Episode 16: Amy Edmondson
The Science of Failing Well with Amy Edmondson
Episode 16: Show Notes
In today’s world, we’re caught between two failure cultures. One tells us that it must be avoided at all costs, while the other tells us to "fail fast” and often. The issue is that both approaches lack the necessary distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. Today, we’re joined by author, scholar, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and champion of psychological safety, Amy Edmondson, who believes that we need to reframe our understanding of failure and discover what it means to “fail well.” In this episode, we discuss her latest book, The Right Kind of Wrong, and gain some insight into the inherent relationships between organizational learning and change management, psychological safety and innovation, and failure and the creative process. Tuning in, you’ll learn when to quit, when to experiment, and how to measure your failure performance, plus you’ll also hear some remarkable stories that illustrate what it means to be a hero of failure! Believe it or not, there is a science to failing well, and Amy Edmundson is here to provide us with a practical framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely.
Key Points From This Episode:
• Amy’s roots in organizational learning and the journey her career has taken since.
• The NYT article that put her studies of psychological safety on the global map.
• A look at the relationship between psychological safety and idea generation.
• Cultivating the idea of failure as input rather than outcome: it’s part of the process!
• What we can learn from “failure heroes” like Thomas Edison and Buckminster Fuller.
• How to know when you should quit and when you should persist.
• The playfulness and willingness to experiment that comes with being a hero of failure.
• Failure diagnostics: practical ways to measure your failure performance.
• Tips for creating a healthy failure culture in your organization.
• What it takes to be excruciatingly present, why context is shaped by the level of uncertainty, and more from our lightning round with Amy!
• Insight into Amy’s creative process, which starts with a whole lot of conceptualizing.
Quotes:
“Part of creating the right environment for good ideation is just saying, ‘Anything goes,’ because the craziest idea is one that probably has a foothold onto something else or a tangent off which we can find something else.” — @AmyCEdmondson [0:17:01]
“If an idea doesn’t survive the cutting room floor, yeah, it’s a failure but it’s actually just part of the process. [Failure] is part of any creative process.” — @AmyCEdmondson [0:19:40]
“An A-plus player in the failure space would be an organization that’s far more aware than its counterpart of where the vulnerabilities are.” — @AmyCEdmondson [0:38:03]
“[Build] in a sense of humility and curiosity about the developing project or process that says, ‘We love it but please come and shoot holes in it because we’d much rather do that inside the organization than later in the market.’” — @AmyCEdmondson [0:46:33]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
'What Google Learned in Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team'
EPISODE 16 [TRANSCRIPT]
“AE: Now, to the technical part, it is a smart course of action to keep going if you have legitimate kind of, I’m going to say, sufficiently rational evidence-based thinking to support why and how that does next attempts could work and it can’t just be you know, if you’re on 5125 and well, maybe 5126 will work. Well, that’s not a good argument.”
[0:00:34.3] JU: You’re listening to Paint & Pipette. I’m your host, Jeremy Utley. I teach innovation and entrepreneurship at Stanford University. Thanks for joining me to explore the art and science of bringing new ideas to life. Let’s dive in.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:56.1] JU: All right folks, welcome to another episode of The Paint & Pipette Podcast, great to see you all here today. If you want to drop your name and location in the comments, we can see it and we can hear where folks are joining from in the world. JDShram, I see you there, nice to see you, hope you're doing well. Yesenia, nice to see you, excited to dive into this conversation with the amazing Amy Edmondson. Amy, thanks for joining us today.
[0:01:22.3] AE: It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be here.
[0:01:24.3] JU: I’m so delighted and honored that you joined us right on the heels of your second – is that your second sequential award of the number one management thinker in the world by Thinkers 50? I mean, whole just said that in the chat. Is that true?
[0:01:38.2] AE: That is true. Thank you. Yes, it’s quite a surprise and I’m deeply grateful.
[0:01:43.7] JU: Unbelievable. I mean, it’s very well deserved. I was emailing with our mutual friend, Kelly Leonard who run Second City in Chicago, and he was saying that he thought that humility was your superpower. So, I’m –
[0:01:57.2] AE: That’s lovely to hear. I love Kelly. We had such a fun conversation last summer.
[0:02:01.9] JU: Oh, he’s amazing. He’s absolutely amazing. I learn from him every single time I talked to him. But today, we’re here to talk to you about your new book, The Right Kind of Wrong. I was hoping we could have a little bit of a book sandwich so to speak, where the book is kind of the middle or the meat, so to speak.
But I’d love to have some Amy bread on both sides, where hopefully, by the end, as the folks who tune into the show know, that we love to talk with creators about their own process. So, we’d love to do that at the end but I thought it would be fun just to start with a little bit of your journey. My understanding is that you actually started your research journey focused on the subject of learning, is that right?
[0:02:36.8] AE: That is right. For the organizational learning, not human learning or education-based learning in school but why is it that organizations struggle so and how can we overcome it? But struggle to change, adapt, innovate, improve, in a world that keeps stubbornly changing.
[0:02:55.1] JU: Yeah, you know, folks are obviously familiar with my obsession with this topic. I mean, I’m absolutely obsessed, especially with the area of innovation in particular. We’ll get there. One question I have for you just to begin with is what drew you to organizational learning? I mean, it sounds like you kind of knew there were maybe faults or failures there. How did that become the focus of your early research efforts?
[0:03:19.2] AE: So, before I started my Ph.D. program, the four years prior to that, I worked in a small boutique consulting company. It was very much focused on culture change and installing teams and teamwork in operating companies usually, very big ones, usually ones with quite a history of success, and I was absolutely intrigued by the work. I really loved it, I really learned so much about people and workplaces and just enough about business to be dangerous. One of the things that just kept coming up again and again and again is how hard it is for organizations to pivot, to adapt.
You know, for instance, I spent some time in one of the major, you know, big three automotive companies and this was at a time in the late 80s when it was the writing on the wall was crystal clear, that customers wanted small, high-quality, fuel-efficient, less expensive cars, and the big three just really weren’t making them and it wasn’t that they didn’t realize that. It’s that they realized it but found it hard to retool, rethink, just – it’s just hard.
It’s hard when you’ve got a machine that’s producing, especially when we – yeah, literally, producing cars and profits and has always been this way. It’s hard even when thoughtful well-intended people recognize the need for change. So, that intrigued me because my – going into it, I just thought, “Oh, maybe they don’t realize they need to change.” No. They realized they needed to change, they just found it hard to do both behaviorally and more importantly, operationally just from the complexity of their installed systems and processes.
And so, that struck me as a really important problem, and at first, like all academics, you take this really giant important issue and end up studying something rather small and specific because it’s the only way to gain traction but that’s why I was interested because I met all these wonderful human beings who were frustrated by the inability of the large systems to sort of – to be agile.
[0:05:29.9] JU: Yeah, was there any moment in particular in working with say, the auto manufacturer, where this idea around organizational learning kind of crystalized for you, or where you realized, “I don't know enough to answer the questions that are coming my way.” Or how did you even – how did you decide to make the change, even to go, perhaps what’s your weakest?
[0:05:49.2] AE: Well, it’s sort of a – yeah. So, first, the one I’m embarrassed to say this because I think that there was a kind of an “aha moment” and that “aha moment” was from the outside, right? As an outsider, my assumption, which was really stupid, was that these people just must not be very bright, right? They just don’t – they don’t see what I see, right?
That I see that gosh, you know, California seems to be filling up with those Hondas over there and you know? So, that was a, you know, a really bad hypothesis that I had, that these companies don’t change because they aren’t aware. Well, then to get in there, and I do remember that, with some surprise, how thoughtful and observant these individuals were, right? So, then it’s like, “Okay, that was wrong” right?
[0:06:35.5] JU: So yeah, intelligence isn’t the problem there, okay.
[0:06:36.9] AE: Intelligence isn’t the problem, it’s more that organizations are challenging, right? They’re interesting, in a way, they are built and designed to do one thing really well and they get better and better and better at it and then they hit the limits of current practices and it’s not as easy as it was when you were a startup a hundred years ago, creating that replicable formula for success, where it was creative and generative and sleeves rolled up and no one could do any wrong.
And it’s just both psychologically and sort of organizationally meaning from a systems and performance management and all the rest point of view, it’s very hard to shift the ship’s direction.
[0:07:25.8] JU: And so, you, let’s fast forward a little bit. You stepped out, you decided to pursue academic study.
[0:07:31.4] AE: Yeah.
[0:07:32.0] JU: You’re working for a legend or with, I don't know what the right word is but Richard Hackman, right? And who by the way is – who has been recommended to me by one of my colleagues at Stanford, Bob Sutton is a huge fan of Hackman and we use some of his work in our classes together. What was the research project that really set you in a fresh kind of sense of an answer to this question around organizational learning?
[0:07:57.5] AE: You know, I think I should say, yes, Richard Hackman was a big influence and Richard was an expert in teams of course and in a way, you know, his focus was on how do you get effective teams and his answer lay largely in get the structures right. They get the right people on the team, the right goal, good leadership, the right resources, and that little machine will then take care of itself, or at least, it will increase the chances of effectiveness.
Richard was half the story for me, the other half was Chris Argyris, I didn’t know Richard before I started the Ph.D. I had met Chris Argyris and Peter Senge and some others from both MIT and Harvard who were interested in this broader issue of organizational learning and Chris Argyris’ work was on how we think and how we interact with each other in non-learning ways. Like, how the sort of mental programming and the interpersonal programming is utterly at odds with organizational learning, with our ability to make really better decisions in the face of uncertainty and to draw from and really use each other’s knowledge effectively.
And so, it was really the combination of Argyris and Hackman that led me ultimately to my insights around teams but it was through Richard that I did get into the field in my first research project. So, Richard Hackman had done work in cockpit crews and aviation settings, and really sort of looking at how those team dynamics could make the difference between more successful flights and less successful ones and of course, the occasional tragic accident.
When the medical community in the early 1990s got interested in the problem of medical error and adverse drug events that happened because of human error, they thought, “Well, who better to contact than Richard Hackman?” who is sort of looked at a similar problem in the aviation context and there’s some similarities. There are many differences of course but there’s some similarities in these two worlds.
So, they asked the PI, the principal investigator of a big study of [inaudible 0:10:12.5] asked Richard Hackman whether he would like to join and help and he said, he was a little busy but you know, maybe his Ph.D. students, that was me, might be called upon to help. So, I didn’t have anything better to do and I did see a very real connection between error and learning which is not a new idea, right?
It’s an old idea and I thought, “Well, you’re studying errors, I’m interested in learning, like organizational learning. If organizations don’t learn from their errors, well, they’re not learning.” So, I said yes, of course, as one does.
[0:10:46.4] JU: Well, and by the way, a lot of really great stories begin with, “I didn’t have anything better to do,” So that’s a perfectly plausible part of the story.
[0:10:53.6] AE: That’s true. I knew I had to do something, right? Absolutely. So, that’s how I got, that’s how I first got into the field with Richard’s help, and one of the challenging things, which today seems second nature, was that when I got into the hospital to study teams and started talking to people about their teams or which team, you know, they’re on the hematology team but then I’m also on the ICU team over here and I’m on you know, I’m – do you mean my clinical group? Do you mean –
And then I realized, “Oh, these people aren’t on teams, they’re teaming” right? They’re teaming up with different people at different times in different ways based on the needs of the work and so it made it rather challenging to study them the way you’d study old-fashioned teams. So, that was kind of part of the challenge as well.
[0:11:42.2] JU: So, I know that from this study, part of the insights around psychological safety or as you say, teams like logical safety came out but that’s – it’s not that that became a part of kind of the zeitgeist as it is now, really. I feel now, psychological safety and team psychological safety is everywhere, and credit to you for popularizing it. When – and discovering it and sharing.
When do you feel like all of a sudden, this is something people are aware of? Because it's like, you’re kind of doing the study, you’re probably publishing papers but it’s not like it’s – it’s not getting the newspapers or things, right? So, what change were all of a sudden, people go, “This matters” like, capital “M” matters kind of a thing?
[0:12:22.5] AE: Funny you should ask and funny you should say, newspapers because that’s when it changed I believe. February of 2016, there was a very long, prominent, and beautifully written article on Project Aristotle at Google, written by Charles Duhigg and it was called, What Google Learned in Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team, right? That was sort of the headline and I had nothing to do with that study.
But the long story short part of that study was that they discovered, they used my measure, my concept of psychological safety from the academic paper, from one of the early academic papers I wrote, and they put that variable in the model, in their study, and that was the factor that best-explained performance in teams at Google.
So, that put it on the map because it was, first of all, it was a great article and really well-written with lots of suspense and so on, and then it was in the New York Times so it’s quite visible, and so then, in the aftermath of that, all of a sudden, I saw, you know, that the coming weeks and months, many digital articles on – with psychological safety, and then I started seeing Google’s idea of psychological safety and –
[0:13:34.0] JU: Right, wait. Hey, they didn’t invent that.
[0:13:36.0] AE: Yeah, and at around that time, Wily, which is my publisher reached back out. They said, “You know, your beak Teaming” which I think I had published in – this is 2016. We’re now on sort of the spring of 2016. I published that book in 2012 and it was really about the sort of the dynamic nature or the dynamic fluid nature of teamwork and how do you manage that and they said, “Your book is funny.”
You know, we publish lots of management books and usually, they sort of, you know, they launch them, they have their sales, and then on to the next thing. She said, “Yours is weird and that every year, it sells more than the year before,” right? Not saying it was a big blockbuster book but like there was something evergreen about it or the interest was growing rather than shrinking.
So, she said, “Do you have anything else? Like, would you like to write another book?” And it was that confluence of those two things where everybody’s talking about psychological safety in Google and Jeanine Ray and Wiley’s calling me up saying, you want to write another book and I’m like, “Oh, I guess yes, I think so. I think I’m going to write a book about psychological safety” which I never had thought was worth.
There is a chapter about psychological safety and teaming but I never thought it was worth a whole book because like, I said that, did that, you know? With the articles are out there, the articles were well-sighted in the academic community but that’s different than, as you said, reaching, you know, the popular community and the practice community. So, that odd combination.
That sort of confluence of two events led me to say, “Yeah, I think I would like to write another book and I think it will be on psychological safety.” And then, that became The Fearless Organization. So, it wasn’t something, you know, it was 20 years after, the – my initial discovery.
[0:15:20.8] JU: That’s incredible.
[0:15:22.0] AE: By the time it came out.
[0:15:23.3] JU: Yeah. I love that. I wrote that commend down, “I never thought it was worth a whole book.” That’s such a great comment. It’s just amazing. But I mean – so, as you know, from my work at Stanford and Ideaflow, we’re really big believers in the volume of ideas that are required to get to a good idea, right? We can see that it’s – to me, failure, it’s certainly psychological safety.
We’ll get to failure in a second, but psychological safety, what do you see is the connection between or the relationship between psychological safety and idea generation in an organization, what’s the relationship there?
[0:15:59.3] AE: Oh, I think it’s such a powerful and important relationship. Without psychological safety, which is a belief that you can speak up without fear of humiliation or being made to feel not good about yourself by colleagues because they make fun of your ideas or maybe they are tough on you because you made a mistake, whatever, right?
The interpersonal domain is fraught in some environments but when it’s not, right? When you believe, honestly, that you can be open and honest and transparent and human, that’s psychological safety. Ideation and the generation of wild and then ultimately good ideas is inherently interpersonally risky, right? What if I say something and you just laugh at me?
[0:16:47.6] JU: Right.
[0:16:48.1] AE: What if I say something that you’re thinking maybe aloud or in your head, “That is the stupidest thing I ever heard,” right? I’m just – I’m going to then only give the safe ideas, right? The things that I’m pretty sure you’ll think I’m smart if I say them. So, part of I think, creating the right environment for good ideation is just saying, “Hey, anything goes” right? Because the craziest idea is one that probably has a foothold on to something else, you know? Or a tangent off which we can find something else, right?
So, making that, you know that, right? Everybody knows that in the ideation space but making it – You might think, well then, you don’t have to say it since everybody knows it. No-no-no. I think you do have to say it to be explicit about that context where we’re trying to – we’re trying to go wild, where we expect more bad ideas than good, and that’s how the sport is played.
[0:17:42.1] JU: So, the notion of more bad ideas than good, and that’s how the sport is played. You know, you saying that the Google article kind of brought into the spotlight, ideas that you had been sharing for a long time. I had the same experience with Taylor Swift recently.
[0:17:56.5] AE: What?
[0:17:58.6] JU: Where at some award speech, she said, “I want everybody to know that it’s the hundreds or thousands of dumb ideas that I’ve had that have led me to my good ideas.” You’ll never believe how many people are reaching out to me going, “Hey, what you say is true, it’s like, it was true before Taylor Swift said it.”
[0:18:11.8] AE: Exactly, exactly, but it just got blessed.
[0:18:15.0] JU: Yeah, exactly. Now, all of a sudden, it matters, right? Maybe we could shift a little bit to failure because to me, sharing a bad idea or as Taylor Swift says, a dumb idea is a micro failure of sorts, right?
[0:18:27.4] AE: Yeah.
[0:18:27.8] JU: And maybe this is a good point to connect the two but you said, it takes a lot of that – I can’t remember your exact phrase. Something like, we’re going to generate a lot of bad ideas to get a good idea. How do you even build the resilience to – there’s something about failure as an outcome which is one thing, right? There’s also a failure as an input, meaning, I don’t know how else to say that but say, having the courage to say, “I know this is a bad idea and I’m going to say it because I know we’re supposed to say bad ideas.”
It’s like a failure as an input almost. How do you cultivate that failure orientation even at the beginning, not just a tolerance at the end?
[0:19:05.2] AE: I think you keep saying things like, the future is unknown. None of us in this room has a crystal ball. So, by definition, we’re sort of standing at time zero, looking forward without a map, without a guidebook. So, it’s being explicit about the name and the game that we’re playing. You’re right in that failures can be inputs, not just outputs but more than in any other aspect of failure, that’s a frame issue.
I mean, it may in fact, not be necessary to frame them as failures, right? If an idea doesn’t survive the cutting room floor, yeah, it’s a failure but it’s actually just part of the process. It’s part of any creative process. We think about writing a book. I mean, if you write a book, you are absolutely, unless it’s not a very good book, leaving way more words on the cutting room floor than end up staying in the actual book.
So, it’s just the nature of a creative process is, you know, there’s clay, or there’s stone and you chip away at it you find the creative output that you're trying to put out into the world. So, are the things that don’t make it failures? Yes, in a way, they are but it’s probably helpful to reframe them as the necessary ingredients that help us get where we’re trying to go.
[0:20:34.9] JU: Right, right. You know, It’s funny, I had an experience, I’ve got a newsletter and I sent out an opportunity to join this kind of pilot of a tool that I’m building where basically, the purpose of the tool is, to be like a brainstorm partner to help you come up with bad ideas. That’s the purpose, right? And just because we know bad ideas as Kevin Kelly said, right? A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea.
So, the point of the tool is – and I shared a screenshot of the tool with my newsletter group, and the prompt I used was, “How do I get my children” I got four daughters, “How do I get my girls to eat vegetables?” And one bad idea that I wrote down was, I could bribe them with treats and I was thinking about, I got a screenshot of that in this email. Well, I had a pediatrician write me, saying, “Jeremy, I really wish you used a different example because giving kids treats…”
I wrote back very politely, you know, “Oh, just so you know, actually, my girls do love vegetables, you know? It’s not even actually a problem in our house but I wanted to have like a ubiquitous kind of a challenge.” And she wrote me back and she goes, “I can’t say how embarrassed I am that my instinctive response was to say, I wish you had…” But it’s like, the whole frame of the thing is, let’s come up with bad ideas.
[0:21:45.5] AE: Right.
[0:21:46.6] JU: And yet, it’s so hard to do it.
[0:21:49.3] AE: Right, and the pediatrician is an authority figure, and the authority figure, you know, even if you’re just fully enlightened, right? When the authority figure tells you, “You did a bad thing” you feel bad.
[0:22:02.5] JU: Oh, I apologize, and it’s like, and I know that I was, in keeping with the point of the exercises.
[0:22:07.3] AE: Right, right.
[0:22:07.6] JU: Yeah, I feel terrible.
[0:22:08.7] AE: I don't know if you’ve ever seen the ideal video, you know, the night line video but I always loved that, you know, Velcro pants, Velcro seats, this is the way to help the kids not slide out of the grocery cart seat, right? And you know, Kelly sort of, “Velcro pants? Velcro seats, like no, you’re not going to do that.” But there’s something there that is kind of useful or creative or memorable.
[0:22:33.6] JU: That’s so funny. Okay, let’s – so let’s just speak of David Kelly, I mean, an absolute hero of mine, I wanted to ask you, are there heroes of yours when it comes to the art of you know, the right kind of wrong? Are there failure heroes that come to mind for you? And if so, what makes them a hero of failure for you?
[0:22:53.1] AE: Well, let me start with the classic one from you know, from history, which would be Thomas Edison and I do – I have that, you know, that little tiny story, kind of a classic story about Thomas Edison in the book because he famously said to a lab assistant who approached the famous inventor saying, “Gosh, it must be so hard for you with all these failures.” He said, “Failures? What do you mean? I haven’t failed. I found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”
So, talk about a reframe but he was clearly – first of all, he’s like, he’s kind of a failure hero because most of us would be sort of sick of it after 999 failures, let alone 10,000 failures but there is this doggedness and one can infer that he’s learning from each of them and making progress and of course, he is also so wildly creative. I mean, the variety of inventions from the lightbulb to the phonograph to early motion pictures and so on is just – runs the gamut of things that one might think about back in –
[0:23:57.3] JU: By the way, also, the variety of materials in his – if you hear the pilots.
[0:24:01.5] AE: Right.
[0:24:02.6] JU: Horsehair and sulfur.
[0:24:05.4] AE: Talk about it –
[0:24:06.6] JU: He’s like, “I have no idea.”
[0:24:06.9] AE: Yeah, bringing strange things together and then also in his process, you know, which we know him for his inventions but his process was he also created really, the first RND lab and the essential nature of that is still informative or essentially used today. As you said, bringing in kind of diverse ingredients and being absolutely willing and enthusiastic to fail along the way, so long as you’re learning from them.
So, he’s sort of absolutely a failure hero, and in a more personal context, Buckminster Fuller was a failure hero for me and he too was an inventor but also, an educator and a writer of books that were all, you know, in various ways about helping us think in bigger ways and more whole systems ways and thinking as designers, as designers who are here to use our problem-solving ability to make a better world.
And he too was willing to have many, many failures along the way and even to write about that as a natural and necessary part of the journey and this is a man who was born in 1895, who became the fifth generation Fuller in a row to go to Harvard College but the first to get kicked out for failing to show up for his mid-term exams and mid-year exams. You know, he just really wasn’t a good fit.
He wanted to make things and invent things and do physics and engineering and essentially, Harvard in 1913 was about learning Greek, Latin, and Government. So, he said, it was just not – he didn’t feel like it was for him.
[0:25:46.3] JU: Wow. I had no idea.
[0:25:48.1] AE: Yeah, yeah.
[0:25:48.9] JU: You know, you, saying Edison and the number 10,000, maybe it kind of gave me a question I had, it was a fun idea for me. So, another number and a note-worthy hero and failure in my mind is James Dyson, right? 5,126 prototypes before the 5,127th worked. I don’t know if you know that.
[0:26:06.8] AE: I didn’t know that.
[0:26:07.7] JU: He worked for four and a half years building a prototype per day until the 5,127th worked. Now, here’s my question.
[0:26:14.7] AE: That’s a lot of years.
[0:26:15.7] JU: Yeah. How do you know when to – and I mean, how many years did Edison spend 10,000 things that don’t work?
[0:26:21.1] AE: Yeah, I don’t know.
[0:26:21.1] JU: My question is, when do you know whether you should quit or persist? Because I mentioned the Dyson story to Annie Duke, the author of Quit, most recently and she told me, “I hate it when people reference that story because he’s the exception that proves the rule. The vast majority of the time, you should not build 5,127 versions.” So, how do you think about it? Because we hold up these heroes.
Thomas Edison tried doggedly, 10,000 times, and yet, it’s almost like survivorship bias, right? There’s probably a lot of people who tried thousands of times, whose stories we don’t know because it doesn’t work. When do we persist versus, when do we go, “You know what? I gave it my best shot, I did it a thousand times, it didn’t work.”
[0:27:02.1] AE: You know, Stephen Dubner recently called this the grit versus quit, right? And when do you know? And it’s just lovely to have the rhyme but I thought about this a lot and I’ll start by saying, there’s no right answer in a technical sense. It’s judgment, right? It’s a judgment call and then I will say, with some confidence that it ought to be a team sport, meaning that the judgment should not be one you make alone.
You almost, because it’s judgment in the face of uncertainty, you almost certainly need others’ judgments to help you figure it out. Like, to help you answer the question of, “Is this a smart course of action to keep going?” Now, to the technical part. It is a smart course of action to keep going if you have legitimate kind of, I’m going to say, sufficiently rational evidence-based thinking to support why and how those next attempts could work.
And it can’t just be you know, if you’re on 5,125 and well, “Well maybe 5,126 will work.” Well, that’s not a good argument, right? So, let me illustrate my thinking with the Sara Blakely Spanx story. Again, retrospective so – but with her, she is – was the founder of Spanx, she’s in shapewear and –
[0:28:25.7] JU: First self-made billionaire, right?
[0:28:27.9] AE: First self-made billionaire or at least, first female self-made billionaire and she went to manufacturer after manufacturer, textile manufacturer after textile manufacturer and they all turned her down but she persisted. Of course, finally one said yes and the rest is history but here is how I think about that, right? She believed because of evidence, based from her friends and sisters, that if you could make this thing for me, I want it.
Like people loved the prototypes, they loved the product. The hurdle was, “I’ve got to get a manufacturer to make it,” and so that seems like a reasonable argument that here’s a clear hurdle, nobody’s taking me seriously yet but someone ought to see the wisdom in this product, particularly with this kind of rave reviews from albeit a small sample but a motivated sample but in contrast, let’s say it’s Sara Blakely and she’s got these tights and her friends aren’t interested, you know?
[0:29:25.5] JU: Very different, yeah, they don’t care.
[0:29:27.1] AE: Right, nobody wants to make it, nobody wants to buy it, you just really can’t drum up any interest in your thing. Then the obvious right answer is quit. So I think you need to be able to articulate that the hurdles are ones that, if overcome, will have a clear benefit. If I can get an electric light bulb, you are transforming nighttime, you know, the evenings.
[0:29:53.0] JU: Right.
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[0:29:57.6] JU: How many ideas have you tested today? How about your team or organization? Ideaflow is a set of tools that help you test more ideas faster. I’ve worked with both high-growth startups and global organizations and success comes when you test more ideas faster. Want to learn how better Ideaflow can help your organization? Check out my website, jeremyutley.design or reach out to me at jutley@jeremyutley.design. I’d love to talk with you.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:30:30.8] JU: Truly, part of what you’re saying here I think the way we kind of position it in the design thinking kind of way of viewing the world is there are different lenses that you have to apply at different times, one, in order for innovation to work, right? You’ve got technological feasibility, you’ve got business economic viability, you’ve got human desirability, and yeah, experiment can be oriented towards answering different of those questions.
[0:30:53.7] AE: Yes.
[0:30:54.0] JU: And by the way, the different questions have different kind of hurdles and expenses associated with them and what you just described was –
[0:31:01.1] AE: Right.
[0:31:01.5] JU: They are both, it is a great case where one, the desirability hurdles she had cleared. She knew that people wanted it, then she resolved the next question of, “Can I make it?” And what I would say where most people falter is look at Google Glass or the Segway or countless other failed innovations where they said, “Can we build it?" first rather than, “Does anybody want it?” And so for us, there is a big question of sequencing those.
You have to eliminate risk but which risk could you eliminate first as should Sara Blakely start out on the kind of manufacturing assembly line without ever validating whether it’s not being wanted? No way, that would be good, right?
[0:31:38.1] AE: No, because then she’s – you’re skipping the empathic design part or you know that appreciation for what potential customers or users, the problem they’re trying to solve in their lives that is for them real and meaningful and they would pay something to solve it. If you can glimpse that that exists and you can glimpse a solution but there is and will be hurdles in your way and I guess, the Dyson story falls into that.
It’s a little hard to believe it’s really 5,126 but because especially since there’s so many vacuum cleaners or hair dryers or whatever already out there, like do we really need that? You know, is it really going to be that much better and that much more attractive? And then you better be able to explain, “Yes, it is, and here’s why.”
[0:32:21.5] JU: Right, right, So we’ve talked about individuals, maybe let’s go to the organizational level. Are there organizational heroes of failure that you hold up as these folks do it well?
[0:32:32.8] AE: Well, I hate to be unoriginal but IDEO always pops into my mind first.
[0:32:38.6] JU: Okay.
[0:32:39.0] AE: And then it’s not – I had the always – I mean, I knew about IDEO a long time ago but when I spoke at a design conference 20 odd years ago and met the Douglas Stanton, who was then the head of the Boston area studio, then I got to know them even better because he invited me in to write a case study and them analyze a failure, project failure and so then I got to know them quite well and of course, to know them well is to know that they really mean it around failure’s okay and it’s part of the game.
And the playfulness of wild ideas and bringing people with different expertise together. I mean, I just love that. So, they certainly rank up there.
[0:33:22.6] JU: So, for folks who haven’t had the privilege like you or I have to kind of be inside a little bit when you say they take it seriously, what are the kind of behavioral or interpersonal evidences that they walk the talk so to speak? Which is to say, if one of, you know, our audience members just got plopped in the middle of an organization, what are they looking for as evidence of, “This is a safe place to fail here” or “This is – I am on the grounds of a hero of failure.”
[0:33:51.6] AE: There’s a playfulness, which is a lightheartedness, an obvious willingness to say silly things, to experiment, to try things. You’ll hear laughter but not ever of a mocking kind, right? They’re were never laughing at anyone but we’re sort of laughing together at the things that didn’t work or anyway, so there is an ease of experimenting and calling out the things that don’t work without it ever feeling painful.
There’s likely to be collections of people who have different areas of expertise and background, right? You’re not going to see all of the electrical engineers in one corner and you know, the marketing folks in another but they’re likely to be on teams together and sharing their knowledge and ideas with each other.
[0:34:43.2] JU: One thing I was thinking about as I was reading your book is I was trying to ask myself this question. I’ll ask it of you, you probably have better answers than I do, but I wanted to create a failure diagnostic so to speak. How do I know if I am getting better or what am I even measuring in order to know whether am I’m improving in regards to failure, am I regressing in regards to failure?
[0:35:02.3] AE: Oh, that’s a great question. So, my first instinct was to say, was to try to answer the question in a healthy failure culture and that starts to look almost identical with psychological safety and I know how to measure that but then I thought –
[0:35:19.6] JU: That works too but go ahead, keep going.
[0:35:21.7] AE: So, let’s come back to that but then I thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to really measure your failure performance?” This is what we would want to measure. We would want to measure first of all, that there is a healthy and this probably have to be subjective I think but a healthy number of intelligent failures, right? That everything is not going well all the time or that would not be a solid A-plus failure performer because then you’re not trying.
[0:35:49.9] JU: So, no failure is a failure.
[0:35:51.2] AE: No failure is a failure, for sure, right, and that of course creates the risk of stagnation, of obsolesce in the future. So, no failure, and then we want to assess the type of failures that we’re experiencing. So, let’s say we pass the test we’re not where – there is no evidence that there are no failures, so we’re okay. We’re good to go. Now, what kinds of failures are they?
And I identify in the book three kinds of failure, basic failure, complex failure, and intelligent failure. In an ideal world, which we all live in, but in an ideal world, all of your failures would be intelligent and in order for that to be true, it would not be that you’re perfect at the other stuff. It would be that you are good enough at catching and correcting deviations in a timely way so that you’ve caught and prevented most of the preventable failures that could have happened otherwise.
Let’s say, you’re really vigilant and alert and able to catch problems in especially familiar territory before they cause problems. So, could we met – you know, it’s hard to measure the dog that didn’t bark.
[0:37:01.4] JU: Right, exactly. So, how do you measure the number of bad failures averted, right?
[0:37:05.8] AE: And one way to do that, I mean, one way of seeing that done in healthcare is to get very serious and very cheerful about near misses because often, you know near misses often in a normal underled, undermanaged setting don’t really get reported because there are still deviations, right? There is still a gap between what happened and what was supposed to happen if you had a near miss.
But if you go out of your way to frame near misses as good news rather than bad as good catches, you know, rather than, “Oh my gosh, we screwed it up but thankfully, we caught it in time.”
[0:37:40.9] JU: Look at what could have happened, yeah.
[0:37:42.6] AE: Right, then people are more willing to speak up about them and then you actually get a data set if you will of failures or potential fail, non-failures but potential failures that didn’t happen thankfully but that were on their way to happening and you can learn from them. You can learn from where – you really can learn where the vulnerabilities are. So you know an A-plus player in the failure space would be an organization that’s far more aware than its counterpart of where the vulnerabilities are.
Where things could go wrong in consequential ways whether from an economic or a human safety perspective and you know, you are just sort of unusually good at catching things before the worst thing happens.
[0:38:24.4] JU: There’s almost like a – what I am hearing is a healthy paranoia.
[0:38:27.6] AE: Yeah, yeah.
[0:38:28.2] JU: You know, what is it? Is it Andrew Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive, right?
[0:38:31.5] AE: Exactly.
[0:38:32.1] JU: It’s like a healthy sense of we’re about to be disrupted but not to be in trouble.
[0:38:37.0] AE: I mean, I love that idea, that book title is very provocative. I wish maybe it’s like the pediatrician, I wish it was a different word, you know? Because it’s paranoid has a kind of clinical negativity to it but the truth is, you could say you know only the realistic survive, right? Because it’s realistic to know that you don’t have a crystal ball and because you don’t have a crystal ball and you’re operating in a VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, the reality is things will go wrong.
Very likely, you know, you may not hear about it but things will go wrong. So, instead of it being about paranoid, it is about being realistic, scientific, smart.
[0:39:16.0] JU: So we got a number of leaders here who are members of our community, who may be saying things like, “You know what? If I diagnose my organization right now, we don’t have a healthy failure culture.” What if someone – so, it’s one thing to kind of start – I think about Pixar as kind of the quintessential example of starting from scratch, blank sheet of paper, building it from the ground up.
And we had Ed Catmull on the show and he talked about their brain trust meetings, their daily’s and they’ve got a number of practices that they were instituted from the very beginning and it seems those are resilient and robust. I know you’ve mentioned Pixar as well before.
[0:39:49.7] AE: Yes.
[0:39:50.1] JU: Suppose someone doesn’t have the privilege or the luxury of starting from scratch and they are actually starting from they’ve got an existing structure, they’ve got existing interpersonal dynamics, they’ve got existing culture, policies but they want to do, call it a failure renovation or a failure overhaul or psychologic and so far as they’re somewhat assisted in side parts we’ll see at the overhaul.
Where do they start? What are kind of some of the if you thought about like Prado-principle kind of first things you can do that have the biggest impact to start to shift the culture in a different direction? Where does a leader start?
[0:40:22.4] AE: Well, I want to stay away from sort of one-thing kinds of recommendations but first thing is probably fair but I would say, it’s hard and we know it’s doable and I’ll give two examples of we know it’s doable, one from my own research, one from Bryce Hoffman’s amazing book, American Icon, about the turnaround at Ford and I’ll start first with my own, which is children’s hospital and clinics 20 odd years ago became a leader, like an organizational leader in the patient safety movement, I would say, you know?
So, back again to the early days of realizing that people were being harmed while they were in hospitals by error, you know, just epidemic way that nobody had really fully appreciated before and so once that awareness started to seep out, then a few pioneers decided, “What are we going to do about it?” and it’s not easy because you know, complexity and all the rest but so what did at children’s hospital and clinics had was a leader named Julie Morath, sort of stepped in and came in from the outside and just started –
And I think this is the place to start, started educating people just early and often on reality, that the reality is healthcare delivery, especially hospital healthcare delivery is a complex error-prone system. Like it or not, things are going wrong every day in every ward in almost every process. That is not – it is neither shameful nor bad in a moral sense, it’s just true.
[0:42:00.7] JU: It is accepting the reality, yeah.
[0:42:02.8] AE: Right, and working together, you know we can’t change the complexity of healthcare but working together, we can really do a better job of speaking up quickly and passionately to catch and correct. It’s really about, what this is about is framing the work as the either uncertain or novel or complex or interdependent work that it is, making sure that we’re on the same page because the page that people are naturally spontaneously on is the industrial era page, which is you know –
[0:42:33.8] JU: What does that mean? Yeah, how do you define that?
[0:42:36.6] AE: That means bosses have plans and targets and it’s your job to meet them, which makes sense in a reasonably predictable certain world. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in a VUCA world. You’re trying to sort of reorient people’s thinking. I’d like say it’s think like a scientist. You don’t have plans, you have hypothesis. You know, you don’t have certainty, you have possibility.
Your job isn’t to kind of evaluate people when they get it wrong, it’s to help people make sense of the ambiguous data and then figure out where we pivot next. So, this think like a scientist is a pretty good rubric for painting reality in its glory, in its accurate glory, and why that calls for input from everyone and why that calls for smart experiments, etcetera, etcetera. So, it’s sort of reframing the nature of our reality so that we can all get on the same page about the knowledge era, the digital era, whatever it is that we are operating in.
And then structure, supports, and processes for people to do the work they need to do in a learning-oriented way and so that will take a different form in care delivery as in the scientific laboratory as in intake forms. You are inviting people in to make things work better in very specific ways.
[0:43:59.8] JU: Are there kind of meta categories? Like I think for example of I’ve heard you talk about 3M’s practice of having kind of biannual science fairs. Obviously, a science fair doesn’t really –
[0:44:11.9] AE: Yes, yeah that’s a great example.
[0:44:14.2] JU: Like a principle like regular gatherings to show unfinished work. I don’t know, I’m just making that up right now.
[0:44:20.3] AE: Right, absolutely. I mean, again, I think you can make up the right structures and convening activities that make sense in your industry or your company rather than one-size-fits-all. So, for example, I went to Boston Medical Center a couple of weeks ago when they were having a lecture and then a nice lunch around posters, where the posters were everybody’s improvement projects, and walking there, there was like 45 posters from one to another.
These are all teams of people who teamed up to make a measurable difference in some activity that really matters, you know, ranging from handwashing to handling family challenges, like really different kinds of things but coming together around that lunch and walking through that gallery of posters, celebrating that learning, that work is a very powerful experience and statement about who we are, what matters.
We’re not just going through the motions of like, “Let’s do our work” right? No, no, no, we’re doing our work but we’re doing our work as a learning process, a learning journey.
[0:45:29.1] JU: What you’re kind of making me think of too is recognizing that the leader’s job is to design the organization and recognize that that – they are not going to get it right but if they are in the game of attempting to design it, like Ed, one of my friends who runs an apparel company had asked, “How do you create a brain trust when the product you need to get into context for isn’t a movie?”
How do you get some people context when you want to have a brain trust around a shoe?” And you know what Ed said, you’ll love this, “Never forget you asked that question” and what he meant was the leader’s job is to be wrestling with, “How do I give people sufficient context for that kind of feedback?” right?
[0:46:06.0] AE: Right.
[0:46:06.4] JU: And to me, it strikes me that part of this you go, “It doesn’t matter if it’s a science fair or whatever the mechanism is, the important thing is that there is someone who’s trying presently to develop mechanisms to accomplish some outcome and then actually attending to whether the mechanism delivered the outcome.”
[0:46:23.3] AE: Right and just whether it’s a shoe or a movie, you are saying, we don’t know yet if this is any good. Like we need you, we need your input, right? So, there’s a – you are building in a sense of humility and curiosity about the developing project or process that sort of says, “We love it but please come and shoot holes in it because we’d much rather do that inside the organization than later in the market.”
[0:46:52.0] JU: Right, it is going to be a lot more painful when the analysts are shooting holes in it. Okay, I want to do a lightning round and see if these words trigger anything for you, positively or negatively potentially, and then I want to hear briefly about your creative process. I’m just mindful of the time here. Okay, first phrase, excruciatingly present.
[0:47:10.3] AE: Effortful.
[0:47:12.0] JU: Effortful, say one more sentence about that.
[0:47:15.3] AE: Well, it’s necessary and actually I think exciting but it does take effort, right? So, you can’t be excruciatingly present in your sleep, I know that is kind of –
[0:47:26.7] JU: Without effort, without effort. It does require it, yeah, I love that. What about context is shaped by the level of uncertainty, can you say more about that?
[0:47:36.5] AE: Yes, yes. So, context varies, right? And one of my pet peeves about much of the management literature or management advice is it sort of often sounds like – I’m sure they don’t mean it but it sounds like one-size-fits-all. To me, one size fits one context and what do I mean by context? Context essentially is determined by uncertainty and the stakes or the risks. Uncertainty goes from very, very low as in mass production to very, very high as in scientific laboratory.
And the stakes go from very high as in human life, it could be lost if we get this wrong, to very low as in I might be slightly embarrassed if you don’t like my idea. If you think about that landscape as two dimensions, if you are in the dimension of very low stakes and very uncertain, have fun experimenting. Like go to town, there are no wrong answers yet, just let it fly, right? This is ideation, you know, little experiments.
Again, behind closed doors, nobody in the outside world has to know but that’s the proper behavior for high uncertainty low stakes. If you’re talking about high stakes and either medium or low uncertainty, this is all about vigilance. This is all about being hyper-present and thoughtful and aware of what you’re doing and why and doing it well, right? Because the stakes are too high to just be all whacky about it and I could go on from there.
So, it is about really just – and you can do that in two seconds, right? What’s the uncertainty around here, what are the stakes? What does that mean for me?
[0:49:13.5] JU: And then allow that kind of where you are on that map to inform how you approach –
[0:49:17.3] AE: To shape your options, right? It gives you either enormous leeway or not so much leeway, that’s a different mindset.
[0:49:23.4] JU: Right. Well, it reminds me, I was talking with Astro Teller once, who is as you know, at Google X. I know you wrote about him a little bit in the book and he said, he told me, “I used to give an hour-long innovation lecture." He said, “Now, I do an innovation lecture in one minute.” I go, “Okay, well now, I have to hear the minute” and he goes, “It’s simple.” He’s like, “Everybody,” he said, “Raise your hand if you would take a one in a hundred chance at making a billion dollars over a guarantee of making a million.”
Everybody in the room raised their hand, he said, “That’s because you have a – it’s that the expected value is 100x.” Whatever the math is, maybe I got the numbers wrong but the expected value of that calculation is 100x if you take the chance and he said, “Now, keep your hand up if your board and CEO and management team are fully supportive of you making that decision.” And he said, “Almost always, their hands go down.”
He said, “You don’t need an innovation lecture, you need a new manager.”
[0:50:22.0] AE: I love that.
[0:50:23.2] JU: Which is to say the context, right? The context drives so much of, “What are we talking about here?”
[0:50:28.1] AE: But then I want to ask one more question is, how sure are you that your manager, your CEO, your board, whatever, think that, right? I think oftentimes people project onto the higher-ups, whatever that means that they won’t let me, right? But what’s the evidence and have you tested it, right? Or is this becoming a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?
[0:50:51.2] JU: Right, right, yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah, okay, last question for you, tell us a little bit about your creative process. You can tell us kind of whatever is most important to you. So, how do you either develop or document or test ideas for your creative output, which is obviously you know, incredible?
[0:51:10.0] AE: Thank you. Well, it starts for me, I’m a conceptualizer by nature where I have to really work hard is getting my concepts connected to concrete stories and images. You know, I am not a filmmaker, right? Where – so I conceptualize more easily and conceptualizing meaning, I’m coming up with concepts and the relationships between them. I think about the experiences I’ve had, I think about the data I have.
I get more and more confident that some of these concepts have legs and then in order to write a book, you have to have more evidence and way many more stories. So, then I have to search, it’s a little bit of a search both in my own experience and memory and my papers and my research and out there, not so much the academic journals but in popular media, in books, in other things where you’re looking for a story that illustrates this concept well.
It ends up being an embarrassment of riches, right? Because then I have to pick and choose which are the doggy dogs, the best illustration of this concept. Thomas Edison’s better than someone else and the whole set of stories and studies and examples needs to have proper diversity of industry and people from different countries and races and you don’t want every story to be a white man.
So, it’s all of that and so things, you know that ends up being a very big catchment than most things end up on the cutting room floor.
[0:52:39.6] JU: How do you capture them? Like where do they – I was talking with an [inaudible 0:52:42.3] last week who – he keeps a physical shoebox with note cards.
[0:52:47.3] AE: Wow, wow.
[0:52:48.1] JU: So how do you – where do these stories that you’re collecting live and what makes the cut to get it in there and –
[0:52:54.0] AE: That’s a great question. I mean, I always start with paper, I’m sorry to say but then when – if something’s worth keeping, I’ll type it up, and then it’s living in Dropbox in a folder somewhere.
[0:53:05.3] JU: Sounds easily accessible.
[0:53:07.2] AE: Although I do have a pile over here, it’s you know, I think it’s ready to – I’m ready to recycle it but I have a pile of sort of failure articles that I have collected over the last 10 years and I did go to that and not too many of them made it in but –
[0:53:20.9] JU: Wow, but over 10 years, that’s incredible.
[0:53:23.2] AE: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.
[0:53:26.3] JU: One thing that you’ll like, one tactic that you’ll like from our mutual friend, Dan Pink, he said that he tests material at dinner parties and he said he’ll just kind of toss it out there, kind of just like he’s fishing almost and just see does it get a nibble, do people pick it up, and he said if it doesn’t get a lot of engagement, then you know he’s, “I’ve got to rework that” and [inaudible 0:53:46.9]
[0:53:48.0] AE: Well then, along those lines, I just happened to read the book, The Widow Clicquot, a couple of years ago, which is the story of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, who is the founder of the wine, Veuve-Clicquot, and Veuve, meaning widow and you know, this is a remarkable story of someone who created, you know, ultimately one of the most successful and enduring businesses in France and certainly, one of the best brands around the world.
And you think, “Oh, well, she must have just been success after success.” Turns out, no, it’s like failure after failure. So, I thought, “Okay, this is a great story,” and then a lot of Dan Pink. For some reason, everybody just loves that story, right? So, it became one of those things like as soon as people hear about it they want to know more, and maybe because this is a woman born in 1777, maybe because it’s champagne, who knows? But there is something about it that leads people to want to know more.
[0:54:43.1] JU: Yeah. No, it’s great and I mean, it’s such a nice and simple way I think to assess the quality of a story or a principle as you people, do they pull on it, do they retell it? That’s great. Amy, I know we can talk for a lot longer but I want to be respectful of your time and everybody else’s. I want to thank you so much for making it. Thank you to everyone who joined us today. We again, I’ll plug the book one more time, Right Kind of Wrong, available now.
Amy Edmondson, two-time number-one management thinker in the world, I am so delighted to have spent the last hour with you. Thank you for making it happen.
[0:55:15.5] AE: Thank you so much for having me.
[0:55:17.5] JU: It’s my pleasure, I hope you have a wonderful day.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:55:19.9] JU: By day, I’m a professor but I absolutely love moonlighting as a front-row student next to you during these interviews. One of my favorite things is taking the gems from these episodes and turning them into practical tips and lessons for you and your team. If you want to share the lessons you picked up from this episode with your organization, feel free to reach out. I’d be thrilled to do a keynote on the secrets that I’ve gleaned from creative masters or put together a hands-on workshop to supercharge your next offsite adventure. Hit me up at jutley@jeremyutley.design for more information.
[END]
The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.