Randstad RiseSmart is the only coaching provider that lets you offer coaching to all your employees. Their disruptive, innovative approach does away with cumbersome and expensive licenses, allowing you to be more equitable and inclusive and extend the reach of coaching for all like never before. Welcome to ATDs Talent Development Leader podcast. Featuring monthly conversations with the greatest influencers in the talent development field.
We cover the latest trends, hot topics, and future focused ideas that current and aspiring TD leaders need to know. Learn more by visiting www.td.org and searching for Talent Development Leader podcast. Welcome to ATV's Talent Development Leader podcast. I'm your guest host, Jennifer Homer, vice President of Career Development with a TD. Today we have a very special episode. We're joined by Amy C Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School.
An upcoming keynote speaker for a TD 25. She's been recognized and ranked as the number one management thinker by Thinkers 50 in 2023 and 2021, and been on their global list since 2011. Amy studies teaming psychological safety and organizational learning, and her articles have been published in many academic and management outlets. Her last book, the Fearless Organization, has been translated into 15 languages.
During our time together today, we'll be exploring the topics in Amy's new book, the Right Kind of Wrong, the Science of Failing Well. It builds on her prior work on psychological safety and teaming, and provides a framework for thinking about and practicing the science of failing. Well, Amy, welcome to the show. It's terrific to be able to talk with you today. Oh, thank you so much for having me.
I encourage everyone to join Amy, myself, and the entire A TD community in Washington, DC This May for the A TD 25 International Conference and Exposition. We're looking forward to your presentation on Tuesday, May 20th. So through today's conversation, I hope we can give listeners a sneak peek into some of the topics you'll touch on at a TD 25.
There is so much great content to unpack in your latest book, the Right Kind of Wrong, and I'm sure you're asked often about the notion of what it means to fail. Well, early in the book, you provide terrific context for why failure is both difficult for many to understand yet so important as there is a much learning and improvement that can be gained. So I'd like to start our discussion with some of the reasons failure is hard and you break down the reasons into these three categories.
One aversion, two, confusion, and three fear. So let's start with a concept of aversion. I personally felt immediately drawn to what you wrote in this section of the book as it reminded me of having an aversion to taking risks. Things like getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, putting yourself or your ideas out there. Risks that are small, medium are huge. Ultimately having faith that you've done your best, but you're still not sure what you've done, will succeed or fall apart.
Can you talk about the connection between risk taking and aversion to failure? Of course. So, you know, aversion is that spontaneous emotional reaction to failure, especially our own failures. We're less emotionally upset about other people's failures, I have to say, before you can sort of stop it and correct it. Recognizing that in some cases it's irrational. We have that spontaneous response and it's an emotional response, and because we recognize that, we know it.
We've experienced since, you know, elementary school, we are at risk of failing to take smart risks, right? Failing to try new things, failing to enter into new territory where we might experience failure. Now, you mentioned small and large and. I just wanna be clear, I am not a fan of, you know, really large consequential expensive or, you know, reputationally harmful failures. Clearly those are worth avoiding.
The whole notion of the right kind of wrong is small, smart failures that we, we can learn from, but we can't do that. As you asked in your question, when we are risk averse, when we're unwilling to take risks, we can't make progress. We can't grow and learn and develop in in new ways, and so we have to overcome our aversion to be able to do the things that are in our best interest. That makes lots of sense and it really helps people become comfortable with the learning part and the growth.
Right. About being comfortable with making, as you said, small mistakes. And I didn't say mistakes and this is, um, I hate to, uh, I hate to do this with words, but I think it actually might help and it might matter. It might help people really apply these ideas. So I define a failure as an undesired outcome, right? And that obviously covers a lot of territory, but a mistake is more precise. A mistake is. An unintended deviation from existing knowledge, practice, protocol, or recipe, right?
So it's unintended. That's what makes it a mistake. If it's intended, then it's sabotage. But if it's an unintended deviation, it can only be a mistake if we already have the knowledge we need to get the result we want. And so the kinds of risks that I really wanna encourage people to take are the kind where you don't yet have the knowledge or the ability that you need to get the result you want. So you have to take those risks.
Yes, we will come up short sometimes, and you can be a novice in an area I. And do something that would be a mistake if you were an expert, but is technically not yet a mistake for you. That's great. To clarify for everyone, do you have some advice or examples of how you start from that point of being a novice and to help somebody learn and, and take some more maybe baby steps to help you grow?
Well, you mentioned my three, the three barriers I talk about early in the book aversion confusion and fear and aversion is that emotional, spontaneous reaction, but confusion is cognitive, right? Confusion is a lack of framework or categories for sorting the, essentially the good failures from the bad. And so I think one of the ways to help people is say yes, you know, there are failures that we should work hard to avoid, and.
There are failures we must embrace if we are to grow and learn and make progress in our lives or in our fields of work. You know, I identify basically three kinds of failure, and two of them are when we're at our best preventable, but one of them, the right kind of wrong. The intelligent failure is neither preventable, nor should we want to prevent them. Why we are okay with them is because, you know, one, one of the, one of the criteria is that they're no bigger than necessary.
We're not being wasteful or reckless with resources or safety. We're experimenting in new territory, in small, safe ways. That's a great point, and I know we're gonna get into a little bit more about intelligent failures in our interview. Back to that point you just made, which I'd love to dive into in confusion.
In your book, you note some previous rhetoric around that notion, which I think many of us have heard before about fail fast, fail often, which may not be appropriate in all context or environments. But you've offered readers a way to categorize and contextualize failures based on a situation. So I'd love to hear how you describe how we can think about failures in those three ways, consistent, variable, and novel context. Why is it helpful to make sense of situations in this way?
Because I think people feel torn and understandably they feel torn between, okay, there's the happy talk about failure, the, you know, fail fast, fail off, and isn't it great? Talk about failure. And then there's some sense of, well wait a minute. Not where I work or I work in the real world. You know, failure's not an option. Or we do high stakes things or we take care of patients, or whatever it is that leads them to rightly push back against the happy talk or the rhetoric.
If you're tempted to say, well, which side is right? It's the wrong question. The right question is, under what conditions does fail fast, fail off and make sense, and under what conditions does, let's. Make sure we get this, you know? Right. As close as possible. Makes sense. And the answer to the where does fail fast, fail often and make the most sense is in what I call novel context. So as you said, there are three basic kinds of environments, work environments, but also environments in life.
And there are, they're the consistent or routine, the things that we can practically. Use a stopwatch to predict what's gonna happen when no, an automotive assembly line every 57 seconds, the little vehicle's gonna come off the end. Perfect. Or even just, you know, something more casual at home. Emptying the dishwasher, there's absolutely no reason why you can't put everything back in the right place. It has a place whereas.
In novel context, like a scientific laboratory or a startup or, you know, when you decide to, you know, learn how to throw pottery on the wheel. Mm-hmm. And it's a novel context for you. If you're expecting that it should be perfect, you are not gonna get very far in your new hobby. Right. So only in novel context where the only way to make progress is to fail fast, fail often. Mm-hmm. And probably should have said, fail small.
You know, don't bet the farm don't, don't put all your money or all your time into something that's uncertain. Just put as much as you can afford to lose. So, fail fast, fail often, or failure's not an option. They each have their place. And context is what tells us the difference. So there's consistent on one hand, novel on the other. And then right there in the middle is variable.
And the variable context are the ones, you know, like the one we're in right now where it's a lot of mature knowledge about how to produce a good podcast, you know, which platform to use and how to ask good questions. And it is a given. That it will be unique, right? That there will be small or large variables, some of which are anticipated, some of which are not. That's what makes them fun and exciting, right? Is that yeah, we've, we've got confidence here.
We know what we're doing and we don't know exactly what will happen next. And it's also a great way to experiment and try something new and interesting. Probably a lot of us who are parents want to do that with our children, which is to try something new, but in a context that is, you know, small risks, a hobby, or try something interesting you've never done before because it helps them experiment and be creative and innovative. Exactly.
And in fact, you know, I think children and adults, all of us, we need to kind of strengthen our failure muscles. And it's very instinctive. As a parent, I'm a parent, it's very instinctive to want to shield your kid from failure, like from discomfort. If you're very short son in high school comes up and says, I'm gonna try out for the basketball team, there's a part of you that wants to say, you know, you know he is not gonna get picked. Don't do it. Right.
'cause you want him not to suffer the pain of rejection. I. The right answer is stay out of it. You know, let him try out, let him not get accepted. Maybe he's got great skills and he will get accepted, but it's okay, right? If we don't have that experience of going for it and having some things work and other things not work, we really are not very well prepared for life where there will always be things that don't work out as hoped.
What great advice, those examples really help and it, to your point, it's really about building life skills and resilience too. Absolutely. I mean, for this book, for me, it was the first time I ventured talk about new territory, but ventured into the territory of writing about things that aren't just for workplaces, but that are also practices that could enhance our lives. That's awesome. That's terrific. Why don't we take the third reason and why failure is hard and that's fear.
And as you describe it, it's the emotional aversion, the fear of looking bad in the eyes of others. And I remember in this section, and many times in the book, you note the importance of learning and our audience are, are lifelong learners and they help others learn. And you said both that a fear of failure can inhibit our ability to learn. But also that importance of psychological safety in creating environments that allows people to be comfortable with trying something new and making mistakes.
Can we spend some time understanding what your research has shown and maybe providing some advice to TD professionals to help them? Understand how to establish environments. We're learning from mistakes or learning from those, you know, small risks is a natural part of the flow of work. Sure. So when I have that, you know, that little framework aversion, confusion and fear, the aversion is sort of the more emotional, the confusion is more cognitive and the fear is more social. Right.
Because it's, you know, if I'm alone in a room. And I make a little mistake. There's no fear there. I mean, I'm, I'm not embarrassed. I don't, I just, I correct it. I, I learn from it or if I fail in some way. But it's that, the fact that so many of the risks we need to take, especially in work environments, are public, if you will. They're in the context of our team or our department. And so we are, and this is a very old emotion. We are. Deeply concerned about what others think of us.
And by the time, you know, in elementary school, we start to learn that you wanna look good, not bad. You wanna have the right answers, not the wrong answers. Like we care what people think and so that, that leads us to be at risk for. Playing not to lose. for playing it safe for not taking any risks because we don't wanna look bad when we come up short. So this of course relates to my research on psychological safety. That's why it's in there. If you're really going to, um, innovate or fail.
Well, as I like to say. You're going to have to have a kind of a socially safe environment, a psychologically safe environment where you're candid, you're speaking up, you're asking for help, you're admitting mistakes, you're willing to point out others' mistakes, and you're willing to fail, you know, preferably in, in smart ways. So there's a great deal that can be said about how do you build those.
Types of, I think the best way to talk about it is how do you build a learning environment, right? How do you build an environment where people mutually know we don't have it yet. We don't have all the answers. We're, we're here to learn. We're here to try things, we're here to share information because you know, things I don't know, and vice versa. You know? We're not here to look good. We're here to learn and grow so we can perform on behalf of our.
Company. And I think the professionals who are listening to us now, it's their job to increase the chances that people in their organization can do this. And I, I think that helping is a combination of things, right? There isn't just one tool in the toolbox. There's offering formal programs or other materials that help people do independent learning. And then, you know, actual classroom learning or. Experiential learning.
There's training people, managers at all levels in the skill of high quality conversations and good feedback. You know, giving people good performance information about where they're doing well, where they need to, you know, improve some skills, not as a bad thing, but as an absolute necessity for success in a changing world. I love what you said about we're not necessarily here to look good. We're here to learn and we're here to learn from each other.
And that's really what, you know, growth is all about, right? But we so want to look good, like at a very deep desire, right? Well, we have to either get over it or we have to realize that in today's world, looking good is something different than it used to be. In today's world, looking good isn't like, here I am. I'm perfect. I get it right every time. In today's world looking good is being a learner.
It's like being that person who's willing to try something, being that person who goes, oops, I got that wrong. Well, that's interesting. What do we learn from that? Those people are quite attractive and quite compelling, and we have to help people see that. That's the kind of person you wanna show up as a learner, a learn it all, not a know it all as Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Put it. That's terrific. Love that advice.
There are so many stories in your book, Amy, of failures, big and small, some life changing, and all of them, to me, very moving in their own way, and I'd like to spend our time together now on another crucial concept of your book, really the. The main focus of your book, which is what does it mean to fail? Well, can you explain to listeners what an intelligent failure is and why? Continuing to practice the habits and the mindsets of intelligent failures are so important throughout our lives.
Yes. So an intelligent failure. Here's my short definition. It's the undesired result of a thoughtful foray into new territory. Now, to get more precise, I identify four criteria, or maybe four and a half. You'll see what I meet. So the four criteria that make a failure intelligent are number one. It's in new territory. There is no way to just skip to the end and get it right. Right. It's new territory.
We don't yet have, or you don't yet have the knowledge you need to get the result you're trying to get. Number two, it's in pursuit of a goal. You're not just messing about for the fun of it. Nothing against messing about for the fun of it, but this is something else. So you're in pursuit of a goal, maybe to improve a skill, maybe to start a new company, whatever it is. Number three, you've done your homework so you're not just throwing darts at the wall. You have good reason to believe.
This might work, this experiment, if you will, might work. And number four, the one that is often missed in, in, uh, some company settings is it's no larger than necessary, right? So the failure is preferably small. Certainly we're not at risk of losing more resources than we can afford to lose, right? So it's what you're, what the discernment here is try to figure out how to get the learning that we don't yet have without. Excessive reputational, financial or safety risks.
So, you know, it's new territory, pursuit of a goal, done your homework, no bigger than necessary. And the last one is, of course, take the time to learn from it. Right? If you fail, don't just say, okay, okay, I'll, I'll try harder next time. No. Pause, what do we set out to do? What actually happened? What's the difference and why? What will I try next? Like be systematic, be scientific about it. But I know there's many stories in the book.
So many, and they're all different and unique and terrific in their own way. Is there a specific story in the book that you feel like on that intelligent failure side that you feel like really emulates going through all of the steps you just talked about? Well, you know, it's funny because the other, the preventable failures are in a way easier to talk about, um, because they're, you know, they're, they're sort of like, oh look, this was wrong and that was wrong.
But the, the intelligent failure, so I opened the book with my own intelligent failure, and then I opened the chapter on intelligent failures with a scientific failure in a lab and, and. Actually mine is sort of a scientific failure too. Social science failure, the other's a chemistry, science failure. But research is the quintessential context for intelligent failures. That doesn't mean we can't have them in our, we do.
In fact, we must have them in our lives to enrich our lives and enrich our skills. But I suppose my own failure is a little bit more fun as a story because the failure in the lab is more, you know, it's sort of complicated to explain what the scientific. Hypothesis was, and then the fact that it didn't work, it's a little dull.
Whereas my own was me as a second year PhD student, uh, doing a study under supervision, doing a study of teamwork and adverse drug events or error induced bad outcomes for patients in the hospital. And my hypothesis was that better teams using a validated team diagnostic survey. The teams that scored higher on team effectiveness in a variety of ways would have lower error rates because of the better coordination, better communication and and so forth.
And so, you know, that seemed pretty straightforward to me. I collected the survey data. Trained medical investigators were visiting the units day by day to get as much information as they could about the errors that were happening and. Fast forward six months. I get the data, I correlate the results. First thing I notice is that I have a statistically significant correlation. That's great. So I'm feeling pretty good for a second and a half when I then realize that the. Sign on.
The correlation is in the wrong direction. In other words, the data seemed to be saying that the better teams did not have lower error rates. They had higher error rates, right? So let's just call it what it is. I had failed. I had failed to support my hypothesis, and it felt emotionally devastating. I mean, I literally started thinking about, you know, when I drop out of graduate school, since I'm clearly not good at research, you know, what will I do?
Next, what other things might I do with my life? Fortunately, I did what you're supposed to do, which is pause and think and say, okay, I wonder why this might have happened. And then it suddenly occurred to me that at least a plausible explanation for the unexpected undesired result I. Was that the better teams, they might not be making more mistakes. They might be reporting more mistakes. Right.
They might be more willing, particularly given the nature of the work and how important it is, they might be the kinds of teams and the kinds of people who were just willing to do this hard thing of speak up about error. Mm-hmm. And the others might have been. More likely to height and not speak up. Right. So that was just a hypothesis. Now I won't go through the rest of the story.
People can read it in the book if they want, but it, it, it was not just having that insight was a far cry from proving it. Ultimately, I was able to collect. Supplementary data that showed this was a pretty plausible explanation of the unexpected results that, in fact, what I had stumbled into quite by accident was palpable differences in interpersonal climate across groups in the same organization. Like the same organization with very strong, you know, culture, et cetera.
High standards, all the rest. But interpersonal climate varied from team to team. Right. And, and that was interesting and ultimately. I called that interpersonal climate psychological safety. But at the time, I varied between calling it like threat tolerance or you know, like people just interpersonal threat tolerance. And it was like a blinding flash of the obvious.
Ultimately, an individual might be able to learn from their mistakes, but a team can't learn from mistakes if no one's willing to speak up about them. So then I started this whole passionate pursuit of how do we help? Teams be in environments where people can speak up about mistakes. 'cause it's interpersonally threatening. We have a natural aversion to it. And the, I mean the great thing about it is a failure story is that it was clearly a failure. Yes. New territory.
Yes. In pursuit of a goal, you know, an academic publication, that's what you need to. Be in my business. I had good reason to believe it would work. I had a good hypothesis and even though it didn't feel like it at the time, it wasn't a gigantic failure. It was just a good sized failure, and I learned from it. And what's really great about it is what I learned from it opened a new door. My original hypothesis was in a way less interesting than the research.
I stumbled into and started to pursue after that, which is, are there differences in psychological safety across teams? And if so, does it affect learning behavior? And if so, does it affect team performance? And the answer to all three of those questions is yes, yes, yes. I love the story.
I love all the stories in your book, Amy, but what I find to be so fascinating about how you describe this is that not only did you learn so much from that, and probably for a lot of organizations, it opens the doors, as you just said, to many ahas, to many other things that you might uncover in a company, in a team for other things. So it not only leads you to one piece of learning, but it can also lead you to a lot of other.
Things that you might uncover and learn from that are unexpected and that you didn't even plan for, which I think is probably one of the most interesting things, right? And success doesn't give you that right when you, when you have a success. It's what you expected. It's what you wanted. So it's just, there you are. You haven't really learned, you know, you've proved something, but you haven't really learned something in quite the same way.
And probably for a lot of people who think about that or companies who've experienced it. In teams, those can be transformational. One project you start with, but it is a transformational event. Right, right. For a team and an organization, which is truly a big deal. It is. And in an uncertain, fast changing world. Most project, I mean, you should expand. Expect pivots, right? You should expect stumbling blocks along the way, or failures along the way that bring new, valuable information.
That mean you have to sort of take a left turn or a right turn and pursue something different. So, you know, most projects that are at least reasonably new and innovative. Are going to suffer changes along the way. Sure. Makes me think about the necessity for a lot of us to be curious and to be curious about what you are learning and what you are seeing about the data in front of you. Exactly.
In fact, one of the things I try to remind myself all the time is, you know, is to actively choose learning because otherwise you spontaneously choose knowing. I got this. I see reality. No, I don't. I see a version of reality that's biased based on my expertise, my backgrounds, my priors, and, and so if I can actively override that sense of knowing with a desire to actually learn, which is a curiosity, then I'm better off. And if I'm working with you, you're better off, right?
I would love to end our time together today. Maybe on a fun note too, not that we haven't had fun together, we have, um, but a fun example perhaps for our listeners. In the book, but also in a lot of your content, you give some great advice to everyone about trying new things and about learning from mistakes. But when the stakes are low, right? How can we practice, all of us practice this at home through our hobbies, with our kids, with our friends and family?
What's some advice you have for that? Well, let me go back to our discussion of, you know, three basic kinds of context, right? You know, consistent, variable and novel. And in order to sort of, you know, progress in your life and have opportunities to learn new things and master new things, you're looking deliberately for some novel context where you can't yet say, yeah, I've got this, I've mastered it. This is new, either new to the world or new for me.
And so in those novel contexts, you accept at the outset. The not only possibility, but the inevitability of some failures along the way. So you're okay with that. And then the other dimension, we have this horizontal dimension, if you will, of consistent variable, novel. But then the other dimension is what are the stakes? You know, whether economically, reputationally, or from a human safety point of view, and with very high stakes. But high novelty. Do not go crazy experimenting, right?
We don't want pilots at 30,000 feet learning a new skill. Do that in the simulator where it's the exact same experience, but the stakes are low, no one can get hurt. So in our lives, I mean, whether it's in the kitchen or on the sports field, or you know, uh, in the art studio, you know, wherever it is that you would love to stretch and grow. Find those areas of novelty and do a check to say, yeah, what are the stakes? Really remind yourself.
'cause you can feel like, oh, it would be awful if I'm terrible at it. No, it wouldn't be. It would be just fine. In fact, it's expected. And so to remind yourself and make sure it's true that the stakes are low, and then have fun with it. Right? Have fun experimenting. It can be more playful when the stakes are low. What a great idea. So trying something new, a hobby that you haven't. Picked up before, but have said to yourself forever, I've always wanted to try this.
I've always wanted to do this. Or encouraging, you know, your family members to do the same or to try it out, which sort of puts yourself out there and you know, gets that to that curiosity level as well. Yeah, which is great. Take more risks. Right. But again, not stupid risks, smart risks. And with your kids, you know, there's a difference between, you know, you want them to experience some failures.
There's a difference between letting them run out into the street after a lost ball and letting them try out for the team where they might get rejected. Right. Or my son Jack took a summer job doing door-to-door sales. I mean, I thought, oh my God, I should tell him not to do it. 'cause he's gonna get rejected. I. He did it and he got a lot of rejection and enjoyed it. Not the rejection.
No one enjoys rejection, but he really enjoyed the experience and he learned, and he also really was excited about the sales he did make. I like what you said about that because it's also helping to model that behavior that you want. You're showing other people or you're showing your kids that you are.
You know, stepping out beyond your comfort zone and trying something new, and to your point, something that is learning from something small, but something that is easy to try, even though, you know, maybe that's a fear of yours. You know, maybe you don't like heights, but you're gonna try something new, like a ropes course or whatever. Something that you. Are going to try and accomplish and maybe, you know, model that behavior for someone else. Absolutely.
I love the ropes course is a great analogy or a great experience for feeling that fear of failure, but in such a safe environment, you know, such a right full, redundant safety equipment all over the place, but your emotions are still real and then you realize, oh, it's actually okay. Like it's okay to stretch and look how people are supporting me. Sure, yes. That's awesome. Last item, we often ask all of our guests this question on the Talent Development Leader podcast.
What is something that has you curious right now or a moment that makes you go, huh? Or Aha, is there anything that comes to mind? Something related to your area of expertise that has you curious? Well, I am enormously curious right now about how we can, you know, fully engage employee hearts and minds in this very new, far more chaotic, faster changing, more distributed world of work.
And so I thinking about this question a great deal and I, and obviously there's a lot of things I have some confidence in, but there's a lot of curiosity. About how, you know, what is the role of purpose, what's the role of culture? What's the role of growth and learning, you know, and then ultimately what's the role of the material aspects of where and how and when you work. And much more importantly than just those separate factors, how do they interrelate?
So I'm really curious about the system of factors that engage employees to help us as organizations really accomplish great things. That's great. I know it's curiosity, I'm sure for a lot of people in the talent development and uh, a TD community as well, and we are very much looking forward to seeing you and welcoming you to the stage at a TD 25 in Washington. This May, and thank you Amy, so much for our discussion today. It's been insightful.
It's been with great purpose and I'm very excited to see you and hear you talk more at our conference. And I encourage our listeners to check out Amy's new book, the right kind of wrong, and to join us for what will be an outstanding learning experience at a TD 25 and also on Tuesday May 20th. When you can hear Amy on stage, you can learn more about the conference on our website@td.org. Have a terrific day, everyone, and we look forward to seeing you soon.
So, yeah, you know, may, for the longest time it just seemed so far off, but it is not far off anymore. I know. Here it is, the warm weather and uh, I know, and may, may is coming up. We really appreciate your time. Thank you. And thank you for pleasure this, um, make it happen today. So glad we could do it. Thank you for listening to this podcast by the Association for Talent Development. If you found this show insightful or useful.
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