Join Sarah Noll Wilson and Brandon Springle as they sit down with Dr. Amy Edmondson to discuss her groundbreaking research on psychological safety. Uncover the critical role of high-quality conversations and the powerful impact of embracing intelligent failures for organizational growth.
ABOUT
Amy C. Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, is a management scholar best known for her research on psychological safety and team learning. She has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011 and was ranked #1 in 2021 and 2023. She is the author of eight books and more than 100 academic articles. Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024, her most recent book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, won the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of 2023. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University.
- Website: www.amycedmondson.com
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/amycedmondson
- X: x.com/AmyCEdmondson
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/AmyCEdmondson
- When a Team Member Speaks Up – and It Doesn’t Go Well (HBR article): www.hbr.org/2024/07/when-a-team-member-speaks-up-and-it-doesnt-go-well
TRANSCRIPT
Sarah Noll Wilson
Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of Conversations on Conversations where each episode we explore a topic to help us have more powerful conversations with ourselves and others. I am your host, Sarah Noll Wilson, and you can probably hear the smile in my voice. I am so excited. I am over the moon excited for our guest today for Episode 101. We are interviewing the one and only, Dr. Amy Edmondson, so also joining me today is my colleague, Brandon Springle. We’ve never done a co interview before, but we thought, why not with this one? Because he’s so passionate about psychological safety, and I thought it could just make it for an even deeper conversation. So let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Edmondson for those of you who are unfamiliar. Dr. Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, is a management scholar best known for her research on psychological safety and team learning. She has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and was ranked, no surprise, number one in 2021 and 2023. She is the author of eight and might I add, incredible books, and more than 100 academic articles. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. Her most recent book, Right Kind Of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well, won the Financial Times and Schroeder’s Best Business Book of 2023. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University. Please help me welcome to the show, Dr Amy Edmondson. Amy, what else do you want our audience to know about you?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
I’m a fallible human being.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah. I love that. (laughs)
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Right? And it’s not that I like being a fallible human being, but I’m trying to come to terms with it, because that’s reality. We all are. None of us are exempt and and so that’s one of the things that drives me, is that, you know, how do we, how do I we? How do I help myself? How do I help others live comfortably with that? But that doesn’t take us off the hook, right? I mean, that isn’t sort of, Oh yeah. Well, then no, need to work hard. No, it’s, it’s almost the opposite, right? We have to, we then have to be thoughtful and vigilant and willing to take risks, but preferably smart ones.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, yeah. That was, that was one of the things when Brandon and I, we were having preparatory conversations about your book was it felt very much – your other work have been great and monumental. This one in particular, I think for both of us, felt like this is what she’s been like pushing towards all of this time is, how do we get uncomfortable with mistakes? How do we get uncomfortable with uncertainty? And so, you know, if you may take us back just a little bit. So we have people in the audience who know your work, who love you, who respect you, and then we have people who, this might be the first time they’re introduced to you. So give us like, what’s the abridged version of your journey to being so passionate about helping humans be –
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Okay being fallible, right?
Sarah Noll Wilson
(laughs) Yeah.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
That’s a great, yeah, so I’ll try to do this succinctly and maybe playing around with time here. So at the moment, I am, and have been, for 28 years, a professor at Harvard Business School. And my my stated field is organizational behavior, and I have a particular interest in in team dynamics, conversational dynamics and and how we can lead to improve both, right? And so actually, I’m quite passionate about conversations. It’s one of the things that that I’ve studied for years. And in my classroom, I try to work very hard to give students the tools they need to have higher quality conversations. More honest, learning oriented and able to make progress in uncertain territory. So that’s, that’s sort of who I am today, what I study, what I care about. And I got here in a very circuitous way. I started life as an engineer. I worked as an engineer for a few years. I sort of found my way, again, indirectly, into organizational consulting. Got absolutely fascinated with the problem of organizations and why they’re so complicated and problematic, but important to our lives, and pretty quickly, I hope, meaning, after about four years, reached a point where I thought I just don’t have enough knowledge, I don’t have enough education, I don’t have enough training to do what I really want to do well. So, at that point, 10 years out of undergrad, I went to do a PhD, kind of thinking, I’ll just do this. I’ll get smarter, I’ll get better, I’ll go back out there, and I’ll be more effective. I hadn’t quite realized that one of the risks if you do a PhD is that you never leave. (laughter) You just you finish, but you don’t leave, right? You become you, then you move on and become a professor. And I mean, the good news about that is I get to do research and I get to teach. And I guess the bad news is I, my impact on the world is more indirect than direct.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Wait, I – Brandon, can we, like, push her on this? Because it may, yes, technically, it’s indirect, because it’s, you know, not always through you. But boy, has it had a significant impact on so so many people. And Brandon and I, we are talking ahead of time. We’re like, we we know that she’s used to getting her flowers, but we need to make sure she gets her flowers on the impact that she’s had on not just us personally as humans, but the work, the, seeing people you know see themselves differently. See what’s possible at work. Brandon, I, you know, I want to give you a chance to to jump in as well. So if you don’t mind, Amy, we just want to give you a little bit of love for a sec.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
I guess I can handle it. I guess I can.
Brandon Springle
Yeah, so, so we take this journey all the way back to like 1954 and we go towards the theory of creativity, right? And the work of Dr. Edgar Schein, and the book there in 1965 and so forth and so on. But from 1954 to 1999 a lot was taking place. And as you position, you know your work, your experience being extremely vulnerable, and how that failure work leads to, you know this, now explosion of psychological safety, so many people exploring the concept. You popularized the concept, and you made it broad, and you started to stretch that out, and then more and more research started to come down the path. So I just wanted to acknowledge that and acknowledge how it started with you willing to be vulnerable in saying, I didn’t even know if I was going to continue to make it through school. Like this was a huge failure, like, I didn’t know what was going to happen. So seeing that starting point and how you leveraged failure to power your resilience, right, and amplify that through the power of psychological safety, and then help build stronger teams all throughout the globe. So we just wanted to acknowledge, to magnify and to make sure we were amplifying that specific and direct example.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Well, thank you, and I’ll underline, because if you know readers, I mean listeners, will not necessarily have read my new book, Right Kind Of Wrong, but I do open it with that, with a story of, which I won’t try to tell the whole thing now, but I will just say, you know, it was, I opened with a just a glimpse of a PhD student, me, sitting at my desk with a massive failure on my hands in terms of the data not supporting the hypothesis and feeling utterly lost and little bit hopeless, because you know, what do I do now? I’m obviously not very good at this, because it’s a big failure. And jump ahead that failure opened the door to the discovery of profound differences in psychological safety across teams in a couple of tertiary care hospitals, and that that discovery that teams could vary so much In whether people felt able and willing to speak up about mistakes or when they need help was not something I was looking for, but having stumbled into it, then I recognized that it might have legs. That, that, that could be something that was more generalizable than just this one situation, and it might be something that was measurable, and if measurable, then it might, in fact, be a good predictor of of team performance. So, so it did. It started a whole different line of research than the one I was engaged in in the first place. And I think it’s a metaphor too, because in life, sometimes the biggest disappointments, the failures that you really didn’t expect or want are, in fact, I know it’s a cliche, but they are opening a new door, and sometimes that new door is a whole lot more interesting, or the path out of that door is a lot more interesting, then one that you’d set your sights on in the first place. So learning to, you know, not only be okay with the disappointments of failures, especially in new territory, failures, but also to recognize that that’s, in fact, how life, that life is paved with failures along the way to achievement, you know, friendships even, and some sense of of joy as well, right? But that’s just part of the curriculum.
Sarah Noll Wilson
It’s you mean, that’s something that I love so much about your most recent book, The Right Kind Of Wrong is helping people be able to reframe these moments that can feel so painful, right? And it, you know, and it makes me think I was, this was a number of years ago, I was speaking to a group of women in business at a college, and they were asking me about my journey and and it was explaining to them, like, here’s all the, thought I was doing this, but, you know, and they’re like, I – One young woman said, I want what you have. I just don’t want it to take 14 years to get there.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
(laughs)
Sarah Noll Wilson
And I was like, 14, yeah, that’s, that’s what it took, like, that was the journey, you know, for us to go there, you know.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
There’s no shortcut. Really. I mean, you can get lucky, and some, you know, some amazing, serendipitous things can happen. And you can have, you know, you can have sudden opportunities you might but that are just in a way, good good luck, but more generally, right, despite those occasional exceptions that prove the rule, there isn’t a shortcut to either achievement or, you know, joy or meaningful relationships. It’s, they’re all – and I don’t think saying they’re all hard work means it’s not fun. I mean that hard work can be a lot of fun.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
There’s that sense of, it feels good when you you work really hard at something and you get somewhere.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, yeah. So let’s like, so let’s, let’s make that connection between failure and psychological safety.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Sure.
Sarah Noll Wilson
You know we, we know that we talk about that work a lot, but we find that a lot of people either misunderstand it, misdefine it, they hear it as, oh, well, psychological safety means people need to feel comfortable when, when the truth is that that couldn’t be further, for, you know, from the truth. So I would love to just sort of kick us off on, you know, how do you define it? How do you want people to think about it now, right?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yes, yes.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Knowing how often it gets misconstrued, or, sometimes weaponized, even.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Even. Absolutely. In fact, as I travel even around the world, I’m hearing that more and more that people are saying help, you know, people are weaponizing psychological safety, which is the height of irony, really. But I get it. I understand, right? I understand why, why it happens. And in part, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s linguistic, it’s psychological safety. It sounds comfortable, rather that you know. So it’s almost that confusion between fear and courage. I think people sometimes think you know, courage means you’re not afraid. It’s not, right? Courage means you’re afraid, but you do it anyway. I mean, if you’re not afraid, there’s no courage needed, right? But it’s, we get confused. So psychological safety is a sense of around here, my environment, there’s permission for candor, there’s permission to ask for help when I don’t know what to do. I believe that it is expected, welcome, won’t lead to punishment or rejection. So it is not that it’s easy or comfortable, it’s that you believe it’s how we roll, right? So it’s, you know, around here, maybe it’s because of what’s at stake. Maybe it’s just because we’re really all pretty comfortable with, I mean, we know each other well, and we understand that we’re going to tell we’re going to tell the truth and we’re going to tell it in a timely way. So my formal definition is it’s it’s a it’s a belief that the context is safe for interpersonal risk. But that is not the same as that, that it’s easy or fun or comfortable. And so how it’s being weaponized now is that people are, you know, people working in organizations, they get feedback that maybe is constructive feedback. They say, Okay, you took away my psychological safety. You know, you can’t criticize me because you took you, you removed my psychological safety. And that’s ironic, because, in fact, if I’m if I’m willing, you know, it’s a kindness. Now, if I’m your manager, it’s my job, but still, it’s still a kindness, right? Because I could just write you off and not tell you, and not develop you, and not promote you and all the rest. But if I, you know, if I give you the gift of constructive feedback, um, that is not taking away your psychological safety. That’s demonstrating our psychological safety. I mean, it’s demonstrating the premise that we have agreed to be open and honest and timely with each other.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Brandon, what comes up for you?
Brandon Springle
I mean, that’s just a beautiful example. I think about, you know, constructive feedback is construct to build upon, versus destructive feedback, which tears down.
Sarah Noll Wilson
I love that.
Brandon Springle
And you know, when we think about, you know, psychological safety. Amy, I like the way that you described it in another episode on a different platform. I heard where you talked about it more as if I could kind of look at it again, it’d be just around the learning environment, –
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yes.
Brandon Springle
The learning culture
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yes.
Brandon Springle
And so when we think about, you know, allowing people that space to speak up, and that sometimes that seems to be, you know, attacked, or people want to take that away, what do you think the greatest modern threat is to the great work of psychological safety.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
(chuckles) Well, I think the greatest threat is people misunderstanding it and then using, and then the weaponizing that follows. And then it becomes toxic, right? Then it becomes sort of off the table, and then we lose out on the opportunities it brings, right? So the there’s a pretty robust research literature now that says, you know, teams, groups with more psychological safety have better results, right, in variety of contexts. So, so you’re right. I have said it that way. Said, Gosh, you know, part of this misunderstanding is my fault, right? That the term itself has this implication of comfortable, you know, I’m going to, I’m going to be happy and comfortable psychologically, you know, free or whatever. But what it really is, I mean, what, what the definition really describes, is a learning environment, a learning environment, if it had been called learning environment, people would have thought that was a little squishy, I think, or vague, or something like, Oh, you mean a classroom. Well, no, really. I mean anyway, and it is this interpersonal environment. So I think the risk is that we lose access to the benefits of creating these learning zones, if we have decided, oh, that’s some touchy feely thing, or that’s, you know, that’s some situation where we can never be honest with each other, because it might be, it might hurt someone’s feelings.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, it’s a well, and it’s like, it’s a pendulum right of the weaponizing of it. Because on the one end, what we’re talking about is people saying, Oh, I’m uncomfortable, I’m not psychologically safe, and then on the opposite end, people can use it to be harmful, right?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Right.
Sarah Noll Wilson
To be aggressive, to be assertive. And it is this delicate sort of balance, or I’m curious to get your thoughts on that, of like, what’s that? How do you navigate the nuances of it, you know? Because I know, for me, I know when I feel it and I know when I don’t feel it. (laughs)
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yep, right? Me too.
Brandon Springle
Yeah.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
I mean, I think it actually comes back to – that’s why I’m emphasizing this so much now, in my in my classroom, comes back to the goal, or a goal of high quality conversation, because that – Okay, fine. High quality that sounds easy. No, no, no, that is really hard. Because, you know, here’s how I define a high quality conversation. It’s one in which we are, I’m not holding back what I’m really thinking. Because I don’t think you’ll approve of me if I say it. I’m, you know. So people, people are both, you know, they’re willing to lean in and be truthful and speak up in a timely way. So we’re, you know, we’re the real issues are being surfaced. Number two, there is a healthy balance of what Chris argers called advocacy and inquiry. Right? We’re making statements, we’re asking questions, and when we’re asking questions, we’re actually, genuinely listening to the replies. So that, in a sense, it’s not really, we’re not really, it’s not really inquiry if we’re not listening, we’re not learning anything. So there we are learning a high quality conversation necessarily involves learning. And third, there is a palpable sense of making progress, right? We’re not, we don’t feel like we’re going around in circles. I feel at the end of that conversation that I came out knowing more than I knew going in, and perhaps contributed something to others learning as well. Now those three criteria, you know, we’re speaking up candidly, we’re balancing advocacy and inquiry, and we’re making progress. I think if you grade most conversations on, let’s say, a one to five scale for all three dimensions, there are very few conversations that are going to hit it out of the park, right? And not because we’re bad people or uncaring people, but because these are really skillful acts, right? So to, you know, to speak up candidly, to get even just something as simple as giving constructive feedback is not easy.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Because you, you, you, you need to figure out a way to say it like you can’t just say, I mean, obviously, you know, you’re just not good enough. Well, that doesn’t that’s just utterly unhelpful. But you can say, you have to, so you have to take the time and the work of figuring out concretely, what did I notice that led me to think you’re not good enough, right? So I have to kind of, I have to be concrete. I have to notice actual behaviors and actual perceived consequences of those behaviors and and then I have to be willing to share those as best I can, and then you will have learned something. I will have learned something. And you know, we’re we’re having a high quality conversation. So this is a highly skilled activity, and it’s a highly skilled activity that is easier to master in a psychologically safe environment.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, yeah. It’s um, something that one of the ways we talk about is none of us are born knowing how to be in relationship with each other.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Right.
Sarah Noll Wilson
None of us are born and and depending on how you grew up, you know? I, so I’m from Iowa, right? Midwest, nice. I always say we’re violently polite, so there’s a lot of conditioning as a white woman, right, of how to show up and, and, you know, when I think about I remember the first time that I read your definition of team as teaming, like, no, it’s a verb. It’s an active thing. And, and for me, that’s the same way I feel about relationships.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yes.
Sarah Noll Wilson
It’s not a thing. It is a choice.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
It’s a verb.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, it’s a verb. It’s to be in relationship with, you know, with each other and and recognizing that, aain, it’s not easy. One of the things that that Brandon and I were talking about, and our colleagues and we’ve observed a lot, is the reality of, well, and I’ll speak this from my own experience, I’m so passionate about helping people free the elephants in the room, and how do we stop feeding them? How do we have those conversations? And that work started because I had never experienced a team that had that kind of I didn’t know the word psychological safety at that point, right, in my study.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
The elephant in the room, that’s perfect.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, the elephant in the room like didn’t, didn’t know it. And then I also realized that not only had I never experienced that on a team, I had never experienced that in my personal relationships, either. So I started on this quest, right, of, how do I learn this? And I think that that is something that we see in our work, that you can talk about it, you can show what it can look like, but when people have never experienced it, it’s really, it’s an even bigger stretch to get them to step into those moments, because everything in their life to that point is like, red flag, the stove is hot, you don’t speak up. You don’t, right, like they’ve learned and been conditioned to not do that. And I’m just curious to get your thoughts on that idea of, how do we shift if we’ve never experienced it, to start stepping in and doing the work. It’s a big question.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
It is, I mean, it’s, it’s, maybe we it’s, you know, it’s baby steps. It’s, we don’t talk about the elephant in the room, but we talk about that kind of little lizard in the room or something.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah. (laughs)
Dr. Amy Edmondson
You know, you just, and then you realize, well, that was kind of a relief, like now we’re talking about the lizard. And so if we can talk about the lizard, we can then maybe move on to, I don’t know what’s next?
Sarah Noll Wilson
The squirrel, the groundhog.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yeah, something, some medium sized thing.
Sarah Noll Wilson
(laughs)
Dr. Amy Edmondson
And then, and then, you know, and then again, we every time we have the experience of taking a small interpersonal risk and you don’t die, that is, like, profound, like, that is just, oh, okay, you it’s, it’s, it’s actually okay, right? I tried it and it wasn’t as awful as my brain was telling me it might be. And in fact, it was kind of relief. And so I’m going to do that again. And if you layer on to that, the possibility that, you know, we actually make progress, come up with a better idea for our project, or, you know, do something we wouldn’t, you know, manage to get something done we wouldn’t have gotten done, then that’s even more rewarding. So I think it’s you know, one, one risk at a time, and a gradient where we start taking more risks, and the risks are really the building of skills, like interpersonal skills are hard, cognitively intellectual. But they’re also hard emotionally, and that that’s why it’s such tricky territory.
Sarah Noll Wilson
I really appreciate Brandon. I want to hear your thoughts. I know you’re thinking about a lot right now. I just want to name this real quick is that idea of giving ourselves and giving other people permission or grace or compassion, because sometimes when you’re in a situation where maybe somebody’s very comfortable with it. They’re like, I don’t know. Why can’t you just, like, just say it, not recognizing that my muscles not built up. It’s, you know, it’s like working out with somebody, working out with my trainer recently, and she wanted me to do this plank that I hadn’t done in four months. I was like, I can’t do that. Like, let’s start real small. And, you know, and it’s the same kind of thing. Brandon, I’ll turn it over to you. We’ll
Dr. Amy Edmondson
We’ll work up to the plank. Yeah.
Sarah Noll Wilson
We’ll work up to the plank. Yeah, yeah.
Brandon Springle
We must always work up to planks. (laughter) So when I think about, you know, what’s being stated, I start to think about the landscape of social threats versus social rewards, and that’s part of what makes it so difficult and why psychological safety is so important. Because psychological safety, and I’m going to go to your two by two, you have high psychological safety and the high standard, and you have to have both if you’re seeking that high performance culture where you can learn and grow. But sometimes that standard is not made clear. And one of, one of my favorite parts of of your book, The Right Kind Of Wrong, is this, this unequal license to fail, especially when you start talking about relationships, because my threat state might go up a little bit higher depending on who am I approaching, and what are the consequences if this doesn’t go well, can I afford this failure? And so just want to get your reaction to that.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yes, and that’s in chapter eight, which I, I’m sorry to say that it’s not until chapter eight, although I think there’s some, –
Sarah Noll Wilson
There’s breadcrumbs along the way.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Breadcrumbs. Yes, breadcrumbs. That’s right.
Brandon Springle
It builds up, it builds up.
Sarah Noll Wilson
I was like, isn’t it interesting that it’s in eight, but it is, there is a thread throughout.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yeah. I mean, there is, you know, the story of, you know, various people who had difficult roads because of their identity. But, anyway, but, but, but I’m so glad you brought this up because it’s, you know, there are unconscious and very spontaneous cognitive processes that lead to stereotyping, right? It’d be people. I mean, most people don’t stereotype on purpose, but if they’re honest, they have to be aware their brain is, is stereotyping kind of automatically. So when you know, when a kind of, you know, Joe Blow, white guy fails in a particular assignment in a corporation, nobody, but nobody, would ever come to the conclusion, well, we shouldn’t have hired a, you know, a tall white guy for that role. Because look what happened, you know, it just, it’s literally nonsense, right? Whereas, if you are, if you have a person of color or a woman in a role where they are very much underrepresented and a you know, fail in that role, the brain of others is instantly going there, right? So this is why I say failure is a, you know, failure can be seen, especially, you know, the good kind of failure as a privilege, right? It’s a we don’t yet have a level playing field for failure. Some people have more license to fail and still be thought well of than others.
Brandon Springle
Yeah, and it just, it puts it puts me in a position to think, and that’s why I think this book is so important. And to a degree, I’m glad that’s on the back end, because of what you’re working through to get there. And you provide so many examples with so many diverse perspectives of people who have been successful navigating like, I think of the doctor with the I think it was rational behavioral theory.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yes, Maxie Maultsby, I love him.
Brandon Springle
Yeah. So, so all the things it helps us understand how we kind of navigate, almost that emotional intelligence and that rational behavioral therapy and that healthy thinking to start to reframe, and then your work can help us teach other leaders how to shift their brains and not go into that space of unconscious bias. So, I did want to just acknowledge that.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
No, that’s alright. I love that, and because Maxie, whom I had the privilege to know back in the late 80s, he really influenced me in his work. He’s a founding father of rational behavior therapy, which is close cousin to cognitive behavior therapy by his mentor, Albert Ellis, but the recognition that we can talk about conversations. Some of the conversations are the ones that are going on inside our heads, and a great number of them are unhealthy and unhelpful. And his idea was, we really can learn to notice them and tame them, right, and make them more, his word, rational, which I would would describe, and he would, too, as more in line with factual reality. You know, you know you’re, you’re going to be late for an appointment, and you’re, you know your, your brain is just saying, Oh my God, you’re gonna, I’m gonna die! Right? It’s like, No, you’re not, right? It’s, it’s not catastrophic, it’s inconvenient. Like, let’s get it right. And that, that cools down the, you know, the emotional tenor of of your thinking, and gets it closer to where you can be more effective and and so. But I think you’re right. Brandon, the fact that it’s, the fact that I write about the unequal license to fail in the end, is after seeing stories, not only stories of people like Maxie Maultsby, who was an African American physician born in 1931 in the south. But also you’re just seeing story after story, right, of failures that either you know that led to success and other failures that we wish had been avoided altogether, like certain air airline crashes. But you’re getting the under, you’re getting the gist of the framework, right, that there are, there are failures we should work hard to prevent in familiar territory, and then there are others that we must embrace, because they’re part of progress and part of accomplishment in any field. But you’re seeing all those stories, you’re getting a sense of how it works. It’s like, okay, like, here’s my toolkit. But then there is this need to point out that the toolkit is not equally accessible to all.
Sarah Noll Wilson
I, it’s, that is such a gap in so much literature and research. Right? When we, any book on difficult conversations, on giving and receiving feedback, even my book right on not feeding the elephants. I mean, that was one of the points of feedback I got there. Like, a lot of this works really well for people like you. And I was like, damn, you’re right, right? And I have to examine that and also help people understand that there’s no one way, right?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Right.
Sarah Noll Wilson
And we just have to understand and I do love that imagery of, you know, there is a toolbox, but the toolbox is going to look different for different people.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yeah, and not everyone has a key to the toolbox, right?
Sarah Noll Wilson
Right! And you might be able to use the hammer successfully, but if I use it, I’m, you know, like it’s bringing that awareness and again, like I just go back to to grace and compassion.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yes.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Because that’s, that’s part of what can make it easy to step into the uncertainty and the pain together. You know, one of the things that Brandon and I, we were having conversations about ahead of time, we we had a lot of glorious conversations. It’s been quite fun. But you know, one of the things you talk about in the book of how critical it is to become comfortable with failure, and one of the ways we do it is essentially this. This is our language is to right size it, but to look at like, what’s the type of failure? And I would love for you to piece that out for your audience, and then my follow up question can be in the spirit of of the focus of the show in our work of relationships, how did those types of failures also apply to how we engage in relationships?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yeah, absolutely spot on. Well, first of all, I just realized we, you know, in in leaving the conversation about unequal license to fail behind. It’s a little depressing, and so I want to say there isn’t a kind of a magic wand, but I do believe that sunshine is the best medicine here, right? That, in fact, the only, the only approach I can think of is by calling attention to it. It makes it less so, right? So that, you know, with all of us working together, we call attention to the unequal license, and then it’s like, oh yeah, oops, right. And then we can make it more equal, because it’s no longer hidden. You know, it’s out there. Now you’re, I love the phrase, we’re right size it, because I think that is right. I think that’s related to what Maxie Maultsby was talking about, like, where we tend to awfulize, but then we can kind of bring it back down to inconvenient or not my first choice, but still okay. But so what I thought, you know, one of the things I tried to do in this book is if we can really train ourselves to make the distinction between the different types of failure, and I think these are scientifically valid, then we will be better able to welcome the good ones, right, kind of wrong, what I call intelligent failures, and paradoxically, also better able to prevent the preventable ones that we just as soon you know, not have. And so the three kinds of failures I identify are basic failures, complex failures and intelligent failures. Basic failures have a single cause. They’re simple. They have a single cause, usually human error, you know. And just you, you know, you make, you’re making a batch of cookies, and you know, you forget the sugar. They’re not going to be very good. And it was, you know, if you’d been paying more attention or checking off the ingredients as you use them, you would have easily been able to prevent that failure, and I’m a fan of that, right? There’s no point in wasting all those other ingredients, and, you know, and ending up without yummy cookies at the end.
Sarah Noll Wilson
I’m having a very strong reaction to your example. My husband’s listening to this because he’s reminded of the cheesecake I made without sugar.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Oh, well, you know. –
Sarah Noll Wilson
So don’t ask me to make cheesecake. (laughs)
Dr. Amy Edmondson
We have, we have many such stories. But maybe I should add, because of your strong reaction, that, in fact, just because a failure is basic and preventable doesn’t make it shameful, because I’ll go back to the beginning. I’m a fallible human being, right? As we, each and every one of us, is a fallible human being. That’s, by the way, a Maxie Maultsby term. We aren’t. Nobody’s, you know, nobody’s exempt from from being fallible. So we will make mistakes. But you, you you want to try not to make really catastrophic ones, right? You don’t want to text and drive. Now, 90% of the time you’ll get away with it. But then there’s that time where you know something, you get into an accident or worse. So I think we can all aspire to be, you know, to do our best with our recipes and do our best with our practices. And, you know, not, not have more than our share of basic failures. But, but also not to beat ourselves up for the for the ones we do have. And I bet that cheesecake wasn’t so bad.
Sarah Noll Wilson
My dad poured a lot of table sugar on it and I was really confused.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
See, there you go.
Sarah Noll Wilson
And then it was fine. (laughs)
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Pour some nice, like strawberry syrup on it, or something. Maple syrup. Oh, I love maple syrup!
Sarah Noll Wilson
It’s a great story. Okay, keep going.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
So, complex failures are perfect storms. There, they have multiple causes where any one of the factors, any one of the contributing factors, on its own, would not have produced a failure. Maybe the best way to think about that is, you know, kind of a handful of small deviations from best come together to produce a failure. You know, those days where nothing, where, you know, nothing goes well and then ultimately, you’re, you know, you’re you, you mess up something pretty important to you because of that. And it’s those too, you know, with real vigilance, with appropriate training, you know, with care, we can, we can prevent and, or at least mitigate most of those. And so not a fan of preventable failures. I think that’s clear by now. So then the third kind is what I call intelligent failures, and they are best understood as the undesired result of a thoughtful foray into new territory. And the criteria are that, yep, it’s new territory. You know, you can’t just pull a recipe off the internet. Like, we don’t really know how to get the result we want. It’s in pursuit of a goal, like, it’s worth trying something uncertain, brave, what have you. And third, you’ve done your homework. You’ve, you’ve got good reason to believe this might work. You’ve, whether you’ve read the literature or talked to friends, you know, whatever it is, you’ve, you’ve thought about it. So it’s a genuine hypothesis. And then number four, the the experiment or the failure, if you get one is no bigger than necessary. No bigger than it has to be to get you the new knowledge you need in new territory and and so if you think about failure that way, you realize these are just essential aspects of progress, especially in new territory. And that could be new to the world, like leading edge scientists. It also could be new for you. If you pick up, you know, pottery and take a class, and you’re not going to be good at it right off the bat, and, and, or the thing, you know, the plank, right? You’re so, you’re, you’re willing to try something that you won’t do well at right off the bat, because it’s in pursuit of a goal.
Sarah Noll Wilson
That right there is such a beautiful – I don’t know that I’ve ever heard it described so succinctly, because even that word experiment can scare people sometimes, right? You know, if our colleague, Dr Teresa Peterson, would be here, she’d say her engineering husband would be like, I don’t experiment. I just, you know, I fix it. (laughter)
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Okay, well, yeah, the very fact that, you know, it’s like any, any, any marriage was, except an arranged marriage, was preceded by dating, right? And all dating is subject to intelligent failures, right? You know, someone says, I have a friend I’d like you to meet, and they have good reason to believe and you believe, yeah, it’s a trustworthy friend. And yeah, you do want to meet someone, perhaps to share your life with. So, you know, you go out on the date and lo and behold, doesn’t work out. That’s okay, right? It’s an intelligent failure. And you know, if you only did things that you were absolutely guaranteed to work out without, otherwise you wouldn’t do them, you would definitely never find a life partner.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, that’s such a great – I just never thought about, like, the act of dating being a full experiment. But it is, I mean, –
Dr. Amy Edmondson
It is!
Sarah Noll Wilson
I mean everything we do that’s different and new and novel and trying it.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yeah! And no guarantee.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Right, right. Yeah, what comes up for you Brandon?
Brandon Springle
Well, I love the example, because when I think about the book, there’s this example of blind dates, and then at some point there’s a marriage situation that may or may not be your parents, right?
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, I love that.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Right. (laughs)
Brandon Springle
So when you think think about those relationships and just having that conversation, and I love the framing that you had earlier, of the high quality conversation, in a way you can even assess that. So after, I have to go back and watch that part so I can take notes.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Me too, yeah.
Brandon Springle
But then you think about the failure typology and how you overlay that right on the high quality conversation. So you might get two out of three. It might even be one out of three. Might be zero out of three, but understanding what a high quality conversation looks like, you can go back to the drawing board and build that resilience through failure. So I just wanted to kind of make that connection.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
I love that.
Brandon Springle
Because that’s what was resonating for me.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
No, that’s right, because I mentioned the idea, you know, thehypothetical idea of self rating, right? You can self rate on those dimensions, and yet we should take it seriously and actually do the rating and then say, Okay, well, if it fell short, like, what will I try next time? What will I do differently next time? How will I help myself be more willing to share what I’m really thinking? Or how will I force myself to ask more questions rather than just advocate my view?
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, I’m excited to go back and think about that more as well and see what else you’ve written on it. Because one of the things we’re really passionate about is, how do we better understand when conversations miss the mark?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yeah.
Sarah Noll Wilson
And for people and because, because, because relationships feels like something you should just know what to do, but you don’t. You know, one of the things that we’re always looking for is like, how do we make that more explicit or specific.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yes.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Just like the examples you shared of here’s what a high quality conversation. And so what we’re playing with, and, you know, figuring out what research to validate it is like, what are the different needs in the moment? And how do we better see that? And how do we get better at noticing, you know what I mean? The model we’re working on, and I’d be curious to kind of get your thoughts on it, is this idea of the six conversational needs. There are moments when you need to inform, there are moments when you need to advocate, there are moments when you need to create. There are moments when you need to clarify, right? And then the two that we find people struggle with the most is there’s moments when you need to validate and there’s moments when you need to repair, and when you look at that like sense of failure. A lot of times, people don’t want to validate or repair or even create or clarify, because they’re so afraid it’s going to go wrong. And so like, I’m so excited to chew on this idea of the high quality conversations. So I’m just curious to know what’s coming up for you?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yeah, so I’ll send you three things. So one I haven’t written about that, I have, but I haven’t. But I have one slide which will have the three dimensions and some definitions, and I’ll send you that. But then and then I have written, there are three articles that come to mind. And one is with Diana Smith, who I think I introduced you to, called Too Hot To Handle.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
And, and this is where we, we talk about how conflict can get hot. And in a sense, this is like right sizing. It’s, it’s since, it’s about, you can’t just, you know, ignore it or just not. You have to cool it down. You have to confront it head on and cool it down. And the way you cool it down is through inquiry and exploring and finding out what’s really going on, really underneath it. But in that article, which we published in California Management Review, we do give a kind of framework, which is managing self, managing conversations, and then managing relationships. And each of them kind of start with being, you know, being self being being more self aware, being being more honest with ourselves about our own impact, and and so on. And I think that does really have a kind of set of practical, not easy, but practical suggestions that we or practices, really that we can learn to master. And then, and then two, there’s one very recent one with Megan Reitz from the UK, where we write, we talk about how those with those little that that comment that lands poorly at a meeting, and you just want to fall under the table. And it’s we talk about those as intelligent failures that you know, in fact, we should do a better job of learning from and we don’t, generally. And then with Tijs Besieux from Belgium. We wrote a piece a few years ago on, on, sort of, there’s, there’s, there’s speaking up, there’s holding back. But there’s also, that’s not the only dimension, right? There’s there. So I, I’ll send, I’ll send you that too.
Sarah Noll Wilson
I would, I would welcome that. I mean, these are things that we continue to explore because it, I mean, again, we all struggle with communication, (laughs) and it’s something we have to learn, and it’s something we all know is important, but you’re like, but what does it look like? And even, you know, even in your work, and that’s something I really appreciate about this book, and something Brandon and I have talked about is just, yeah, those specific frameworks of, okay, here’s how you can categorize it differently. Here’s how you can think about it differently. Because so often I feel like people are like, well, you just got to get comfortable with failure. Like, well, how the hell do I do that?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Yeah, I need to break it down, right? Break it down into something a little bit more actionable that I can practice tomorrow.
Sarah Noll Wilson
And like, micro, that’s, that’s one of our big things is micro actions, macro impact, like we just got to start really, really small. Brandon, as we’re winding up our time, and before I get to ask her the question we ask every guest, I want to be very thoughtful of her time. What final thoughts do you have, or a final question you have, my friend?
Brandon Springle
Just the biggest thought that I’m having right now is that when we’re engaging in conversations, it’s best to have the psychological safety to be able to say, I’m working on this, and I would like for you to give me feedback, because I want to get better at this, because I want to have a deeper connection. I want to be able to partner with you. And so just want to kind of understand how that’s hitting you, how that’s resonating with you and your thoughts. Because sometimes I think we might have an opportunity, we might be working on it, but we’re not telling anybody, and so they’re just like, you’re acting different. I don’t know why. I’m not going to ask you. I just want to get this conversation done.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
That is my, that I, that is so important to me. And one of the things that I often say is, make it discussable, right? Because once, once you make it discussable, then it’s out in the open, then it is. You say, some of these things would would feel a little awkward for people to try. So it’s much better if you’re you can say, here’s some things I want to try, and I’m going to welcome your feedback. Like I’m going to be trying, I’m going to be leaning into inquiry, and I hope you won’t think I’m trying to interrogate you, right? No, I’m literally trying to learn from you. But it might, it might look different, because it’s not the way I’ve been showing up in the past, right? So, you know when you’re trying something unfamiliar, say so because then you can learn your accelerate, you’ll accelerate the learning that way. So I think that’s, I think that could not be more important, and it then has the potential to give rise to sort of virtuous feedback loop. Are they going to take that little risk of leaning into some domain of learning, and I’m explicitly asking you for feedback, so I’m going to get some more feedback and how that worked out pretty well. So now I’m going to try something else, right? It becomes, it becomes more natural and more comfortable the more we do it.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah, and how we receive it and how we show up with it. I mean, that’s something that I feel like we’re – a coach of mine would say I’m nauseatingly consistent about the fact that when you ask for feedback, it isn’t just about the information you’re getting in that moment. It’s how you show up to make it safe for something else down the road, for them to share, and also when we can speak it, because sometimes it happens when you start showing up differently, people can be skeptical, and then they can be distrusting about it.
Brandon Springle
Yes.
Sarah Noll Wilson
You know, I can’t tell you how many times, typically it’s a man. I’m just going to say it, they’ll be like, Sarah, I listen to my wife differently, and she was like, What’s wrong with you? And what are you, like, what did you do? But I mean –
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Is it a gimmick? Is it a trick?
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah. Yeah, and normalizing that, and there’s so many layers of benefit to it. You’re building safety, you’re role modeling what it looks like to have intellectual humility, right? You’re inviting them on the journey. So I really appreciate Brandon you bringing that up and the conversation. Dr. Amy Edmondson, we could and would love to talk to you all day long, but we know that you’re a very busy woman, and we’re so grateful for this opportunity, and maybe there will be another conversation down the road. I hope so.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
I hope so.
Sarah Noll Wilson
But every new guest of the show, every new guest of the show, we ask them this question, which you’ll love, because it’s in the spirit of the work you do, but what is a conversation that you’ve had with yourself or with someone else that was transformative?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Oh, the one that came to mind, which is long time ago, was a conversation I had with Chris Argyris and a mentor of mine since graduate school, where he was giving me or was giving me the written feedback on the proposal, my dissertation proposal, and and he essentially said it was, he said it was competent. He thought it was, he thought it was, looked to him the work of a good student of Richard Hackman, another committee member and advisor. And, okay, like, it’s not like, wild eyed praise, but at least it’s, you know, I didn’t flunk out or anything. So I’m, I’m hearing that. I’m okay with that. And then he said something that really did change, changed everything. He said, I don’t see Amy in it. What, like, what? I mean, it’s something, what I what I heard from that, I assume it’s what he meant was you are allowed to express yourself. Like you are allowed. You are invited here to bring your voice forward. Do not be duplicative, or, you know, you don’t have to turn yourself into a clone. You know what you think a good researcher of teams looks like. I’m hoping he was saying that you can actually bring your voice and your insight forward and possibly do something a little better than this, right? (laughs) And I, I was really quite floored. I mean, it was, it was, it was profound, right? It just hit me. I had to leave pretty quickly, the office, because I was, I was starting, I was going to cry any minute. And I did cry, because it was so freeing. It was so, it was like he’d opened the door to find your own voice, do your own work.
Sarah Noll Wilson
You just, you answered the follow up question, which is, what has been possible for you?
Dr. Amy Edmondson
I mean, everything has been possible because I just didn’t, I think I just stopped holding back, you know, I started saying, Okay, if I think this is interesting to me, it’s probably interesting to at least one other, a couple other people, so I’ll write about it that way. I won’t try to – also, I stopped trying. I mean, I think I did less of making my writing sound oh so academic, and I decided to just write clean prose.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Which we appreciate, and my neurodivergent brain in me really appreciates. This has, this has been such a gift to be in conversation with you and to have the opportunity to deepen our understanding and be in convers – just to explore these topics. We’re just so grateful for you and continue, please continue to bring Amy forward in your work, because it’s literally changed the world, and we can’t wait to see what you create next. So thank you for saying yes.
Dr. Amy Edmondson
Thank you. Thank you so much. Been just a pleasure and a privilege.
Sarah Noll Wilson
That’s been our episode of Conversations on Conversations. Normally, I would share something that resonated for me. But since we have a co facilitator, co interviewer, we thought we’d just take a couple moments to reflect on what were some of the things that stood out for us so Brandon, what, what were some of the things that stood out for you in that conversation with Dr. Edmondson?
Brandon Springle
Yes. Certainly the the framework of the high quality conversation, –
Sarah Noll Wilson
Oh yeah!
Brandon Springle
That was the part, because now you have almost a way to measure, like, how effective you are you can now, you know, strive to get better at different dimensions of that conversation. So I thought that was so powerful. It was powerful to me, and it’d be powerful to anybody who listens and takes that note.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Yeah. And one of the things that you know we are talking about that I want to make sure we highlight is this is somebody who is literally identified as one of the top thinkers in the world, in her field, and you had made the observation, and she’s still learning. So for people who who are listening to this, what you might not, you wouldn’t have known is she was still taking notes. She was still jotting down stuff. She was still having moments of, Oh, that’s really, like, I really liked how you said that. That even as somebody who is seen as really one of the former most experts, is still learning and, man, that’s a great reminder for all of us.
Brandon Springle
Yeah. And we covered, like, such a wide spectrum of topics, and it was all integrated, like, when you think about failure, when you think about the need for psychological safety, and really how psychological safety is an accelerator, it needs more around it. In isolation, okay, but you got to have standards with the safety, and then you get the space for learning. You know, and the space to fail well. Because failing well is dependent upon how the leaders around you are viewing you, or even your peer group, whoever it might be, and everybody has a role to play to create that psychological safety in alignment with the right standard that you want for the environment or the culture that you find yourself in. Or that you actually influence.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Right, right, or that you have like, like, a lot of authority over.
Brandon Springle
That’s right.
Sarah Noll Wilson
Brandon, as my first ever fellow co interviewer. Thank you. Thanks for saying yes, and thanks for showing up and folks listening. You won’t be surprised, but Brandon and I had countless conversations prepping for this, so we’re going to try to capture some of those concepts on social and articles. But I am so, see I get to take this as a moment. I’m so grateful you connected with me on LinkedIn, and now we get to do this kind of work together. So thank you, my friend.
Brandon Springle
It is mutual. It’s mutual.
Sarah Noll Wilson
I love it.
Well, friends, that completes another episode of Conversations on Conversations, and for those of you who are listening, yes, my face hurts from smiling so much. Not only did I get to be in conversation with somebody who I have admired for years, but I got to do so with my colleague, Brandon Springle, who I just absolutely adore. And it was just such a special experience. And as always, we want to hear from you. And actually, I’m going to put a little skin in the game for reaching out. So her latest book, The Right Kind Of Wrong, is such a great book. It is a dense book. I mean, she goes into goes into the different practices, and there is something for everyone in that book. So if you are hearing this and you would like a copy of it, the first 10 people to send me an email at podcast at sarahnollwilson dot com will get a copy of the book sent to them. So just send me your name, your address, and we will get that copy sent out to you. So even if you’re listening to this in a couple of months, don’t assume that 10 people reached out to us. You can still send us an email, and the worst we’ll do is probably just send you a copy. So again, podcast at sarahnollwilson dot com, and also would love to hear what resonated for you. If you are a long time or first time listener of the show and would like to support the show, please make sure that you rate, review and subscribe to the show on your preferred podcast platform. This helps us to be able to get exposure, continue doing the great work that happens with the show, and be able to continue to have amazing guests like Dr. Amy Edmondson. And if you want to support the team that makes this show possible, please consider becoming a Patreon. You can go to patreon com slash conversationsonconversations, where your commitment of even $10 a month goes to support the team that makes this show possible. Not only do you get the episodes early, you get them ad free, and you get some pretty great swag for free from the show that you can only get by becoming a Patreon. So please consider doing that.
A final thank you to the team that makes the show possible. To our producer, Nick Wilson, to our sound editor, Drew Noll, our transcriptionist, Becky Reinert, and our marketing consultant Jessica Burdg, along with the rest of the SNoWCo crew. I want to give another shout out to Brandon Springle. This was his first time interviewing somebody on a podcast, and he was brilliant and amazing, and I was so grateful that he said yes to doing this with me. And then finally, a whole, wholehearted thank you to Dr. Amy Edmondson for the work that she’s done the way she has pushed our thinking about what’s possible in the workplace, and for saying yes to the show. All right my friends, that’s it! That wraps up another episode of Conversations on Conversations. Thank you all so much for coming back, listening, giving us your time and attention, and remember when we can change the conversations we have with ourselves and others we can change the world. So till next time, please be sure to rest, rehydrate, and I will see you again soon. Bye.
Sarah Noll Wilson is on a mission to help leaders build and rebuild teams. She aims to empower leaders to understand and honor the beautiful complexity of the humans they serve. Through her work as an Executive Coach, an in-demand Keynote Speaker, Researcher, Contributor to Harvard Business Review, and Bestselling Author of “Don’t Feed the Elephants”, Sarah helps leaders close the gap between what they intend to do and the actual impact they make. She hosts the podcast “Conversations on Conversations”, is certified in Co-Active Coaching and Conversational Intelligence, and is a frequent guest lecturer at universities. In addition to her work with organizations, Sarah is a passionate advocate for mental health.
