Failing well includes a healthy portion of risk taking in pursuit of things that you care about. Take more smart risks and be okay with the fact that they don't all pan out because they're risks, right, They're experiments. They're not supposed to all work. And in fact, if everything always works out as planned, you're not taking enough risks.
Today. I'm so excited to welcome Amy Edmondson to the podcast. Amy is a professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School, and she is ranked number one this year on the Prestigious Thinkers fifty list. Amy is such
a legend in my field. I first came across her work when she came up with her idea of psychological safety, which is a concept that has been really powerful in the workplace to empower people to speak their truth and to challenge structures and systems and powers that need to be challenged, and also just for people in the workplace to feel safe to work there and feel safe to express what they think is working and what they don't
think is working. So her work has been so seminal in helping us understand the importance of psychological safety in the workplace. But today's episode really focused on her new book, which is the idea of failing well. And this is such an important idea, you know, the idea that we can take smart risks in our life, and that risk taking in pursuit of the things you care about should
be encouraged. There's one idea that really stood out to me in this whole interview, and that choose to play a game where you fail more often than you succeed. If you just decide that that's the game you're going to play in life, then all these seeming failures that you accrue in your life are not something to shun or not something to be upset about. It looks like the thumbs up just automatically happened there. That's pretty cute.
If you decide to play that game in life, all the sort of failures that come your way are things that are not things to fear. She makes a lot of really clever and nuanced distinctions between failures and errors, talks about three different archetypes, three different awareness zones. But the bottom line of this whole episode is that failure often brings us value. It brings us new perspectives, it brings us new knowledge, and we can have fun. You know,
we can have fun from failure. I mean, failure isn't inherently fun, but we can try to make it fun. You know, it's part of life. At the very least, we can just accept that it's part of life. We can help people reframe failure as a part of learning and it does not have to be a source of shame. So I really think that this episode will give you all the practical tools that you'll need to fail well. Lots of implications here for society, education, the work place,
for parents. So let's get into it already without further ado, I bring you Amy Edmundson. Amy Edmundson. So we did have it, Yeah, we did. Thank you for coming on the Psychology Podcast.
My pleasure and.
Huge congratulations to you for topping the Thinkers fifty ranking. That is huge. Although I have a feeling it wasn't your first year that you toppt.
That it was my second time, but I was stunned, flabbergasted even so, thank you.
Well, it's quit quite an accomplishment, but it just reflects your incredible career that you've had so far. And this new book is really cool. I mean, I'm a longtime fan of your work on psychological safety, right, and this going into this territory Now, I'm wondering, I'm wondering when you started to get into this territory. You know, when did your research start to when did your attention start to go in that direction?
But you know, it's really all of a piece. It's it's it's it's there's one big, integrated whole. And I can zoom in, you know, like a fractal on psychological safety. I can zoom in on failure, I can zoom in on teaming and collaboration. But my overarching desire has always been how to help people in organizations learn in a
world that keeps changing. And because early on in my graduate career I sort of stumbled into the chance to study mistakes and failures in the healthcare setting, that's actually how I got to psychological safety rather than the other way around.
Oh that's interesting. Tell me a little bit more about your background then, Like what was your dissertation about.
Well, my dissertation was called Psychological Safety and Learning in Work Teams, and actually it was a group in Organizational Influences on Learning in Work Teams, and psychological safety was sort of a centerpiece of it, and it came about quite by accident. I was part of a large study of medication errors. And the reason I was interested in that because I understood the basic idea that we have to learn from mistakes. Teams have to learn from mistakes,
organizations have to learn from mistakes. So I was happy enough to join this project. And what happened was I discovered that there were and this wasn't what I set out to look to look at, but I discovered that there were remarkable differences across work teams in their willingness to talk about error, in their ability to speak up when they didn't know what to do or when they thought someone was doing something wrong. And this I later
called psychological safety. And you know, I was interested in it primarily because it was a precondition for learning. If teams can't if you can't speak up about mistakes, you can't learn from them. If you can't speak up, uh, and and sort of ask for help from someone, you're not you're not learning. So so it was it was basically learning from the beginning. Yeah it's all connected, Yeah,
it's all connected. And it was, and it was you know, the role of of of failures and mistakes was always just such a big part of it as well.
Yeah, and that's the new topic. It's the topic of this book and in your most recent book. And we'll definitely get there. Since I've never had you in my podcast before, I'd love to spend a couple of minutes just talking about psychological safety. Absolutely, I'd feel remiss if I didn't totally. So, how do you define psychological safety?
Is it is? It is the primary component there being feeling safe to speak up in a in a corporation or a company kind of situation where you might feel a lot of pressure to stay silent or client.
Yes, it's it's it's a belief that your context is safe for interpersonal risks, primarily the interpersonal risks of speaking up with an idea, a question, a concern, a mistake, a dissenting view, all of those sort of utterances that are interpersonally challenging. You know, it's never easy to say something, either at work or in other contexts in our lives that might lead someone else to not think well of you.
We have a natural instinct to self protect and we don't want to look ignorant and competent and trusive or negative, so we will generally err on the side of let's wait and see, right if I think you're doing something wrong there, rather than quickly point that out as it would be sort of natural to do. In some sense, I don't want you to think less well of me, so I hold back. So psychological safety describes the rather unusual environment where you really do believe your voice is welcome.
Not that it's easy or effortless to speak up with potentially contra virtual ideas or when you've made a mistake, but that you believe it's welcome, it's expected, it's what we do around here. So that's psychological safety. And primarily I've studied it in the work context, in the context of people who are interdependent in getting in getting work done.
Yeah. Yeah, And as much as I think that it's important to keep your politics out of the workplace, we're becoming a really really increasingly fractionated society. Really concerns me, you know, especially in America. And I don't know how familiar are with Jonathan Height's work on viewpoint diversity. I was wondering how you've linked maybe this idea of viewpoint diversity to psychological safety.
It's very related, and I in fact I've done. I've done some work, not enough, but some work on and I teach. I teach this material often on how to ensure high quality decisions are made in complex, uncertain environments, which requires viewpoint diversity to have come into the conversation, and in part, when psychological safety isn't present, and a variety of other reasons, people will often you know, they want to be likable, they want to be friendly, what
have you. They will they will hold back their their differing views. So viewpoint diversity is an absolutely essential element of high quality decisions under uncertainty, and yet a lack of psychological safety and also a desire to you know, be likable or look good in front of especially high status others will lead people to withhold their their opinions. So yes, right, there's there's there's there are real connections here between these different ideas.
Yeah, because I think, like on college campuses right now, I think a lot of Republicans feel don't feel psychological safety. You know, It's just depends on what the context as we're talking about.
Yeah, or let's I mean, let's it's it's I'm not sure anybody feels terribly psychologically safe. You know, from any any sort of political perspective, in terms of the stakes have gotten higher, right, the stakes for if you say something wrong, you're now subject to you know, cancel culture or or or worse. And and so I think there
are we've created a very fraught interpersonal environment. This is tricky, right because I guess I started my research career and most of it is still this way looking at the work environment and really looking at the things we have to talk about so that we can get the work done, so that we can make if we're you know, an executive team, so that we can make good strategic decisions, if we're a new product development team, so that we can include the features that customers most want, and if
we're taking care of patients, again speaking up quickly to make sure we don't give the wrong drug, the wrong dose, etc. So I've been I have been primarily interested in the work and what it takes, which I think is a lot to do work well, especially interdependent work. And you know, it seems odd in a way that people would hold back work relevant observations concerns, but they do. You know, even people have trained as engineers. I have plenty of
evidence of this. Will we'll hold back. I think it's a different phenomenon also important, and I'd love to sort of think aloud with you on it, but that of people feeling that it's no longer safe to express their political views, and because I mean maybe on a college campus that sort of is the work, or if you're in a course of political science course, that is the work. So yes, absolutely, and you know, a thoughtful facilitation of
a good conversation may help. There's so many ways we can go with this, because what's what's coming into my mind is this is not just or maybe not even primarily a psychological safety problem. It's primarily a quality of discourse problem. Most most people have not learned the skills to have productive conversations, conversations that Chris Arduus might think about as truly learning oriented where they where we are
balancing advocacy and inquiry. That means statements and questions, where we are are using high quality advocacy and high quality in qui, which means we're not stuck at the top of a ladder of inference, debating or even offering our conclusions. You know, this guy's terrible, or you know whatever, right we're we're offering evidence and data, and we're walking through
our reasoning to try to help people. Like, if I see something, you know, if I see something differently than you, My natural spontaneous response is to say I'm right and you're wrong. But a more thoughtful, learning oriented response is to say, I wonder why I think X, and you think why. I'd like to walk through my thinking with you and tell you some of the some of the evidence, some of the facts, some of the data that I tend to look at, and I know it's selected from
a vast amount of data. I'm sure you're looking at some different ones and maybe some of the same. Like, let's walk through our thinking together and see if as a result we can both learn more. We don't do that very often. People haven't learned the skills to do that, and so they get stuck at the top of the letter of inference with their conclusions, saying it's not safe for me to express my conclusions.
Yeah, and in that spirit, let's continue that conversation. Because I was trying to think of a specific examples to make this concrete. Yeah, it seems to me like a big problem is when the company has sacred certain sacred cows that can't be challenged. To me, that's what I'm thinking of. So I'm thinking of examples like DEI. DEI
programs are sacred cows in some companies. Now it's taboo for someone in the company to say, actually, I don't think the way we're going about it is effective, you know, And so how do you hold a space for dissenting opinions when a certain sacred cow of the company in a certain way. I guess that's what I'm thinking.
Yeah, I mean, so I think that's a great a great examples. So if you know, if I don't, if I worry, I mean, if I am under the belief that the way we're going about our DEI program isn't working, if it's a valid belief, it comes from somewhere. So I think I have a responsibility, maybe first alone and then together to think through why do I think that? Like what what are my concerns? And then I need to express them in the following way. Right, I have
some concerns about how we're going about this policy. I'd love to share them with you and and and hear your reactions, because I'd love to learn more from how you see it. Let's say if you see it, if you see it differently, so it's not coming and saying oh, I think this is you know, bunk, and it's not safe to say so, so I'm just going to shut up and write it out. That's neither a terribly learning
oriented nor a terribly responsible stance. Now, what I'm asking us and people to do is really hard because it means we have to first have the discipline to pause and examine our own thinking, like, how did I get here? How did I get to the conclusion or maybe the tentative conclusion that this program is is failing us or is not a not serving a productive end. And I've got to have something that's leading me to think that, right, I mean, and it could be I mean, it could
let's let's think, let's think of possibilities. Or it could be that, you know, many of the people I know who are in my dominant group are are feeling, maybe rightly or wrongly, that they now are not welcome to apply for certain jobs because they're being reserved for for other people who are not in their group. Let's talk
about that. Let's let's let's let's let's test it and explore what the if that's true, what are the implications of that, If that's not true, how do we help them understand that it's not true so that they put their hat in the ring. You know, I'm trying to get concrete here, but I think we've gotten so good at jumping up to our conclusions and then sticking with them and believing they're either welcome or unwelcome, and then
saying we're stuck. We're not stuck. We're you know, we're fallible human beings who need to be good learners.
And that attitude that you just described as scene in every direction, which doesn't cause great progress of no on either side.
No, it creates stagnation and stuckness.
It's a really good point. So it seems like a lot of it has to do with the manner in which you voice your descent.
You know.
Yeah, there is really high quality research showing that diversity training programs backfire, and that's really problematic.
It's yeah, absolutely, it's high quality. Thinking of Frank Dobbin and others, it's very high quality also very so very macro. Right, They're they're getting data, which is what you do if you're doing research. You want to make a thoughtful conclusion about a large number of entities. You need a lot,
a lot of data from many different organizations. So that kind of research gives us very robust conclusions about let's say that statement that these programs aren't working right, but they don't tell us very much about what's really going on with those programs and and how what's that? What's the quality of the programming and how well led are they and how have they been framed, and how have
they been introduced? Have they been a checkbox activity or have they been you know, the result of really high quality dialogue.
That is that is.
Genuinely trying to do the hard work of making a more fair world. And I suspect, and you'd need some qualitative research to get at those details. And I suspect more often than not, the answer is that the programs are not high quality enough, not because those were not well intentioned, good people, but because this is very hard to do well. So my takeaway from that, I think really important research is we've got work to do in making the quality of our interventions actually serve our aims well.
Yeah, I mean, that's an excellent point. And then there's also philosophical disagreements about whether or not ideological core blindness is a better approach, right than focusing everyone's attention on race differences in a workplace. And that's a separate issue, that's more philosophical, it is.
Yeah, and you're right. I mean it comes back to philosophy or values. And I think reasonable people can disagree on what you prioritize and when, and and that I think is the kind of debates we should be having. And I would agree with your premise, I think your implicit premise, which is we're not having.
Those not having honest discussions.
Right, We're just sort of leaping over sometimes to kind of all or either and all or nothing and and and and it's not it's not working.
It's not what we're whatever we're doing is not working right right, right, right right. So anyway, your work, we can put up all there, and we can go into your new work. But I did want to.
I'm so glad you raised it actually because I do think something needs to be written on this, because people have been kind of in the hallways and on the you know, in audiences, in the in the pit afterwards, people will come up and say, yeah, but it's not safe for.
Me anymore, exactly right.
And I empathize, and I never have quite enough time to say, let's really get into this, like let's see we might you know, what might be done. Can't do that in the thirty second sort of you know, meet and greet.
Yeah, I mean, I think that these these contexts of power can can change in a dime. You know. I don't think that there as static as possible where we say like, well, if you're this group, then you're victimized forever. If you're this group, you're never victimized. I mean, I think that depending is very contextual.
Yeah, and we're all, you know, in some ways, we're all victims at the points, you know, and and and victims of doors, victors at others. But but what's never particularly useful for us, and this does take us into the failure topic. It's never a particularly healthy stance, the victim stance, even under those conditions when it is entirely true.
Meaning man search for meaning, Victor Frankel, you know, at Auschwitz, right, there's no better you know, moment of truly being a victim of forces way outside your control, and his deep and brilliant recognition was there is a space between stimulus and response right, And in that space lies our freedom and our power right, and and that that they cannot take away from me, my ability to choose my response right, and to choose and to look around at the incredible
courage and suffering and strength and magnificence of some of the people he was with and envision a better future for all of us. That was all he could do. But he did that, right, And that's I mean, that's an extreme case, But it's an extreme case that illustrates that the opposite I guess, you know. But the when when we instead decide or don't decide, but get stuck in the victim mindset, we really lose our our power and our opportunity to create something better.
Really speaking my language here in this new book, you talk about failing well, Well, did Victor francl fail well in a way?
Well? He succeeded brilliantly. Yeah, I mean he was. He was let's say, I don't think I would argue that he failed. Uh, he was in a deeply and profoundly large failure systemstemic failure. You know that that had many, many opportunities to have redirected it. You know, years and years earlier, but not not opportunities that Victor Frankel himself was in charge of. But he was an unwitting participant in this massive societal failure and made better psychological choices
than most. And so in that sense, he was navigating failure.
Well, I love that he was navigating a system of failure. Well, you know, I was trying to think of a meta's kind of view of what does failure mean? Yeah, what does even? What? What if you just don't interpret anything as failure? Like what if you just refuse to even have that vocabulary? And so everything that there's a feels like a setback is actually sure growth spotder for growth.
You know that it's true. It's you know, nature includes failure. We all, you know, death is failure when we I mean, we have it's part. In other words, I'm agreeing with you that the word may be problematic, right, because the the word means an undesired outcome. We wanted something else, we got this. So it's you know, the project was supposed to succeed, but it failed, and and and yet that's our narrow, you know, human perspective. I wanted, you know,
I wanted that project to succeed. But but you know, the universe didn't want it to succeed, so therefore it's you know, it's it depends on perspective, right, it's the from the perspective of universe, maybe that's not a failure. But that's that's well beyond my pay grade.
Mm hmm. Well that's fair enough. Well we can let's stick with the way you frame it in your book. There you say there are many reasons why we hate failure. One aversion. You know, we have this emotional, visceral response. Probably evolution designed us that way from confusion. When we don't have a healthy relationship with our failure, I can confuse us in fear, which is the obviously the social stigma.
Have you found in your research that one of those three seems to be most prominent among humans?
Well, you know, I think I have a biased perspective because I've been most interested in the interpersonal realm. So in a way, those are those three, those three sort of factors that lead us to have an unhealthy relationship, you know, the aversion, confusion, and fear. Aversion is kind
of a spontaneous emotional response, and confusion is cognitive. You know, we are we don't always do a good job between sorting, you know, distinguishing between like lovely discoveries and new territory and you know, you know, stupid mistakes that we make.
So but the but the third one is the one that I'm I think because of my lens, because of my long standing interests, because I look at organizations and teams, which is the the the interpersonal domain is the one I'm most interested in and often the one that seems most challenging to fix. And and that is the you know that that very real worry about what other people think of me. And I want to look good, not bad.
I want to look like a success, not a failure, and so you know, I do everything I can to kind of avoid the looking bad.
My friend Michael Gervai just wrote a book. He coined this term called FOPO Fear of People's Opinions.
I love that.
Yeah, yeah, it just came out, so it's fresh in my mind and I'm going to be having him on my podcast soon. It's a really cool book. Yeah, I can see it relating to this very much, I guess, you know, so much of it does come down to the framing though, you know, like that you're a failure. You know, so many people I think, deep down, maybe based in childhood trauma or whatever, whatever past experiences one has had, we think we are like our existence is a failure, and so we do all these You see
this a lot in hyper over competitive, hyper achievement cultures. Actually, just go to the gym and you'll see, yeah, absolutely, yeah, I mean we we work over compensation.
We're over compensation. You know, we're working so very hard, you know, to be a success in the minds of others. And maybe we should start with, you know, just being this first, being being okay with who we are, you know,
being being okay. But but I think we shouldn't just be complacent, like we should be okay with who we are, because you know, we do our best to make a positive difference in the lives of either the people in our family or or more more broadly, we're fighting a good fight and and we're doing our best, and we're not always succeeding, of course, but we can we can feel good about it.
So well, how can how can people overcome this?
Uh?
You know, how can they fail? Well?
Well, failing, Well, here's how I think about it. It's it's let's let me start with the good kind of failure, the the the kind that scientists do for a living, and those are I call them intelligent failures. And I would say failing well means having more intelligent failures in your life. And intelligent failures are still undesired results of thoughtful experiments in or thoughtful forays into into new territory.
So to be intelligent, it has to be in pursuit of a goal in territory where you can't just you can't avoid it by doing your homework. You do your homework to have a thoughtful hypothesis or a good reason to believe that what you're about to do might work. And then you you want to keep it as small as possible. And so that's that describes anything from trying to make a new friend, you know, going on a blind date, to a project at work, to a scientific experiment.
You know, it covers a lot of territory. But we may be a better way to put this psychologically is take more risks, right, take but take more smart risks. You know, don't run out into traffic in search of a lost ball. Take more smart risks and be okay with the fact that they don't all pan out because they're risks, right, they're experiments, they're not supposed to all work. And in fact, if everything always works out as planned,
you're not taking enough risks. You're not stretching, you're not growing. So failing well includes a healthy portion of risk taking in pursuit of things that you care about. It also includes best practices to avoid preventable what i'll call basic failures, as well as to try to get out ahead of and prevent and mitigate complex failures.
Wow, so you have three archetypes you just described the failure. It's basic, complex, and intelligent. Right where do you come you come up with that? When do you come up with this stuff?
You know? I came up with it years ago, actually, well about a decade ago, more a little more than a decade ago. I was asked to do a talk I was at. Teresa Moveley asked me to come do a talk in her creativity conference.
I love her and I do too.
She's such a gem. And so I thought, I know, I'm going to talk about failure because I was really interested. I've always been interested in innovation. That was also interested in you know, medication errors and organizational learning. So I thought, I'll give a talk about failure. Then I thought, oh my gosh, you know, like I have to figure out what I want to say. So I went through all the case studies, all the research that I'd done, and said,
you know, can I categorize this in some way? And I did, and then I wrote this Harvard Business Review article about it. But it really was, you know, it was a conceptual categorization that was I would say, from qualitative research, like making that different category. I'm also married to a scientist, so that helps, right, I think about you know, I asked him what percent of failures in your lab? He's a stem cell scientist, you know, end
in failure. And he thought about it, you know, quite seriously, and he said, I think about seventy percent. Seventy percent of the experiments that the young scientists in his lab were running would not pan out, would end in failure. And you know, I started to think about it, So how do you get out of bed in the morning? And the answer is, of course, the thirty percent are pretty exciting, and many of them lead to great publications
or occasionally to actual therapies to to cure diseases. So it's you get out of bed in the morning despite those bad odds because A the upside is really worth it, and B you train yourself to understand that that's the game you've chosen to play, because you're in new territory. Literally, you have chosen to play a game where more often than not you'll fail. Right, you'll fail more often than
you'll succeed. And and so you think differently. And one of the things I think all of us need to or could sort of get from the scientists in our lives is to think more like them, you know, and less like nineteenth century industrialists who believe you can just sort of say here's the target, then hit it, or you know, here's our ten year plan and then we'll meet it. It's like, no, we don't live in that world anymore.
That's a really good point. Yeah, I fear sometimes I need to think less like a scientist just to communicate with other humans.
Well there's that, but whatever, do you know? Think about possibilities, think about where you might be wrong, Think of your actions more as hypotheses than as guaranteed plans. You know that there will always work.
I knew what you meant, Amy, I was making a joke and it was a good one, you know the supermarket. You know, like, statistically this product is not going to do well for my cholesterol. People like, we don't care about that. But anyway, okay, what is the difference between mistakes, errors, and failures.
Well, I treat mistakes and errors as synonymous. One is more academic sounding than the other. But mistakes are deviations from known practices, procedures, or policies. There is established knowledge in place to get the results you want to get, and you deviate from it by mistake, you know, without without intention, and that's a mistake. Failures can be caused by mistakes, but they can also be simply a hypothesis that was wrong, it didn't pan out. So failure is
a larger term, it covers more territory. It's any it's any undesired outcome, whereas a mistake is a particular kind of undesired outcome. And of course some mistakes you make a mistake, but it's like minuscule and it doesn't it doesn't actually affect anything, so it's it's technically a mistake, but there was no real consequence of it. So so no failure.
Who invented the concept of failure, isn't that interesting? Questions? Yeah, Like, if you go back in human history, was it school systems with tests, like you failed the test? Like, I wonder if that's Yeah, you.
Can't have failure without some you know, without some definition of success, right, Yeah, Yeah, so probably it probably came out in pretty early language, even before school systems. But as you you know, let's say you're you know, you're trying to find a mate and the one that you have your eye on goes off with someone else, Right, you'd probably feel that as a failure and you'd pivot and you'd try something else.
But you probably I bet we had that that conception of you know, disappointing outcome pretty early.
Yeah. Probably, But I'm wondering when language arose. When when did the word what's the root of failure? Yeah, what's the what's the Latin etymology of it?
It's a great question.
Let me just google that, real Q.
Maybe it has something to do with faith or working, like there's.
So the Latin translation translation of the word failure is defectus, which comes from the verb defic catory defective deficiency, Aha, deficiency deficiency.
We've come up short again, you know. And even scientists who have a good hypothesis and tested the lab and they're wrong, they do feel they came up short, you know, they they don't love it.
Yeah, yeah, so that's the French. It came from a French notion of lacking.
Oh dear right, but good to know I should have done that myself. Of course.
Well I'm a nerd, you know, so well, speaking of me being a nerd, your book really tickled my desire, my fancy for systematizing. You also have three awareness zones. I love it because you just have all these like, here are three archetypes, here are three.
Just assert them, right, I know, I love that stuff.
So hey, your three awareness zones, self, situation, and systems. You know, we kind of talked a little bit about systems, but yeah, could you could you kind of tell me walk me through the different series three.
You know, this is actually something that often had had come up often in my classes and in my own analyzes of cases of sort of complex cases, and I noticed it as a pattern a couple of years ago, you know, I was teaching a case and a student said something that was in the back of my mind.
But basically sort of used that as a framework in her comment to describe something in her analysis had gone wrong in this situation, this wrecking mission that leaders who are more self aware, more situationally aware, and more systemic thinkers could be more effective in you know, in navigating uncertainty and complexity. So it really is. I don't want to say this is some kind of I think the failure archetypes are. I think the three types of failure
is a pretty robust classification system. I'm personally at the moment enamored with this idea that there's something fundamental about self,
situation and system awareness, especially in navigating uncertainty. I'm sure I'm missing some other element that we that we could talk about, But I could draw a straight line from each of these competencies to various failure stories, both the good kind and the bad kind, And so I thought it might be a helpful way to, you know, help help people become more comfortable with uncertainty and fallibility.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Yeah, wouldn't Yeah, I'm trying. I'm still working on that myself.
Oh yeah, I can. I can resonate. I can resonate, and I really do link that I really do see clearly now this connection with psychological safety that I didn't see as clearly before. So this has been really elucidating this conversation.
Well.
Relating to our earlier talk about de I you distinguished between privileged failure and the kind of failure pressure that minority groups face. Can you kind of walk me through that distinction?
Sure? I did some thinking about the unequal playing field, right, the unlevel playing field for failing, let's say in an entrepreneurship environment or a in a company setting a project
that you're that you're leading. And I began to realize, and I'm not the first person to realize this, that if you are a member of the dominant group in that organization, you're less likely personally to worry and collectively to be seen as a representative of a group, so that your failure is less likely to be seen as reflecting badly on the group that you are part of.
And so if you are a member of an underrepresented minority and you're put in charge of some project and you fail, you will be anxious, and probably rightly so that people will then say, Okay, we'll never do one of those You know, we're never going to put some one of that kind of person again in a role like that, because look, she failed, and so you know, the aspiration would be a level playing field where we
just don't think that way anymore. That anyone who has a success us or a failure is, you know, is simply a case study from which we can learn about better and worse things to do in a particular situation, not a representative of some identity group doing things that we either can or can't learn from in that situation.
Well, well I need to process that.
Sorry, Sorry, I know I'm a little abstract, but it's you know, it's it's just if you imagine an organization where we're putting someone in charge of let's say, a major country division, who is we've never had maybe an African American woman leading such a thing before, and something goes badly wrong, what's the first thing people are going to.
Think, Well, they you know, like they got it because of their skin color.
Yeah, they got it because of that, And look, we shouldn't try that again. That was a mistake. You know. It's it's it's going to be all about their category. It's not going to be about what we learned from that, and you know, we know no one or maybe we do it the other way. It's it's a it's a it's a it's a white male, and you know, project goes wrong. Nobody would ever think, let's not because he was picked because he was a white male, and let's never let's never do that again.
Yeah, people don't think that way.
Yeah, but yeah, that just wouldn't that just wouldn't make any sense, I mean statistically speaking, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm just thinking of because I feel like there's a lot of like insiduous, like micro questions against white males these days.
Though.
No, No, I mean I I think I see it sometimes, you know, it's it's.
Sort of there, you know, wouldn't it be interesting if we could be David Thomas he used to use the the term and I guess others have used it as well. Unearned privilege, and an unearned privilege of course, refers to to white men. And I would love to be at the at a at a place where that isn't it's not an insult, right like we we should we should
be able to enjoy the advantages we have. And everyone, not everyone, but many people have different kinds of advantages and people are you know, more attractive, and some people are taller and in a sense, you know, height is one of those fantastic things where you know.
The same with physical attractiveness.
Right, Yeah, they're wildly overrepresented in in you know, not jobs like actors and actresses where that makes sense, but jobs like CEOs where it makes no sense.
Well, the halo effect is a real thing.
Right, the halo effect is a real thing. And so that's that's kind of this phenomenon en of you get certain privileges or advantages that you didn't strictly speaking earn, you know, by just working harder at your calculus than anybody else. And but why does that have to be an insult? Like you're, yeah, you're lucky. We all got some luck, and we could celebrate it and be okay with it and not think you're dissing me when when you have such a phrase.
Yeah, so the unearned privilege there is is just whatever privileges are confined to having white skin? Is that the idea? Because I think it can be an insult to treat the totality of a human based on the color of.
There's absolutely absolutely, I'm just trying to think this through we're not an insult but a gross minimization of who they are exactly.
I don't like seeing that in any direction. I certainly don't. I hate racism, but I also hate when we reduce anyone to their skin color. So, but you could see a situation where a white man, for instance, has earned They've worked extremely hard, and many of them, and there can be an element where they you know, they recognize whatever privileges they've had that have contributed. But when you were do when you dismiss their achievement one hundred percent
right based on the color of their skin. Because I do see that sometimes, I do think that's an insult.
It is, it is, and it would be fun to again to engage engage those moments and engage those situations with a truly learning oriented perspective and the skills to kind of dig into it. Wow, I mean, imagine a world where we had more mutual understanding and more it's just sort of appreciation for what each each one of us brings to a situation, our strengths and our weaknesses, and kind of could could embrace each other for who we are, some of the things we've worked really hard on.
Others we've kind of skated along. It's okay, right, The whole totality of me, of who I am, could be seen by you and vice versa, and that's unusual.
It's very unusual. Is that? Is that what you think would help create a healthy failing well culture?
Yes? Yes, In fact, I would describe, you know, a healthy failure cultures as one in which we are okay with the fact that we're each fallible human beings, and we're willing then to take risks, both in the business sense and in the interpersonal sense, in pursuit of of learning and progress and and and towards the goal of creating a you know, a healthy and sustainable world for all of us.
I'm very much on board with that, you know, your Your bottom line here seems to be that failing isn't fun. It doesn't always feel comfortable, never fun, but like it feels great. But that's okay. Now, everything easy to feel part of life. I think we live in this culture where everything you know, they're on my Instagram feed. I have one advertise me after another trying to make me feel great. It's just like we're obsessed with feeling great, you know, but there are so many things we can
learn from uncomfortable and even awkward moments. I mean, my day are awkward interactions with humans. But that's not bad right now, No.
It's not bad. It's part of life, Like failure is not fun, but it's part of life, and it often even brings value to us, you know, new knowledge, new perspectives, right that make us enriched as as people, and you know, in psychological safety describes an environment where you are okay, feeling uncomfortable because you know you're not going to die, just feeling uncomfortable or you know, having an awkward conversation or asking for help. But sometimes it feels like that.
Sometimes it feels like that. Yeah, So I do like this idea of intelligent failures, yeah, and how they can bring discovery. You talk about four essential tools for failing well, persistence as one persistence and you just think it's not from stubborn its So what's the difference between the two.
Well, the difference is one of perspective. What I I'm often intrigued by these these words that are kind of strengths and positives that also have you know, a flip side where it's really could potentially be describing the same behavior, but seen through a critical rather than a praiseworthy lens. And so you know, your persistence, which is admirable, might be seen by me as stubbornness. By the way, my persistence is never stubbornness, you know, for me and so.
And the only reason I bring bring that up is that I want to be clear that while persistence is of value and it's necessary, right, none of us ever accomplished anything in our lives without a little bit of persistence and hard work and grit and you know, picking ourselves back up. Let's just go back to the proverbial bicycle, right. No child ever learned how to ride a bicycle the minute they got on, just off they went, right, there
was persistence involved because it was hard. And yet I just wanted to make the point there in the book when talking about these things, that there's always judgment, right, there's always discernment, because there are times in life where we have to sort of step back and say, hmm, I wonder if I'm persisting too long in a failing course of action and the world is trying to tell me something and it's time to sort of shift and
try something else. And how do you know how do you make the distinction between healthy, admirable persistence and unhealthy, problematic stubbornness. And there's no easy answer, but one suggestion would be get some other voices in, you know, make sure to get feedback from others. You know, I'm going to keep pushing this boulder up the hill. What do you think am I throwing good money after bad here? Right?
Get get some other perspectives and and dig, dig in, and dig down to try to understand what the argument is to keep going, and what the argument is too it's time to stop. And a kind of rule of thumb in that one is, you know, persist if you have good reason to believe that there's just a there's a hurdle or two here that once we overcome it, then we will. The rest is sort of clear sailing.
There's a there's genuine evidence that there's a market for this, right, if we can only find someone to manufacture it, there will be a market. I have data to show that there are customers out there ready and willing to buy this if only we can make it. But if conversely, you know, you got some idea and you can't even get anyone to say, yeah, love that idea. I would buy it if it exists. Did and you know, no one but no one thinks it's a good idea except
you and maybe your mother. Then you know the persistence is probably not will.
So to summarize, no one to grit and no one to quit, Yes, exactly, Yeah, yeah, I love it. You have four here. Your second is reflection. I think that's a self explanatory.
Self explanatory, but make it a habit, right, That's not something we naturally do.
Yeah, no, it's not something that is predominant, even though it's self explanatory. Accountability So you know, can you have accountability partners for failing?
Well? Sure so. So accountability is a word, at least in the sort of corporate space that has come to mean punishment, And I think that's problematic. Yes, you know, you know, there's there's got to be accountability, right and and and but the real root of it is about taking, you know, being able to provide the account you know what happened, like to really truly understand what happened and own and acknowledge your contribution to the failure or to the to the disappointment.
No one's willing to do that these days.
Yeah, what are the things that you did that contributed? What are the things maybe by omission, you failed to do that could have helped? Right, But that is again, that's the kind of thing we don't do because we think will look bad, and in truth, you look good, you know, when you have the courage and the confidence to say, huh, here's the way I came up short. Here are the things that I did or didn't do
the contributor to this outcome. You actually look like someone who's pretty wise and pretty capable to have figured that out. And you're now equipped to go forward and do that.
I know you weren't talking to me, but thank you. Yeah, yeah, no, I love that you have such a nice way of framing things. It's so polite, well uh and and and mature and respectful.
You know, it's well, framing is a Framing is a skill. I think, Oh yeah, oh yeah, it's a it's a cognitive skill and it's and it's a it's a skill that can really help us cope with the challenges that lie ahead.
Oh yeah, but I mean behind. I'm saying you have that skill, Well, thank you.
I guess I've worked I've worked at it, but you know, I don't always have it in the exact moments when I need it.
I mean, there's just there are so many cultures where cultures that are so antithetical to that spirit. I mean, did you see the Wolf of Wall Street? Can you imagine like saying to them you should reframe, you know, because there are cultures that are so like testosterone and enhanced, you know, where it's like winning competition with do this. I mean for them, they would they would listen to this and and roll their eyes.
Right, But those kinds of cultures often look really good in the in the short term or for some period of time, and then they crash and burn, they collapse under their own weight because nature doesn't really work that way.
It's I mean, I agree, that's a good point. Sometimes you have to find out the hard way.
Yeah, time, timeframe is everything, right, yeah?
Yeah? Yeah. And then the last one is sincere apologies. You know, that's a good tool for that takes a humbleness, right, that takes it.
Yes, it does.
You know, a lot of this is taking the ego out of the equation. You know, that's thread running.
Through all of these Yeah, because and the ego is really a source of unhappiness that we mistake as a source of happiness. I mean, you know, we puff ourselves up thinking that will make us feel better. It just makes us lonely really, But so sincere apology, it was really fun actually for this book to go to the there's actual research on apologies, you know, it's very thoughtful. And they use the term that the purpose of an apology is to is to repair the rupture in the relationship.
And if I do something wrong, I have, in either a small or a large way, created a little rupture in the relationship. And if I can be courageous enough and you know, ego free enough to apologize, I'm helping repair that rupture. And a high quality apology they they show is one in which you, you know, you do take some responsibility for your part in what happened, You acknowledge the harm, you offer if possible, to make amends, which could even just be a promise to do to
do better next time or not do that again. And that takes courage, it takes honesty, and it's very hard to do unless you genuinely do put the relationship ahead of ego, you know, unless the unless the really if the relationship doesn't mean anything to you. You'll resist the apology indefinitely.
Yeah, I mean it's such a good point, and you have to remind yourself of that when you're in the grips of veg.
It's so hard.
Yeah, you know, i'd be remiss. You know, we're ending this this interview, and I want to be respectful of your time. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about this fascinating link you talk about in your book between social media and perfectionism.
Yeah, that's that's I mean, I think that's it's intuitive. I think most people or many people are increasingly thinking about this, this this challenge and the mental health implications of it. But social media, you know, by definition, is you choose what you're posting, and you you try to post things that make you look good, not bad. So maybe you post just the best pictures we can easily, you know, toss in the trash the pictures that aren't
so good. You highlight your success is not your failures. So that's natural, that makes sense. I mean, who would want to go and stand on a mountaintop and yell out about their failures? But it leaves us with an artificially curated data set. It is not representative of people's full and complicated lives, but is only the you know, the happy front, and then ours feel our lives feel
sad and inadequate by comparison. So the whole phenomenon of social comparison, which we've been doing since the dawn of time, is now distorted by social media. You know. We used to sort of look to our right, look to our left, and and some of that comparison was healthy because it would say, oh, I guess I'd better sit up straight, you know, and and and some of it made us feel bad because someone looks like they're happier than you are,
what have you. But now it's a distorted, biased data set against which many people, especially teenagers and more vulnerable young people are are sort of stuck with this biased data set, and and it can cause great harm.
Yeah, I really can. I was I was thinking though, there are instances where I think people on social media are rewarded socially by signaling their victimhood or signaling their vulnerability.
That's interesting, that's true, right, And everybody kind of swarms in to say, oh, oh, we.
Have getting attention, getting attention, you know. Now everyone and their mother has has discovered trauma, you know, and in their life, and and everything on social media is about like, you know, look at me, I've had trauma. You know.
It's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. I haven't done much thinking about that, but that's actually a very real point and very real trend. I wonder, I mean, what the implications are of getting your positive you know, the attention that you crave, the caring that you crave for your for being weak or traumatized or vulnerable. Is that is that is that as nourishing as you imagine, it will be very long run interesting, it's food for it thought. Yeah.
Okay, So to conclude, you know, really really important work you're doing here that has implications for society, as implications for the workplace, for education, and I even love how you talk about implications for parents. But but the thread running through all of that is that as managers, as parents, as leaders, we can help people reframe their failure as something that is part of learning and it doesn't have to be a source of shame. Is that a fair?
So right? So beautifully okay, thank you Amy, so wonderful and I'm honored to have you finally on my podcast, and congratulations and all your very well deserved, earned, earned, earned, earned successes. What's the opposite of us?
Thank you.
I don't care if you're white, I don't care if you're whatever you are. You earned it. No, I'm really proud of you. Thank you, really proud of you. Thank you.