The Science of Failing Well with Dr Amy Edmondson [Podcast]

In this final episode of the podcast before beginning his research sabbatical, your host Dr. Nathan Reiger welcomes high performing teams expert and scholar Amy Edmondson. She is a Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, author, and pioneer in the role of psychological safety in high performing teams. This conversation explores the science of failure and insights from Amy’s new book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, including the empowering components of compassion, vulnerability, and intelligent failure.

What’s In This Episode

• How did Amy become interested in researching failure?
• Are some failures better than others?
• How does psychological safety help us fail well?
• What is the role of conflict in failing well?
• How does the Compassion Mindset connect support intelligent failure?
• How did Amy discover the power of psychological safety for high-performing teams?
• How do you distinguish an intelligent failure from other kinds of failure?
• How do we deal with the vulnerability inherent in failure?
• Amy’s favorite story from the book, Failing Well.
• What about AI?
• How does Amy explain the DC plane crash.

 

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Read The Transcript

Nate Regier:

Hello. I’m Nate Regier, your host for the Compassionate Accountability® Podcast. I’m the founder and CEO of Next Element, a global consulting and training firm helping organizations transform their cultures with Compassionate Accountability. I’m the author of four books about compassion at work, including my new book, Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results. Thank you for joining me. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, and review to help us reach more listeners, and be sure to visit our website at next-element.com, where you can learn more about the work we do, as well as all of the previous podcast episodes.

This is the last episode of the Compassionate Accountability Podcast before I take a break for my research sabbatical, and we’re definitely ending on a high note. My guest is Amy Edmondson, one of the most noted experts in the study of high-performing teams, and somebody who deeply appreciates the power of Compassionate Accountability in leadership. Dr. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, where her focus is in the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. She studies teaming, a psychological safety and organizational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets.

Dr. Edmondson has been recognized by the biennial Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked number one in 2021 and ’23. She also received the organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019 and Talent Award in 2017. Amy is the pioneer in the field of psychological safety and its role in high-performing teams. Her book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, has been translated into 15 languages. Her newest book, Right Kind of Wrong, builds on her prior work on psychological safety and teaming to provide a framework for thinking about discussing and practicing the science of failing well. First published in 2023, this book is due to be translated into 24 additional languages, and was selected for the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year award.

Wow. I followed Amy’s work for many years, and when I read her newest book, which brought together the science of psychological safety and failing well, I saw so many connections with Compassionate Accountability. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time.

Amy, welcome to the Compassionate Accountability Podcast.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Thrilled to be here.

 

Nate Regier:

It’s really an honor to have you here, and I’ve been following your work for so long and it took a bit to get connected with you, and so I appreciate you so much making the time to explore this topic of failing well, and for coming on my show. I want to start with just a brief history. My listeners really like to know how my guests came to be interested in what it is they’re passionate about, so what’s kind of the 30-second history of how you got interested in this topic of failure?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Oh, my. Well, I guess the short answer is, from personal experience with failure, and trying to put it together in a way that saw the value rather than just the disappointment in failures. And more specifically, before I became an academic, I was a consultant and working with organizations in change programs and team effectiveness programs. And it just became clear to me that learning was the order of the day, that organizations, to be effective in a changing world, and I know this is obvious, have to keep learning. And then, what are one of the most important inputs to learning? Well, failures, of course.

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Right now, this podcast is going to go live in probably March of 2025. We’ll probably remember this quarter for a long time as another area of disruption and change and plenty of opportunities to fail. So, let’s start with your definition of failure, or maybe, are there different kinds of failure?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Yes. So first, I mean, my definition of failure, which is a very large and encompassing concept, is an undesired outcome. That covers a lot of territory, and as you suggested, I’ve identified three kinds of failure, basic failure, complex failure, and intelligent failure. Small hint, only the intelligent failure are really the good kind, the celebratory kind. The basic failure is a failure in familiar territory where you make a mistake that’s really preventable, right? You text and drive and get into an accident, that’s a basic failure. Don’t do it. We don’t want to celebrate those kinds of failures. You’re making cookies and you put in salt instead of sugar. No, it’s wasteful.

Complex failures are those perfect storms, those failures that happen increasingly in our lives and in our organizations, because a handful of factors conspire to make something go wrong, again in an undesired way, but in a way that’s a bit more complex, and still preventable often, but not as readily and simply preventable. And an intelligent failure is unique. That’s the undesired result of a thoughtful experiment.

 

Nate Regier:

That’s actually become a little mantra in our team meetings right now. Our executive team, we’re having to do a lot of pivoting, a lot of adjusting, and sometimes the question is, how could we set up an intelligent failure here? How do we want to craft it? And a shout-out again for your book, Failing Well, Right Kind of Wrong, is that you lay out such a great articulation of these differences and you go further and talk about, so how do we set up systems and processes and plan for failures to be intelligent? And I really appreciate that.

One of the things that is a big theme in your book, and I know it comes from all your research, is the importance of psychological safety. You’re a pioneer in this field, and will you share a little bit about what role does psychological safety play in failing well?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Actually, psychological safety plays a big role in failing well across that spectrum of different failure types and different context types. So, psychological safety plays a huge role in helping us prevent those failures that we can and will and should want to prevent in the following way. When people speak up, often, so many of the failures I’ve studied could have been prevented had someone felt able to speak up in a timely way about a tentative concern, as sort of, “Mm, not quite sure this is right, or this gives me a little worry. But then again, who am I? I don’t know enough to raise it and it doesn’t feel welcome for some reason around here.” So, job one for psychological safety in the science of failing well is preventing that which can be prevented. I don’t like [inaudible].

And then the other part, the other big part is the willingness to take risks, to try new things that might work but might not. Most people would rather be safe than sorry, or that’s probably not the right phrase, but would rather get it right than potentially do something even bigger and more exciting. So, it’s about saying, “You know what? Here is a perfect, safe context for trying new things.” Again, no bigger than necessary, because new things might fail, and so when they fail, they bring us new information, but let’s not make it more expensive than it has to be.

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah. Well, I can think of a personal real example from yesterday. We publish a bi-weekly newsletter, and we’re trying to think about, are there any ways we want to reach out to our community, to our constituency, to offer support resources during times of transition? And I’d written the intro to the newsletter, and one of my colleagues called me and she said, “Something doesn’t feel right about the theme and the tone of your introduction.”

 

Amy Edmondson:

Oh.

 

Nate Regier:

“But I know how hard you worked on it, and I just want to say something, but I don’t want you to be mad, because you’ve worked so hard on it.” And in that moment, what I realized is, now is the time for psychological safety, because she’s coming forward with something in her gut that could be supremely helpful for us. So, how I respond now really makes a difference on whether I’ll hear from her again.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Right. Exactly.

 

Nate Regier:

And her input turned out to be very important, and so, ah.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Oh, wow. It’s free, right? I mean, it should be free. People should not think of voice as costly, because failures are costly. Preventable failures are costly, and so you always want to create the conditions where people will err on the side of, I’m not quite sure, but I’d like to raise this. And you don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to turn over the reins. You just have to say, “Thanks for sharing that, and I’m going to ponder it for a moment,” and, “Well, here’s what I’m thinking. What do you think of that?” It’s engaging in what I call high-quality conversations as often as possible, and that’s particularly important in times of uncertainty.

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah. Well, and the standards keep going up. The competition keeps getting higher. And one of the quotes from your book, you said, “Insisting on high standards without psychological safety is a recipe for failure.” And for us, this is an example of what I call Compassionate Accountability. You’ve just described why this is so important, but inherent in that is conflict. So, when my colleague calls me and says, “I’m experiencing a gap between what I think is the right thing to do and what I’m seeing in your writing,” there’s conflict. How does conflict … Well, you talk about where conflict fits in in all this.

 

Amy Edmondson:

I mean, conflict is one word for it that’s accurate. It’s also, it’s uncomfortable. It’s not fun to call someone up and say, or in a meeting room to say, “I think you’ve done this wrong,” or, “I think there’s a gap between what you’re saying and what you’re doing.” I mean, that will never be fun for us fallible human beings, but because we are passionate enough about our mission, or what’s at stake, or our collective desire to do the best we possibly can under the circumstances, we’re willing to do those uncomfortable things. We’re willing to engage in conflict.

I mean, most of us, or at least to varying degrees, are a little bit conflict adverse. Fundamentally, we’d rather not have conflict than have it. However, that’s not a recipe for excellence. A recipe for excellence is, we’re going to have conflicts and we need to process them as effectively as possible. And to me, this is a matter of there are interpersonal skills that can help us do that well, and they’re very important for innovation, they’re very important for just pure execution as well.

 

Nate Regier:

Well, I didn’t plan to do this, but since you brought up this topic that conflict can actually be a catalyst if we do it well, use it well, I want to give a shout-out to … We’re going to be publishing a survey on understanding the relationship between trust and conflict. And our feeling is that conflict, most people are adverse to it, but one of the things about conflict is, when you do it well, you actually build trust. It’s pretty amazing to be able to count on your neighbor to do healthy conflict with you.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Right.

 

Nate Regier:

Anyway, shout out for that, but that’s not about today. So mindset, I want to talk about mindset. You reference quite a bit mindset. Specifically, you talk about Carol Dweck’s work with growth versus fixed. Amazing stuff. We’ve identified what we call The Compassion Mindset®, and I want to run it by you to see how it fits with your understanding of failure.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Great.

 

Nate Regier:

The Compassion Mindset views people as capable, or valuable, capable, and responsible, and the three are all important. So, I see a lot of parallels in what you’re talking about. Treating people as valuable means we assume positive intentions and we foster a safe place to bring your full self. Treating people as capable means we invite exploration and curiosity and problem-solving instead of thinking, “Oh, we have it all figured out,” and we accept failure as part of the process of learning. But the responsibility part means we have to take ownership over our part, and you talk about that, is that most importantly, we ask ourselves, “What can we do next to learn to prevent it from happening again to increase the quality and the outcomes?” So it seems that a mindset of seeing ourselves and others as valuable, capable, and responsible could be pretty important for failing well. What’s your perspective on that?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more, and I love that definition and construction of a compassion mindset. The mindset shift that I’ve spent the most time thinking about is the shift from knowing to learning, which is tightly related to Carol Dweck’s work on fixed versus sort of growth mindset. But it’s very specifically recognizing that, and I think this encompasses or at least includes, makes room for, the compassion mindset that you’re describing, because my aim is to remind us that we have a spontaneous reaction of knowing. And even in this moment, I see you, I’m with you recording a podcast, I have this general sense that I know, that I know what’s going on. I know what question you just asked and what you intended from it. It’s like it’s automatic.

I’ve got to keep pushing myself to shift from the knowing to the learning, which is, “Huh, what am I missing? What did he really want or mean? Or what’s really happening here so that I can learn and grow and I can contribute as well as I can, so I can be more valuable, I can be more responsive to the actual needs of the situation, rather than to what my biases and past and expertise tell me.” The button that you just pushed that I say, “Okay, I’ll give you that answer,” it’s like, no. Can I actually be present and genuinely learn? Can we learn together? And the argument is, and this is in chapter five of the book, that we have this default knowing, but we can shift to learning, and it’s very powerful, and it’s powerful both for preventing unwanted failures and for producing smart experiments.

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah, I love that. And near the end of the book, you kind of say, “Well, what does it really come down to for me?” And you shared that, that learning versus knowing. I love that. I think Stephen Covey said, “Be a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all,” and I love that, so-

 

Amy Edmondson:

Yes, yes. It came from Satya Nadella, I think, or maybe the other way around. But he, when he was the new CEO, a little over a decade ago, at Microsoft, said he wanted to change the culture from a culture of know-it-alls, very smart people doing amazing stuff, but to a culture of learn-it-alls [inaudible].

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah, I love that. It really is about curiosity, and how do we cultivate that? How do we maintain that in that space of failure? One of the messages that I think is a really bit of a mindset shift for a lot of readers could be that, and you repeat this throughout the book, is that our goal should not necessarily be to eliminate failure errors, but to foster better reporting. And in your research on psychological safety, one of the things you found is that high-performing teams don’t necessarily make fewer errors, but they report them at a higher rate. Will you unpack that a little bit about why this is so profound?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Sure. Well, we’re so used to, in part because we’re knowers, right, to assuming that when you see the data or you see the report, so here’s a team reporting mistakes and here’s a team not reporting mistakes, what does your brain do? It immediately says, “Well, the team reporting mistakes is a poor performer. They have all these mistakes. The other team, no mistakes. Oh, they must be really good,” when in fact we don’t know for sure, but it could be exactly the opposite. It could be that the ones who are reporting are wise enough to know that yes, we work in a complex error-prone system. Things will go wrong. The quicker we report, the quicker we catch and the safer our patients or customers or whoever are. Or, it could be that this team that we’re not hearing anything from are in fact perfect.

Now, my money is on the former explanation, right, because I just haven’t met that many perfect people or perfect teams. And so I get, especially in … There are some settings that are very routine. When I empty the dishwasher later today, I don’t expect to have lots of errors. I don’t expect a lot of things to go wrong. It’s a pretty straightforward activity, but a lot of the work we do together in our organizations is anything but straightforward. So, I would like to train people to be wary of the no-news-is-good-news mentality, to be wary of attributing excellence to the group that’s reporting no mistakes. And saying, “Okay, let’s just at least keep our curiosity open to the possibility that when we’re not hearing the red, that doesn’t mean the red doesn’t exist.”

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah, and your book has so many amazing stories and examples of companies that have done it well, not done it well, leaders who have learned and implemented changes. And so, I think for listeners, if you’re a leader and you’re curious about this, the book offers some really great insights and strategies to make that more part of your culture. If you’re just someone that wants to understand failure better, it’s also an incredible book to be able to do that.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Thank you.

 

Nate Regier:

And I like how the book goes from understanding failure, then you start talking about the science, and then you go into strategies, structures, systems, because I know you’ve worked with a lot of companies at that kind of high-level consulting as well. I want to circle back. You high-level describe the three kinds of failure. Let’s go back to intelligent failure. Will you give us a brief criteria? What makes a failure intelligent?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Yes, because it’s so funny, because in a way, I had to, to write this book and to write other things, I had to, which criteria are really necessary, and which are just redundant or derivative from the others? And so, here’s where I arrived. And then I realized that the criteria which I’m about to describe are in fact also a playbook. They’re a way that you can judge a failure after the fact. Was it intelligent or not? But they’re also a playbook for how you can go have more smart experiments in your life or in your job.

Here they are. Number one, it’s in new territory. It means you can’t just look up the formula for how to get the result you want on the internet or ask an expert. It just doesn’t exist yet. And number two, it’s in pursuit of a goal. You’re not just messing around with resources for the fun of it, but there’s a valued goal that you’re trying to reach or advance toward.

Number three, you’ve done your homework, so it’s not a matter of just throwing darts at the wall. It’s about, even though it’s new territory, you’ve done what you need to do to find out, what do we know? What do we not know? And I don’t want to make that sound like that’s extensive and months and months of work. No. I mean, just quickly pause to think. In fact, a better way to put that is, you have a legitimate hypothesis. You have good reason to believe that this thing you’re about to do that’s in new territory might work.

And then number four, so important, no bigger than necessary.

 

Nate Regier:

Ah.

 

Amy Edmondson:

We want to keep our intelligent failures as small as possible, just big enough to give us the new information, but not so big that we’ve wasted time, money that are always scarce in their pursuit.

 

Nate Regier:

Ah, thank you. Great, great criteria. This invites me to consider, when I hear leaders say, “Failure is not an option,” and I wonder, it’s like, “Okay, so what kind of failures have you been having if that’s what you say?” Because there are failures that are not an option, like a plane crash, but there are failures that are actually an option that we wouldn’t mind having if it’s intelligent.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Right, right. I mean, that line, “Failure is not an option,” is famously attributed to Gene Kranz, who I absolutely admire, great leader at NASA during the Apollo era, and he famously said, “Failure is not an option.” I think that often gets misinterpreted to mean, we’re going to have no failures around here, and that’s what good leadership looks like. No. I mean, what he was saying is, “We all know what’s at stake,” right? “There are some lives hanging in the balance here. And given our engineering talent, our ability to team up and solve new problems that we’ve never solved before, I am convinced we can do it.” And the thing that’s not an option is not trying, not giving it your all, not caring enough to give it your all. Not caring enough to say, “Here’s a crazy idea, maybe it won’t …” So I think it was, in context, a message of great confidence in the team, not a message of, you better not fail, and that we have to be thoughtful about that.

 

Nate Regier:

Well, that makes a lot of sense in the context too, because a country is hanging on every word. This is a big deal. The spouses of the astronauts want to know that failure is not an option. I don’t want that to be an option for you. Yeah.

 

Amy Edmondson:

But it’s not meant to be magical thinking. In order to prevent that failure, we really have to work as hard as we can right now. And let’s be clear, it was in new territory. Nothing like this had ever happened before, so it was now, okay, what do we got? What do we try? What can we do to get them home safely? New goal and valuable goal.

 

Nate Regier:

I want to shift gears to the vulnerability that is inherent in this whole process, and it’s part of failure, it’s part of coming forward, it’s part of speaking up, and I want to set the stage with a quote from Brené Brown that you share in the book. In section two, you talk about practicing the science of failing well, and I want to just read this quote and then give you a chance to just share whatever’s on your mind.

She said, “I believe that’s what compassion really is, struggling with others through failure. We often misunderstand compassion and empathy.” Well, actually what I’m sharing is a response to the quote. You talk about how important … She talks about how important vulnerability is, and I think in my view, that’s what compassion is. It’s not vulnerability in terms of weakness, it’s vulnerability in terms of struggling with others. It’s not just empathy in action like, “Oh, I see your pain. I feel your pain. I want to go fix it for you.” It’s not that. It’s about-

 

Amy Edmondson:

It’s with.

 

Nate Regier:

It’s with. That’s disempowering, but ultimately, it’s about getting alongside people to gather, to learn from failure. Will you talk a little bit about vulnerability in this context?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Yeah. I think for me, the biggest issue with vulnerability is the willingness to acknowledge that you’re vulnerable. The fact is, you’re vulnerable. I mean, we’re all vulnerable to the vagaries of the future that are coming at us that we can’t fully control, so we are vulnerable. The question becomes, are you willing to acknowledge it to yourself and then to others? And I find that a really powerful thing to do, because when you acknowledge it, especially to others, you open the doors for people to have more honest conversations. It doesn’t feel good to be vulnerable, but guess what? We are. But it does feel good to connect with others on our vulnerability, and it’s empowering, because we can then find better ways. With your support, I can find a way out of a situation that I’m in that I can’t seem to get out of by myself, and I need your help, but I won’t get your help unless I’m willing to acknowledge and ask for it.

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah, and then it can be a self-reinforcing cycle. If I respond by fostering psychological safety, it makes it less scary, and so we can continue to increase that. We’ve worked with thousands of leaders in situations where they’re failing all the time, failing while we’re learning new things, not successful in a simulation. We do a lot around personality, and one of the things I noticed throughout your book is, I sense that personality might play a role in how people approach failure and respond to failure. What’s your view? Do you have any research on that?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Well, honestly, I have to agree with you, and I don’t have a lot of research on it. I have a little bit. And I shy away from personality explanations, because I might be wrong about this, but they indicate to me that, oh, well, if I wasn’t born with that personality, I’m out of luck here, which is of course not what you’re saying and not true. So I like to frame these issues, these phenomena, as skills rather than personality. In the same way that an extrovert is more geared to interact with others, it doesn’t mean an introvert doesn’t know how or can’t be extraordinarily good at it. So, I want to lean into the skill aspect of thoughtful experiments, high-quality conversations, willingness to try new things or to team up, right?

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah. Well, where I find it empowering is that, based on my personality, I might have some natural proclivities, some natural inclinations, but being aware that, hey, that might be my default, it’s like, okay, I’m aware of it.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Sure.

 

Nate Regier:

Now I can work on skills to be able to be more effective anyways.

 

Amy Edmondson:

That’s well put. Yeah, that’s really great, because in fact, the good part about personality for me is that I think it’s just inherently fascinating. I think we’re all drawn toward and appreciate the typologies when they shed some light. You learn that you’re this Briggs Myers or that Briggs, and you sort of go, “Yeah, right, that’s me.”

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Then you say, “Okay, well, what does that set me up for?” It sets me up for some risks over here and some advantages over there, and then I can focus on developing skills to close the risks.

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to know, again, the Right Kind of Wrong, it’s all about learning the science and practice of failing well, and this book is just packed with so many things. I want listeners to know that your book’s not just about some interpersonal dynamics around failure, but it’s packed with stories. And these stories by themselves are so empowering, but then you pull out the strategies and the applications, and even down to, how do we design systems that support intelligent failure?

I love some of your tables. You have some really cool visuals, and some of them were kind of thick, like dense, I’ll have to admit. But some of them it’s just like, oh, my gosh, yes. Do you have a favorite framework or visual from your book that you’re just like, “Okay, that one just hits it”?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Oh. Well, let me give you two. One is page 64, the table goes through the criteria, and to me, as I said, it’s analytical, but it’s also useful. And I think it’s an aha for most people, and an intelligent failure that could be the next project you’re leading at work, but that could also be dating. I mean, trying to find a life partner and it’s like, yeah, you have to expect some sort of bumps in the road, so it’s like it’s a way to think about things in life as well as things at work, so I like that one a lot.

And I suppose because this is our focus on accountability, which is just a concept I love as a sense of real psychological ownership, I also love the … There’s an early graphic where the vertical dimension is psychological safety, and the horizontal dimension is essentially accountability, that sense of ownership, and failing well, meaning innovating, learning, growing, teaming with others, is in that upper right-hand quadrant. That’s where the magic happens.

 

Nate Regier:

Ah. Yes. I can resonate with the joy of coming up with a really good visual. It’s so satisfying, because you can convey so much in a short … Also, there’s lots of stories, and I don’t want to put you on the spot, but I’m going to. Do you have a favorite story of failure from your book?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Thank you for saying. I mean, I think there are a lot of good stories in there, and we’re wired for story as humans, so stories are a great way to make intellectual content memorable and useful, so thank you for that. I guess my favorite, I mean, some of the stories are longer and shorter, and so I have different favorites. But sometimes, I really like a story that makes a concept really simple and straightforward, so I’m going to break the rules and give you two.

One is my own story of intelligent failure early in the PhD program, which is what we already talked about with the error rates, where I was absolutely hell-bent on showing that better teams had lower errors, and the data failed to show me that, right? In fact, they seemed to be suggesting the opposite. So that failure, that research failure, and it really was, led me to something so much more interesting ultimately, which was psychological safety. So, that’s classic research context made a failure, and I think I describe that whole journey, the motions of it, and in a sense, this happy ending. All good intelligent failures should have some kind of happy ending eventually. Not right away, but eventually.

The other one, just because it’s so darn simple, is that Citibank in 2021, an employee essentially checking the wrong box and accidentally wiring $900 million to a group of lenders. That is a basic failure, right? It’s kind of single human error in familiar territory leading to a very expensive failure.

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. There’s also some great stories that you pick up over and over throughout the book, and they continue to illustrate the point, so those are wonderful.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Right. Right, right, right.

 

Nate Regier:

So-

 

Amy Edmondson:

Oh, oh, oh, and I just have to give a little tiny shout-out to Madame Clicquot, right? Isabelle Ponsardin Clicquot, who is the founder of the Veuve Clicquot Champagne, this very successful business and brand.

 

Nate Regier:

Oh, yes.

 

Amy Edmondson:

And her story, late 1700s, early 1800s, is just littered with failures, some of them so painful and devastating, and she perseveres and becomes this remarkable entrepreneur who more than just has a successful business. She creates an industry.

 

Nate Regier:

If there’s not a movie about that, that would be an incredible movie.

 

Amy Edmondson:

You know what? There is a movie that just came out last year, but it’s not very … I shouldn’t say this. You can decide whether to include this or not, but it’s not very good. It’s got lots and lots of stuff thrown into it that wasn’t part of her real journey, but it’s, whatever. It’s still fun.

 

Nate Regier:

Well, if you don’t like the movie-

 

Amy Edmondson:

I think a better movie … There could be a better movie.

 

Nate Regier:

If people don’t like that movie, they can read your script, which is in the book.

 

Amy Edmondson:

There you go.

 

Nate Regier:

Okay. Before we wrap this up, I want to connect your book to some current things going on, and just see where your brain’s at. Failure and AI.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Oh.

 

Nate Regier:

What are your thoughts?

 

Amy Edmondson:

My thoughts are that AI is ripe for complex failures, and complex failures happen when a handful of interconnected or interrelated elements combine in an unexpected way. And I am surprised by how little conversation we have about the potential for unexpected, undesired complex failures with AI. I’m not saying don’t do it, button it back up, put it back in the box, right?

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah.

 

Amy Edmondson:

But I’m saying we had better be extraordinarily thoughtful about this potential for breakdowns.

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah, and when you read the book and understand what complex failures are, it’ll make a lot of sense what you’re saying, because AI is being entrusted with a lot of variables all at the same time that can conspire-

 

Amy Edmondson:

Yup, that’s a good point. It’s as if it’s like familiar territory. It’s not.

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah. Yeah. And if we’re lured into thinking it is, and we’re looking at it through the wrong lens … Okay. Shifting gears. You talked briefly about inequity in permission to fail, and will you say a little bit about kind of the context of inclusion and what’s going on in our culture right now?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Yeah. This is what I think the section title in the book is, The Unequal License to Fail. The problem is, let’s put it this way, if you are a member of an underrepresented group in some environment, let’s say senior executives, that’s a group where more senior executives around the world, or at least in … let’s just stick to the US, are going to be white men than any other category. So, let’s say you’re promoted to a senior executive role and there really hasn’t been anyone else who looks like you.

And now, let’s say you fail in some material way in that role, people’s brains, like it or not, even good people, will instantly go to, “Oh, that’s what happens when you put such and such category into that role.” It’s not true. I mean, it’s very unlikely to be true, but no one would ever say … Here’s the sort of the thought experiment. No one would ever say, when there’s a significant failure by some executive, “Well, we never should have put a white man in that role,” right?

 

Nate Regier:

Right.

 

Amy Edmondson:

They’d be like, “Oh, really?” No, that’s just silly, right?

 

Nate Regier:

Yeah, yeah.

 

Amy Edmondson:

So it’s, in other words, people are likely to attribute the failure to your group membership rather than to consequences or situations outside your control or any number of other things. Therefore, there’s an unequal license to fail, because you are at greater risk if you’re underrepresented of having the failure attributed to your group. And that makes you very risk-averse because people are conscious of owning that burden, and so they don’t want to put others in the community at risk, and so they will be more cautious.

 

Nate Regier:

Have you seen the movie, I think it’s, Six Triple Eight, about the first Black women infantry?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Yes. Yes.

 

Nate Regier:

What a great example of unequal license to fail.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Oh, it was so frustrating.

 

Nate Regier:

And oh, such a great movie though, about-

 

Amy Edmondson:

It’s a great story. I mean, I would love … Actually, I saw it not that long ago and it made me want to read up, I haven’t done it yet, but it made me want to read up on the … because it’s based on a true story, and it just seems like they solved a remarkably hard problem. Talk about complex failure. The whole mail system was a complex failure, and they solved it, even though they were just treated badly at every turn.

 

Nate Regier:

Oh, everything from the perfume to the way they figured out how to track these soldiers, it was amazing.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Yeah, it was really … Yes, yeah.

 

Nate Regier:

Okay, so this may be a really touchy topic. Have you been asked, or have you thought about, how we respond to the plane crash in D.C.?

 

Amy Edmondson:

The very first thing I’ll say is, we let the investigators do their job. They’re extraordinarily good at it. That would be almost necessarily example of a complex failure. We could be proven wrong. Like tomorrow, or six months, we could be proven wrong and someone could say, “Oh,” make it basic failure by saying, “The pilot was drunk.” I am extremely sure that will not be the case. What will happen is, this will be shown to be a complex failure, but a complex failure that the chances of which were increased by profoundly low staffing, right?

 

Nate Regier:

Right.

 

Amy Edmondson:

One air traffic controller doing both the helicopters and the commercial flights, that’s just not right. Certainly a causal factor. It’s probably not the only causal factor, because no other planes crashed that night, and that person was … So, we know it needed other things to happen. We have heard that the helicopter was higher than it’s supposed to be. We don’t know why. So, I will predict we’ll end up with a kind of short-to-medium-sized list of factors that were deviations from appropriate or best practice that conspired to create this tragic failure.

 

Nate Regier:

Wow. Mm. Hard stuff. Thank you for just sharing your thoughts on that. And Amy, here we could go in so many different directions. Your candor, your wealth of information, and just your journey is such a great example of learning from failure. I want to close with sharing a principle that I learned from one of my colleagues, Jamie Remsberg. She’s a master facilitator on adventure courses, ropes courses, and you create these experiences where people are going to fail.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Exactly.

 

Nate Regier:

And how do you set it up for maximum outcomes? And we also do a lot of work around self-efficacy, and how do you raise self-efficacy for failure? She said, “Coping role models are way more powerful than mastery role models.”

 

Amy Edmondson:

Ah.

 

Nate Regier:

Coping role models are living examples of intelligent failure, whereas mastery role models always do it perfect. And when we watch them, we don’t learn anything about how to fail well. So Amy, thank you for being a wonderful role model of coping, of a coping role model for the rest of us and for writing about it and sharing all that you’ve learned.

 

Amy Edmondson:

That’s really incredible. Sure.

 

Nate Regier:

Is there any last thing you’d like to share about what’s coming up for you as you share about this book, as you talk about it, as you are out there, hearing people respond to this message?

 

Amy Edmondson:

No. I just want to say, what a pleasure it has been to talk with you about it. I feel heard, and I’m hearing from you, and I love Jamie’s insight. That’s a very powerful one, and I will take it to heart, because I think it’s really important for people, especially in leadership positions, to know that they are even more impactful, and their model is even more important and influential, when they’re struggling and coping and problem-solving aloud than when they’re nailing it, crushing it.

 

Nate Regier:

Well, if compassion means to struggle with others, how can people struggle with us if they don’t know what we’re struggling with?

 

Amy Edmondson:

Right.

 

Nate Regier:

And wonderful. Thank you again so much.

 

Amy Edmondson:

Thank you.

 

Nate Regier:

Appreciate you, appreciate the work you’re doing, and thanks for making time today.

 

Amy Edmondson:

My pleasure.

 

Nate Regier:

Thanks for joining me, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Compassionate Accountability Podcast. What struck you, what can you take and use today? I’d love to hear from you. And if you haven’t already, pick up a copy of my new book, Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results. If you’ve already read the book, I’d appreciate your review on Amazon. Contact us today to learn more about how Next Element helps companies transform their cultures with Compassionate Accountability. And remember, embracing both compassion and accountability is the secret to great leadership, and the roadmap for thriving cultures and strong brands.

 

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