February 29, 2024 • 60 mins
This week Scott is joined by author of "The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well". Scott and Amy discuss the encouragement of taking smart risks, reframing one's thinking to expect and accept more failure to gain greater success, and how to have a little fun when something doesn't work out.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
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,
(00:48):
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
(01:10):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:53):
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,
(02:18):
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.
(02:40):
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,
(03:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
My pleasure and.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
That it was my second time, but I was stunned,
flabbergasted even so, thank you.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
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
(03:51):
did your research start to when did your attention start
to go in that direction?
Speaker 1 (03:55):
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
(04:17):
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
(04:37):
way around.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Oh that's interesting. Tell me a little bit more about
your background then, Like what was your dissertation about.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
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
(05:05):
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
(05:28):
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
(05:50):
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,
(06:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
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
(06:41):
or a company kind of situation where you might feel
a lot of pressure to stay silent or client.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
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,
(07:11):
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
(07:31):
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.
(07:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
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,
(09:08):
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
(09:30):
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
(09:51):
here between these different ideas.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
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
(10:28):
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
(10:53):
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.
(11:15):
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,
(11:38):
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
(12:03):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:49):
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
(13:12):
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
(13:35):
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
(13:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
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
(14:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
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
(15:20):
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
(15:40):
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
(16:03):
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
(16:28):
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
(16:51):
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
(17:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
And that attitude that you just described as scene in
every direction, which doesn't cause great progress of no on
either side.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
No, it creates stagnation and stuckness.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
You know.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, there is really high quality research showing that diversity
training programs backfire, and that's really problematic.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
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,
(18:17):
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
(18:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
That is that is.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
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
(19:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Those not having honest discussions.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Me anymore, exactly right.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:32):
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
(22:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Really speaking my language here in this new book, you
talk about failing well, Well, did Victor francl fail well
in a way?
Speaker 1 (23:21):
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
(23:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
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
(24:27):
like a setback is actually sure growth spotder for growth.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
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,
(24:53):
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
(25:18):
from the perspective of universe, maybe that's not a failure.
But that's that's well beyond my pay grade.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
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
(25:48):
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?
Speaker 1 (25:59):
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,
(26:21):
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,
(26:44):
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,
(27:05):
and so you know, I do everything I can to
kind of avoid the looking bad.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
My friend Michael Gervai just wrote a book. He coined
this term called FOPO Fear of People's Opinions.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
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
(27:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
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
(28:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
So well, how can how can people overcome this?
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (28:48):
You know, how can they fail? Well?
Speaker 1 (28:51):
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
(29:16):
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.
(29:37):
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
(29:59):
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,
(30:22):
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,
(30:44):
as well as to try to get out ahead of
and prevent and mitigate complex failures.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
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?
Speaker 1 (31:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I love her and I do too.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
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,
(31:38):
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
(32:00):
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.
(32:22):
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,
(32:46):
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
(33:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
That's a really good point. Yeah, I fear sometimes I
need to think less like a scientist just to communicate
with other humans.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
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,
(34:14):
and failures.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
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,
(34:36):
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
(34:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
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
(35:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
But you probably I bet we had that that conception
of you know, disappointing outcome pretty early.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
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?
Speaker 1 (36:19):
It's a great question.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Let me just google that, real Q.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Maybe it has something to do with faith or working,
like there's.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
So the Latin translation translation of the word failure is defectus,
which comes from the verb defic catory defective deficiency, Aha,
deficiency deficiency.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Yeah, yeah, so that's the French. It came from a
French notion of lacking.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Oh dear right, but good to know I should have
done that myself. Of course.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Just assert them, right, I know, I love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
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
(37:51):
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
(38:13):
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
(38:36):
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
(38:59):
help people become more comfortable with uncertainty and fallibility.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Wouldn't that be nice?
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah, wouldn't Yeah, I'm trying. I'm still working on that myself.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Well.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
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?
Speaker 1 (39:39):
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
(40:01):
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.
(40:26):
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
(40:47):
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,
(41:10):
not a representative of some identity group doing things that
we either can or can't learn from in that situation.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Well, well I need to process that.
Speaker 4 (41:21):
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
(41:42):
goes badly wrong, what's the first thing people are going to.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Think, Well, they you know, like they got it because
of their skin color.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
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
(42:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Yeah, people don't think that way.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yeah, but yeah, that just wouldn't that just wouldn't make
any sense, I mean statistically speaking, right.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Though.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
No, No, I mean I I think I see it sometimes,
you know, it's it's.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
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
(43:02):
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
(43:23):
are taller and in a sense, you know, height is
one of those fantastic things where you know.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
The same with physical attractiveness.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Well, the halo effect is a real thing.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
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
(44:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
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
(45:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
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
(45:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
It's very unusual. Is that? Is that what you think
would help create a healthy failing well culture?
Speaker 1 (46:11):
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
(46:32):
learning and progress and and and towards the goal of
creating a you know, a healthy and sustainable world for
all of us.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
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,
(47:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
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,
(47:38):
just feeling uncomfortable or you know, having an awkward conversation
or asking for help. But sometimes it feels like that.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
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.
(48:25):
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
(48:48):
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
(49:11):
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
(49:33):
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
(49:54):
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
(50:16):
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.
(50:36):
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
(50:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Self explanatory, but make it a habit, right, That's not
something we naturally do.
Speaker 2 (51:27):
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?
Speaker 1 (51:37):
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
(52:00):
what happened, like to really truly understand what happened and
own and acknowledge your contribution to the failure or to
the to the disappointment.
Speaker 2 (52:13):
No one's willing to do that these days.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
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
(52:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
Oh yeah, but I mean behind. I'm saying you have
that skill, Well, thank you.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (53:36):
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.
(53:57):
I mean for them, they would they would listen to
this and and roll their eyes.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
It's I mean, I agree, that's a good point. Sometimes
you have to find out the hard way.
Speaker 1 (54:19):
Yeah, time, timeframe is everything, right, yeah?
Speaker 2 (54:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yes, it does.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
You know, a lot of this is taking the ego
out of the equation. You know, that's thread running.
Speaker 1 (54:37):
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.
(54:58):
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
(55:19):
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,
(55:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (56:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:09):
It's so hard.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:24):
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
(56:44):
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
(57:04):
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
(57:27):
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,
(57:49):
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
(58:10):
data set, and and it can cause great harm.
Speaker 2 (58:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (58:25):
That's interesting, that's true, right, And everybody kind of swarms
in to say, oh, oh, we.
Speaker 2 (58:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (58:48):
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,
(59:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (59:27):
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
(59:49):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
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.
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.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
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,
(00:48):
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
(01:10):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:53):
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,
(02:18):
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.
(02:40):
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,
(03:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
My pleasure and.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
That it was my second time, but I was stunned,
flabbergasted even so, thank you.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
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
(03:51):
did your research start to when did your attention start
to go in that direction?
Speaker 1 (03:55):
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
(04:17):
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
(04:37):
way around.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Oh that's interesting. Tell me a little bit more about
your background then, Like what was your dissertation about.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
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
(05:05):
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
(05:28):
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
(05:50):
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,
(06:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
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
(06:41):
or a company kind of situation where you might feel
a lot of pressure to stay silent or client.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
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,
(07:11):
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
(07:31):
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.
(07:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
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,
(09:08):
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
(09:30):
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
(09:51):
here between these different ideas.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
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
(10:28):
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
(10:53):
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.
(11:15):
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,
(11:38):
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
(12:03):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:49):
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
(13:12):
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
(13:35):
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
(13:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
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
(14:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
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
(15:20):
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
(15:40):
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
(16:03):
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
(16:28):
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
(16:51):
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
(17:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
And that attitude that you just described as scene in
every direction, which doesn't cause great progress of no on
either side.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
No, it creates stagnation and stuckness.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
You know.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, there is really high quality research showing that diversity
training programs backfire, and that's really problematic.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
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,
(18:17):
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
(18:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
That is that is.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
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
(19:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Those not having honest discussions.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Me anymore, exactly right.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:32):
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
(22:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Really speaking my language here in this new book, you
talk about failing well, Well, did Victor francl fail well
in a way?
Speaker 1 (23:21):
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
(23:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
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
(24:27):
like a setback is actually sure growth spotder for growth.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
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,
(24:53):
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
(25:18):
from the perspective of universe, maybe that's not a failure.
But that's that's well beyond my pay grade.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
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
(25:48):
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?
Speaker 1 (25:59):
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,
(26:21):
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,
(26:44):
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,
(27:05):
and so you know, I do everything I can to
kind of avoid the looking bad.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
My friend Michael Gervai just wrote a book. He coined
this term called FOPO Fear of People's Opinions.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
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
(27:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
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
(28:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
So well, how can how can people overcome this?
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (28:48):
You know, how can they fail? Well?
Speaker 1 (28:51):
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
(29:16):
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.
(29:37):
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
(29:59):
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,
(30:22):
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,
(30:44):
as well as to try to get out ahead of
and prevent and mitigate complex failures.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
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?
Speaker 1 (31:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I love her and I do too.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
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,
(31:38):
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
(32:00):
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.
(32:22):
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,
(32:46):
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
(33:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
That's a really good point. Yeah, I fear sometimes I
need to think less like a scientist just to communicate
with other humans.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
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,
(34:14):
and failures.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
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,
(34:36):
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
(34:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
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
(35:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
But you probably I bet we had that that conception
of you know, disappointing outcome pretty early.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
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?
Speaker 1 (36:19):
It's a great question.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Let me just google that, real Q.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Maybe it has something to do with faith or working,
like there's.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
So the Latin translation translation of the word failure is defectus,
which comes from the verb defic catory defective deficiency, Aha,
deficiency deficiency.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Yeah, yeah, so that's the French. It came from a
French notion of lacking.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Oh dear right, but good to know I should have
done that myself. Of course.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Just assert them, right, I know, I love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
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
(37:51):
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
(38:13):
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
(38:36):
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
(38:59):
help people become more comfortable with uncertainty and fallibility.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Wouldn't that be nice?
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah, wouldn't Yeah, I'm trying. I'm still working on that myself.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Well.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
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?
Speaker 1 (39:39):
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
(40:01):
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.
(40:26):
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
(40:47):
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,
(41:10):
not a representative of some identity group doing things that
we either can or can't learn from in that situation.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Well, well I need to process that.
Speaker 4 (41:21):
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
(41:42):
goes badly wrong, what's the first thing people are going to.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Think, Well, they you know, like they got it because
of their skin color.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
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
(42:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Yeah, people don't think that way.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yeah, but yeah, that just wouldn't that just wouldn't make
any sense, I mean statistically speaking, right.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Though.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
No, No, I mean I I think I see it sometimes,
you know, it's it's.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
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
(43:02):
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
(43:23):
are taller and in a sense, you know, height is
one of those fantastic things where you know.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
The same with physical attractiveness.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Well, the halo effect is a real thing.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
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
(44:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
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
(45:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
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
(45:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
It's very unusual. Is that? Is that what you think
would help create a healthy failing well culture?
Speaker 1 (46:11):
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
(46:32):
learning and progress and and and towards the goal of
creating a you know, a healthy and sustainable world for
all of us.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
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,
(47:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
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,
(47:38):
just feeling uncomfortable or you know, having an awkward conversation
or asking for help. But sometimes it feels like that.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
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.
(48:25):
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
(48:48):
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
(49:11):
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
(49:33):
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
(49:54):
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
(50:16):
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.
(50:36):
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
(50:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Self explanatory, but make it a habit, right, That's not
something we naturally do.
Speaker 2 (51:27):
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?
Speaker 1 (51:37):
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
(52:00):
what happened, like to really truly understand what happened and
own and acknowledge your contribution to the failure or to
the to the disappointment.
Speaker 2 (52:13):
No one's willing to do that these days.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
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
(52:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
Oh yeah, but I mean behind. I'm saying you have
that skill, Well, thank you.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (53:36):
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.
(53:57):
I mean for them, they would they would listen to
this and and roll their eyes.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
It's I mean, I agree, that's a good point. Sometimes
you have to find out the hard way.
Speaker 1 (54:19):
Yeah, time, timeframe is everything, right, yeah?
Speaker 2 (54:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yes, it does.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
You know, a lot of this is taking the ego
out of the equation. You know, that's thread running.
Speaker 1 (54:37):
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.
(54:58):
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
(55:19):
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,
(55:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (56:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:09):
It's so hard.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:24):
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
(56:44):
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
(57:04):
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
(57:27):
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,
(57:49):
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
(58:10):
data set, and and it can cause great harm.
Speaker 2 (58:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (58:25):
That's interesting, that's true, right, And everybody kind of swarms
in to say, oh, oh, we.
Speaker 2 (58:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (58:48):
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,
(59:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (59:27):
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
(59:49):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
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.
Popular Podcasts
Fudd Around And Find Out
UConn basketball star Azzi Fudd brings her championship swag to iHeart Women’s Sports with Fudd Around and Find Out, a weekly podcast that takes fans along for the ride as Azzi spends her final year of college trying to reclaim the National Championship and prepare to be a first round WNBA draft pick. Ever wonder what it’s like to be a world-class athlete in the public spotlight while still managing schoolwork, friendships and family time? It’s time to Fudd Around and Find Out!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com