In the latest episode of Transform Your Workplace, host Brandon Laws sits down with Harvard professor Amy Edmondson to explore the concept of “intelligent failure” and the crucial role of psychological safety in innovation and teamwork. Edmondson, author of The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, delves into how venturing into the unknown often comes with failure but also leads to valuable learning. Listeners will learn how to create a workplace dedicated to continuous improvement, where employees feel safe to take risks and learn from missteps.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, specializing in teamwork, psychological safety, and innovation in the workplace. She is also the author of The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
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INTO THE UNKNOWN
Amy Edmondson believes that venturing into the unknown inevitably comes with failure, as it’s impossible to master something new on the first try. She said, “If you’re not failing, you’re not journeying into new territory.” After all, whenever you’re trying something unfamiliar — whether it’s learning an instrument, starting a pottery class, or leading a new project — there are bound to be mistakes. She explained that expecting perfection in such situations is irrational because you’re in a place where you “haven’t mastered it yet.”
Amy’s perspective is shaped by her own experiences, particularly a graduate studies medical research project that yielded results that completely contradicted her expectations. At the start of the project, Amy hypothesized that better teamwork would lead to fewer adverse medical events. However, after six months of data collection, the results showed the exact opposite — better teamwork was linked to higher error rates. While initially shocked, she reconsidered the data. She realized that better teams weren’t necessarily making more mistakes but were more willing to speak up about them. This realization led to the concept of psychological safety, a term she coined much later to describe the climate where team members feel safe to voice their concerns, ultimately driving learning and improvement.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Intelligent Failure
“An intelligent failure is the undesired result […] of a thoughtful foray into new territory, whether that’s a little kid learning to ride a bike and falling over a few times. […] There’s opportunity here. It’s new. You’re not good at it yet. You fail more often than you succeed early on in any new activity, in scientific endeavors, of course, and in research endeavors. But it’s intelligent in part because it brings great new intelligence. It brings new knowledge. […] The only way to know whether it works or not is to try it. And if, lo and behold, you’re wrong, that’s an intelligent failure.”
Psychological Safety
“I think psychological safety plays two roles. One is, as you just implied, in helping people have the thoughtful conversations they need to prepare. It’s that willingness to ask for help, to ask people what they think of this crazy thing you’re about to try, and so in that sense, psychological safety for you to have candid, brave conversations is an important precursor to coming up with good hypotheses and good experiments. The other way that psychological safety helps is it just creates room for risk-taking, right? Instead of feeling like you have to play it safe and you have to know everything.”
The Good in Failure
“Everything I write, I believe, is fairly logical, but it turns out to not be intuitive, especially not in the workplace. When you go into organizations, by and large, people have a hard time having the proper emotional reaction to different kinds of failures, like an intelligent failure. Sure, it’s disappointing, but it’s valid new data and we should be excited by it and grateful for it. […] My experience has taught me that organizations, by and large, do not do a good enough job of differentiating between different types of undesired outcomes and learning how to celebrate — really call positive attention to — the learnings in new territory while also finding ways to prevent basic failures.”
The Wrong Kind of Fear
“Interpersonal fear is that fear I have if I don’t want to look bad in front of a colleague or a manager, and so I hold back. I need help, but I don’t ask for it, and then something bad actually happens. So that is absolutely counterproductive fear, but there is some fear that’s productive. Like you should be afraid of that damn virus because it could make you sick — doing what you can to protect yourself against the virus or against your child running out into the street after a lost ball. Those are healthy fears. Those are fears that we want to use to stay safe in truly dangerous situations. But the irony is that interpersonal fear often makes us unsafe, right? Because we don’t get the help we need, or we don’t speak up to help someone else who’s about to make an error of some kind. So fear plays an absolutely vital role in keeping us safe and keeping us healthy and alive, but interpersonal fear? That we have to try to drive out of the organization.”
Reflecting on Failure
“It is easy to shortchange the reflection on failure because confronting failure is not fun. It’s aversive. ‘Okay. It didn’t work. Let’s move on.’ But when you get a failure in a workplace, you can think of it as an investment, right? You’ve spent the money already. Now, get your money’s worth, which means get the lessons from it. […] If you’ve got a failure that has happened in a project, I can almost guarantee you that different people will have seen different parts of the elephant. They will have slightly different perspectives based on where they were or their area of expertise. […] And so just pausing to get those different perspectives. And secondly, use the following question to get started. ‘What happened?’ Let’s look at what happened, not ‘why’ and not ‘who’ — those may be your questions for a little bit later — but start with the ‘what.’ Let’s tell the story of this failure as accurately and holistically as we possibly can.”
LEARN MORE
Grab your copy of Amy Edmondson’s book, The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, on Amazon.com or wherever books are sold.