This week Scott is joined by author of “The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well”. Scott and Amy discuss the encouragement of taking smart risks, reframing one’s thinking to expect and accept more failure to gain greater success, and how to have a little fun when something doesn’t work out.
Transcript
Amy: [00:00:00] Failing well includes a healthy portion of risk taking in pursuit of things that you care about. Take more smart risks and be okay with the fact that they don’t all pan out because they’re risks, right? They’re experiments. They’re not supposed to all work. And in fact, if everything always works out as planned, you’re not taking enough risks.
Scott: Hey, I’m so excited to welcome Amy Edmondson to the podcast. Amy is a professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School, and she is ranked number one this year on the prestigious thinkers 50 list. Amy is such a legend in my field. I first came across her work when she came up with her idea of psychological safety, which is a concept that has been really powerful in the workplace to empower people to speak their truth and to challenge structures and systems and powers [00:01:00] that need to be challenged.
And also just for People in the workplace to feel safe to work there and feel safe to express what they think is working and what they don’t think is working. So her work has been so seminal in helping us understand the importance of psychological safety in the workplace. But today’s episode really focused on her new book, which is the idea of failing well.
And this is such an important idea. You know, the idea that. We can take smart risks in our life and that risk taking in pursuit of the things you care about should be encouraged. There’s one idea that really stood out to me in this whole interview. And that’s that choose to play a game where you fail more often than you succeed.
If you just. Decide that that’s the game you’re going to play in life. Then all these seeming failures that you accrue in your life are not something to shun or not something to be upset about. It looks like the thumbs up [00:02:00] just, just automatically happened there. That’s pretty cute. If you decide to play that game in life.
All the sort of failures that come your way are things that, uh, are not things to fear. Um, she makes a lot of really clever and nuanced distinctions between failures and errors. Talks about three different archetypes, three different awareness zones. But the bottom line of this whole episode is that failure often brings us value.
It brings us new perspectives. It brings us new knowledge. And We can have fun, you know, we can have fun from failure. I mean, failure isn’t inherently fun, but we can try to make it fun. You know, it’s part of life. At the very least we can just accept that it’s part of life. Um, we can help people reframe failure as a part of learning and it does not have to be a source of shame.
So I really think that this episode will give you all the practical tools that you’ll need to fail. Well, lots of implications here for society, education, the [00:03:00] workplace, for parents. So, Let’s get into it already. Without further ado, I bring you Amy Edmondson. Amy Edmondson! So glad to have you. we did. Thank you for coming on the Psychology Podcast.
Amy: My pleasure.
Scott: And, uh, huge congratulations to you for topping the Thinker’s 50 ranking. That is huge. Although I have a feeling it wasn’t your first year that you
topped
Amy: that. It was my second time, um, but I was stunned, flabbergasted even. So thank
Scott: you. Uh, well, it’s quite a, quite an accomplishment, but it just reflects your.
Um, and this new book is, is really cool. I mean, I, I’m a long time fan of your work on psychological safety, right? And this going into this territory now, um, I’m wondering, I’m wondering when you started to get into this territory, you know, when did your research start to, when did your attention start to go in that direction?
Amy: Well, you know, it’s really all of a piece. It’s, it’s, um, it’s, [00:04:00] it’s one big integrated whole, and I can zoom in, you know, like a fractal on psychological safety. I can zoom in on failure. I can, I can zoom in on, on, on teaming and collaboration. But my, Overarching desire has always been how to help people in organizations learn in a world that keeps changing and because early on in my graduate career, I sort of stumbled into the chance to study mistakes and failures in the health care setting.
That’s actually how I got to psychological safety rather than the other way around.
Scott: Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me a little bit more about your background, then. Like, what was your, uh, dissertation about?
Amy: Well, my dissertation was called, uh, Psychological Safety, uh, and, and Learning in Work Teams. And actually, it was Group and Organizational Influences on, on Learning in, in Work Teams.
Psychological Safety was sort of the [00:05:00] centerpiece of it. And, and it came about quite by accident. I was part of a large study of medication errors. And, and, and the reason I was interested in that, because I understood the basic idea that we have to learn from mistakes. Teams have to learn from mistakes.
Organizations have to learn from mistakes. So I was happy enough to join this project. And what happened was, I discovered that there were And this wasn’t what I set out to look to look at, but I discovered that there were remarkable differences across work teams in their willingness to talk about error in their ability to speak up when they didn’t know what to do or when they thought someone was doing something wrong.
And this I later called psychological safety and I, you know, I was interested in it primarily because it was a precondition for learning. If teams can’t, if you can’t speak up about mistakes, you can’t learn from them. If you can’t speak up, [00:06:00] uh, and, and sort of ask for help from someone, you’re not, you’re not learning.
So, so it was, it was basically learning from the beginning. Yeah. It’s all connected. Yeah. It’s all connected. And it was, and it was, you know, the, the role of, of, of failures and mistakes was always just such a big part of it as well. Yeah. And
Scott: that’s the new topic. It’s the topic of this book and your most recent book and we’ll, we’ll definitely get there.
Since I’ve never had you in my podcast before, I’d love to spend a couple minutes just talking about psychological safety. Absolutely. I’d feel remiss if I didn’t. Totally. Um, so, uh, how do you define psychological safety? Is it, is it, is the primary component there? so much. Um, being, feeling safe to speak up in a, in a corporation or a company kind of situation where you might feel a lot of pressure, um, to stay silent or
Amy: quiet.
Yes, it’s, it’s, um, it’s a belief that your context. Is safe for interpersonal risks, primarily the interpersonal risks of speaking up with an [00:07:00] idea, a question, a concern, a mistake, a dissenting view. All of those sort of utterances that are interpersonally challenging. You know, it’s never easy to say something either at work, um, or in other contexts in our lives that might, um, lead someone else to not think well of you.
We have, we have a natural instinct to self protect and we don’t want to look ignorant, incompetent, intrusive, or negative. So we will generally err on the side of let’s wait and see, right? If I think you’re, you’re doing something, uh, wrong there rather than Quickly point that out as it would be sort of natural to do and in some sense, I don’t want you to think less well of me.
So I, I, I hold back. So psychological safety describes the rather unusual environment where you really do believe your voice is welcome. Not that it’s easy or effortless. To speak up with potentially [00:08:00]controversial ideas or, or when you’ve made a mistake, but that you believe it’s welcome. It’s expected.
It’s what we do around here. So that’s psychological safety. And primarily I’ve studied it in the work context, in the context of of people who are interdependent in getting in getting work
Scott: done. Yeah. Yeah. And Yeah. As much as I think that it’s important to keep your politics out of the workplace, we’re becoming a really, really increasingly fractionated society.
Uh, it really concerns me, you know, especially America. And I don’t know how familiar you are with Jonathan Haidt’s work on viewpoint diversity. I was wondering how you’ve linked, uh, maybe this idea of viewpoint diversity to psychological safety.
Amy: It’s, it’s, um, it’s very related. And I, in fact, I’ve done, I’ve done some work, not enough, but some work on, and I teach, I teach this material often on how to ensure high quality decisions are [00:09:00]made in complex, uncertain environments, which requires viewpoint diversity to have come into the conversation.
And. In part, when psychological safety isn’t present, um, and a variety of other reasons, people will often, you know, they want to be likable, they want to be friendly, what have you, um, they will, they will hold back their, their differing views. So viewpoint diversity is an absolutely essential element of high quality decisions under uncertainty.
And, and yet, A lack of psychological safety and also a desire to, you know, be likable or look good in front of especially high status others will lead people to withhold their, their opinions. So yes, right, there’s, there’s, there’s, there are real connections here, uh, between these different ideas.
Scott: Yeah, because I think like on college campuses right now, I think a lot of Republicans feel, don’t feel psychological [00:10:00] safety.
You know, it’s just, it depends on what the context is we’re talking about.
Amy: Yeah. Or let’s, I mean, let’s, it’s, it’s, um, I’m not sure anybody feels, um, terribly psychologically safe, um, you know, from any, any, Sort of political perspective in terms of the, the stakes have gotten higher, right? The stakes for if you say something wrong, you’re now subject to, you know, cancel culture or, or, or worse.
And, and so I, I, I think there are. We have created a very fraught interpersonal environment. It, this is tricky, right? Because I, I guess I, I started my research career, and most of it is still this way, looking at the work environment and really looking at The things we, we have to talk about so that we can get the work done so that we can make if we’re, uh, you know, uh, an executive [00:11:00] team so that we can make good strategic decisions if we’re a new product development team so that we can include the features that customers most want and, and.
Uh, for taking care of patients. Again, speaking up quickly to make sure we don’t give the wrong drug, the wrong dose, et cetera. So I’ve been, I have been primarily interested in the work and what it takes, which I think is a lot to do work well, especially interdependent work. And it, you know, it seems odd in a way that people would hold back work relevant.
observations, concerns, but they do. You know, even people trained as engineers. I have plenty of evidence of this. We’ll, we’ll hold back. I think it’s a different phenomenon, you know, also important. And I’d love to sort of think aloud with you on it, but that of, of people feeling that it’s no longer safe to express their political views.
[00:12:00] Um, and because, I mean, maybe on a college campus that sort of is the work, or if you’re in a course, a political science course, that is the work. So yes, absolutely. And, you know, a thoughtful, um, facilitation of a good conversation may help. There’s so many ways we can go with this because what what’s what’s coming into my mind is this is not just or maybe not even primarily a psychological safety problem.
It’s primarily a quality of discourse problem. Most. Most people have not learned the skills to have productive conversations, conversations, um, um, that Chris Argyris, um, might think about as truly learning oriented, right? Where they, where we are balancing advocacy and inquiry. That means statements and questions where we are, are using high quality.
Advocacy, um, and high quality [00:13:00] inquiry, which means we’re not stuck at the top of a, of a ladder of inference debating or even offering our conclusions. You know, this guy’s terrible or, you know, whatever, right. We’re, we’re, we’re offering evidence and data and we’re walking through our reasoning to try to help people.
Like if I see something, um, you know, if I see something differently than you, Um, my natural, spontaneous. response is to say, um, I’m right and you’re wrong. But a more thoughtful learning oriented response is to say, I wonder why I think X and you think Y. I’d like to walk through my thinking with you and tell you some of the, some of the evidence, some of the facts, some of the data that I, I tend to look at.
And I know it’s, Selected from a vast amount of data. Um, I’m sure you’re looking at some different ones and maybe some of the same, like, let’s walk through our thinking together and see if as a result, we can both [00:14:00] learn more. We don’t do that very often. People haven’t learned the skills to do that. And so they get stuck at the top of the ladder of inference with their conclusions saying, it’s not safe for me to express my conclusions.
Scott: Yeah. And in that spirit, uh, let’s continue that conversation because I was trying to think of the specific. examples. Um, to make this concrete. Yeah. It seems to me like a big problem is when the, the, the corp, the company has sacred, certain sacred cows that can’t be challenged. Yes. To me, that’s what I’m thinking of.
Right. So I’m thinking of examples, um, like DEI. are, are sacred cows in some companies. Now it’s, it’s, it’s taboo for someone in the company to say, actually, I don’t think the way we’re going about it is, is effective, you know? And, uh, and so how do you hold a space for dissenting opinions when a certain sacred cow of the company is a certain way?
I guess that’s what I’m thinking.
Amy: Yeah. I mean, so I think that’s a great. A great example. [00:15:00] So if, you know, if I don’t, if I worry, I mean, if I am under the belief that the way we’re going about our DEI program, isn’t working, if it’s a valid belief, it comes from somewhere. I think I have a responsibility, uh, maybe first alone and then together to think through why do I think that?
Like what, what are my concerns? And then I need to express them in the following way, right? I have some concerns about how we’re going about this policy. Um, I’d love to share them with you. Um, and, and, Okay. And hear your reactions, because I’d, I’d love to learn more from, um, how you see it, let’s say, if you see it, if you see it differently.
So it’s not coming and saying, Oh, I think this is, you know, bunk and it’s not safe to say so, so I’m just going to shut up and, and write it out. That’s neither, um, a terribly learning oriented nor a terribly responsible stance. Now what I’m asking. [00:16:00] Us and people to do is really hard because it means we have to first have the discipline to pause and examine our own thinking.
Like, how did I get here? Right? How did I get to the conclusion or maybe the tentative conclusion that this program is? Um, is failing us or is, is not a, not, um, serving a productive end and I’ve got to have something that’s leading me to think that, right? I mean, and it could be, I mean, it could, let’s, let’s think, let’s think of possibilities, right?
It could be that, you know, many of the people I know who are in my dominant group, um, are, are feeling it’d be rightly or wrongly that they now are not, um, Welcome to apply for certain jobs because they’re being reserved for, for other people who are not in their group. Um, let’s talk about that. Let’s, let’s, let’s, um, let’s test it and explore what, [00:17:00] if that’s true, what are the implications of that?
If that’s not true, how do we help them understand that it’s not true so that they put their hat in the ring? Um, you know, I’m trying to get concrete here. Um, but, but I think we’ve gotten so good at. Jumping up to our conclusions and then sticking with them and believing they’re either welcome or unwelcome and then saying we’re stuck.
We’re not stuck. We’re, we’re, you know, we’re, we’re fallible human beings who need to, uh, be good learners.
Scott: And that attitude that you just described is seen in every direction, which doesn’t cause great progress of learning on either
Amy: side. No, it creates. Stagnation and stuckness.
Scott: It’s a really good point.
So it seems like a lot of it has to do with the manner in which you voice your dissent. You know, there is really high quality research showing that diversity training programs backfire. And that’s really problematic. It’s high. Yeah,
Amy: absolutely. It’s high quality. If [00:18:00] you’re thinking of Frank Dobbin and others, it’s very high quality.
Also very, very macro. Right, they’re, they’re getting data, which is what you do if you’re doing research, you want to make a, um, a thoughtful conclusion, um, about a large number of entities. You need a lot, a lot of data from many different organizations. So that kind of research gives us, um, very robust conclusions about, um, say that statement that these programs aren’t working.
But they don’t tell us very much about what’s really going on with those programs and, and how, what’s the, what’s the quality of the programming and how well led are they and how have they been framed and how have they been introduced? Have they been a checkbox activity or have they been, you know, the, the, the result of really high quality dialogue, um, that is, that is.
Genuinely trying to do the hard work of making a more fair [00:19:00] world And I suspect and you’d need some qualitative research to get at those details and I suspect more often than not The answer is that the programs are not high quality enough not because those were not well intentioned Uh good people but because this is very hard to do.
Well, um, so my takeaway from that I think really important research is we’ve got work to do in making the quality of our interventions actually serve our aims.
Scott: Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s an excellent point. And then there’s also philosophical disagreements about whether or not Ideological colorblindness is a better approach than focusing everyone’s attention on race differences in a workplace.
And that’s a separate issue. That’s more
Amy: philosophical. It is. Yeah. And you’re right. I mean, it comes back to philosophy or values. Um, and, and I think reasonable people can disagree on. what you prioritize and [00:20:00] when. And, and that I think is the kind of, you know, debates we should be having. And I would agree with your premise, I think your implicit premise, which is we’re not having those.
Um. We’re not having these honest discussions. Right. We’re just sort of leaping over sometimes to, uh, kind of, um, all or either an all or nothing and, and, and, and it’s not, um, It’s not working. It’s not, whatever
Scott: we’re doing is not working. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah. Um, so anyway, your work, we can put a pause there and we can go into your new work.
Um, but I,
Amy: I did want to highlight that a little bit. I’m so glad you raised it, actually, because I, I, I do think, um, something needs to be written on this because people, um, have been kind of in the hallways and on the, you know, in, in audiences, in the, in the pit. Afterwards, people will come up and say, yeah, but it’s not safe for me anymore.
Right. And I empathize. Um, and I never have quite enough time to say, let’s really get into this. Like, let’s see [00:21:00] what we might, you know, what might be done. Um, can’t do that in the 32nd. sort of, you know, meet and
Scott: greet. Yeah. I mean, I think that these, uh, these contexts of power can, can change in a dime. You know, I, I don’t think that there is a static as possible where we say like, well, if you’re this group, then you’re victimized forever.
If you’re this group, you’re never victimized. Right. I mean, I think that depending is very contextual.
Amy: Yeah. And we’re all, you know, in some ways. We’re all victims at some points, you know, and, and, um, and, and victors, victors at others. Um, but, but what’s never particularly useful for us, and this does take us into the failure topic.
It’s never a particularly healthy stance. The victim stance, even under those conditions, when it is entirely true, meaning, um, man’s search for meaning Victor Frankel, you know, at Auschwitz, [00:22:00] right there, there’s no better moment of, of truly being a victim of forces way outside your control. Um, and his deep and brilliant recognition was.
There is a space between stimulus and response, right? And in that space lies our freedom and our power, right? And, and that, that, that they cannot take away from me my ability to choose my response, right? And to choose and to look around at the incredible courage and suffering and strength. Um, and magnificence of some of the people he was with and envision a better future for all of us.
That was all he could do. Um, but he did that, right? And that’s, um, I mean, that’s an extreme case, but it’s an extreme case that illustrates that. the opposite, I guess, you know, but when, when we instead decide or don’t decide, but get stuck in the victim mindset, um, [00:23:00] we really lose our, our power and our opportunity to create something better.
Really, really speaking
Scott: my language here. In this new book, you talk about failing well. Well, did Victor Frankl fail well in a way?
Amy: Well, he succeeded brilliantly. Um, he sure did. I mean, he was, he was, let’s say, I don’t think I would argue that he failed. Uh, he was in a deeply and profoundly. large failure, a massive complex systemic failure, um, you know, that, that had many, many, um, opportunities to have redirected it, you know, years and years earlier, but not, not opportunities that Viktor Frankl himself was in charge of, but he was, um, an unwitting participant in this massive societal failure and made [00:24:00] better psychological choices than most.
And so, in that sense, he was navigating failure well. I love
Scott: that. He was navigating a system of failure well. Um, you know, I was trying to think of a, yeah, a meta kind of view of what does failure mean. Yeah. What is even, what, what if you just don’t interpret anything as failure? Like, what if you just refuse to even have that vocabulary?
And so everything that there’s a, feels like a setback is actually growth. It’s fodder for growth. You know,
Amy: it’s true. It’s, you know, nature. Includes failure. We all, you know, death is failure when we, I mean, we have, it’s, in other words, I’m agreeing with you that the word may be problematic, right? Because the word, the word means an undesired outcome.
We wanted something else. We got this. So it’s, you know, the project was supposed to succeed, but it failed. And, and, um, and yet, it didn’t. [00:25:00] That’s our narrow, you know, human perspective. I wanted, you know, I wanted that project to succeed, but, but, you know, the universe didn’t want it to succeed. So therefore, um, it’s, um, you know, it, it, it, it, it’s, it depends on perspective, right?
It’s the, uh, from the perspective of universe, maybe that’s not. Uh, a failure, but that’s a, that’s well beyond my, uh, pay grade.
Scott: Well, that’s fair enough. Well, we can, let’s stick with the way you frame it in your book. Um, there, you say there are many reasons why we hate failure. Um, one, aversion. Um, you know, we have this emotional visceral response, probably evolution designed us that way.
Right. Confusion. Um, um. When we don’t have a healthy relationship with our failure, it can confuse us. And fear, which is obviously the social stigma. Have you found in your research that one of those three seems to be most prominent among
Amy: humans? Well, you [00:26:00] know, I think I have a biased perspective because I’ve been most interested in the interpersonal realm.
So in a way, those are, those three, Those three sort of factors that lead us to have an unhealthy relationship, you know, the aversion, confusion, and fear. Aversion is kind of a spontaneous emotional response and, and confusion is cognitive. You know, we are, we don’t always do a good job between sorting, you know, distinguishing between like lovely discoveries in new territory and, you know, you know, stupid mistakes that we make.
So, but the, but the third one is the one that I’m. I think because of my lens, because of my long standing interest, because I look at organizations and teams, um, which is the, the, the interpersonal domain is the one I’m most interested in. And often the one that seems, um, most challenging to fix and, and that is the.
You know, that, that very real worry about what do [00:27:00] other people think of me, and I want to look good, not bad. I want to look like a success, not a failure. And, and so, um, I, you know, I do, I do everything I can, uh, to kind of avoid, uh, the looking bad.
Scott: My friend, uh, Michael Gervais just wrote a book. He coined this term called FOPO.
Fear of people’s opinions.
Amy: I Love that. Yeah. Yeah, it just
Scott: came out so it’s fresh in my mind and I’m gonna be having him on my podcast soon It’s a really cool book Yeah, I can see it relating to this very much. I guess it you know So much of it does count come down to the framing though, you know, like that Yes fail that you’re a failure, you know, so many people I think Deep down maybe based on childhood trauma or whatever whatever past experiences one has had We think we are like our existence is a failure And so we do all these you see this a lot in hyper over competitive hyper achievement cultures Actually just go to the gym and [00:28:00] you’ll see Yeah, absolutely.
Amy: Yeah, I mean we work over compensation. We’re over compensation Yeah, we’re working so very hard, you know to be a success in the minds of others Um, and maybe we should start with, you know, just being as first being, being okay with who we are, you know, being, being okay, but, but I think we shouldn’t just be complacent.
Like we should be okay with who we are because, you know, we, um, do our best to make a positive difference in the lives of either the people in our family or, or more, more broadly, um, we’re fighting the good fight and, and we’re doing our best and we’re not always succeeding, of course, but, um, we can we can feel good about it.
So
Scott: how can, how can people overcome this? Uh, you know, how can they fail well?
Amy: Well, failing well, um, here’s how I think about it. It’s, it’s, let’s, let me start with the, the good kind of failure, the, the, [00:29:00] the kind that scientists do for a living. And, and those are, I call them intelligent failures. And I would say failing well means having more intelligent failures in, in your life.
And intelligent failures are still undesired results of thoughtful experiments in or thoughtful forays into, into new territory. So to be intelligent, it has to be in pursuit of a goal in territory where you can’t just, you can’t avoid it by doing your homework. You do your homework to have a, a thoughtful hypothesis or a good reason to believe that what you’re about to do might work.
And then you, um, Uh, you want to keep it as small as possible and, and so that, that’s, that describes anything from trying to make a new friend, you know, going on a blind date, uh, to, um, um, a project at work, uh, to, uh, a scientific experiment, you know, it, it covers a lot of territory. We and [00:30:00]maybe a better way to put this psychologically is take more risks, right?
But take more smart risks, you know, don’t run out into traffic in search of a lost ball Take more smart risks and be Okay with the fact that they don’t all pan out because they’re risks right? They’re experiments. They’re not supposed to all work and in fact If everything always works out as planned, you’re not taking enough risks, right?
You’re not, you’re not stretching, you’re not growing. So failing well includes a healthy portion of risk taking in pursuit of things that you care about. It also includes best practices to avoid. preventable, what I’ll call basic failures, as well as, uh, to try to get out ahead of and, and prevent and mitigate complex failures.
Scott: Wow. So you have three archetypes. You just described the failure, basic, complex, and intelligent. Right. Where did you come up? How’d you come up with that? [00:31:00] Where’d you
Amy: come up with this stuff? You know, I came up with it years ago. Um, actually, uh, well, About a decade ago, a little more than a decade ago, I was asked to do a talk.
I was at Teresa Amabile asked me to come do a talk in her creativity conference. I love her. And I do too. She’s such a gem. And, and so I thought, I know I’m going to talk about failure, right? Cause I was really interested. I’ve always been interested in innovation. I was also interested in, you know, medication errors and organizational learning.
So I thought I’ll give a talk about failure. And then I thought. Oh my gosh, you know, like I have to figure out what I want to say. So I went through all the case studies, all the research that I’d done and said, you know, can I categorize this in some way? And, and I did. And then I wrote this Harvard business review article about it, but it really was, um, you know, it was a conceptual categorization that was.
I, I would say from qualitative research, like one, making that, that different category. I’m also married to a scientist, so that helps, right? I think about, I, [00:32:00] I, you know, I asked him, um, what, what percent of failures in your lab, he’s a stem cell scientist, you know, end in failure. And he, he thought about it, um, you know, quite seriously.
And he said, I think about 70 percent 70 percent of the experiments that the young scientists in his lab were running would not pan out, would end in failure. And, you know, I started to think about this, like, well, how do you get out of bed in the morning? And the answer is, of course, The 30 percent are pretty exciting and, and many of them lead to, uh, great publications or, or occasionally to actual therapies to, to cure diseases.
So it’s, um, you get out of bed in the morning despite those bad odds, because A, the upside is really worth it. Um, and B, you train yourself. to understand that that’s the game you’ve chosen to play, right? Because you’re in new territory, literally, you have chosen to play a game where more often than not, you’ll [00:33:00] fail, right?
You’ll fail more often than you’ll succeed. And, and so you think differently. And one of the things I think all of us need to, or could, uh, sort of get from the scientists in our lives is to think more like them. You know, and, and less like 19th century industrialists who believe you can just sort of say, here’s the target and then hit it, or, you know, here’s our 10 year plan and then we’ll meet it.
It’s like, no, we don’t live in that world anymore.
Scott: That’s a really good point. Yeah. I, I fear sometimes I need to think less like a scientist just to communicate with other humans
Amy: in the everyday life. Well, there’s that. But what I mean by think like a scientist is, you know. Um, think about possibilities.
Think about where you might be wrong. Think of your actions more as hypotheses than as guaranteed plans. You know that there will always work.
Scott: I knew what you meant, Amy. I was making a joke. And it was a good one. You know, the supermarket, you know, [00:34:00] I’m like, statistically, this product is not gonna do well for my cholesterol.
People are like, we don’t care about that. But anyway, okay. Um, uh, what is the difference between mistakes, errors,
Amy: and failures? Well, I, I treat mistakes and errors as synonymous. Um, one is more academic sounding than, than the other, but mistakes are deviations from known practices, procedures, or policies, right?
There is, Establish knowledge in place to get the result you want to get and you deviate from it by mistake, you know, without, without intention. And that’s a mistake. Um, failures can be caused by mistakes, but they can also be simply. A hypothesis that was wrong that didn’t pan out to failure is a larger term.
It covers more territory. It’s any, it’s any undesired [00:35:00] outcome. Um, whereas a mistake is a particular kind of undesired outcome. And of course, some mistakes you make a mistake, but it’s like. miniscule and it doesn’t, it doesn’t actually affect anything. So it’s, it’s technically a mistake, but there was no real consequence of it.
So, so no failure.
Scott: Who invented the concept of failure? Like, isn’t that an interesting question? Yeah. Like if you go back in human history, was it school systems with tests? Like you failed the test. Like, I wonder if that started
Amy: at all. You can’t have failure without some, you know, without, um, some definition of success.
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So probably it probably came out in pretty early language, even before school systems. But as you, you know, let’s say you’re, um, you know, you’re trying to, um, find a mate and, and the one that you have your eye on, um, goes off with someone else, right? You’d probably. Um, and you’d pivot and you’d [00:36:00] try something else, but you probably, I bet we had that, that conception of, you know, disappointing outcome pretty early.
Yeah,
Scott: probably. But I’m wondering when language arose, when, when, when did the word, what’s the root of failure? What’s the, what’s the Latin etymology of it? It’s a great question.
Amy: Let me just Google that real quick. Maybe it has something to do with faith. or working like there’s so the
Scott: Latin translation translation the word failure is defectus which comes from the verb defecatory, um, defective, deficiency, aha,
Amy: deficiency, deficiency.
We’ve come up short again, you know, and even scientists who have a good hypothesis and tested the lab and they’re wrong. They do feel they came up short, you know, they, they don’t
Scott: love it. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the French, uh, came from the French notion of lacking. Oh
Amy: dear. Right. But good to know I should have done that [00:37:00] myself.
Of course.
Scott: Well, I’m a nerd, you know? Um, so, well, speaking of me being a nerd, uh, your book really tickled my, uh, desire, uh, my fancy for, uh, systematizing. You also have three awareness zones. I love it because you just have all these like here are three archetypes. Here are three of them. I love it. Just assert them.
Right. I know. I love that stuff. So, okay. You’re a three awareness zones, self situation and systems. You know, we kind of talked a little bit about systems, but yeah, could you, could you kind of tell me, walk me through the difference between
Amy: these three, you know, this is actually, um, Um, Okay. Something that often had had come up often in my classes and in my own analyses of cases of sort of complex cases, and I noticed it as a pattern a couple of years ago, you know, I was teaching a case and a student said, and it’s something that was in the back of my mind, but basically sort of use that as a framework in her comment to describe something in a class.
Her analysis had gone wrong in this situation. [00:38:00] Recognition that leaders who are more self aware, more situationally aware, and more systemic thinkers, um, could be more effective in, you know, in navigating uncertainty and complexity. Um, so it really is, I don’t want to say this is some kind of, I think the failure archetypes are, I think the three types of failure is a pretty robust classification, uh, system.
I’m personally, um, at the moment enamored with this idea that there’s something fundamental about self situation and system awareness in, especially in navigating uncertainty. I’m sure I’m missing some other. Elements that we, that we could talk about. Um, but I, I could draw a straight line from, um, each of these competencies, um, to various failure stories, both the good kind of the bad kind.
Um, and, and so I thought it might be a helpful way to, you know, Help help people [00:39:00] become more comfortable with uncertainty and fallibility. Wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah. Wouldn’t it? Yeah. I’m trying. I’m still working on that myself. Oh
Scott: yeah. I can, I can resonate. I can resonate. And I, and I really do link that.
I really do see clearly now this connection with psychological safety that I didn’t. See as clearly before so this has been really elucidating this conversation
Well relating to our earlier talk about DI you you distinguish between privileged failure and the kind of failure Pressure that minority groups face. Can you kind of walk me through that
Amy: distinction? Sure. I I did some thinking about the unequal playing field, right? The, the, an unlevel playing field for, uh, for failing, um, let’s say in an entrepreneurship environment or in a, in a company setting a project that you’re, that you’re leading.
And, and I began to realize, and I’m not the [00:40:00] first person to realize this, that if you are a member of the dominant group in that organization, um, you’re less likely personally to worry and. Collectively to be seen as, um, a representative of a group so that your failure is less likely to be seen as, um, reflecting badly on the group that you, um, are part of.
And, and so if you are, um, a member of an underrepresented, um, minority, And you’re put in charge of some project and you fail, you will be anxious, um, and probably rightly so that people will then say, okay, we’ll never do one of those, you know, we’re never going to put some one of that kind of person again, uh, in, in a role like that, because.
Look, she failed. And so, um, you know, the aspiration would be a level playing field where we just don’t think that way anymore, that anyone who has a [00:41:00] success or a failure is, um, you know, is simply a case study from which we can learn about better and worse things to do in a particular situation, not a representative of some identity group doing things that we Either can or can’t learn from in that situation.
Scott: Well, I’ll need to
Amy: process that. Sorry. Sorry. I know I’m being a little abstract, but it’s, you know, it’s, it’s just, um, if you imagine, um, an organization where we’re putting someone in charge of, let’s say a major country division who is, um, we’ve never had, um, maybe a African American woman leading such a thing before.
Something goes badly wrong. What’s the first thing people are going to think?
Scott: You know, like they got it because of their skin color.
Amy: Yeah, they got it because of that. And look, we shouldn’t try that again. That was a mistake. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s going to be all about their [00:42:00] category. It’s not going to be about what we learn from that.
And, you know, no one or maybe we do it the other way. It’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a white male. And, um, you know, project goes wrong. Nobody would ever think let’s stop because he was picked because he was a white male. And let’s never, let’s never do that again.
Scott: People don’t think that way. Yeah.
Amy: Yeah, that just wouldn’t.
That just wouldn’t make any sense. Um, I mean, statistically speaking,
Scott: right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m just thinking of, because I feel like there’s a lot of, like, insidious, like, microaggressions against white males these days, though. No, no, I
Amy: mean, I, I, I think it’s true. I see it sometimes. You know, it’s, it’s sort of the, um, here, you know, wouldn’t it be interesting if we could be, um, David Thomas, he used to use the, um, The term, and I guess others have used it as well, unearned privilege.
And, um, and unearned privilege of course, refers to, to white men. And [00:43:00] I would love to be at the, at a, at a place where that isn’t, um, it’s not an insult, right? Like we, we should, we should be able to enjoy the. Advantages we have and, and everyone, not everyone, but many people have different kinds of advantages.
Some people are, you know, more attractive and some people are taller and, and in a sense, you know, height is one of those fantastic things where, you know, the same with physical attractiveness, right? Yeah. They’re wildly overrepresented in, in, um, you know, not jobs like actors and actresses where that makes sense, but jobs like CEOs where it makes no sense.
Well, the halo effect is a real thing. The halo effect is a real thing. And so that’s, that’s kind of this phenomenon of you get certain privileges or advantages that you didn’t strictly speaking earn, you know, by just working harder at your calculus, uh, than, than anybody else. And [00:44:00] why does that have to be an insult?
Like you’re, yeah, you’re lucky. We all got some luck. Um, and We could celebrate it and be okay with it and not think you’re dissing me when, when you have such a phrase. Yeah,
Scott: so the unearned privilege there is, is, is just whatever privileges are confined to having white. Skin. Is that the idea? Because I think it can be an insult to treat the totality of a human based on the color of their skin.
Absolutely.
Amy: Absolutely. I’m just trying to think this through. Or not an insult, but a gross, um, minimization of, of who they
Scott: are. Exactly. I don’t like saying that in any direction. I certainly don’t. I hate racism, but I also hate when we reduce anyone to their skin color. So, but you could see a situation where a white man, for instance, has earned, they’ve worked extremely hard.
And there can be an [00:45:00] element where they, you know, they recognize whatever privileges they’ve had that have contributed. But when you reduce, when you dismiss their achievement, A hundred percent based on the color of their skin. Cause I do see that sometimes I do think that’s an insult.
Amy: It is, it is. And it would be fun to, again, to, to engage, engage those moments and engage those situations with a, a, a truly learning oriented.
Um, perspective and the skills to kind of dig into it. Wow. I mean, imagine a world where we had more mutual understanding and more just sort of appreciation for what each, each one of us brings to a situation, our, our, our, our strengths and our weaknesses and, and kind of could, could embrace. Each other for who we are.
Some of the things we’ve worked really hard on others. We kind of skated along. It’s okay. Right? The, the whole totality of me, of who I am could be seen by you [00:46:00] and vice versa. And that’s unusual.
Scott: It’s very unusual. Is that, is that what you think, uh, would help create a healthy, failing well culture?
Amy: Yes, yes.
In fact, I would describe a, you know, a healthy failure culture, um, as, as one in which, um, we are okay with the fact that we’re each fallible human beings and we’re willing then to take risks, both in the business sense and in the interpersonal sense. In pursuit of, of learning and progress and, and, and, um, toward the goal of creating a, you know, a, a healthy and sustainable world for all of us.
Scott: I’m very much on board with that. You know, your, your bottom line here seems to be that failing. Isn’t fun. It doesn’t always feel comfortable. Never fun, but it’s not like it feels great, but that’s okay. Not everything easy to feel great life. I think we live in this culture where everything, you know, they’re all on my Instagram feed.
I have one [00:47:00] advertisement after another trying to make me feel great. It’s just like, we’re obsessed with feeling great, you know, but. There are so many things we can learn from uncomfortable and even awkward moments. I mean, half of my day are awkward interactions with humans, but that’s not bad, right? No, it’s not bad.
It’s
Amy: part of life. Like failure is not fun, but it’s part of life and it often even brings value. to us, you know, new knowledge, new perspectives that make us enriched as, as, as, as people. And, and, you know, and psychological safety describes an environment where you are okay feeling uncomfortable. Um, cause you’re not, you’re not going to die just feeling uncomfortable or, you know, having an awkward conversation or asking for help.
But sometimes it feels like that.
Scott: Sometimes it feels like that. Yeah. So I do like this idea of intelligent failures. Yeah. And how they can bring discovery. You, you talk about four essential tools for failing. Well, persistence, uh, is one persistence and you distinguish that from [00:48:00] stubbornness. So what’s the difference between the two?
Um,
Amy: well, The difference is, um, one of perspective. So I, what I, I, I, I’m often intrigued by these, um, these words that are kind of strengths and positives that also have, um, you know, a flip side where it’s really, could. Potentially be describing the same behavior, but seen through a critical rather than a praiseworthy lens.
And so, you know, your persistence, which is admirable, might be seen by me as stubbornness. Um, my, by the way, my persistence is never stubbornness, um, you know, for me. And so, uh, and the only reason I bring, bring that up is that, um, I want to be clear that. Well, persistence is a value and it’s necessary, right?
None of us ever accomplished anything in our lives without a little bit of persistence and hard work and grit and, you know, picking ourselves back up. Let’s just go back to the proverbial bicycle, right? We [00:49:00] know child ever learned how to. ride a bicycle, the minute they got on, just off they went, right?
There, there was persistence, uh, involved because it was hard. And, and yet I just wanted to make the point there in, in the book when talking about these things, that there’s always judgment, right? There’s always discernment, um, because There are times in life where we have to sort of step back and say, Hmm, I wonder if I’m persisting too long in a failing course of action and the world is trying to tell me something and it’s time to sort of shift and try something else.
And how do you know, right? How do you make the distinction between healthy, admirable persistence and unhealthy, uh, problematic stubbornness. And. There’s no easy answer, um, but one suggestion would be get some other voices in, you know, make sure to get feedback from [00:50:00] others, you know, I’m, I’m gonna keep pushing this boulder up the hill.
What do you think? Am I throwing good money after bad here? Right? Get, get some other perspectives and, and, and dig, dig in and dig down to try to understand what the argument is to keep going and what the argument is to, it’s time to stop. Um, and. A kind of rule of thumb in that one is, um, you know, persist if you have good reason to believe that there’s just a, there’s a hurdle or two here that once we overcome it, then we will, um, the, the rest is sort of clear sailing.
There’s genuine evidence that there’s a market for this, right? If we can only find someone to manufacture it, there will be a market. I have data to show that there are customers out there ready and willing to buy this, if only we can make it. But if conversely. You know, you got some idea and you can’t even get anyone to say, yeah, I love that idea.
I would buy it if it [00:51:00] existed and, you know, no one but no one thinks it’s a good idea except you and maybe your mother. Then, um, you know, the persistence is probably, uh, not well.
Scott: So, to summarize, know when to grit and know when to quit. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Love it. Um, you have four here. Your second is reflection.
I think that’s self explanatory.
Amy: Self explanatory, but make it a habit, right? That’s not something we naturally do. Yeah. No, it’s not
Scott: something that is predominant, even though it’s self explanatory. Um, accountability. Um, so, uh, you know, can you have accountability partners for
Amy: failing well? Sure. So accountability is a word, at least in the sort of corporate space, that has come to mean punishment.
And I think that’s problematic. I see. I see. You know, there’s got to be accountability, right? And, and, and, but the real root of it is about. Taking, you know, being able to provide the account, [00:52:00] you know, what happened, like to really truly understand what happened, um, and own and acknowledge your contribution to the failure or to the, to the disappointment
Scott: that no one’s willing to do that these
Amy: days, right?
What? Yeah. What are the things that you did? that contributed? What are the things maybe by omission you failed to do that could have helped, right? But that is, again, that’s the kind of thing we don’t do because we think we’ll look bad and in truth, you look good. You know, when you have the courage and the confidence to say, here’s the way I came up short.
Here are the things that I did or didn’t do that contributed to this outcome. You actually look like someone who’s pretty wise and pretty capable to have figured that out and you’re now equipped to go forward and do better. I know you weren’t
Scott: talking to me, but thank you. Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. Um, but you have such a nice way of framing things.[00:53:00]
It’s so polite and, uh, and, and, and mature and respectful, you know. It’s Well
Amy: Framing is a, framing is a skill, I think it’s a, it’s a cognitive skill and it’s, and it’s a, um, it’s a skill that can really help, um, us cope with the challenges that lie ahead.
Scott: Oh yeah. But I’m using, I’m saying you have that skill.
Amy: Well, thank you. I guess I’ve worked, I’ve worked at it, but you know, I don’t always have it in the exact moments
Scott: when I need it. I mean, there’s just, there’s so many cultures, we’re cultures that are so antithetical to that spirit. I mean, did you see the Wolf of Wall Street? Yeah. Can you imagine, like, saying to them, you should reframe, you know, because there are cultures that are so, like, testosterone enhanced, you know, where it’s like, winning competition, let’s do this.
I mean, for them, they would, they would listen to this. [00:54:00] and roll their
Amy: eyes. Right. But those kinds of cultures often, um, look really good in the, in the short term or for some period of time. And then they crash and burn. They, they, they collapse under their own weight because nature doesn’t really work that way.
Scott: No, it’s a root. I mean, I agree. That’s a good point. Sometimes you have to find out the hard way.
Amy: Yeah. Time timeframe is everything, right?
Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then the last one is sincere apologies. You know, that’s a good tool for fun that takes a humbleness, right? That takes, uh, you know, a lot of this is taking the ego out of the equation, you know, that’s thread running through all of these.
Yeah.
Amy: And the ego is really a source of unhappiness that we mistake as a source of happiness. I mean, you know, we puff ourselves up thinking that will make us feel better. It just makes us lonely really. Um, but so a sincere apology, it was really fun actually for this book to go to the, there’s actual research on apologies.
Um, you know, it’s very thoughtful and, and, um, they [00:55:00] use the term. That the purpose of an apology is to, is to repair the rupture in the relationship. And if I do something wrong, um, I have in either a small or a large way created a little rupture in, in the relationship. And if I can be courageous enough and, you know, ego free enough to apologize, I’m helping repair that rupture.
And, and a high quality apology, they, they show is one in which. You, you know, you do take some responsibility for your part in, in what happened, you acknowledge the harm, um, you offer, if possible, to make amends, which could even just be a promise to do, to do better next time or not do that again, and that takes time.
Courage. It takes honesty. Um, and it’s very hard to do it unless you genuinely do put the relationship ahead of ego, you know, unless the, unless the relay, if the relationship doesn’t mean anything [00:56:00]to you, you’ll resist the apology. Indefinitely.
Scott: That’s, I mean, it’s such a good point. You have to remind yourself of that when you’re in the grips of Vigo.
It’s so hard. Yeah. You know, um, I’d be remiss, you know, we’re, we’re ending this, this interview and I want to be respectful of your time. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about this fascinating link you talk about in your book between social media and perfectionism.
Amy: Yeah, that’s, that’s, um, I mean, I think that’s, it’s intuitive.
I think most people or many people are, are. Increasingly thinking about this, um, this, this challenge and the mental health implications of it, but social media, you know, by definition is, is you, you choose what you’re posting and you, you try to post things that make you look. good, not bad. So maybe you post, uh, just the best pictures.
We can easily, you know, toss in the trash, the pictures that aren’t so good. You highlight your, uh, successes, not your failures. So, [00:57:00] um, that’s natural. That’s makes sense. I mean, who would want to go and stand on a mountaintop and yell out about their failures, but it leaves us with. Um, and artificially curated data set.
Um, it is not representative of people’s full and complicated lives, but it’s only the, you know, the, the happy front and then ours feel our lives feel, um, sad and inadequate by comparison. So the whole. Phenomenon of social comparison, which we’ve been doing since the dawn of time, um, is now distorted by social media.
You know, we used to sort of look to our right, look to our left and, and some of that comparison was healthy because it would say, Oh, I guess I better sit up straight, you know, and, and, and, and some of it made us feel bad because someone looks like they’re happier than you are, what have you. But now it’s a distorted biased data [00:58:00] set against which.
Many people, especially teenagers, um, and more vulnerable, um, young people, um, are, are sort of stuck with this biased data set and, and it can cause great, great harm.
Scott: Yeah, it really can. Uh, I was, I was thinking, though, there are instances where I think people on social media are rewarded socially by signaling their victimhood or signaling their vulnerability.
Amy: That’s interesting. That’s true. Right. And everybody kind of Swarms in to, to, to say, oh
Scott: yeah. A way of getting attention. A way of getting attention. You know, now everyone and, and their mother has, has discovered trauma, you know, and, uh, in their life, and um, and then everything on social media is about like, you know, look at me, I’ve had trauma.
You know, it’s a good point.
Amy: That’s a good point. Yeah. I haven’t done much thinking about that, but that’s actually a very real, uh, point, a very real trend. Um, I wonder, right. I mean. [00:59:00] What the implications are of getting your positive, you know, the attention that you crave, the caring that you crave for your, for being weak or traumatized or vulnerable is you.
Is that, is that, um, is that as nourishing as you imagine it will be? No, in the long
Scott: run. Interesting food for thought. Yeah. Okay, so to conclude, you know, uh, really, really important work you’re doing here, um, that has implications for society, has implications for the workplace, for education, and I even love how you talk about implications for parents.
But, but the thread running through all that is that as managers, as parents, as leaders, we can help. people reframe their failure as something that is part of learning, and it doesn’t have to be a source of shame. Is that a fair summary? Exactly right. Beautifully put. Okay. Whew. Thank you, Amy. Thank you.
It’s so wonderful, and I’m [01:00:00] honored to have you finally on my podcast, and congratulations on all your very well deserved Earned, earned, earned, earned successes. What’s the opposite of unearned earned? Earned, earned, earned, well earned. Thank you. I don’t care if you’re white. I don’t care if you’re whatever you are.
Right. You earned it. Um, no, I’m really proud of you. Thank you. I’m really proud of you. Thank you.