663: How to Grow From Your Errors, with Amy Edmondson

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Many leaders espouse the value of talking about our failures, but failure is a threat to our ego. So it turns out we’re better at learning from the failures of others than we are from our own. In this episode, Amy Edmondson returns to show us how to do a better job of growing when we’re in the wrong. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 663.Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:33]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Oh, how I wish I was never wrong about anything. But, of course, I am, and so many of us are on a regular basis. It’s just part of work, it’s part of leading, and, of course, it’s part of being human.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:03]:
The question is not so much, are we wrong? The question is, how do we respond when we are? Today, I am so glad to welcome back a guest to the show who is gonna help us to respond in a better way when we’re wrong, and more Importantly, how do we grow from that? I’m so pleased to welcome back Amy Edmondson. She is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, where she studies people and organizations seeking to make a positive difference in the world through the work they do. She has pioneered the concept of psychological safety for over 20 years and is recognized as number 1 on the thinkers fifty global ranking of management thinkers. She also received that organization’s breakthrough idea award in 2019 and talent award in 2017. In 2019, she was first on HR Magazine’s list of the 20 most influential international thinkers in human resources. Her prior book, The Fearless Organization, explains psychological safety and has been translated into 15 languages. In addition to publishing several books and numerous articles in top academic outlets, Amy has written for or her work’s been covered by such outlets as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Financial Times, and many others.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:20]:
Her TED talk on teaming has been viewed more than 3,000,000 times. She is the author of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Amy, So glad to have you back on the show.

Amy Edmondson [00:02:33]:
But, Dave, thank you. Thank you for having me back, and thank you for that incredibly gracious introduction.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:39]:
I was sharing with you before we started recording that it is really so impressive to me how the term psychological safety comes up in my conversations with engineers, educators, health care practitioners, folks from all different fields, I know so many people are studying psychological safety now, but you really put this on the map. Thank you so much for all the work you have done on behalf of all of us of getting better at really creating environments that work so well for people and for teams.

Amy Edmondson [00:03:11]:
Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you to say, and I have to admit it has been quite gratifying to see the growth in interest in this topic. And to me, that really represents a growth in awareness of the inherent uncertainty and interdependence and complexity of the world in which we work and in that kind of world, it is really important that people believe it’s safe to speak up and speak up quickly.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:39]:
Yeah. Indeed. And I was struck in reading this new book, at the start of the book, how you talk about your own experience with this and the irony of starting to study psychological failure and you in grad school were studying medical teams, and you had made a hypothesis of what you thought was gonna happen. I’m wondering if you could share that moment with us and what came out of that because I think this comes a lot back to failure and how we respond when we’re wrong.

Amy Edmondson [00:04:12]:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it’s really ironic because it was a study of failures. It was a study of medication errors that lead to adverse drug events for patients in hospitals. So it’s a study of failures, and I confronted my own failure to get support for my hypothesis and on and on it goes. So it’s really a layered moment. But I was a I was I was an early stage PhD student. As all PhD students are required to do, I had had to get involved in in research, And I was quite fortunate, I would say, to be included in a larger project on medical errors, and this was run by some very prominent physician investigators who were trying to assess the rate of adverse events caused by errors in in hospitals.

Amy Edmondson [00:05:04]:
And they thought, hey, while while we’re at it, why don’t we see whether, as there is in aviation, there might be a relationship between the quality of teamwork in the patient care units and the, error, results. And so they invited my adviser who suggested that I sort of help them out with this project. So my part of the larger study was simply this, to assess the relationship between teamwork and error rates. My hypothesis, of course, was that better teamwork would be better coordination and so forth, and that would lead to lower rates of medical error. Now when I finally got the data, my team assessment, team survey assessment data and the, medical error data collected on a biweekly basis by trained medical investigators, I ran the correlation and lo and behold, not only was my hypothesis not supported by data, a failure, but it was 180 degrees wrong. In other words, the data were suggesting that better teams had higher, not lower error rates. Now that was more than disappointing.

Amy Edmondson [00:06:18]:
It was, in a sense, devastating. I was, I was truly crushed to have my hypothesis not supported to, you know, to experience that failure, I was quite anxious. I thought that would land me in some silly way, to get I kicked out of the program. So, you know, I there I was engaged in research, but I had failed to understand the most basic lesson about being a researcher, which is you are very likely to be wrong in new territory. Anytime you’re doing something new and potentially important in new territory, there’s a very real chance that your hypothesis will be wrong simply because it’s it’s unplowed terrain. And so, intellectually, I’m sure I understood that, but emotionally, not so much. So I felt terrible about it.

Amy Edmondson [00:07:07]:
But then, of course, as one does, you have to pick yourself back up and say, well, why might this be happening? And It occurred to me, almost just a flash of insight, it occurred to me that maybe the better teams aren’t making more mistakes, and performing more badly, but maybe, in fact, they’re more open about them. Maybe they’re more willing to report them and share them. And think about how easy it is to really, in most work environments, including hospitals, to hide errors. I mean, the ones that have truly consequential, outcomes, of course, cannot be hidden, but very few have that. Right? Most of them are just easy enough to hide. So I began to think maybe the better teams weren’t making more mistakes, maybe they were more willing and able to report them. And and that was the beginning of that insight or the that wasn’t certainly wasn’t proven yet, but that insight was the beginning to an entirely new research stream on psychological safety, which I’ll define as, a belief that you can speak up, especially with interpersonally threatening content like mistakes or dissent or or a need for help that you not only can, but you truly must speak up because of what’s at stake.

Amy Edmondson [00:08:30]:
And what I had inadvertently discovered was that different groups had very different levels of psychological safety. And, ultimately, in those groups where they believed not only can you, but you must speak up and speak up quickly about mistakes and errors. They were better poised to learn and grow and improve quality, and those who could not, were less so. I wasn’t able to prove that in that particular study, but but many subsequent studies were able to show fairly conclusively that psychological safety is a terrific, it’s an immeasurable property of the interpersonal climate, and it’s a terrific predictor of learning behavior and performance in teams.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:10]:
It’s really extraordinary when you think about it. As you said, a a failure in any traditional sense you think about it and yet because you were able to stop and think about, okay, what are some other ways I might think about this that it opened up this whole Incredible line of study and research that you focused your career on and so many other people have now too. And I think about, like, what if you hadn’t? Right. What if you had stopped? Right? Or it said forget this. I’m not cut out for this. And I know you had some of those thoughts. And I think about that in the context of One of the studies you cite in this book is a study of surgeons, and you write, “the surgeons learned more from their own successes than from their own failures, but learned more from others failures than from other successes.”

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:58]:
And I think it’s interesting how failure just becomes such a threat to our ego, doesn’t it?

Amy Edmondson [00:10:04]:
Exactly. Right. So that’s a very interesting study by my former student, Brad Stotts, and his colleague, Francesca Gino. And it’s it’s it’s not just big data set and led by Brad. And it’s fascinating because in a purely emotion free world, that difference would not exist. Right? As you just say, the data are the same. The the ability to learn and take away insights from these failures and these successes should be a level playing field. But because of the emotional component of our own failures, which we don’t have with respect to other people’s failures, we’re at risk of blocking the lessons from them.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:42]:
I used to, long time listeners, Amy, would know that at the end of interviews years ago, I used to ask people, what have you failed at? It was inspired by, like, when that it was very invoked to, like, talk about failure. And people would almost always have the same response to that question. They would say something like, oh, great question. I’m so glad you’re asking this, and then they would inevitably not really answerit, right? They would sorta give some generic sounding response to it. And I found myself thinking, like, why am I even asking this? It’s interesting, like, how we all espouse The value of learning from failure, but when we actually start talking about our own. And I was having dinner with my wife, Bonni, 1 night, and I forget what had happened at work, but she’s made some comment of, it’s so impressive when someone’s willing to change their mind on something.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:34]:
And I got to thinking about that and thought, what if I ask that question at the end of conversations instead? And I’ve now asked people for years, what have you changed your mind on? But I think it’s really it’s interesting that The ego piece of it, if you take that away, if you find a way not to threaten the ego so much, it opens things up because it’s it’s As you point out in the book, i”t’s hard to learn if you already know.” That’s the fundamental challenge, isn’t it?

Amy Edmondson [00:12:03]:
Right. And That sounds maybe just a truism or something, but but we dig into that if if it’s hard to learn if you already know. What that really means is, a, you failed to be curious, b, quite literally cognitively, you could miss disconfirming data, the confirmation bias. And 3, there’s this emotional resistance to learning that you’re wrong. Right? And so we cling in a very real way to our knowing. It’s a reflex, almost a cling to knowing when we have the opportunity to open ourselves up to learning.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:39]:
You talk a ton in the book about framing and how significant that is. And, you invite us to think about how we frame failure or being wrong really matters a lot. What do you mean by framing?

Amy Edmondson [00:12:55]:
Framing is the meaning that we attach to reality, to things, to events in our lives. And, you know, we tend to think of the meaning of an event as just straightforward, as as kind of part and parcel of the event itself. But, no, it’s it’s a layer that we have put over it. Maybe a simple way to explain this, I use this example in the book, is that some research shows that bronze medalists in Olympic competitions are happier with their result than the silver medalists, which is nonsensical because the silvers did better than the than the bronzes. But the bronze medalists will have a tendency, which makes perfect sense, to frame their mettle with relative to not having meddled at all. I mean, they are in a a state of gratitude for having made it onto the podium, but they can easily look to their left and see how easily they could not have you know, they could have missed it altogether, another second of speed or whatever in their sport. And whereas the silver medalist will spontaneously frame their metal with respect to having missed the gold. You know, I’m missed by that much and and feel disappointed.

Amy Edmondson [00:14:10]:
It’s not to say it has to be that way. Right? You could certainly help a silver medalist Reframe their immense accomplishment relative to the many, many thousands of athletes that would have loved to have been in their shoes, but didn’t even make it to anywhere near the the the team. They’re at the very pinnacle of their of their sport, and they can appreciate that, of course. So framing happens automatically. Reframing is a deliberate act of thinking about events in a, I would say, a cool headed, clear eyed view to adopt a meaning that may be even more accurate and certainly is more helpful and productive. So with respect to failure, yep, put the Olympic medals aside. Those are so those are both successes.

Amy Edmondson [00:15:01]:
But with respect to failure, let’s say my research failure as a, you know, 1st year graduate student, I could say, oh, this is awful and wasted time, and maybe I won’t ever be able to graduate or and all this stuff that I have spontaneously layered onto a simple event, which is that the data didn’t support my hypothesis. The correct and healthy thing to do in that moment to reframe it as, well, this is interesting. This isn’t what I expected. These are interesting data. What happened here? You know, what might be going on that would explain this result because this is simply the result? And what might it mean, and where could I go with it next? In a sense, that reframe is not only more healthy and productive, but it’s also more forward looking. It’s not we I think we have a spontaneous tendency to look back and wish the past, even the very recent past was different than it is, versus to be looking forward to saying, what next? What do I try now?

Dave Stachowiak [00:16:02]:
Yeah. And how do I grow from it? Right?

Amy Edmondson [00:16:01]:
Yeah. What do I do with it? It’s what is, but I can add I can layer on a more learning oriented meaning. And, really, that’s for me, that’s the fundamental there’s lots of people who’ve studied frames and framing in in cognitive psychology and clinical psychology and so forth. But the fundamental difference in almost every case is a frame of kind of knowing and almost it it has a certain negativity for reasons we can get into And a frame of learning and and possibility.

Dave Stachowiak [00:16:37]:
I love the example of Doctor Jonathan Cohen, an anesthesiologist you mentioned in the book. And I think his story is really, really beautiful and illustrates that point really well. Could you share it?

Amy Edmondson [00:16:49]:
Yes. So I had the good fortune to meet Doctor Cohen on social media, then I reached out to him, and we’ve had some conversations. And what led me to reach out to him is he had tweeted a a PowerPoint slide that he that he uses in talks, which has a a heading, how do and he’s an anesthesiologist in a cancer center, you know, leading physician in an important role. And he said, how do I feel? How does it feel when someone points out my error? And the next line on the slide was, actually, it feels pretty good. And you’re thinking, wait a minute. You know? Is this guy for real? It never it never feels good if someone points out your error. And then he says, let’s just to be clear, it didn’t always feel that way, but I trained myself to equate someone pointing out my error with the patient getting better care. And I would add, and it means then you can train yourself to think this too.

Amy Edmondson [00:17:45]:
It means you’re a good leader. Right? If you’ve got subordinates, in those other roles who are willing to say, doc, you just made a mistake, you are a good leader. So for both reasons and you can feel good about that event when someone points out your error. But make no mistake. We will not spontaneously feel good about that. We need to train ourselves, which is another way to say reframe that event as a good thing, which it surely is.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:15]:
Yeah. And, I mean, this just goes across so many disciplines. One of the other examples I love from the book is from Larry Wilson, a successful entrepreneur salesperson. Earlier in his career, he started reframing how he did sales calls, didn’t he?

Amy Edmondson [00:18:30]:
Yes. So, Larry was a, a high school teacher with 6 kids and and Having trouble making ends meet, so an uncle suggested he go into selling life insurance. And at first, it wasn’t going so well, and it was discouraging. You know? All of the all of the cold calls that yielded a big fat no were getting him down, and the manager recommended that he reframe his thinking. And he said, you know, a rookie salesperson, on average, it takes 8 calls to get a sale, And you get about this is way back in the in the early sixties. He says you get a it’s about a $200 commission for the salesperson. And if it takes 8 calls to get it, that means each and every one of those calls is worth $25. So Larry decided to train himself to just say not allowed, but in his own head after each call, whether it was a a win or a lose, he would just say to himself, thanks for the $25.

Amy Edmondson [00:19:28]:
He’d be saying that to the imaginary customer, or real customer, but it in his mind. And he said then very quickly, because of that sort of positive forward facing frame, 25 soon turned into 50. Right? He started making more of his sales, you’d make 4 out of the 8, and pretty soon 50 turns into a 100. And He rather astonishingly quickly became extremely successful, and then everyone started asking him how he did it. And it turns out he really had reframed the act of selling from one of, like, how do I get my money out of your pocket to one of, how do I help you? How do I help you solve a problem? And maybe even a problem that at the outset you don’t even know you have. But the fundamentally, his heart was in the right place. I mean, he wanted to make a living, but his heart was in the right place. He really did want to help, potential customers with a life challenge.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:28]:
There’s a story in the book about a scuba diving accident. And as I was reading about it, I was thinking, my brother and I went and got certified scuba diving, like, 20 years ago. I haven’t been for years, but one of the things I remember from the training was when you get into trouble underwater to do 4 things, stop, breathe, think, and act. Those were like the 4 things that were embedded in the training. And the message is when people get into trouble underwater, the real enemy usually isn’t the situation that presents, it’s the panic that happens. And so the whole idea is to interrupt that panic. And I was fascinated thinking about that and then thinking about your research in the work of the model of that starts with stop, which is disrupt the emotional response. That’s really the first, the starting point is just to acknowledge the fact that you’re gonna have pain.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:26]:
You’re gonna have embarrassment. You’re gonna have panic. Whatever that emotional response is. Step 1, you need to disrupt it.

Amy Edmondson [00:21:25]:
Yes. And, of course, that is the first and, therefore, the most challenging of the 3 steps because you have to find ways to remember to interrupt yourself or to to to disrupt the automatic emotional response to the stimulus, to the to the events that happen in your life. And I think that’s great. The scuba discipline, it’s very, very relevant because what what they’re trying to do, I suppose, is make it more automatic. Like, just drill it in.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:05]:
Right. Yeah. And I I was really curious about this this disruption piece because I think it’s so critical to, like, how we think about errors and and failure. And one of the questions you invite us to think about under the stop part, which is the disruption part, is how was I feeling before this happened? Tell me more about that, what’s what’s significant about that question?

Amy Edmondson [00:22:29]:
Well, I guess it’s if because the generally negative, event can alter your feelings and alter them quite quickly. You know, you’ve shifted from probably a state of neutral or maybe even happy or positive to a state of anxiety, fear, and sometimes worse. And so it I think that’s just an anchor to to hang on to, to go back, to to help you see that this event, whatever it was, should not have or need not have that kind of power over you. Go back to where you were just a minute ago. Maybe even might have even been excited or anticipating and and try to reconnect with that Slightly more positive state.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:13]:
When you see people who are able to learn to do that, to ask, like, that question, how was I feeling before, to stop that emotional response, what do you find is a starting point that helps us to develop that discipline of just stopping.

Amy Edmondson [00:23:31]:
That’s interesting. I don’t really know the answer to that question, but my intuition would be that curiosity plays a big role here. And maybe there’s just a little bit more openness, a little bit more open mindedness to the possibility of other interpretations. So quite often, people who are very, very smart and very accomplished struggle with this more than others, believe it or not, because they’re used to being right. They’ve been rewarded for being right and and getting the right answer, and it feels that much more frightening to not measure up in some way. They’ve got more of their self image, tied up in that performance. You know, it’s can be a little bit it’s a little bit of the fixed mindset that Carol Dweck writes about and studies.

Amy Edmondson [00:24:20]:
But but where so where does the I mean, obviously, people can be very bright and very accomplished and have curiosity, but how do we nurture it? How do we how do we hang on to it and nurture it so that there’s that little chink in the armor that can let that wonder back in. Like, I wonder what this means rather than I know what this means, and it’s all sewed up, and it’s terrible.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:44]:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And I think back and, like, so many times I’ve caught myself doing that and, like, what’s different about the times when I can interrupt that? Right. But I think it starts with just asking this question. Okay? And that’s why I think the power of that question specifically is, how was I feeling before this happened? Like, it gets you out of the immediate moment of the natural response we all have, and it It it forces a bit of perspective whether you do something with it or not.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:17]:
Who knows? Right? But, like, it forces some perspective.

Amy Edmondson [00:25:17]:
Well, that’s it. Right? It reminds you very quickly that there is another way to feel. I just felt it a minute ago. Right? There is . There is a there is another state, and maybe I can get back there or or forward to there.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:33]:
Yeah. Which is a good then place if you can allow that moment, that perspective to come into your thinking. The 2nd step of challenge, considering if the content of your thoughts are really useful for your goals. One of the questions you invite us to ask ourselves here is, what other interpretation of the situation is possible? So whatever kind of our initial response was like, okay, how how else may I frame that? Sounds like that’s that’s key in getting that perspective.

Amy Edmondson [00:26:04]:
Just for fun. Right? Even if you don’t believe it. Like, even if you’ve got this all sewn up, locked down, you know, this is awful. This is the end of my research career. Just for fun, right, while we’re at it, what other interpretation of this situation is at least plausible? Well, maybe this is a setback, but not a career ending moment. Well, that’s probably more likely in, 99 out of a 100 cases.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:29]:
Yeah. And those 3 words Are so beautiful. Just for fun.

Amy Edmondson [00:26:34]:
Just for fun. Yeah. That’s true. It’s true because it’s the lighthearted. I, you know, I often think that part of what I’d hoped to accomplish with this book is to help people have a more lighthearted, I don’t mean casual or sloppy, but literally lighthearted relationship with failure because failure and fallibility are part of our lives, and so we can just be cooler in our interactions with it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:03]:
Yeah. Yeah. And There’s something that’s really and I think about what we were talking about earlier of how so much about our traditional thinking about failure and our response to it is is a threat to the ego. And so, like, thinking about it through that more casual playful lens of, like, just for fun, let me think about just another way I might approach this. Like, it gets us a little bit out of that space that makes it more likely that we’re able to kind of look at that bigger perspective.

Amy Edmondson [00:27:28]:
Yeah. And and the other thing I like I’d never really thought about this before, but the other thing I like about just for fun as a device is it it it makes it clear this isn’t gonna be expensive, right. This isn’t going to be painful, not gonna take a lot of time, like, just for fun. What other ways would there be to think about this? What other interpretation of the situation is possible.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:50]:
Yeah. Indeed. And then the 3rd step is choose. Say or do something that moves you closer to your goals. And one of the questions here is, what is going to best help me achieve my goals?

Amy Edmondson [00:28:02]:
Right.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:02]:
I think about that, and I think the the power there for me is it also invites us to think about, okay, what am I gonna do next? Not just in the context of this moment that feels really difficult, but thinking about it through forcing a little bit of us to think about the broader picture, the bigger picture.

Amy Edmondson [00:28:22]:
Yes. So this is a creative act. In that sense, I suppose I said the 1st step is the hardest because I think it’s just so easy to even miss the opportunity to stop, to pause. The second, you know, is is really sort of analytical. It’s challenging. It’s taking a look at your current interpretation and recognizing that there might be alternatives.

Amy Edmondson [00:28:42]:
But the third one is the most creative because you must now think of and act on those alternatives and be willing to choose a healthier Productive one, which means I have to be willing to move away from the notion that I just would rather be right. You know? I’d rather be right than effective. And I loved how you opened with, I wish I you know, I sure wish I was never wrong. We all have that. We all have that disease, but we can, I think, learn to overcome it, and this creative opportunity to choose is right there for the grabbing?

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:19]:
Yeah. And I think back going to even thinking about disrupting that emotional response, that hard part right of stopping is, there’s something about, boy, I’ve caught myself doing this so many times, Amy, and I see it so often in others too, especially if someone’s considering like a career change or a big move. I often find myself asking, well, how does this support your longer term goals. Like, if you made this shift, what does that mean for your 5, 10 year plan? And it’s interesting, like, how often people respond to that with saying some version of, I hadn’t really hadn’t really thought about that that much yet, and I think about the same thing too. Like, when I’ve had those career moments too, inevitably, I’ve gotten caught up in the moment and thought like, oh, I need to think about the, and I miss the, okay, but so what? Like, what’s the bigger picture? And I think that that for me is what’s really nice about this third question, the creativity behind it is like, what am I gonna do with this that helps me toward my goals? It brings us back to the bigger picture. Like, okay. It’s not just about this moment anymore. It’s about the bigger picture.

Amy Edmondson [00:30:28]:
Yes. Absolutely. And I sometimes think that the most fundamental shifts we have 2 shifts we have to just keep making over and over again from, you know, from me to we and from now to later and oftentimes, I think you’re right. When people are you know, they’re fed up. They’re unhappy. They wanna make some shift, But it’s very now. It’s very well, I’m, you know, I’m uncomfortable. I’m happy, so I’m getting it out of here.

Amy Edmondson [00:30:55]:
But they Haven’t. You know, it is it is surprising, but maybe not surprising. They haven’t really thought about it with respect to the longer term where am I going? Where do I want to go? And what will that require from me today? And it won’t always be fun and games what I need to do today In order to arrive where I want to arrive down the road in a in a piece and and me, you know, sometimes we just get so caught up in what do I want? How do I feel? What do need right now we’ve we failed to say, yeah, but what do other people need from me? And there’s real joy in being able to provide for other people, what they need from you and vice versa. There’s a mutuality of it. We sometimes call that teamwork. That is a very pleasurable experience.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:42]:
Alright. We’ve covered about 7 or 8 pages of the book, Amy. There’s so much more. We’re sidestepping a ton. There’s 3 different kinds of failure. There’s a ton of examples you you bring in the book. I mean, there’s so much more that are way beyond the starting point here. So I invite folks to, pick up the book if this has been helpful to you as a starting point to get into a lot more of the details, so many of the practical things that Amy presents through her research.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:07]:
Amy, I’ve got 1 final question for you. I’ve mentioned it earlier, the what you’ve changed your mind on question. The last time you were on, we talked about the fearless organization and psychological safety. It’s been a few years since that book came out, and I’m curious now Yeah. Thinking back since that book’s come out and all the success that’s come with it, what, if anything, have you changed your mind on?

Amy Edmondson [00:32:30]:
Yeah. Well, I think the most important thing, and this is a work in progress, but I think the most important thing is because I’d studied psychological safety for so long and there really is some robust research evidence of its of its value in such things as learning and performance. I’ve focused in on it. I focused in on it. I wrote a whole book about it, and I continue to believe this is a really important climate factor. Right? This this climate variable that, as we said at the beginning, is about It’s about a belief that you really can speak up with interpersonally challenging risky, content for the good of the team and the organization. But I think what I underplayed and underestimated and even have understudied to date is the scale part.

Amy Edmondson [00:33:20]:
And it’s psychological safety. I wanna I don’t wanna say it’s not enough even though that’s true statement. It’s not enough. But it is enacted through some very skilled behaviors, the kinds of behaviors you’re illustrating through your questions. You know, that you’re asking questions with A sense of genuine curiosity with an up with with, I think, an intent to draw me out and so forth, that’s a skill. And I think people are thinking, and partly my fault, about psychological safety as some sort of magical factor that should be put in place and that will be okay. Well, it doesn’t get put in place. Right? It gets enacted day in and day out through skilled behavior that I can best capture as learning behavior, and you can see the connection between this and what we’ve been talking about so far, but it’s, you know, choosing learning and then having the skill to enact it and make it clear to others that you have chosen learning and that part of the learning you’re hoping for is to learn from them.

Amy Edmondson [00:34:23]:
That’s not easy. Right? It’s much harder than I think it first appears And far more of an important component in this whole domain.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:32]:
Amy Edmonson is the author of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Amy, thank you so much for all your work.

Amy Edmondson [00:34:40]:
My pleasure. Thank you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:48]:
If this conversation was helpful for you, 3 related episodes I’d recommend. One of them was the last time Amy was on the show, episode 404, how to build psychological safety. If you’ve ever heard that term or like many folks in our listening community have Worked on building psychological safety within your team or organization, you have Amy Edmonson to thank for that. She’s really at the forefront of the groundbreaking research that’s been done on psychological safety over the years, in episode 404, we looked at some of the key details, the tactics and where to begin. A great compliment to this conversation, of course.Also recommended is episode 448, the value of being uncomfortable with Neil Pasricha, Neil and I talked about this uncomfortable reality that discomfort tends to be a Pretty good indicator that we’re being pushed in a new way. It’s not discomfort for discomfort’s sake, of course, but siscomfort when we’re learning and growing, and yes, failing and getting things wrong, is an indicator that we’re trying things It’s new.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:51]:
It’s an indicator we’re being pushed. We talked about how to really utilize that, how to learn from that and grow from that in episode 448.And then finally, I’d recommend, of course, the work of Annie Duke episode 607, how to quit bad stuff faster. Sometimes when we do error, make a wrong, go the wrong direction, it means that we should stop doing what we’re doing. We fight this cultural mantra many of us have heard all the time of, winners never quit. The reality is is that the most successful people, decide to regularly quit things that are not working for them, not serving their organizations. But how do you decide when that is the right time? In episode 607, Annie and I talked about her research on when to stop, and, of course, our more broad research on decision making. A must listen if you find yourself in that place right now. Should I keep doing something or not? Should I set something aside? I think episode 607 will really help you to frame that well.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:48]:
All of those episodes, course, you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. We have this episode filed under personal leadership because so much about leadership does begin with us. It is not about us, but it does begin with looking at ourselves first. And this conversation today with Amy so much in the spirit of that, Many other conversations we’ve had over the years on personal leadership, but also dozens and dozens of other topic areas inside of the free membership. You can find exactly what you’re looking for that’s relevant to you right now on the website by setting up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com, and then going into the episode library where you’ll be able to search by topic for all of the past episodes. It’s a great starting point. If you don’t know where to start, begin there with what’s most relevant to you right now. Plus, you get access to all of the benefits inside of the free membership, and one of those benefits is my weekly guide that comes to you on email each week.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:42]:
Usually toward the end of the week, I send out a message with the details of each episode each week, the relevant links, the episodes I’ve recommended as I just did a moment ago, those will come later on this week. And then also, usually 2 or 3 articles, podcasts, videos that I found throughout the week that I think are things should that should be on your radar screen that you should know about that will help support your leadership development, and often a quote from one of the books we featured on a past episode. All of that’s inside of the weekly guide each week. It’s one of the key benefits inside of your free membership. To set that up, just go over to coachingforleaders.com.And if you’re looking for a bit more, I am regularly writing and sharing my thoughts and integration of all the experts that have come on the podcast and sharing those with our members inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. If you’d like to hear more from me, receive my writing, more of my thoughts, more of my integration between all the experts we’ve had on the show, go over to coachingforleaders.plus. Details there on all of the benefits that just one of the key benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:51]:
Coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next week, I’m glad to welcome Marcus Collins to the show. Marcus and I are gonna be discussing the reason people make buying decisions. Key key insight on what we need to know as leaders of why people decide to engage with our organizations and what we can do to influence that well, join me for that conversation with Marcus next Monday, and I’ll see you back then.