Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 132. Lean Into Failure: How to Make Mistakes That Work

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Effective and productive teams and relationships are based on the ability to communicate safely and to fail successfully. In this episode, Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, shares profound insights on the different types of failure—basic, complex, and intelligent—and their implications for learning and innovation. In her conversation with host and Strategic Communications lecturer Matt Abrahams, Edmonson opens up about her struggles with failure, highlighting the importance of moving from rumination to reflection. This episode offers listeners a comprehensive guide to fostering an environment where failure is not feared but embraced as a crucial step toward growth and success.Episode Reference Links:Amy EdmondsonAmy’s Books: The Fearless Organization & Right Kind of Wrong Ep.21 Words Matter: How to Make Your Communication InclusiveEp.112 From Mistakes to "Missed Takes"Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn,  Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedIn ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

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to get matched up with your coach today. That's strawberry.comme slash smart and get 50% off your first coaching session. It's the most affordable time ever to see if coaching is right for you. Effective and productive teams and relationships are based on the ability to communicate safely and to fail successfully. I'm Matt Abrams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I'm excited. to speak with Amy Edmondson. Amy is a professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. Her research looks at teeming, psychological safety, and organizational learning. She is the author of the influential book, The Fearless Organization, Creating Psychological

Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. And she has a new book out entitled The Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well. Welcome, Amy. I look forward to our discussion today. I do too. Thrill to be here. Excellent. Shall we get started? Let's. All right. I first came to know you through your work on psychological safety and teams. So I'd like to start our conversation there. What is psychological safety and what specific communication strategies can we employ to foster the kind of open and supportive of dialogue that you talk about. So psychological safety refers to a belief that you can speak up candidly with interpersonally risky content like, I made a mistake or I need help or I disagree with

your point of view. Not that those things are easy, but that you believe they are expected and even welcome. This is a really important distinction because psychological safety has been getting a lot of attention in the last few years and often it's being misunderstood to mean comfortable or not having high standards or not being not feeling a sense of accountability to excellence. And really it's not that. It's simply a learning environment where you believe your voice is welcome and you don't err on the side of holding back. So what communication helps build it? I think really first and foremost, it starts with the work. It starts with making early and frequent references to the

nature of the work and why it requires us to do this. Let's say we're taking care of vulnerable patients. Our processes are necessarily error prone and complex. We need to hear from you. Think about that as a message. Now, that's for patient care. But what if we're developing some new technology that doesn't yet exist in the world? No one's ever done anything like this before. We're going to get things wrong on the way to getting them right? It's like all ideas welcome. Let us know early when things aren't working so we can pivot in a timely way. It's about continually reminding people that the nature of the work is such that it won't go perfectly every time. And that gives us a sense of permission to speak up, right, a permission to be imperfect because

that's just reality. So I think that's the most important messaging. But right, Below that, I would say, is asking questions. It's demonstrating a genuine curiosity like you're doing right now. It's, I want to ask you this question and then I'm going to listen to hear what you have to say. And of course, also to build psychological safety, you need to have productive or constructive responses. If every time you hear bad news, you bite someone's head off, that does not encourage psychological safety. That does not encourage candor. So you have to master the pause, take a breath and say, thank you so much for letting me know. And then dig in. How did this happen? Let's take a look together. What I heard there is you have to have the meta conversation

about the fact that psychological safety is important. You have to be curious. You have to listen for and seek out candor and be grateful when you hear it. I have been in teams and meetings where I have felt the safety that you're talking about. And one of the things I noticed that good leaders did in those circumstances were they acknowledged and expressed gratitude when people did act verbally or share mistakes. Is that a critical part of this too? Yes. It's that how you respond is absolutely critical. And it doesn't mean agreeing with everything. And it doesn't mean praise for everything. But it does mean acknowledging and appreciating and especially appreciating that it's hard. It's hard for someone to offer a dissenting view or it's hard for someone to ask for help or to let you know the project is not going well.

That's always going to be hard. So making that less hard by being appreciative is really important. Well, I appreciate that answer. What role do status, power, culture, and expertise play in all of this? Is it possible for everyone to feel similarly psychologically safe? I can imagine there might be some challenges there. Yes, it's more complicated than you might think. So let me put it this way.

Status or power make a difference. And when we are in an unequal status relationship or situation, there's a boss and then there's others who maybe report to that boss, you will naturally have a more difficult time speaking up candidly because of that power differential. But that does not. mean we should get rid of power differentials or that it's hopeless. What matters even more than the power differential is how it's handled. So I did a study once with Ingrid Nimhard of intensive

care units all actively engaged in quality improvement work. We had 23 of them in 23 different hospitals. They all had the exact same hierarchy. They had a medical director who's sort of a top doc who's very much in charge. They had nurses, they had medical residents and so forth. And hierarchies, again, were identical. But in some, I would say even most, slightly more than half of the ICU's, the degree of psychological safety between higher status and lower status people was significantly different. But in slightly fewer than half, the psychological safety was exactly the same across role groups. Right. No. difference. Now, we fast forward to the end of that story, those with the flat psychological

safety pattern had ultimately an 18% improvement compared to their counterparts in morbidity and mortality. So same hierarchy. But what was different? Well, what was different was how those with the power, in this case, sort of the top doc, the medical director, how they handled their status. And these were the ones who actually did things. I didn't tell them to. They were just thoughtful enough to do it, very similar to what you were just asking me about. So they would routinely say things like, I might miss something. I need to hear from you. Or they'd just reach right out and say, Matt, what did you see last night? I think you were on with, you know, patient so-and-so. Or they would say things like, thank you so much for bringing that to

my attention. They were just, in a sense, thoughtful, wise clinicians who did those things. And that made the natural differential just go away. So I think it's really important to say that differences in status, power, culture, expertise matter, but what really matters is how we handle them. Right. And literally in situations of life and death, as you just described, in those positions of power and status by acknowledging rewarding and being open to those who have less, it's helpful. Do you have any research or advice on people who have lower status? who might not feel comfortable sharing their positions for various reasons, what they can do to help contribute to the overall psychological safety of a group?

So I don't have actual research in the same way that we studied what the leaders were doing and why it mattered. But what I can say is, I think there's a fair amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that any team member who asks a thoughtful question and then listens carefully to the response, whether that's of a superior, a peer, or a subordinate, is in that moment giving others a little window of an opportunity, a stage,

a little opportunity to express themselves. And that demonstrates respect, it's contagious, and it's not that hard to do. And so if we take the same message, that you asked me about earlier and say, wait a minute, do you have to be the boss to do it? I think the answer is no. Anyone can ask a good question. Anyone can be appreciative of what someone else says.

You know, anyone can call attention to the fact, we've never done anything like this before. What ideas to people have? And they will be appreciated, seen as helpful, and nothing bad happened to them, so others will follow suit. Excellent. So we all can contribute. And I think that's really important because psychological safety is not sort of a switch that you turn on and now we have it. It's more something that is enacted day by day. Day by day, it's enacted by each of us taking small interpersonal risks to be the risks of being candid. And it's enacted by nobody getting really mad at us or kicking us out of the team as a result of our doing that. So we're always co-creating it.

I think the higher you go, the more of an outsized influence you have on that climate, but we all influence it. It's something that has to be worked on continuously. Part of feeling psychologically safe is feeling okay, making mistakes and admitting them. This idea of failure is the focus of your new book, Right, Kind of Wrong. Can you talk to us about unproductive failure versus productive failure? and can you share your three archetypes of failure for us? First, let me say that psychological safety is absolutely about feeling okay, admitting mistakes.

It doesn't necessarily make you feel happier or okay making mistakes. I mean, I think all of us would rather not make mistakes. We're all fallible human beings. We'll all make mistakes. But it's more about speaking up about them. So I'll say that. Now, I think it's important to distinguish between mistakes, which are deviations from known practices that will achieve the results you want,

whether a recipe, a playbook, what have you, and failures, some of which are caused by mistakes, but some of which are the absolutely unpredictable negative outcomes in new territory. I think people use the two terms interchangeably. Failure is a bigger term. Mistakes is a more precise term. And to the three archetypes of failure, let's start with basic failures, which are failures caused by a mistake. I put salt in the recipe instead of sugar by mistake and it's lousy, right?

Fine and by the way, mostly avoidable. Complex failures are failures that are caused by multiple factors coming together in just the wrong way, you know, the perfect storm. And main difference with basic failures is that any one of the factors on its own would not have led to a failure. It's the fact of them all coming together and lining up, almost an element of bad luck there that creates a bad outcome. And then neither of those are good news. They're both things we can learn from and they're both things we can work hard to try to reduce in our organizations. The third kind of failure are intelligent failures.

And those are the undesired results of thoughtful forays into new territory. So intelligent failures have in common that they're in pursuit of a goal. They're in new territory. There's no playbook yet that you could just look up on the internet and follow. You've got a hypothesis. You've got good reason to believe this might work. And finally, the failure is no bigger than necessary to get the knowledge that we need to make progress. They readily recognize that as sort of the activity of scientists or inventors or, you know, other people as a living doing things in new territory, creating new thing.

I feel like it's part of the ethos in Silicon Valley is this notion. Entrepreneurs and technologists in general are routinely going into new territory. So they have to live with the reality that you cannot get it right every time because there isn't that playbook. And so you have to be willing to experiment, but you want to experiment thoughtfully. You don't want it to be just random stabs in the dark. You want to have, as I said, good reason to believe it might work. That's kind of the Silicon Valley ethos. Thank you for delineating the different types of failure.

How can leaders communicate about failures and mistakes in a way that encourages learning and resilience rather than fear and blame? You know, one of the chapters in the new book is about the importance of context, the importance of situational awareness. And I think that's where leaders can play a really important role is by calling attention to context. Now, context can mean a great deal of things. I'm primarily interested in two dimensions of context. One is how much uncertainty is there? Is this a situation where there's a nice recipe, let's follow it? And it will work every time. or is this a situation where we're truly on the bleeding edge of some field and we have no choice

but to experiment? So that's low to high uncertainty. The other dimension is what are the stakes? What's at stake here? Whether from a human safety point of view as in health care or financially in many businesses or reputational. And if the stakes are very high, and yet it's high certainty, please follow the protocols vigilantly carefully. If the stakes are relatively low because you're behind closed doors and you're just experimenting in a lab, the uncertainty's high, go to town, right? Take bold experiments and fail fast, learn as fast as you can.

And of course, if it's high stakes and high uncertainty, you've got to find a way to break that down, right? To get to little pieces of it so that we can learn more. We certainly don't want to take undue risks to save, finances or reputation. So the job of the leader is to say, what are the stakes here and then help people think about it and act accordingly? I have seen both errors. I have seen people behave carelessly in very high stakes uncertainty situations leading to such things as NASA shuttle disasters and worse. And I have seen people behave overly cautiously in domains that caused for playfulness.

where the stakes were remarkably low, were behind closed doors, we're experimenting, and yet there's that human desire to want to get it right the first time, leading to unhealthy hesitation and unwillingness to really experiment. What I'm taking away from several of your answers is that all failures are not equal,

and we need to really be thinking about the different types of failure and leaning into some and then making some very conscious choices about others. I want to share an experience I had when I was an operator working in high tech. I worked for a company that had failure Fridays, and we would all convene for lunch, and you could nominate yourself to share a failure you had that week, and the senior leaders would vote on the best failure. You actually got an award. Back in the day, it was enough to take a partner out to a meal, and if you had kids to pay for babysitting. And the idea there was that if we weren't pushing the envelope, we weren't growing,

and it was a teaching moment because the rule was you could never have the same failure twice when. So we all had to learn from each other. And I remember this vividly, and this was decades ago, this to me seemed like a really powerful way to encourage the kind of things you're talking about in terms of failing forward. Exactly. And when you had those kinds of rituals, when organizations or teams that have those kinds of rituals, either intuitively or explicitly know the things, the failure Friday is not about coming together and saying, I texted and drove this week and I got into a car accident. No, that's a basic failure. Human error led to an undesired outcome that was preventable. And maybe there's some value in the reminder to others not to do that.

But that's not what they were talking about, right? They were talking about you tried something bold and on purpose, meaning in pursuit of the company's value proposition. And alas, it didn't work or the client didn't buy it. But it was a bold and lovely idea. And thank you for sharing it because now, A, I won't do the same thing. And B, you're sending that wonderful message that this is how we work in uncertain territory. Yes. And the motto of that company was scary fun, which fits right into what you're talking about.

I want to look at a more serious issue. You discussed the notion of the unequal opportunity. to fail that exists in many groups and organizations. Can you describe this a bit and share what can be done? Not everybody has the same right to fail in some ways. So much of our conversation thus far has been about the modal person, let's say, in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, who gets this stuff. You know, that here's this, yep, we better innovate, we better try things, not everything will work. and your team will react well and all will be well. But what if you are a way underrepresented minority with respect to the role that you occupy?

What if you're a senior executive and no one else looks like you? Or you are a consultant in a client's office again. Here, you do not feel you have that same permission to fail intelligently because there is an added weight that is thinking, either consciously or not, when I fail, it reflects badly on my group, on my identity group. Other people will not have the same opportunities I have if I don't get this right. And that's incredibly unhelpful for them and for the world because it's going to make them more risk-averse, understandably, because they understand how the human process of stereotyping works. So what can we do about it?

Right? I think that most important, maybe the only thing we can really do about is call attention to this as a bind, call attention to this as a problem and commit out loud together to making it less so, to making sure that people from underrepresented groups are having an equal opportunity to shine and that we are just as intent on celebrating their intelligent failures as anyone else's, and, of course, try to do what we can to make them less rare in the positions. Absolutely. I think that's wonderful advice. And I think also trying to minimize consequences if and when those failures happen is critical. We'll be right back to finish our conversation.

But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. If you've ever felt like you're trying to do a everything yourself, especially when the stakes are high. You're not alone. One of the biggest shifts I see in effective leaders growing their organizations comes from focusing on the right things. But that's hard to do when you're stretched thin. You need to be able to delegate some tasks to competent professionals. That's where Upwork can really help. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across areas like marketing, development, data and analytics, and more. It gives you fast access to specialized talent so you can move quickly, fill key gaps, and scale your work without taking on

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Yes. I'm curious, when it comes to failure in your own life, what have you learned and how have you best leaned into the failure that you've had? Well, I've learned that I do not spontaneously have a healthy response to my own failures. And I don't have a healthy response to either intelligent failures, which as a researcher, I should because I get that stuff intellectually, but still emotionally, I would have rather been right than wrong. So I will go into a kind of emotional tailspin before I catch myself and correct that when, say, the hypothesis is not supported by data. And I'm even worse at responding to the basic failures, the ones that were absolutely. unequivocally caused by my mistakes, I can easily end up ruminating rather than reflecting.

So I have to catch and correct myself all the time. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, you are human and these things can be frustrating and an emotion plays an important role. Let me ask question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? You know, there's so many good answers to that, but the one that I thought of is Nikolai Tanjin. And he's the head of the Norwegian Growth Fund, a financial fund that supports many activities in Norway. But why I find him such a compelling communicator, he's got a podcast where he interviews leaders,

occasionally academics, but mostly CEOs of companies that he is investing in. He's a great question asker. He asks good questions. But what he's also doing is allowing them to communicate their work. wisdom and their messages. So he's putting them in the spotlight in enormously thoughtful and productive ways to get ultimately, I think, his messages across using this vehicle of the podcast, much like what you're doing. Well, I love that you picked a podcaster as somebody you admire. And the ability to tee people up to share their experience and knowledge is a true art form.

So our final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I'm going to say clarity, caring, and commitment. So clarity is take the time to think through what is it I'm trying to convey. Be clear about that yourself so others can be. Caring is remind yourself, you really do care about them and the work and what it is we're trying to do. And commitment, I think is the passion that you bring to it that conveys that you are all in. Clarity, caring commitment, a wonderful recipe. Thank you so much, Amy. I really appreciate the many specific actionable takeaways you provided around how to develop

and support psychological safety and how we can all embrace productive failure. And I wish you best of luck with your new book, Write Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well. Thank you so much for having me, Matt. It's been really fun to talk to you. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast from Stanford GSP. To learn more about psychological safety and failing successfully, please listen to Episode 26 with Sarah Sewell and Episode 112 with me. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder.

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