model.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: But the idea is a version is sort of the emotional barrier, right that we just have a kind of instinctive I don't want to fail, I don't like failure, I don't like failure attached to me and that one is addressed best by the human cognitive act of reframing, you know, of realizing yep, stuff happens and I'm okay, I'm still here, right, you know that sort of you talk yourself into a healthier response than your instinctive response would be.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: And I give the example in the book of the odd observed fact that bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists in the Olympics.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: Right, because the bronze medalists spontaneously frame their bronze as a victory.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: Right, they look to their left and realize I could have missed the podium altogether.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: I got a medal at the Olympics, yeah, whereas the silvers are tending to look up and going I missed the gold, like I was that close and I missed the gold.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: So they're unhappy, right.
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: And you could say that the bronze medalists frame is healthier because it makes them feel better.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: And the silver medalists too could be like hey, you know I'm meddled, you know I got that second best medal.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: Right, I didn't get a bronze, I didn't get nothing, you know, but anyway, so we can reframe the things that we sort of instinctively think are catastrophic as disappointing, right?
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: Okay, so that's a version Confusion I say that's, you know that, what we've been talking about for a little while, which is, you know, when it's hard to really embrace failure in a thoughtful way, if you're just, if you don't have the thoughtful distinctions right.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: So if you don't have the distinction between a basic, a complex and an intelligent failure, then all failure seems bad.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: It just does right Cognitively, and so that's addressed by having this framework.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: And then the fear, which I really kind of categorize that as sort of the social fear, more of the not just that emotional aversion that we talked about, but the reluctance to have other people see me in a negative light, right.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: So it's about social stigma of failure and that the antidote there is really about building psychological safety for honest, candid conversations, and, you know, reality based conversations, about that.
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: Things will go wrong in an uncertain, complex, interdependent world.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think social media in a way plays a part in oh yes, in failure, because I don't think there's a lot of posts that I see that talk about I failed today.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: I didn't do this.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: Well, we talk about being real and being transparent and showing the authentic selves, but I don't see a lot of people actually putting it out there, and I'm not.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: I'm not shaming or blaming or anything like that.
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: Oh, the venue you know, the venue of feels to most of us as if it or, you know, putting your best self forward.
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: Right, it's a performance, it's not a, it's not a conversation, and I think that's really important because I think, since social media became a phenomenon, we have made the error in thinking of it as as if it were relationships.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: You know, we do make connections, for sure, but aren't relationships in the, in the sense of that genuine, authentic, vulnerable giving and taking that that relationships involve, in the in real life type of real life, exactly.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, performances, mini performances, and and in the in the very their best spirit of them, like LinkedIn, I think, is the liberally a professional venue.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: And you know, you're, you're you're hoping to educate, I mean, you're hoping to put forward good ideas that people like, but you're also hoping that they make a difference.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you might fail there too.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: I mean absolutely, it's the measure too.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: I think that's important, Like how we measure our failure or the.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: I think that's an interesting concept as well.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: Is there any any way that someone can say like, wow, that was a failure, that was awesome in the sense of like I learned from, and I think maybe that goes back to the types of we talked about, right?
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's not a territory, you're, you're, you're putting something out there.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: You haven't put it out before, so it's, by definition, new.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: You've thought about it, you believe it's.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: You're not being sloppy, right.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: You believe it's useful and not calling it in like you said right, yeah, and so yeah, and you were wrong and that's okay, right.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, one of the things you talk about in the book and we'll kind of close out here is really the, the conflicting failure cultures that in our society and some of the stuff that I've done from research for my own book was just around risk and risk taking, because I connect that to being bold and it's absolutely, it's appealing.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: Women do less of it than men, right, and so I'm wondering what your thoughts are with regard to kind of the failure cultures that are conflicting there, yes, and how we can, as women, fail more in on the intelligent end of the spectrum.
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: Lee, that's such a great question and you know, in the last chapter of the book I have a section called the unequal license to fail, and it's women and people of color and other, you know, in any marginalized communities.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: It worries me, of course, because the so much of the advice, especially on the intelligent failure, is easier for the dominant members of the dominant group to put into place, right.
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: So if you realize, if you sort of recognize that as an observed phenomenon, then all right.
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: What do we do about it?
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: Well, I think part of the answer is what your work is dedicated to, which is let's help People be bolder.
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: I think the best way to do that is by saying you know, in fact, pause to consider, like what's the worst that could happen, and you know, so long as the worst that could happen isn't, doesn't deal with death or harm or real harm.
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and it's just.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: You know embarrassment, or have you?
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: But the upside is potentially great.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: Got to go for it.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: We got to train ourselves to err on the side of going forward, of playing to win rather than play not to lose.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: Because you can play not to lose and look like a success.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: But it's a little bit of a sham, right, and you're taking only safe bets, you're sort of staying in bounds, you're coloring within the lines and it may look to the world like what a success, but in fact you know you're not really going for it and there's an inner loss there.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: You're looking for the upside on the inside, and as you were.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: That's what came to mind.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: For me is like, whether they know it above me, my supervisors or my team knows, like I know, what I did was the right thing to try to do, to experiment or to learn, and I know I was true to me, and I think that's the one thing that I would always keep in mind as a leader of the groups that I led and wonderful institutions of like, I know that was the right thing to do at the right time for the right reason, and I can sleep tonight because of it.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Right, I think it's a great harmony.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure, yep, but you went for it.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: You went for it Right, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: And when it works it's just extraordinary.
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: And I think sometimes, you know, I remember having a meeting like let's just talk about extraordinary failures this year, and what I meant by that, like what did we fail at that?
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: We learned that actually levered us five sets pet, or we keep.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: Or because of the failure, we became a very close knit team or because we were all in it like we all knew what we were doing.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: I think that's something to also think about when we're thinking about failing.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: As you know, women or marginalized communities or people of color I just making sure that you know we you can fail in a group.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: You can fail with someone.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: You have to always fail so alone.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: No, it's true, true, I think sometimes that makes fail even more meaningful.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: And, as you say, then the silver lining part is very loud and clear, because it is that, that bonding, which is so exciting and rewarding.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because I say every idea I have is not a good idea, but it's an idea, so I write it down and I, you know, work to explore it and sometimes they fall off the list, right, but I don't kill it before it grows.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: I had a conversation last week with Dr Jervay.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: One of the things he was talking about was like someone you know, when they're, when they're just kind of in that state below the surface, right they're germinating in a way.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: You don't look at the seed and say you're failing, You're late.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: Yes, yes, you're late.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: That's what you need to do it.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: Just hasn't sprouted yet.
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: You're germinating Right right.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: You know, sometimes we need that space.
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: Don't look at the seed and say you're failing.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: I love that, exactly, exactly so I thought you know.
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: When it comes to that, I think we all need to also realize sometimes in our lives we might be germinating like we're coming back, or we're coming back from something that maybe took us down, but we're.
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: That's not a failure in the sense of that.
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: That's a way that you can actually learn and move forward so well.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being on the bold lounge.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: All the information about Amy, her books and the right kind of wrong is below in the episode notes.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: Thank you for having me.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the bold lounge podcast.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: Through the continuum of bold stories vulnerability to taking a leap you will meet more extraordinary people making a positive impact for others through their unique and important story.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.