Transcript: Author Amy Edmondson on ‘intelligent failure’

This is an audio transcript of the Behind the Money podcast episode: ‘Author Amy Edmondson on ‘intelligent failure’’

Michela Tindera
Earlier this month, the Financial Times and Schroders gave out their annual prize for the best Business Book of the Year. There are some fascinating books on this year’s shortlist. They ran the gamut from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk to an investigation into human rights abuses in cobalt mining. But the one that came out on top is a book called Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson. Amy is a Harvard Business School professor who’s known as the world’s most influential organisational psychologist, which basically means that she spends a lot of time thinking about how you and I behave at work. In her book, Amy chooses to focus on one big topic: failure. She looks at how to learn from failure, how to take more calculated risks, and why she’s tired of one of Silicon Valley’s favourite mantras: Fail fast. Fail often. My colleague Andrew Hill, who’s the FT’s senior business writer and has been in charge of running the book awards since 2005, sat down with Amy a few weeks ago inside our London studio. What you’re about to hear is an abridged version of that conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

Andrew Hill
So, Amy, thank you for joining us in the studio today.

Amy Edmondson
Thank you for having me.

Andrew Hill
And congratulations on winning the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year award, a success for a book about failure.

Amy Edmondson
Thank you so much. I’m thrilled.

Andrew Hill
So just to talk us through a little bit the themes of the book, it presents a very useful taxonomy, if you like, of failure and failures, which, as you point out, aren’t all the same.

Amy Edmondson
Yes. I think the first job of the book is to clarify the different types of failures so that we can be clear-headed about the ones that we should truly celebrate and try to have more of and the ones we should work hard to prevent. So the three types of failure that I identify are basic failures, which are single-cause failures, usually due to human error; complex failures, which are the multi-cause failures, where many factors line up in just the wrong way to produce a failure, where any one of the factors on its own would not have led to the bad outcome. Neither of those are celebratory. Neither of those are good news. They are both theoretically and often practically preventable. The third kind of failure, the right kind of wrong, is intelligent failure. And those are the thoughtful forays into new territory that nonetheless didn’t work out as we had hoped. So intelligent failures are the ones where they are in pursuit of a goal. They’re in new territory. There’s literally no way to look up the answer on the internet, and they’re driven by a hypothesis. You’ve done your homework. You have good reason to believe what you’re about to try. The risk you’re about to take might work. And they’re as small as possible. They’re no bigger than they have to be to get the knowledge that you need. So another way to say that is that intelligence failures are the results, the undesired results of smart experiments.

Andrew Hill
And so this is science, essentially.

Amy Edmondson
It is. In fact, scientists do intelligent failure for a living. They know that’s what they’ve signed up for. They know that more of their experiments, if they’re on the leading edge of their field, will fail than succeed. And yet they get up in the morning and go to work anyway. Why? Well, you could say because of the small per cent that succeed are so exciting. And I think you can also say, because they understand that as pioneers in new territory, seeking to discover new things, there’s no way around the reality of failure some portion of the time.

Andrew Hill
So roll us back a little through your career because you start the book very much with a personal failure, which turned out to be the ignition key for the entire body of research that you’ve produced since including everything on psychological safety for which you’re well known.

Amy Edmondson
So I do. I open the book with this personal research failure, which at the time, or at least in the moment of this failure, was devastating. Scary. I thought maybe I’d have to drop out of my Ph.D. program. So I was a second year Ph.D. student working on a study of medical errors in two nearby hospitals. And my hypothesis was that better teams, according to an old and validated survey instrument, would have fewer medical errors and adverse drug events than the less good teams. Seemed like a pretty reasonable hypothesis. And when I got the data, at first I was very happy because I saw a significant p value, a significant correlation in the data. So I thought, yes. And then I looked more closely and I realised that the correlation was in the wrong direction. So I had failed. My hypothesis had failed utterly, 180 degrees off from what I had predicted would happen. And so then came the moments, even hours of despair, almost despair, until I did what you must do in these situations, which is to sit down and think, what could this mean? This is not an accident. These data are trying to tell me something. And it occurred to me, perhaps a blinding flash of the obvious. It occurred to me that maybe the better teams aren’t making more mistakes. Maybe they’re more able and willing to report the mistakes that do happen. When these trained medical investigators are coming by, they’re just more open.

Now, that was my new idea. I couldn’t just declare that to be true. I had to do a fair amount of follow-on work to sort of suggest that really was a plausible hypothesis. But that insight became the seeds for my later work on psychological safety, where I went out and tested on purpose. Does the interpersonal climate in the workplace differ in terms of people’s willingness to speak up candidly about what’s really going on? And if so, does it predict outcomes of interest like learning behaviours and performance, especially at the team level? And I was able to show in a variety of industries, not just healthcare, that that was the case. And that work became very successful academically and ultimately, practically.

Andrew Hill
It feels as though — obviously psychological safety is important to the whole question of being able to address intelligent failure without blame and so on — but it feels as though this book is driven also by a, how do I put it, a sort of irritation with what you call the failure craze, because clearly we’re often being urged by entrepreneurs and innovators to embrace failure and celebrate failure. And what is it that irritates you, if it does irritate you, about that?

Amy Edmondson
What irritates me is that it’s almost necessarily a mixed message because people know no, failure is not good. Everything in our culture says success is good, failure is bad. So when people are glibly saying fail fast, fail, often, failure parties, celebrate failure, what that does is make people think, OK, we’re not really being truthful with each other. And it’s sloppy. It’s sort of acting as if that’s good advice across the board when in fact, that’s good advice for entrepreneurs. Again, assuming they’re thinking through what they’re trying as carefully as possible. For scientists, for inventors. It’s not good advice for air traffic controllers. It’s not good advice for surgeons. And it’s not good advice for anyone who hasn’t thought carefully about the meaning of context and how different contexts call for different behaviours, especially with respect to risk-taking.

Andrew Hill
Right. Talk us through an example of that, because this is the other part of, if you like, the Matrix, these three types of failure, but you’ve also got these three contexts.

Amy Edmondson
Yes, yes, the three contexts that I just think are archetypes of work environments are consistent where you can have a very high degree of confidence in what will happen next. Right? And just as in extreme cases, the automotive assembly line or any machine based assembly line, you can stand there with a stopwatch and every 57 seconds you will see a vehicle come off the end unless something unusual happens, which occasionally happens, but not often. So that’s a consistent context. Fewer and fewer of our work environments are in the consistent context in the knowledge or digital world that we live in. In the middle are variable contexts, and those are the context where we have a high level of knowledge about how to achieve the results we want, whether it’s in the operating suite or in, you know, aviation or in a newspaper.

And there’s a lot of variability. You know, that you don’t have a perfect line of sight on what the future will bring. We don’t know who’s going to walk into our busy emergency department today, but we know that people will walk in. And so there’s a high maturity of knowledge and professional capabilities and an awareness of or there needs to be an awareness of uncertainty and unexpected events. And then if we keep going in the spectrum, I get to novel contexts where we don’t yet have the knowledge we need to get the results we want. So scientific laboratories, R&D departments.

Andrew Hill
So the question of one example that occurred to me is you talk a lot about heart surgery. Obviously in its developing stage, this was a novel. now it’s probably more of a consistent.

Amy Edmondson
Now it’s variable. I don’t think it’s ever going to be consistent. I talked to the surgeons. They’ll say, yup, you know, I can do this and I can do this very reliably and very well. But I am paying close attention to differences.

Andrew Hill
Right, right. And one thing that occurred to me, I suppose, is, you know, obviously lots of successful people don’t mind talking about the failures and what they’ve learned from them. And you quote a lot of them in the book, but ultimately they are success stories and that’s one of your points. But I wonder to what degree you’re troubled by the people who failed and disappeared. And in fact one of the other books on our Book award shortlist, Bent Flybjerg’s book, How Big Things Get Done, is about huge megaprojects that go wrong, and we can talk later about how, why failure is in vogue at the moment. But he has this example of the Sydney Opera House architect whose project was a disaster not entirely through his own fault, and then disappeared from sight. And we no longer have, Bent used to have a trick of asking audiences who was the architect of the Sydney Opera House. And very few people knew because this Danish architect had disappeared from sight. I just wonder whether there’s a missing piece here of people who failed and then were no longer available.

Amy Edmondson
Well, it’s true, and I think there is a missing piece. And I mean, I think I need to back up and say, you know, ultimately this is a book about success. And it’s about the role of failure in success, which doesn’t mean that failure is a guarantee of success, as you’re pointing out with this example. So I think my hope is that we can have honest conversations about it, and the aspiration is to help people have smarter failures so that the beeline towards successes is clearer to them and to others. And there will always be counterexamples and there will always be people whose failures were so crippling that they could never move beyond them. But I think we’ll find very few extraordinarily successful people who didn’t have the failures along the way.

Andrew Hill
Right. You talk very interestingly in the book about the unequal license to fail, the fact that some people, women in business, ethnic minorities aren’t as free to fail as those who have traditionally held the privileged positions of power. Talk to us a little more about that.

Amy Edmondson
I mean, it’s the only thing I have to apologise for is that that doesn’t come in until chapter eight. So I, you know, I probably could have gotten a . . . 

Andrew Hill
A whole other book.

Amy Edmondson
A whole other book indeed with a lot of evidence to support it. Now the last chapter is called Thriving as a Fallible Human Being. And in a sense, that’s my overarching thesis, that we are fallible and that’s OK. Think we can we can thrive anyway. And it’s important to be clear-eyed about that reality today. So the aspiration, my aspiration would be that we all have equal license to fail in the future that a person who is failing, who is in an under-represented group in some organisational context does not feel that I can’t take the kinds of risks that those in the majority group can take, because when it doesn’t work out, it will then reflect badly on other people like me.

Andrew Hill
Right. We don’t seem close to that, really.

Amy Edmondson
Now we don’t. We certainly don’t.

Andrew Hill
And I mean, does that advance, does that equality of license to fail advance alongside equality of representation, do you think?

Amy Edmondson
Yes. I mean, almost by definition. Because what the phenomenon I’m alluding to is about underrepresentation. So then you’re more likely to be seen as a member of that group than just as an individual.

Andrew Hill
Yes. When we stopped talking about the glass cliff, for example, we’ll have reached a point of, and as some people have pointed out, if more people who are currently not represented are seen to be mediocre, that might be a sign of equality as well.

Amy Edmondson
That’s right.

Andrew Hill
You know, I wanted to talk a bit about what’s happened since the book came out. We talked just after the awards ceremony about the absence of Elon Musk in the book, who clearly is a sort of, as one of the other books on the on the short list, Walter Isaacson’s biography points out, you know, he is somebody who is part of this fail fast, fail better culture, and he’s not in the book. I mean, is that just a question of timing.

Amy Edmondson
I think it’s mostly a question of timing. The manuscript was turned in quite a while ago at this point, and he was, it was before he took over Twitter. It was before he was in the news every single day. If I were to talk about Musk now, I would say he has a sort of an inconsistent record, I think, in terms of failing well. I mean, he has clearly done some extraordinary things in the space exploration that would qualify as failing well. New territory, worthy tries. And I think he’s been rather cavalier with Twitter and there almost seems to be an almost a deliberate destruction of value in that domain. And then, as you have alluded to in the past, some of his sort of personal life failures and successes also seem to be a mixed bag.

Andrew Hill
He is, I think, quoted in the book, or maybe it was after one of the failures of in the Isaacson book about him preferring success. I mean, this is obviously a human thing.

Amy Edmondson
Who doesn’t, right? We all prefer success. Let’s just be real about that. And if you want great success, especially as a pioneer in any field, you’re going to have to tolerate some failures along the way. Isaacson quotes Musk as saying he’s really anti-psychological safety because people shouldn’t feel comfortable at work. From that, I come to the conclusion that neither Isaacson nor Musk have actually read the work on psychological safety. Because psychological safety is in fact explicitly about being OK being uncomfortable, doing things that are uncomfortable in service of the goals of the patient, you know, of the innovation project, being able to disagree with the boss, being able to talk about failures and mistakes, to ask for help when you’re in over your head. All of those are uncomfortable behaviours. And so, I mean, I don’t mind my work being talked about by Musk, but I just wish that he would actually read it.

Andrew Hill
Yes, you and I have talked before about what’s happened in the last few years, which is that safety has become conflated with sort of safe space, don’t intrude on my comfort and safety and that’s the antithesis.

Amy Edmondson
It’s the antithesis. Yeah, it’s become in some people’s minds equivalent of I should get all my needs met while I’m at work. And it really doesn’t matter what impact that has on the work or my colleagues, etc.

Andrew Hill
Yes, I mean, another high profile business person who is quoted in your book is Ray Dalio, and he’s cropped up in other psychologist’s books. Adam Grant has done a lot of work with Ray Dalio in his books. Again, you couldn’t have predicted this, but another big book that has just come out about Ray Dalio alleges that the whole radical candour thing is a bit of a veil over a quite dysfunctional organisation. I wonder if for the second edition you might revisit Ray Dalio.

Amy Edmondson
Probably. You know what I say to this new book and information is it’s a shame. I’m an academic, clearly, but I think the theory, you know, the possibility of a truly candid, vast, open, honest conversation in the work environment is critically important and it’s an aspiration that very few reach. So when you hear about an organisation trying to put this into practice in an earnest way, it’s always thrilling. And watch out, because tomorrow, the mighty fall. Certainly many of my colleagues were waxing poetic about Enron over a decade ago, and they didn’t see that coming. So it’s always risky to be in the business of putting any organisation on a pedestal for good practice, because you can be sure there’s going to be headlines down the road at some point, I mean, you can hope not, but . . . 

Andrew Hill
I mean, neither of us can verify necessarily the new allegations, but it’s always occurred to me that radical candour, which is a fine aspiration, but you really don’t have to be candid. I mean, you know, if you’re not then candid about your own failures or allowing the criticism of yourself as the instigator of a policy of radical candour, then the whole thing collapses.

Amy Edmondson
And let’s be real. This is hard. We as human beings are hardwired and socialised for face-saving and for wanting to protect our image in the eyes of others. So what we’re asking people to do in an uncertain, complex world so as to improve performance, to be radically candid, is very hard for us. It takes skill, it takes genuine commitment to learning, and it’s very hard to be committed to learning because it’s so much easier to relish our knowing.

Andrew Hill
Yes. Yes. Good point.

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One thing that’s intrigued me, and I mentioned this in the review I did of your book and Andrew McAfee’s new book is that we do seem to be more interested in talking about reading about and writing about failure, which to my mind always used to be a bit of a taboo in publishing. But we don’t do failure because people don’t want to buy books about failure. And obviously you say quite rightly that your book is also really about success. But there have been quite a lot. Why are we suddenly so, is it the pandemic which you mentioned as being this immense, complex failure? Is that what’s made us more comfortable talking about this, do you think?

Amy Edmondson
Maybe so. I think it’s a combination of things. I think there’s finally, maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s just finally catching up with us that we’re becoming more aware of uncertainty. Certainly the pandemic contributed to this because if you asked yourself in December of 2019, if you had any clue what was about to happen, you would have to say no. And most of us have, because we didn’t live through, let’s say, World War 2 and other times of great disruption and suddenness, most of us would have not lived through that kind of discontinuity. So that reminds us that, no, we don’t have a crystal ball. And yes, we face uncertainty and challenge. And now that we start to talk about it, then suddenly we need something to hold on to some frameworks or ideas that can help us navigate it.

Andrew Hill
I suppose the other thing I thought about the pandemic and in the UK here we’re going through this inquiry into how the pandemic was prepared for, dealt with and so on, is that nobody can say that they really succeeded. First of all, the pandemic happened, which was, as you mentioned in the book, a part of a complex failure, probably of everything from food hygiene to kind of preparation. And through the course of the pandemic, what I noted was people were, yeah, we’ve succeeded in this first phase, and then suddenly it’s, oh, we’ve now we’re messing up in the recovery period or we’ve done the right thing here. But, so I just wonder whether there is a sort of sense of nobody got this completely right. So we need to be a bit more not necessarily forgiving, obviously people died so there needs to be inquiry but . . . 

Amy Edmondson
We do have to be forgiving though, of again, we’re fallible human beings, fallible systems, fallible governments. So we have to not have expectations that are unrealistic and we have to have honest conversations about our shortcomings or we’re doomed to repeat them. And some of the things we got wrong were preventable, utterly preventable. Could have been prevented by, you know, a single underling saying no. And others of them were just much more genuinely new territory. We didn’t know any better.

Andrew Hill
Yes. I wonder, as we’ve edging slightly into politics here whether you think what are the lessons of the book here? There are 70 elections happening in 2024, so hurray for democracy. But the human fallibility is going to play a part if you know, in all of these whoever gets elected. I just wonder what the message here is for politicians who like to bury failure, right?

Amy Edmondson
I can’t help thinking there is room for a politician or two or a hundred to get out there and start telling the truth and do it thoughtfully and inspire us to roll up our sleeves and work together to create the future that we need. And we’ve gotten so stuck in soundbites and moment-to-moment news cycles and the inability to tell the difference between a deep fake and a, you know, real fact. And you know, I mean, it’s clearly hard to figure out if it’s even possible to put the genie back in the bottle. But I believe the moment is ripe for real leadership.

Andrew Hill
Is there a place for psychological safety in an antagonistic democratic system where one party’s failure will be leapt on by the other party? Doesn’t that prejudice everyone to hide the things that go wrong?

Amy Edmondson
It does. But you see, it doesn’t work. Because your instinct is to hide because of the stakes. But then it always comes out and then it looks worse.

Andrew Hill
The cover-up.

Amy Edmondson
The cover-up is worse than the crime. And you will be more punished for the cover up than for the crime.

Andrew Hill
Are your views sought by politicians?

Amy Edmondson
No.

Andrew Hill
Never?

Amy Edmondson
Not yet.

Andrew Hill
Hmm. That’s interesting.

Amy Edmondson
Yes, it may be just that they’re not reading the same literatures as the management folks are.

Andrew Hill
Yeah. Yeah, clearly. The book is getting a lot of publicity. This will obviously hit home with CEOs. Are there things that you would say business leaders with little time might look at? Is there a chapter you’d ask them to concentrate on a part of the book that you’d say, get into this first?

Amy Edmondson
Well, I mean, it’s it may make sense to just go right to chapter two, which is Eureka. This describes intelligent failure, describes the right kind of wrong. And I would suggest as a counterpart, not a counterpart, but a supplement is then chapter five, which is we have met the enemy, and that is about the importance of self-awareness and being perpetually aware of the fact that you’re missing something, that you, you know a lot, you’ve got a lot of expertise and knowledge and you don’t see reality itself. And it describes from my integration of research by one of my most important mentors, Chris Argyris years ago, and Carol Dweck and various other people, all of which point out two sort of mindsets. There’s two fundamental human states, one of which is far more productive and effective, the other of which is far more common and natural. And in a nutshell, the more common one is the one of knowing, face-saving, of wanting to win, not lose. The more productive, useful one is the one of wanting to learn, wanting to fully understand the broader situation, other people’s views, and come to the best possible hypothesis or decision. And so I am basing that work on very deep and longstanding research traditions that we as humans can learn to sort of tame our automatic, but not very helpful thinking. We can learn to take the slow road, the high road which is the slow road and catch ourselves going into automatic, I’m right. I don’t like the fact that you’re disagreeing with me mode.

Andrew Hill
Yeah. And that’s the CEO level. What about the individual team member? Because clearly part of the psychological safety is the speak-up culture. And that does have to be created to some extent from or certainly with the involvement of the top. Is there something that if you were listening and you’re an individual team member in a culture that is still not very psychologically safe that you would advise people to do?

Amy Edmondson
I still think chapter five isn’t a bad place to be. And chapter two. I mean, I could make an argument for all the chapters, but these, as a team member, as any individual, as a parent, as a family member, increasing your curiosity on purpose is never a bad idea. Just finding little ways to remind yourself to ask the question, what am I missing? Right? Who or what else you know is out there that could actually help me achieve my goals and to stay in touch with that degree of curiosity, I think is a rare and powerful self-discipline. And then chapter two, essentially on the intelligent failure, the right kind of wrong. I think once you see the sort of the questions, you know, the question of is this new territory. If you can go find a recipe on the internet, please do it. Is this opportunity in pursuit of something I care about a goal and can I do it in a in a safe way that won’t expend unnecessary resources or create unnecessary risk? But I think people will find this very intuitive but also very helpful way to think.

Andrew Hill
Yes. Have you found yourself erring in not applying your own precepts in your own personal life? An example?

Amy Edmondson
Well, I’m hopelessly risk-averse. And, you know, I’d so much rather be right than wrong. So that just means I have lots of opportunities to remind myself to do better.

Andrew Hill
Totally. And the last thing I wanted to ask was essentially, what would your advice be to your, to the beaten finalists in the Book Award or our five other very good books, which you pipped to the prize? They can’t categorise themselves as failures, presumably.

Amy Edmondson
Certainly not. I think the obvious advice is a quick reframe from I didn’t win to I was a shortlisted business book of the year for the FT. I mean, certainly that’s how I was planning to manage it. And there there is some research that says that bronze medallists are happier than silver medallists because the silver medallists can’t help themselves from framing the medal as a not gold, whereas the bronze medallist more spontaneously frame this as I medalled. And I think the other five books should be saying I medalled.

Andrew Hill
Nice. Amy Edmonson, thank you very much for joining me.

Amy Edmondson
Pleasure.

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Michela Tindera
Thanks for listening to this week’s show. If you’d like to hear more from Amy Edmondson or from the other authors who medalled in this year’s Book Awards competition, I’m including a link to another Financial Times podcast called Working it in our show notes. They have an episode featuring short interviews with some of the finalists. Behind the Money is hosted by me, Michela Tindera. Saffeya Ahmed is our producer. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. Sound design and mixing by Breen Turner. Special thanks to Mischa Frankl-Duval. Cheryl Brumley is the global head of audio. See you next week.