Dr. Amy Edmondson: How to Fail Well

Guy Kawasaki:
Welcome to Remarkable People. We're in a mission to make you remarkable. I am your host, Guy Kawasaki. Today I have the privilege of being joined by Dr. Amy Edmondson. She's the esteemed professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. Her work sheds light on the pivotal role leaders play in nurturing an environment conducive to learning and collaboration. More than 3 million people have watched her TED Talk “How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team”. Amy is also a prolific author. Her latest book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well invites us to reevaluate our conventional perceptions of failure. It provides profound insights into handling failure with grace and resilience and learning from failure.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. With no further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome the truly remarkable Amy Edmondson.
I want to start, this is a question that may belie my ignorance in the scientific method, but you start your book, and you talk about this Harvard study where your hypothesis was that better teams would have fewer errors, and then you say that you were proven wrong, and it failed. But I would argue that you didn't fail. You just found something different from a hypothesis, right?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I completely agree. That is in fact, a typical experience of a researcher, maybe really an optimal experience of a researcher because I did my homework, I had a hypothesis. It was a reasonable hypothesis. The shortcoming wasn't really the hypothesis. It turns out that the shortcoming was the measure of medication errors was flawed in the sense that I think the researchers who set out to study medication errors had a faulty assumption that people would be willing to report them for science, for research, and of course, that turns out to be, and I suppose in retrospect, quite a faulty assumption.
But what was not expected, I think, by anybody, was that people's willingness to speak up about errors would be wildly different from team to team, and so that was interesting and that got me thinking about a new possibility. But I think the original hypothesis is probably right, that better teamwork does lead to fewer errors.
Guy Kawasaki:
Again, pardon my ignorance of the scientific method, but is the perspective that you're trying to prove or disprove a hypothesis, or you're trying to just investigate and let the facts fall where they may? What are you trying to do there?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
The answer is yes to both, right? The way the scientific method in general seeks to advance knowledge is by reading what has come before, so you read the literature and then you say, "Well, what do we not yet know?" You formulate a hypothesis; you formulate a way to collect the data that will help you support that hypothesis and sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong.
In a grand sense, you are in fact, stepping into the unknown and trying to learn whatever it will teach you. But the way you go about that is by doing your homework and at least entering the unknown with as much knowledge as you can from what people have done before you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is the correct verb testing a hypothesis or proving a hypothesis?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Oh, testing is a better word than proving. You're absolutely right. Because in fact, you can never prove a hypothesis. You can only dis-confirm because if it supports it, that's good, but it's not as informative as failing to support it.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is going to take us down a little bit of a rat hole just for a second, okay? I want to know why does your book have a prelude and an introduction?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
It's a prologue.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, prologue. Sorry.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
No, I think of a prologue and I've looked at other books, I often am looking at books for their structure and how they organize themselves. A prologue is a kind of glimpse, it's a compelling story, perhaps an anecdote, an idea that leads you to want to read more or that gives you a sense maybe of the author and what she cares about and maybe where she's coming from.
But an introduction is almost, if you don't have time to read the whole book, you can often get at least the big picture of the ideas and the territory it's going to cover. Certainly won't do it justice, but the introduction is the sort of lesson zero of the book or lesson one of the book and gets you started. The prologue is just fun, I think.
Guy Kawasaki:
A prologue is like when you watch a Tom Cruise movie or a James Bond movie, it's like that opening scene where he jumps off the building in a wingsuit or whatever. It has nothing to do with the rest of the plot.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
It probably has premonitions about the rest of the plot, or it gives you some glimpse into Tom Cruise's character. But you're absolutely right. It's a perfect analogy. It's just that, oh, okay, what was that? And does it compel me to learn more about this movie?
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so I'm in Silicon Valley, and now I'm going to have to ask you some questions that I know what you're going to say, but still, so we're going to take that sentence I said, oh, but. I'm living in Silicon Valley and every day, I hear fail fast, break things. Like from your academic research, what's the use of a statement like that?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
That's a great question actually. The use of a statement like that is to free people up, to encourage them to take risks. Now, I would like to add smart risks, but to take risks rather than to play it safe. It's about saying our natural tendency is to play, not to lose. I just don't want to lose the game. I don't want to lose the contest. But what we want instead is to help people embrace the possibility to play to win, and that means you're going to take risk and you're going to do things that may or may not work out as you'd hoped. I think the use of statements like that is just to free people up and help them unleash themselves.
Guy Kawasaki:
That does not offend your academic and scientific knowledge?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
No, not at all. Understand it as an invitation to try things. But where it offends my academic knowledge is when it is uniformly applied to everything across this spectrum. For example, it would be nonsensical for a plant manager in any kind of factory, but let's just say an automotive assembly plant, to tell her workers to fail fast and break things. We can laugh at that. It's obviously wrongheaded, and we want our automobiles to come off the end of that line perfect, every last one of them.
The statement isn't helpful in either very routine context or very high-risk context, meaning physical risk. The leader of a nuclear power plant would not say that, the very opposite. There's a whole literature on high reliability organizations which addresses the specific question of how do organizations where there's inherent safety risks managed to operate safely, essentially all the time, 100 percent of the time, or 99.999 percent of the time?
In fact, one of the takeaways of that research is people are not allergic to failure. They're aware of failure, and they're so aware of failure, they do everything they can to prevent it because of what's at stake. Now, if you had your R&D department operating with high reliability organization principles, you wouldn't get any innovation.
If you had a scientific laboratory in a leading university operating with high reliability organizations, they wouldn't have any big discoveries, so it's about being acutely sensitive to context. I think when people in Silicon Valley say these things, they're smart enough to know what they're talking about, what they're saying, but they may not be translating it effectively for all of their listeners.
Guy Kawasaki:
I might debate you on the first part of that statement, but let's not go there. Since you're the queen of failure, what about when people say failure is not an option?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Oh, failure is not an option is I think one of the most misunderstood phrases because I think we can attribute it to Gene Kranz in the Apollo 13 mission, and of course, it's been memorialized in the movie and so on. But what Kranz is saying there is we all know what's at stake here. We know the human lives that are at stake here, and I know that with your engineering training and your big brains and your dedication, you will figure something out, like you will solve this incredibly challenging problem because none of us can bear to consider that other option.
It's a statement of encouragement, of pride, of support, of confidence. It is not a statement of I don't want to hear about anything going wrong around here, which of course, leads things to go underground and have people not speak up about them.
Guy Kawasaki:
If Mitch McConnell says, "Failure is not an option, we have to take back the Senate," how would you interpret that?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I would interpret that as a statement of wishful thinking, but it's not in the same category as the Gene Kranz story. Oftentimes, let's take Mitch McConnell out, but just say, when senior leaders in organizations say things like that, they may not be intending to do this, but they are inadvertently sending the message that when you say failure's not an option, you're really sending the message I don't want to hear about it.
When it happens, because in a complex, uncertain world, some things will go wrong, I guarantee it. What they're trying to say, of course, is please hold high standards and give it your all. Bravo. Wonderful, but what they're inadvertently saying is, "Don't tell me about it," and that leads to way more failures than if you don't make that mistake.
Guy Kawasaki:
I bet that was a favorite phrase of Elizabeth Holmes.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Yes, I am sure you're right.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. That's why she's in jail today. Whenever I meet people, they always ask me what it was like to work for Steve Jobs. I have explained this, I don't know, 50,000 times. The only thing I've explained more is that I'm not part of a Kawasaki motorcycle family, okay? With that prologue or prelude or introduction, I would like you to explain the three types of failures. What is this type of failure? What causes it and how to prevent it? I know, no one has ever asked you that before, but I'm going to stretch you, Amy, and ask you to do that.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Okay. Nobody's asked it in quite that way, I have to say. Now, I've been thinking about this for a very long time, writing about it, studying it, and it only dawned on me in the last year or so that I should start with the good kind. Instead of leading up to it, I should start with the good kind of failure, which I call intelligent failure, borrowing a phrase from Sim Sitkin who's a professor at Duke. Intelligent failures are the undesired outcome of thoughtful forays in new territory.
We can call a failure intelligent when it is genuinely novel territory. We are in pursuit of an opportunity. We've done our homework, we've thought about what might happen, and we've designed a test of that hypothesis and finally, the failure is as small as possible to still be able to learn from it. You don't want to make bigger bets than you have to in uncertain territory.
Now, I think intellectually those four things are pretty obvious, but practically in organizations, it often doesn't happen that way because of various incentives or because people aren't systematic enough, but that's an intelligent failure. These, we don't want to prevent. In fact, for the most part, we would like to have more of them in organizations. Now, they classically happen in research and development, in basic science, in celebrity chefs or all the places where people are deliberately and are self-aware pushing the envelope.
But they can happen in your own life too. Let's say you're searching for a life partner. You will have some intelligent failures along the way to finding your soulmate. You will go out on a date with someone because a friend thought you'd like each other and it was a good hypothesis, it was an opportunity to meet someone, and it was just a date. It wasn't a whole marriage. That would be the same phenomenon, but in a personal setting. These, we don't want to prevent.
The other two kinds of failures, indeed, as your question implies, we do want to prevent, so let's talk about them. The simplest kind of failure I call a basic failure, and it's basic because it has a single cause. That single cause is usually human error. I put the milk in the cabinet instead of in the refrigerator and the milk spoils, so that's a basic failure. That's one that's pretty trivial, but it's one that happens because we're not paying attention or we're not maybe trained in an activity that we're trying to do, we haven't had enough training, we haven't done our homework, what have you. Those are obviously not worth celebrating.
The set of practices that help us prevent them include training, error proofing, checklists, and various other systems and supports that help us do things right in the territory where the knowledge is already established of how to do it. You follow a recipe, you don't just guess when you're baking a cake, and so you prevent that failed cake.
The third kind is what I call complex failures and they are, as the title suggests, multi causal. They generally happen because of a complex mix of factors. Some of them external, some of them internal. They come together in just the wrong way to produce a bad outcome. A supply chain breakdown during a global pandemic is a complex failure. The supply chain has struggled to deliver the goods and services that needed to because of a combination of things, people sick and not able to come to work, a shipping route's being disrupted, storms that might happen and exacerbate the whole thing.
Factories that got shut down so they couldn't supply some of the things that needed to be supplied. That would be a kind of large example of a complex failure. But complex failures are best prevented also by training, by careful systems thinking when people are helped to see how things relate to each other so that they don't make actions over here that lead to some unintended consequence over there that they're unaware of, but they could have been aware of if they actually put their head above the parapet and talked to the right people.
Guy Kawasaki:
When someone is killed on a movie set by a gun, is that a basic failure because it was a simple thing?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
Or is it a complex failure, lots of things had to go wrong?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Turns out that particular one, which I'm sure we're thinking of the same one on the Rust set, I would diagnose it as a complex failure because it had several contributing factors and a handful of at least early warning signs that were downplayed or not paid attention to. It's a complex failure when any one of the contributing factors, if you change that one factor, you would avert the failure.
Whereas if the basic failure is just one bad thing was done, it didn't get stopped and it created the failure. But in the Rust story, you had some unclear how the live ammunition ever made it to the set. It never was supposed to. It was also then checked by someone right before, I think with just a faulty diagnosis and about three or four other things happened that any one of which could have caught and corrected the defect and led to it not happening.
Guy Kawasaki:
In something like that, from a legal liability standpoint, who takes the fall?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
That's a hotly debated question, as I'm sure you have seen and others have seen in the news. Interestingly, the answer to that question with respect to this particular case has shifted around from the producer, to the arms person, the person in charge of the movie weaponry as it were. When there's lots of causal responsibility to spread around, my rule of thumb answer would be that the person in charge is responsible, that the general manager, the CEO, and in this case, that would be Baldwin.
But it's one thing to be responsible, it's one thing to be the person who must apologize, must do whatever is in their power to prevent the same thing ever happening again, but that's different than the question of legal liability because it's hard to be legally liable for a complex and unfortunate confluence of factors.
Guy Kawasaki:
I just want to ask for clarification of this point. You're saying we should not try to prevent intelligent failure?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Yes, I am. Because as long as they fit the criteria, new territory, there's an opportunity here that you or others see, you have done your homework and it's a thoughtful experiment or a thoughtful test, and you are using only as many resources and time as you must, no more, then it is necessarily producing something of value. You hope you're right, and you just produced an intelligent success. But in some fields like basic science, 90 percent of the time, it's failure.
The reason why you don't want to prevent them is because they are where discovery lives. Now, not everyone has to be, at least in their job, a pioneer and a discoverer of new knowledge. But I think in our lives, we do want to be that because we want to keep growing and learning, so we have to be willing, in fact, we should be most eager to have more intelligent failures.
Trivial example, about ten years ago, I started to play golf. Now, you don't start to play golf at that age and expect it to go terribly well, but it's fun to try something new and fail so badly at it, but then get better at it and it develops those muscles, those learning muscles, if you will.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, Carol Dweck would be proud, first of all.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Thank you.
Guy Kawasaki:
I started surfing at sixty.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Good for you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Madisun humiliates me every day when we go out there, but that's a different discussion. Okay, taking intelligent failure off the table, and now we're just basic and complex failures, what prevents people from learning from failure?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
That's a great question and there's really wonderful research on this and the big takeaways from it is, and I'll just summarize, we have an aversion to it. We just have an instinctive aversion to failure. I think we have a sort of a deep reluctance to be imperfect because it's threatening, it's psychologically threatening, and so the easiest way is to self-protect from that threat is to just to ignore it, look the other way, not want to spend the time you need to spend to dig into it and understand what did I do wrong and what could I do differently? We just have the allergy to it. That's one bit.
Another is the social side, the fear of looking bad in front of others, especially others whose opinions we care about. Some failures, you can learn about them absolutely privately and then, this doesn't apply there, but many failures happen in your lives or at work where in order to really learn from them and bring other people in, you might have to admit, "Hey, this failed, and I need your help." Or you might have to get help from others in diagnosing what went wrong and getting their advice on how to do better next time and that's embarrassing and we're reluctant.
We don't want to be seen in a bad light by others, especially others we respect and care about or think their opinion of us matters for some reason, and so that's sort of a second element. Then, I think the third part is just that it takes a little bit of work to get to the root cause of it. We're very quick to jump to the superficial answer. Oh, it didn't go well. I'll just do better next time, but not to want to do the harder work of really analyzing what went wrong.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Flipping the question completely. What do people or what should people learn from success as opposed to failure?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I think we should learn from success to always be a little suspicious of it. Our instinct is to want to say, "Oh, I succeeded at that. I must be great. I must be talented." I must be a great whatever the sport or whatever the academic activity or professional activity, rather than realize I contributed to that great outcome, but so did a bunch of other factors, so you don't want to the phrase rest on your laurels. You don't want to take it as information that suggests you're now good to go. Maybe this brings us back to Carol Dweck as well. A success, it's easy to want to draw the wrong messages from it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Which is what? I'm infallible?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Well, I'm infallible. I'm just great, so I don't have to keep learning or stretching or growing or it wasn't a success. Many successes are the result of a confluence of factors that came together. We've got a, let's say a business environment that's conducive to getting funding for my brilliant idea. I've got a country of laws that helps us get the help we need when someone breaks the law. There's a whole context in which a success unfolds, and all of the factors likely played an important role in that success, not just you and your ability.
Guy Kawasaki:
How about if you start the most valuable automotive company and then you decide to buy a social media site?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
There's an interesting example of I think the phenomenon we're talking about because that could be seen as overattributing success as such a large and global ability that it can be then turned around and applied to anything.
Guy Kawasaki:
Push comes to shove, what's a better teacher, success or failure?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I think they are both important teachers. I would err on the side of failure's a better teacher, but they are both important teachers, so long as you do the hard work of learning from them, meaning really making sure you're being analytic and thoughtful in the lessons you take from them.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think many people are good at declaring success, myself included. That's not hard. I wanted to know your perspective on how and when, or mostly when, how do you declare failure?
How do you know that you can't push this boulder up the hill anymore? It's just the boulder's too heavy, the hill's too tall. Because the same people who are saying fail fast, break things, failure is not an option, half of them are saying pivot quickly and the other half are saying, if you believe, keep trying. Ignore the naysayers, so when do you give up on the boulder?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I would like to say there is no single rule of thumb that will apply to all situations with that one, but it is an absolutely wonderful question, and so I'm going to give you an unsatisfying answer, which is that it's going to require judgment. But I do think we can do better than just judgment because judgment will be better, higher quality judgment if it is informed by diverse perspectives. Because we treasure and value persistence. We love that entrepreneur who persistence with failure.
Guy Kawasaki:
Right, Angela Duckworth.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Angela Duckworth's work, and Sara Blakely and Spanx and that sort of you don't take no for an answer, but at some point, the world could be telling you something. Now, at what point? So how long do you keep pushing the boulder up the hill before you say, "Maybe this is the wrong hill?" Again, I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer to that question, but I do think you have to start listening to the little voices inside your head that are saying, "Maybe this is the time for a pivot."
Those little voices will be well-served if they are allowed to listen to other voices of your friends, your family, your colleagues, your spouse, what have you, in an earnest attempt to see whether you may have blind spots or you may be missing something in this persistence, this quest to make this thing happen that the world seems to not want to make happen. Get some other input because they will help you figure out whether it's just roll up your sleeves and keep trying or whether maybe now's the time to just pivot slightly or a great deal.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would make the case that women will be much better at doing this than men because men cannot admit that the boulder is too big or the hill is too tall.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I wouldn't disagree with you, and that's why maybe you need the diverse voices, so it's a team sport. This exercising of judgment in unclear territory is almost always a team sport.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think people are more likely to give up too early or keep trying too long?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
That may be a personality difference, that some people will give up too early. In fact, I'm sure you can think of some. I know I can, who are just, "Oh, tried it, didn't work." But other people will go too long. Maybe we call them stubborn, maybe they put their blinders on. But I think that is one of those, at least for me, rare things that's very personality dependent.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that failure is a slippery slope? If you quit taking piano or quit violin or you quit calculus, and next thing you know, you're a lifelong quitter?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I hope not, since I quit piano a long time ago, I never really got going.
Guy Kawasaki:
I quit law school.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Yeah, there you go. I prefer to think of it as maybe if you're quitting everything as soon as it gets hard, because just about anything worth doing gets hard at a certain point, so if you're quitting everything, then that's a sign that we need to give you some help to get a little more stick-to-itiveness, but the question was whether doing that can then become too habitual. I'm not sure I have evidence of that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. If you ask Asian American parents, they'll never let you quit anything.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Anything.
Guy Kawasaki:
Not that I'm a tiger dad.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
No, never.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, never. Switching away from failure now, what are the components and how does one create an environment of psychological safety?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I'll first define an environment of psychological safety is an environment, we could really think of it as a learning environment, but it's an environment where people believe that it's possible to take the interpersonal risks of asking for help or speaking up with a concern or admitting a mistake. All of those kinds of behaviors which are interpersonally threatening or challenging or risky in some environments rather than others, they feel acceptable, they feel possible.
The way you create that kind of environment, I think is you first point out, call attention to the either uncertainty or inherent challenge or interdependence of what we're doing together, of the work that we're doing. Because what you're trying to do is set a rationale for why it really matters that people are willing to speak up when they see something, when they aren't sure what to do, because this is the kind of work where when we're not doing that, we'll get ourselves in trouble. It's you're very clear about the nature of the enterprise and why it matters.
But the second thing, and this will seem too basic to even mention, but ask good questions. That's what you're doing here today. You ask a question and I guarantee it, it feels awkward for me to sit here quietly after you've asked a question. It becomes all but impossible. If you're asking people genuine questions, the kind of question that signals I really want to know what you think about this or what you're seeing out there, or what you're feeling or what you know, what I don't know, that is a beautiful invitation to speak. If people were better at asking good questions and then of course, better at listening to what people say, we would have an awful lot more psychologically safe environments.
Guy Kawasaki:
If I asked your kids, "Hey, is your household a psychologically safe place?" Would they say, "Oh yeah, absolutely. My mom rocks this."
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I think so, and I guess I can tell by the evidence. The evidence is they don't seem to hold back much.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, that's a double-edged sword there.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
That is true.
Guy Kawasaki:
Good news, bad news.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Now, psychological safety, I've defined it for you, but it isn't enough. It's not the only thing that matters. We also want discipline and excellence in the pursuit of high standards, or maybe a simpler way to say it is motivation. I think when kids have high motivation and high psychological safety, they are in a great learning place.
Guy Kawasaki:
Angela Duckworth has this concept that in her family, the kids have to pick something very hard to do that requires practice, and they cannot quit on a low note. You take a violin. You practice hard. You have a great recital, and then you can quit. You can't quit if you had a bummer recital.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I think there's some wisdom there, especially if there was a good reason to take it up in the first place. You had some interest in the violin, you love music because certainly kids would be very tempted to quit at things that are hard, like musical instruments or sports or math and I think that's a nice rule of thumb.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going to try this. You tried it, now I'll try.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Mine are now practically baked. They're twenty-two and twenty-four.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh. Where did they go to school?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
They both went to Harvard College.
Guy Kawasaki:
Of course.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
What can I say? They're very hardworking, very smart kids. But I put the emphasis on hardworking, because that's really the difference. A lot of smart kids out there, but got to put in the work.
Guy Kawasaki:
See, Carol Dweck is smiling right now because you didn't say they're naturally gifted kids.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Exactly.
Guy Kawasaki:
You said they work hard.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
That's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
A couple months ago, I interviewed Carol. Carol's book The Growth Mindset was a pivotal book in my life.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Oh, that's great to hear. It's a great book.
Guy Kawasaki:
Absolutely.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
It's great research. It's so important.
Guy Kawasaki:
I pursued her for two years to get an interview. She teaches at Stanford, and I went to Stanford and I used to live about two miles from Stanford and we're going to go off track again, but my favorite Carol Dweck story of all time. Carol Dweck and I, we both used to give a lot of speeches all over the world, and we happened to use the same limo driver, and this wasn't one of those fifty town car kind of places.
This is like one guy with one Lincoln Town Car, and if your flight landed at 2:00 a.m., he picked you up and if the next guy left at 6:00 a.m., he picked you up. Unfortunately, he died a few years ago, and I know his clientele was all the VCs, all the CEOs of Silicon Valley, so his funeral is a memorial service, was on this Sunday. I took my son and two of us went because my son used to use him. There's some circumstances where we had to just send them in a car. We go to this memorial service and I look around the room and it's all family and friends.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Huh.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't see any famous VCs or CEOs except Carol Dweck and her husband.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Oh. Wonderful.
Guy Kawasaki:
I know that she's such a gracious person. Do you know her personally?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I've met her and what a treat that was. We both were asked by Arne Duncan, the former Secretary of Education under Barack Obama, to come actually with Angela as well. The three of us were there for a half day just talking about our ideas and their implications for education, so it was a great treat.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait. There was Amy Edmondson, Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck in the same room?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Holy shit. I hope there was a lot of good air conditioning, because that's a lot of brain power work in there.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
No, I don't know about that, but it definitely was an amazing day.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, there's Harvard, Stanford, and MacArthur Award in the same room. Wow. My head is exploding here. Related to this psychological safety, so the psychological safety, the high standards, the discipline, those three components, is that the definition of an ideal environment for solving problems, or is there more to add?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
No, I don't think there's much more. I guess for solving problems, we probably need to throw creativity in there, that ability to diverge before you converge on an answer, so let's add that into the mix.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. You introduced this concept that I'd like you to explain because I loved it, which is, quote, the good fallible human. What is a good fallible human?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
I'm quoting this wonderful recent, now deceased psychiatrist named Maxie Maultsby who says, "We're all fallible human beings." That's just a fact. And he would abbreviate that as FHB, fallible human being. I think that once you really accept that is a fact and that is true, there's a deep breath there. It's okay. I can still be lovable. I can still be okay as a fallible human being and it's a very different lens with which to view one's life and the world. I'm a fallible human being, sometimes, not always doing the best I can to make a difference in some area of work or life, but I will make mistakes.
Mistakes and failure are not the same thing. Mistakes are when I get it wrong, despite the fact that I could have known better. There was a recipe, I didn't follow it. Whereas a failure is sometimes born of mistake, but sometimes it's a genuine discovery in new territory. But in any life well lived, any life period, there will be mistakes and failures, and that's okay. That's part of being fully alive. It's part of being fully human and in fact, you could go so far as to argue if you don't have enough intelligent failures, you are not doing everything that you could do while you're here to have a full and meaningful life.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think one of the interesting additions to that kind of thinking now is that people who are young today, they're going to live till ninety or a hundred. It's not whether you take a gap year or not in the long run really isn't going to matter if you have ninety years of living. If you have forty-five, maybe, but not ninety, which kind of embraces the good, fallible human being, right?
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
That's right. It gives you more room to maneuver, more room to make mistakes and take risks. I think that's probably a better way to put it, because some of those risks will not work out the way you had hoped. Many of them will work out the way you hoped, and some of them will bring something even better than what you had hoped.
Guy Kawasaki:
God, help me if my kids listen to this episode, but anyway. Okay, last thing for you, Amy Edmondson. We want you to give the pitch for your book. I truly enjoyed your book and I hope that everybody goes out there and reads it, so now this is your chance to tell tens of thousands of people to buy your book.
Dr. Amy Edmondson:
Wow. Well, a few topics in my view are more important than failure, and most people misunderstand failure, and we have two camps, one camp that says, fail fast, break things and that's how you should live. The other camp that says failure is not an option. They're both wrong.
The reality is, if you understand the different kinds of failure, and I describe three distinct kinds of failure, then you are far better equipped to know when it makes sense to fail fast and learn faster, and when it makes sense to be as careful as you can be in getting something to happen the way you really hope, and others are depending on you to do. That clarity, I don't see it offered anywhere else but in this book. I've really clarified what the failure terrain looks like, when it's okay to fail fast, when it isn't, what are the best practices for navigating the uncertainty and opportunity in your lives and in your work lives.
Guy Kawasaki:
That concludes our conversation with Amy Edmondson. Her expertise in psychological safety, learning and the art of failing well has shed tremendous light on transformative approaches to personal and organizational growth.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People, and now I'd like to thank the Remarkable People team: Shannon Hernandez, Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff Sieh, Luis Magaña, Alexis Nishimura, Fallon Yates, and the drop-in Queen of Santa Cruz, Madisun Nuismer. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.