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Right Kind of Wrong with Amy Edmondson · Disengaged

• Amy Edmondson: In a novel context, a context like science or R&D or innovation or entrepreneurship, mediocrity would be no failures. You know, having failures would be stepping stones towards success. now, mediocrity in a manufacturing environment may very well be lots of failures, right? If if you know you're trying to produce something and every third product has a defect in it. That's pretty mediocre James: Hello and welcome to Disengaged. My guest today has spent three decades studying what people do at work when they fear the consequences of speaking up. They stay quiet, they hide mistakes, and they keep ideas to themselves. We cannot build an engaged workforce without psychological safety. And without psychological safety, we lose the candor, learning and experimentation that innovation depends on. Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor. of leadership and management at Harvard Business School. The very researcher whose work has made psychological safety a core idea in modern management, and the author of Right Kind of Wrong. Which won the Financial Times and Schroders Book of the Year in twenty twenty three. We talk about how her hypothesis that failed in a hospital study launched her career. Why our minds hold on to bad news? The three different types of failure and how to tell them apart. why we rush to blame individuals when systems fail? And what each of us can do to build a healthier relationship with failure. As always, if you enjoyed the show, please subscribe so you catch future episodes. Please give it a rating. And share this with a friend. It seems small, but it's just about the best way of spreading these conversations and helping me get more tremendous guests like Amy Edmondson on the show. So without further ado, I give you Amy Edmondson, author of Teaming, The Fearless Organization, and most recently Right Kind of Wrong. I highly recommend taking a look at those books. Amy Edmondson welcome to disengaged. Amy Edmondson: Great to be here. James: Thanks so much for joining me. I've been looking forward to speaking to you for some years now. I'd love to start at the beginning with psychological safety, which managed to propagate around the world in such a good way. When did you understand it, and when did you learn its importance in the world? Amy Edmondson: Well, I should say it has propagated itself. I'm not a very good propagator, it it turns out. But let me s so I'll go back to the beginning. I'll go back to the origin story, if you will. I'm a PhD student. It's the early nineties. And being a PhD student means learning how to do research, which was very much a new sport for me. I had worked as an engineer, I had worked in consulting I had not yet worked in the business of creating new knowledge or trying to publish papers in scholarly journals. And I I would I would say that it was not going well in the sense that I really felt in over my head. Okay, nonetheless, you have to do it. You have to learn how to do it. And so I became part of a large study of medication errors. And I I was willing to join this study simply because. I was interested in the learning organization. I just I really wanted to understand what we could do to help organizations learn better as needed in a changing world. So this wasn't a perfect study for that, but the focus on errors to me said, okay, errors, learning, yeah, that works. Plus, I just had to get experience. I had to sort of jump on board something that was already underway that would allow me to learn. And The study's major aim was to detect error rates in hospitalized patients. My very minor aim was to look at the teamwork properties of hospital patient care units and see whether better teamwork was associated with lower error rates, which makes sense, right? It should be simply because patient care, especially in a 24-7 tertiary care hospital, is very interdependent. There's there's a lot of handoffs, a lot of decisions that need to be made. And so the degree to which people are operating as a good team should very much help to reduce adverse drug events and medication errors of all kinds. Okay, so my little part of the study is use a team survey to assess teamwork properties. And the larger study is has trained nurse investigators who are going team to team on a kind of every other day basis. To do chart review, to talk to people, to collect data on error rates. And they do that for six months. So I have a long wait. And now finally I've got the data from the medical folks, and all I have to do is correlate it with my data on teamwork. And you know, I I'm I'm hopeful that I'll have a relationship, and then I'm hopeful I'll be able to write and publish a paper. At first glance. running the correlations and I see that I have a correlation and I see that it's statistically significant, which is great news. And then I look again and I realize it's in the wrong direction. That is essentially what the data are saying is that better teams have higher, not lower error rates. It's like what? You know, and of course my first reaction was other than dismay and anxiety and fear, Was to just look carefully at where did I make the mistake. You know, where did I make the data entry mistake? What what did I do wrong to produce this obviously erroneous result? And, you know, very carefully tracing my steps. I really hadn't, I had not done anything wrong in that sense. I hadn't made mistakes. And so then I'm sort of befuddled and frustrated and scared. And then within, you know, within a couple of hours, you know, forcing myself to think about it. Like, why might this be? I just couldn't believe that better teamwork would cause more errors. And you could say, well, maybe they're sloppy or maybe they're, you know, happy, go lucky, but it didn't feel right to me given what I understood about that work environment. and then suddenly I thought, maybe the better teams aren't making more mistakes. Maybe they're reporting more. Maybe they're more willing to speak up truthfully about things that go wrong. And I won't go through the whole long story about how I was able to get additional data to suggest that that reinterpretation might very well be accurate. But it was the insight that led me to think maybe even within within organizations across teams. There can be real differences in the interpersonal climate, real differences in people's willingness to speak up about error, which to me seemed to obviously matter for learning. And and so that was the failure story, the you know, the kind of research I failed to to support my hypothesis that led me to, in fact, a better and more interesting insight that went on to spawn a whole sort of research field, which was that. Teams can differ in what I later called team psychological safety and and that can really impact their ability to learn and ultimately their ability to perform well. James: It's a wonderful origin story. It's the Spider-Man Amy Edmondson: Mm. James: origin story of the psychology world, you said there was a moment that you realized, you thought that there might be another explanation that it might be about reporting. Was there a certain circumstance that led to that realization? Amy Edmondson: No, I mean I never left my my desk or James: Right? Amy Edmondson: my my little my little tiny PhD student office. but I you know, I I went you know, I did what well I I won't say everybody does. I did what I do, which was to kind of awfulize first, to sort of spiral out of control, to you know, I'm gonna drop out of graduate school, I can't do this thing, you know, I'm I'm I'm just I I don't know what I did wrong, but it's it's not working. This is this new career is not gonna be working. And well, you know, once I sort of exhausted myself, maybe like a toddler, I I thought, okay, like pause. And I think the good news, this is, you know, b obviously well before social media or, you know, just b essentially right before the internet became something that even researchers w had access to. So I had more reflective capacity back then. So, you know, what do you do? You just you sit and you think, okay, what's going on here? And then it was suddenly obvious. Right. So I I would say it's a looking out the window moment. There was a nice window in my fifteenth floor office there. But but it was yeah, like, you know, think about it, Amy. If you're if you're a person at work, a person in a hierarchy, Person where the stakes are reasonably high, it's not easy to say, yeah, we screwed up here. yeah, you know, this went wrong there. Clearly there are errors and failures that can't be hidden. They're they're right there in plain sight. The patient has a, you know, a a very a very bad reaction to something. You can't hide that. But most errors, you know, most imperfections don't really need to be raised. And it's the it's the the many little errors that sometimes add up to you know a really catastrophic event. But effective teams are the ones where I I would say they're in the catching correct business, you know, not in the perfection business. And you know, and once I thought about just the human experience of this workplace, it suddenly became obvious to me what could be going on. But then as I said, it was a whole lot more work to to find credible data to suggest to others that that might be what was going on. James: You mentioned a moment of reflection as well. I feel moments of reflection are so important. Speaking Amy Edmondson: Mm. James: to Arie Kruglanski, is sort of the father of cognitive closure, and his point was that the more stressed and pressurized you are, like you're in your studies, you've got to get your paper out, there's pressure on you, there's parental expectations, there's social expectations, the less likely you are to have maybe those moments of reflection and quiet space, Amy Edmondson: Yeah. James: which really kind of further emphasizes the need to go out of your way to find those moments. Amy Edmondson: Absolutely. In fact, I think that stress and that anxiety, and there's research on this as well, including Arie's, but is is associated with more sh shallow thinking. I mean, it just isn't conducive to to deeper thought that allows you to get in touch with what you know, what might be going on with out of the box thinking rather than just a linear and and simple thinking. James: I like to explore the world of work and how to create an engaged workforce. And I do believe a cornerstone of feeling engaged with your work is having psychological safety, because without that, you can't get all the wonderful autonomy and problem solving capacity that you need to enjoy your work. why is it so important to the workplace? Amy Edmondson: It is. Well, it's it's so important because by and large, we're all doing knowledge work. And for most people in the workplace, the work is interdependent, meaning what I do affects what you do, and vice versa. And many times, you know, the most important decisions or the most important, you know, design opportunities and projects are truly interdependent. They really truly require us to combine Our knowledge, our observations, our suggestions, our possibilities together to to do great work. And all of that sounds great, but if I'm reluctant to share what I know, what I worry about, what I disagree with, because of the concern of what you might think of me, you know, what what psychologists call interpersonal risk. If I'm if I'm sort of aware of and hampered by interpersonal risk, our work won't go as well. Our the quality of our work won't be as good. And and so psychological safety describes a state where interpersonal risk feels low. Like we might be very concerned about business risk or about, you know, technical or safety risk in the in the in the broader context, but interpersonal risk, nah, right? I feel I can I can I can say some crazy thing and even if it's totally off base, you're not gonna You're not gonna sort of reject me or humiliate me for it. So, so that state of you know low interpersonal risk just allows us to focus on the work, you know, rather than focus on impression management or you know, focus on self-protection more broadly. So that's why psychological safety matters to a great deal of the modern work. And indeed, there's research that suggests that. Psychological safety is always correlated with team performance, meaning psychological safety in a team is pretty robustly correlated with team performance, but the correlation is higher when the work is more knowledge intensive, you know, more in need of decision making, problem solving, you know, creativity, which is a is a beautiful result. James: it kind of saddens me that so many people don't have that when you talk about people's day-to-day experiences of work and their fear of Speaking up and their fear that they might have made a mistake Which is why I think Right Kind of Wrong is such a great book, because it helps people, I think, find that space. Amy Edmondson: Yeah, in in a way in Right Kind of Wrong, I try to, you know, psychological safety describes the climate, right? And Fearless Organization talks about team climate, why it matters, but Right Kind of wrong is the substance, right? It's sort of what are we doing? You know, how how does the actual work unfold in ways, you know, how how do we get to success? Well, we get there through trying things. And many of the things we try, especially in new territory, fail. So it's it's really I I turned my lens, you know, from the sort of interpersonal to the substance, although it's still interpersonal at the end of the day, because we still it still has this centrality of we care what people think about us. James: you write that we remember negatives more readily than positives and read negative facial expressions faster than positive ones, for example. Why are we built this way? Amy Edmondson: I I think that that's work done by other psychologists, not me. Bad is stronger than good. I think maybe well, I I Baumeister, maybe, and and others. James: Mm-hmm. Amy Edmondson: but it's I I think the speculation is we're built that way because in prehistoric times we had to be extremely t tuned into dangers. I mean, those had to capture our attention because it you know, it might be the proverbial saber toothed tiger, it might be the, you know, enemy tribe. But we had to be hyper sensitive to dangers because they really were existential threats. and and so we bring that nervous system to the present day and we are are are wired that way. James: It's kind of fascinating. I feel like I see it crop up everywhere, this kind of two times negative thing. And I noticed that Teresa Amabile wrote about it in the Progress Principle, that people perceive negative setbacks twice as powerfully as positives. And also came up in prospect theory, of course, that we perceive losses twice as much. So it's kind of intriguing that that sort of just shows up Amy Edmondson: Right. James: in a lot of places in psychology. Amy Edmondson: Yeah, and our you know, our our progress depends on our ability to overcome that, right? Because if if you're really tied up in knots about the negative, the the best way to not experience negative is just don't try new things, right? Don't don't take risks of any kind, interpersonal, you know, business, you know, s you know, stretching into new territory, learn a new language, you name it. Better not to do it if you're really unable to cope with the negative. James: You quote the line that success means going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm, which I love Amy Edmondson: You know what's important to me about that one is the enthusiasm, right? Because I I James: Yes, yes. Amy Edmondson: think we all know, yes, you know, failures are stepping stones on the way to success, but you gotta hang on to that enthusiasm for trying again, for picking yourself back up and going out and doing another research project. James: how can people do that? Because it can get worrying when you go from failure to failure, it wears you down. How do you protect that enthusiasm in those situations? Amy Edmondson: Well, I I guess my answer to that has been one that's probably unhelpfully cognitive, because big in part because I believe our emotions follow our cognitions, right? Our cognitions are very quick and very spontaneous. And so what what I try to do in that book and in other aspects of my work is help people reframe reality in a way that I think is more accurate, but it's a it's more conducive to enthusiasm as well. So more specifically. to understand the difference between, let's just be simple, bad failures and good failures seems to me quite empowering. Like it it it frees you up if you know that sure, like we all our intuition tells us there are things we should work hard to avoid. You know, we shouldn't have preventable explosions, we shouldn't have we shouldn't have we shouldn't bet everything we own on an uncertain investment. Right? There's you know, so because we understand that there are failures that we are wise to prevent, then we're at risk of thinking all failures should be prevented. And then we're at risk of not taking the kinds of smart, thoughtful risks that allow us to really stretch and succeed. So I thought that creating a framework that sort of that I think with with with good logic and good data identifies three different archetypes of failure that it You know, once once you sort of think about it that way, you're more willing and able to take risks in new territory. And if I could be very clear about what is a good failure, what's an intelligent failure, what what are its criteria, that that also serves as a kind of playbook that allows us to go out there and enthusiastically try them. James: which actually brings me on to my next topic, which is the basic, complex, and intelligent failures. And I love this framing idea because I can look back at my own failures and say, OK, was that a basic failure that I really just shouldn't have done? And it was just a silly mistake in the day. Or was it an intelligent Amy Edmondson: Mm-hmm. James: failure that I can learn from? what are those criteria for an intelligent failure? Amy Edmondson: So I offer really four and a half. Well I'll I'll s we we can be simple and call it five. Right. So the first one is it's in genuinely new territory, right? If if you know if there's a recipe and you can use it to get the result you want, please do. If there's someone you can call who's done it before, why not? Right? Num so new territory. Number two, in pursuit of a goal. When this isn't, I mean, there's I love play, but that's not what I'm talking about. This is about Trying to get closer to some outcome that that matters to me. And number three is you've done your homework, you have a hypothesis, you have good reason to believe this might work. You understand it might not. You might be wrong, but it might. And number four, very important, the failure if it happens, or the experiment is no bigger than necessary, right? It's just big enough to bring that vital new knowledge and no bigger. And so Again, you you don't bet the farm, you don't, you know, you don't do something that might really might really h harm someone or might be reputationally catastrophic. You you mitigate that risk by mitigating the size of the experiment. And the fifth is of course, now that you've you know had the failure, learn from it. So take the time to really unpack what happened and why, you know, where was I wrong, and that becomes vital information to informing the next step. James: you mentioned Alphabet X, their moonshot laboratory a few times in both books, which as you're going through those, I think they do a wonderful job of institutionalizing those things. Amy Edmondson: Yes. James: Like you see it in the way they operate. Is that fair to say? Amy Edmondson: It is fair to say and and Alphabet X was the first place I ever heard a leader, Astro Teller, say to people, because they they there had just been some layoffs at Google and people were getting and I was talking about psychological safety a while ago and people were like, But you know, we how can we have psychological safety when there are layoffs? Well, first of all, psychological safety doesn't mean you always get to keep your job, but it's not the same concept as job security. But but but they were saying essentially, and I, you know, admired their honesty, this is gonna make us, this these layoffs is gonna make us risk averse because we don't want to fail. we don't wanna stand out as having failed because we might be next, right? And and Astro Teller essentially said, actually it's the people who aren't failing that would be at risk, right? Because we're in, you know, we're X, we're in the in the moonshot business. Most of what we do, 90% of what we do, will end in failure. And so if you're not failing, you're not taking the right kinds of risk around here. The the work we do. So context matters. I have a whole chapter on just how very much context matters in the science of failure, if you will. But but if you're if you have set yourself out to do really bold, impossible things that may or may not be possible. And you know, you have a perfect track record for not failing, you're not a good employee. And now that's obvious, but it turns out it really matters when very senior people talk about it that way, when they when they reframe in that case, failure as evidence of good performance rather than as evidence of, you know, poor performance. James: And they even, you know, they put their money where their mouth is as well, right? They pay out bonuses for failure to say, hey, look, we're so important to us, we're gonna pay for failure as long as it's a good failure. Amy Edmondson: Yeah. and here's another thing they do. They really reward and celebrate projects and pro project teams for shutting a failure down, right? Because there's always this human temptation to think, you know, well we'll find something in here somewhere and just you just keep going, throwing good money after bad. And so knowing that people are vulnerable to doing that, they say, Okay, we'll just, you know, we will celebrate you when you call it. And it you might think, well, wouldn't that pe lead people to you know, call everything a failure? No, of course not, because all of us still continue to prefer success over failure. But let's reward you for cutting or shutting down a losing course because then you're freeing up all those resources, people, especially for the next experiment. James: there was a project where they did exactly that. They invested quite a lot but again to your point no more than they had to in pursuit of understanding the possible success and not only do they shut it down but they paid out a bonus, they presented internally on the project and they published all their findings publicly so other people could maybe pick up on that and if they could do something with it work with that as well. that and that's a good failure to me that's an amazing, failure. Amy Edmondson: Such a good failure. And that last step is not to be taken for granted, right? Of saying, you know, rather than just internally, but publishing more widely, so that you can spare others, you know, the time and expense and heartache of doing the exact same thing. Because if it was a smart thing to do, other smart people will think of doing it also. But helping not have the failure of the same intelligent failure a second time, which is no longer intelligent. is a very good thing to do. James: Astro Teller, fantastic name for the head of the moonshot lab. You couldn't make that up. That's amazing. Amy Edmondson: I know, I know, I know. What were what were his parents thinking, right? James: What is it called? There's a kind of joke theory, I believe, called nominative determinism, which is that your name will dictate your possible career. Amy Edmondson: yes, yes. Right. James: we share a fascination with the fundamental attribution error. why do we explain other people's failures by their character and we explain our own failures by circumstance? Amy Edmondson: It has to be evolutionarily helpful in some way. But and and the best I can do is to say that the sort of the the positive emotion we get from finding ourselves to be blameless, so that when things go wrong for us, well, it was circumstances outside our control. And so I'm still okay, right? I'm still I'm still a good smart person. When so that that just that's self-protective, right? That self-protective cognition that leads us to have positive emotions rather than negative. whereas it makes us feel sadly better about ourselves when we can kind of look to our right and look to our left and contemplate other people's shortcomings, right? This is not our most attractive attribute, but it must have some kind of, you know, self-protective mood-enhancing value that. You know, gets us out of bed and taking on the challenges of another day. James: curious, isn't it? I do this all the time. My wife blames me for this all the time Amy Edmondson: Yeah. James: as well, that I always think it's someone else's fault, specifically her fault if something is missing or goes wrong. what can we learn from Swiss cheese about failure? Amy Edmondson: what a great question. So James Reason, the the British philosopher, error psychologist who died recently, used the Swiss cheese model to explain how systems that are complex and are are are vulnerable to breakdowns and failures, you know, like aviation, like healthcare delivery, can withstand many small deviations from best practice, right? There can be errors, there can be shortcomings or failures. and the system is robust enough for that not to prove catastrophic. But now and then the whole and those are the the deviations, the errors are like holes in your Swiss cheese. You know, there's the cheese, those holes aren't nutritious, so they're failures, they're shortcomings. No problem, because they they don't get all the way through. But now and then the holes line up and form a tunnel. So this is just a metaphor to help people see how complex systems are vulnerable now and then. So when the holes line up and make a tunnel, then the the errors kind of line up and sneak through and create some kind of you know catastrophic outcome or or meaningful failure outcome. And and I think the Swiss cheese And I've seen in many hospitals, you know, Swiss cheese sponges around to kind of remind people. The point isn't just to explain, the point is to improve. And so when you are aware that these small deviations are largely fine, but could occasionally line up to produce a really bad outcome, you're more willing then to speak up quickly about the little holes that you see so that they won't on your watch line up. And create havoc. James: It's a wonderful metaphor, isn't it? It kind of sticks in your mind, obviously, with the visual. Amy Edmondson: Exactly. Visuals. I think visuals are so important. James: speaking of visuals, the Andon cord, Amy Edmondson: Yeah. James: a wonderful, just real-world, physical, visceral kind of image of acknowledging and reporting on failure and improving. Now, this comes from Toyota. I learned something about this. I didn't know this, but it actually came from looms, steam-powered loom machines. Amy Edmondson: actually the yeah, the history of Toyota, the early the first company formed, created by Mr. Toyota, was in the loom business. And if you're working on a loom and making a fabric, you know, and there's some little error way up there, it's too l you know, you've you've put good money after bad. You've done lots and lots of very careful painstaking work and there's nothing you can do but start over because that that error in the fabric will not you know, will not correct itself. So, so because of that history, there was this, you know, kind of awareness of wanting to catch small errors or failures quickly so that they don't compound and don't create waste. Right? We don't want the Toyota, the whole Toyota production system is really about minimizing waste to maximize quality. Now, we fast forward and we're in the automotive business. And again, the same s the same theory is true, which is that a small error not caught early in the production process is going to create a lot of waste if if it, you know, the car comes off the line and that error is still in there. So catching it early is real money, right? It's real value. So but here's the problem. You know, the Japanese culture is not conducive to Asking people to kind of raise their hand high and say, you know, I see a mistake or I see something, I'm not even sure it's a mistake, but it might be a mistake, and I'd rather have another set of eyes on it now before it compounds. That's just antithetical to a culture, you know, where in the in in the West we have the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they have the nail that stands up gets the hammer. Right. So it's it's it really do not stand out and do not stand out and say something negative, right? So so how do you then engineer a sort of a cultural habit of saying, hey, I see a problem or a potential problem? What what they came up with, and actually the original Andon cord was inspired by one of the one of the early managers being on a tr trolley car in San Francisco, and you could it could be a New York bus too, because they had them, but where in the old days there were these sort of wires that you would pull when you wanted to get off. So make sure the bus would stop at the at the stop where you wanted to get off. So and he looked at that and he sort of liked the idea that you know you pull on something that's maybe a little easier than sort of speaking. And you pull on this cord and it lets you off. So the Andon cord Andon meaning lantern, right? It's gonna shed light on something, was inspired by the the trolley car and then installed and to this day is still installed in Toyota factories around the world and it is an empowering device it it eases the psychological challenge of calling attention to an error or a potential error. James: think a lot of more organizations need their own proverbial Andon cords. Amy Edmondson: Exactly. Right. Figure out what your Andon cord needs to look like and put it in place. Make it James: Exactly. Amy Edmondson: easy. It's about lowering the threshold for speaking up. James: And there are two interesting ways I think that does that. One is that it doesn't stop everything immediately. It takes, I think, a minute, isn't it? Amy Edmondson: yes. When you pull the cord, it does not stop the line. It alerts a team leader who comes by and if if the two of you then can't figure out the problem within it's about a minute, then then the line will stop until James: Yeah. Amy Edmondson: we figure it out. But eleven out of twelve pulls of the Andon cord last time I checked, which was not recent, are do not lead to line stoppages. But they because they get solved. They're either not a real problem, it was a false alarm, but they still people still enthusiastically continue. And and part of that is because they get positive reinforcement from the team leader. Thank you so much. Right. Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. And and so but it but it shows you how yeah, how how effective it is really that people are still willing to pull even with without certainty. James: I think because the barrier is so low, it's an easy thing to do. You know that it's not going to stop production immediately. You're thanked for stopping the line. I think that's a huge lesson for other companies. Yeah. Amy Edmondson: Right. Or not stopping it, but but but potentially stopping it. Yeah, and and you have a little moment of learning, right? A little moment of of reflection to go back to our prior James: Right, moment of reflection. Amy Edmondson: you know, where you get to sort of think aloud or poke around aloud with someone, and then it's actually a nice outcome when you conclude it's fine, right? James: Hmm. Amy Edmondson: And if you conclude it's a problem, that's okay too, because we'll fix it. James: You've contributed a lot to the body of research on near misses, if I'm not mistaken, which is, many Amy Edmondson: Yeah. James: ways, those 11 out of 12, you could argue, are near misses. What have you found around near misses, and what are we missing in an organizational setting? Amy Edmondson: Yes. Well, you know, near near misses are kind of fun because the the miss part is, you know, clearly bad, but the near part is good, right? In other words, it was it didn't happen. So they're the you know, they're the the the failures that didn't happen, but could have had we not caught and corrected it in time. So they're very clearly a moment, short moment, for celebration. Like we can pat ourselves on the back that we caught and corrected something. So long as we're framing the near miss as, you know, as a as a good catch, you know, rather than a gotcha. And so that is a kind of a leadership challenge or a framing challenge, you know, then I think we we we get to celebrate the fact that it was caught. We get to we get a kind of helpful reminder that we are fallible human beings operating in fallible systems, right? With there things will go wrong. The only real question is do we catch and correct them, you know, before the ultimate the before the harm occurs. So I like to say error will never go away, but we can aspire to make harm pretty close to zero. James: our instincts are all pulling us away from error, know, that 2X, you know, we perceive it so strongly. It makes me wonder, and one of the things you do so well in The Fearless Organization is points out how well companies institutionalize our relationship with failure. And it made me wonder, like, how could we institutionalize our relationship with near misses, almost maybe have a near miss day or a celebration of the best near miss. Amy Edmondson: Yeah. James: Just to say, hey, The more we speak about this, the more we can all learn from your miss, rather than you hiding Amy Edmondson: That's right. James: that near miss away Amy Edmondson: I think that's exactly right. It's it's it's you know, we've just been talking about near misses as so obviously a positive thing, but that's not the norm. I mean that that's not the default. The default would be oops, you know, I I just dodged a bullet and I'd prefer nobody to know. Pr I prefer that nobody knows I'm a fallible human being. Well, guess what? They already know. They may not know that you know. So I think that's a useful gap to close. James: Amy Edmondson, is failure a privilege? Amy Edmondson: I have to admit that it is, in the f in the following sense. First of all, I mean, in a very basic sense, those of us who are lucky enough to sort of pursue new things for a living, right? To to to be researchers or to be given and pursuing stretch goals which aren't guaranteed to succeed all the time. I mean, I think that is a privilege, right? There's there's an awful lot of contexts where you're expected to just, you know, deliver on the predictable and known stuff. So I think in that sense it's a privilege. but the other way in which it's a privilege is that our feeble human brains have a hard time valuing all of us equally. And so it's it doesn't take too much thought to realize that Failure and sort of smart failure and the kind of exciting stepping stones that are on the path towards success are easier to endure for people in the sort of demographic majority in given roles or fields. And so, in you know, in most organizations in most organizations, that might mean that it is easier for and less psychologically challenging for white men. to sort of you know celebrate their their intelligent failures and even talk about how how necessary they were to their success. but if you are a you know a person whose identity group is rarely you know at the top ranks in some kind of organization, you're well aware of the fact that if you fail at something, people will quickly make an attribution about your group. Right. And and and so because you know our brains do that, a leadership challenge is to keep helping us override that, right? Keep you know, trying to level the failure playing field and and trying to keep the you know, that was a failure that was, you know, smart and good and in this situation, and that's not a reflection on, we shouldn't hire people like that because they You know, they they have a failure. So I guess what I'm trying to say is we we have to accept the I mean, we have to be aware that there's an unequal unlevel playing field for failure, and then we have to do everything in our power to level it. James: Yeah, it makes me think back to the Hidden Brain and the power of, which is when I first really started appreciating the power of inherent bias. this is a side note, I've recently been watching a lot of nineties thrillers, know, sort of like Michael Douglas movie, you know, I just found myself going back to that. And it's Amy Edmondson: yes Yeah. James: fascinating the depiction of men and women in the workplace and how differently they come across. So the men, these sort of mad, powerful geniuses and the women just not in that era. And it kind of helps you understand why culturally, Amy Edmondson: Right. James: the position of men Amy Edmondson: Right. James: and women and people of color in companies is now so different. I mean, there's a lot of pop culture contributing to those views over the years. Amy Edmondson: And it just isn't I mean, y you say nineties, it's not that long ago, right? James: No. Amy Edmondson: I mean it's it's you know, maybe it's a close to a generation, but it's just it's not that long you know, it's it's it's still painful to me that movies hadn't cleaned up their act by then. James: you mentioned leaders need to be more embracing of failure and democratize this notion of failure as well. So that is not a privilege. But surely if we encourage failure, aren't we encouraging mediocrity? Amy Edmondson: no. although James: you Amy Edmondson: I that is I can see how people might think that, right? So and and the that that comes from a sort of a false equation of failure with not trying, right? There there's I think we all have a kind of mental model in our heads which is, and this is in Fearless Organization, you know, effort produces success, you know, low effort produces failure. And Course, that's true sp in in some contexts. It's especially true in very well understood and very well practiced contexts. But it's also the case, just ask any scientist you know, that sometimes you work really hard, have a great hypothesis, you know, a great project, really stunningly ambitious work, and you get a failure. And you know, if if you can't stand that, you're not going to become a scientist, right? Because you've worked really hard, you got a failure. And then worse, at least in my mind. Sometimes, you know, you mail it in, you get lucky, and you get a success, right? So it's it's I'm not saying, of course, that the relationship between effort and success isn't real. I'm saying it's imperfect. And and so the your question comes from a kind of f false connecting of effort and success. And and so, you know, mediocrity. In a novel context, a context like science or R&D or innovation or entrepreneurship, mediocrity would be no failures. You know, having failures would be stepping tones stepping stones towards success. now, mediocrity in a manufacturing environment may very well be lots of failures, right? If if you know you're trying to produce something and every third product has a defect in it. That's pretty mediocre and and because that is a context where in fact we can have a wonderful replicable formula to produce the the the result we want and do it we can we can, if we really try, do it perfectly every time. James: it was a loaded question obviously, because I remember you mentioned this towards the end of The Fearless Organization that inevitably in any given presentation, someone will put their hand up and ask, aren't we just celebrating mediocrity at this point? Amy Edmondson: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's and to me that's I one of the things, you know, in Fearless I mean in Right Kind of Wrong, I my primary goal was to describe this this framework, that there are basic failures, complex failures, intelligent failures. But then I also explored into new territory with, you know, there's the the competencies that we need to do this well, or more broadly, to navigate uncertainty well. And one is, and we've talked a little about this, but self-awareness, sort of just being more aware, being more aware of ourselves doing the fundamental attribution error and laughing at it and saying, okay, yeah, you know, actually there I am again doing the the fundamental attribution error. And I don't want to be, I don't want to be making error, so let me do better. Let me look at the ways in which I contributed to the bad outcome. And let me look at the ways in which you in fact were partly caught In circumstances beyond your control. so self-awareness. And then, but the the one that I wanted to raise right here is context awareness. It seems to me, it seems so obvious, but I've got case study after case study where, in a sense, the actors are misreading the context. You know, they're doing something crazy like space travel, but acting as if they're doing production in like a you know routine setting. Their mindsets are geared toward production. And and so I thought we actually do need context awareness as a competency, right? To pause to say how much is known, how much is unknown, what are the stakes, you know, from a human safety or financial or ~ perspective. And then we need to behave and think differently depending on where we are on the uncertainty dimension and where we are on the on the sort of high stakes or low stakes dimension. James: That's the tricky part. You described discernment as vexing at one point in your book. between different types of failure, but also different types of context around that failure. Amy Edmondson: Yes. And you know, I just I and this I think is a very thoughtful question I'll often get, but you know, what if it's you know, i the the bring up a sort of a gray area failure and and it's usually because might something might be new for you but not for the world. And so what kind of failure is that? And I say, okay, it's you know, I can articulate a framework and all frameworks are meant to be helpful thinking devices. They're not answer keys. And so There will always be a need for discernment or judgment. Where, you know, for example, the criterion that a failure shouldn't be too big. Well, what's big for me, might be very small for you, and vice versa. You know, if I'm if I'm Microsoft, I can afford to spend a lot of money on on something that doesn't work out. If I'm, you know, a brand new startup, that's that's the end. So, so, you know. It's it's it's all it's relative, it requires discernment, it's you know, it's this is not a an instruction manual so much as a thinking guide. James: we also need to respect other people's impression of failure, other Amy Edmondson: Yeah. James: people's discernment of the situations around them, which takes a huge amount of empathy to be able to Amy Edmondson: Yes. James: respect those situations. If a company came to you and said, are struggling with psychological safety, people aren't taking risks, we're not innovating, what would be the best thing or maybe one or two of the best things you would say, okay, if you just want to just go nuclear on psychological safety, here are the things that you should do as an organization. Amy Edmondson: Well, if someone came to me and said that first I would say, I apologize. because I think I have failed to convey, you know, in my enthusiasm about the research on psychological safety, I've failed to convey how hard it is. Right. So I've I I'm now encounter many organizations where they say, you know, we've been thinking about this and working on this for a while, and we're still not there. So like what's wrong with us? It's like, I forgot to say, you're human. you know. What's w there's nothing wrong with you. That's actually normal and natural because the cognitive and emotional and organizational forces are really pushing in the direction of low psychological safety. Our our natural desire to self for self-protection is very powerful. Our organizational hierarchies and so on. So I I I say, you know, I've failed to tell you you're swimming upstream. And then they might say, well, I don't want to swim upstream. I know you don't, but the problem is performance requires it, right? So if you want to be great, you got to swim upstream. So when it's not yet there, that's to be expected. So what do you do? And it's really just three sort of simple, simple isn't easy, but three simple things. One is refer often to the nature of the context that requires speaking up. for excellence. Like what if it's aviation, you know, refer often to the, you know, the the the safety necessity, you know, the the uncertainty, the ambition of what we are doing here, you know, 157 souls on board, you know, whatever just talk about the reality in such a way that it's clear that someone offering their thoughts is is a good thing, not a disruptive thing. Talk about, and basically that means talk about novelty, uncertainty, or complexity. you know, we've never done anything like this before. Need your ideas. Whatever. So set the stage. Number two, proactively, early and often ask good questions. Invite, this is what you're doing here. You're you are asking me questions. And I can't tell you how awkward it would feel to me. I mean, I just couldn't do it to just sit here quietly and not say anything. I couldn't do it. Right? So it's like you you've literally created the tiny demand characteristics for my voice by asking good questions. And in organizations, day in and day out, if we got more into the habit of asking people, what are you seeing? What are you thinking? What am I missing? We would just there'd be psychological safety. And then finally, and obviously respond productively to bad news or dissent or or you know mistakes, like just Thank you for telling me, or how can I help? Rather than how the heck did that happen and where did you go wrong? Right. I mean, make it as positive an experience as it can be because it's not naturally positive. So this is how you create and reinforce a culture. I now, I mean, I increasingly want to call it it's a culture of learning, right? It's a it's a culture where we acknowledge uncertainty that lies ahead and we say, How are we gonna nail it anyway? James: one of my favorite questions that I think any manager or anyone can ask is just, what do you think in any given situation? It's such a powerful question. And it's also a very fragile Amy Edmondson: What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Right. James: thing, that culture, isn't it? Because if you bring in the Amy Edmondson: It is. James: wrong person at the wrong time, you can break that very, very quickly. And that whole damage two x-ing positives comes back into play again. Amy Edmondson: Exactly. And and so that that 2X thing, that makes for a a ratcheting problem where it's quite James: Mm-hmm. Amy Edmondson: easy, you know, if you have a you know, an emotional and belittling response to someone who's just shared you know, bad news, they're not gonna be doing that again for quite some time, right? But all of the kind of productive and positive responses, that just keeps them going. It doesn't sort of multiply their willingness to do it, right? It just it just reinforces it. So That's a that's a very profound asymmetry James: Hmm. Amy Edmondson: that leads it to more easily drift down than up. James: before you go, I'd love to ask you, where can people find you, learn more about you? What's a good starting point for them? Amy Edmondson: Well, the I think the best answer to that is on the HBS Harvard Business School faculty page. All faculty have pages, and I try to keep that up to date with, you know, recent papers and articles, although I sometimes fall short, too busy doing it to sort of update it and publicize it. I am on LinkedIn, and I also do have a website, amycedmondson.com, where again I've got information about books and articles. But I am guilty of not updating it often enough. James: Well, to anyone listening as well, I'd highly recommend starting with either the Right Kind of Wrong or The Fearless Organization, both really good entry points. And I promise you'll end up reading the other one. And there's actually a third book that you've written that Amy Edmondson: Thank you. James: I've not read yet, which I think you published before The Fearless Organization, Teaming, that's the one. Yeah. Yeah. Amy Edmondson: Teaming. Yep. Long ago, long ago. but but still I think because it's about human behavior, still relevant. James: Well, thank you so much. As I said at the beginning, I've been looking forward to chatting with you for so long. You did not disappoint at all. so wonderful just to sit and listen to your thoughts. So thank you so much for your time. Thank Amy Edmondson: Very kind. James: you so much for all the work, all the research, all the contributions you've given to this space. I think you're doing some wonderful things. Amy Edmondson: Very kind of you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. James: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Disengaged. If you enjoyed it, please remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes and if possible, please give the show a rating. Finally, if you have friends or colleagues that you think might find this interesting, please let them know. This is tremendously helpful and I do appreciate it. see you next time on Disengaged.