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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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When you say failure is not an option, what you really mean is we are going to do our very best with what we have to produce success.
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We re going to use best practices.
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We re going to use our skills.
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We re going to help each other.
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We re going to be a great team because that s what we truly need in this execution moment.
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When we say fail, fast, fail often, we should be, I hope, referring to contexts in which there s no known solution yet.
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And the faster we get to some kind of viable solution, the better off we all are.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles.
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And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become passion struck.
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Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 343 of Passion Struck.
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Consistently ranked by Apple as one of the top 10 most popular health podcasts in the world.
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And thank you to all of you who come back to the show every single week to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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Passion Struck is now on syndicated radio on the Brushwood Media Network, and you can catch us every Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m.
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Eastern Time.
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Links will be in the show notes.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we now have Episode Starter Packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics.
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Give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash Starter Packs to get started.
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In case you missed it, earlier this week I had two great interviews, and I m using this Momentum Friday episode today to do a third interview for a book release this week.
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The first was with Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist and professor of public policy at Harvard University.
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Todd has spent over three decades studying the science of writing and has authored the groundbreaking book with Jessica Lasky Fink, Writing for Busy Readers, How to Communicate More Effectively in the Real World.
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I also interviewed Eduardo Burcino, and we explored how to escape the performance paradox and embrace intentional living for higher-level results.
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Eduardo has coined the term chronic performance trap to describe the counterintuitive phenomenon that often occurs when we relentlessly work harder only to find ourselves exhausted and unfulfilled.
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But fear not, Eduardo brings a wealth of strategies from world-renowned individuals and companies that have cracked the code to peak performance.
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Please check them all out.
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And I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews.
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If you loved either of those episodes or today s, we would so appreciate you giving it a five star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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I know we and our guests certainly love to see comments from our listeners.
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Now let s talk about today s episode.
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In a world where complexity is the norm and decisions often come with a side of confusion, we find ourselves at a crossroads of progress and uncertainty.
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From navigating climate shifts to deciphering the economy, from personal choices to professional paths, there s one constant companion, the notion of failure.
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In this episode, I m privileged to have Dr. Amy Edmondson, the respected Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School.
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With a career spanning over two decades, Dr. Edmondson s research has illuminated intriguing facets of human behavior and how organizations tick.
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You might have stumbled upon her award-winning insights in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times.
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Her thoughts have found their way into the pages also of Psychology Today, Fast Company, and the Harvard Business Review.
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Recognized as the number one management thinker in the world by Thinkers 50 in 2021, Dr. Edmondson s impact on management and leadership is undeniable.
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We discuss her new book, Right Kind of Wrong, that released earlier this week.
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Her book challenges the way we perceive failure, offering a nuanced perspective that goes beyond extreme avoidance or reckless pursuit.
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Dr. Edmondson redefines failure as a source of insight and personal growth, a mindset shift that could change how we navigate life s challenges.
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During our interview, I explore tantalizing insights from her book, gems like why do we hate to fail and four essential tools for failing well.
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realm of a fail-well mindset comes to life as she unearths the paradox of intelligent failures.
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Those accidental breakthroughs that drive progress yet remain a rarity.
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She dives deep into the chasm between catastrophic failures and preventable ones, shedding light on the nuances that spell the difference.
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Fear, shame, blame.
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These invisible barriers stand between us and the untold benefits of failure.
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Dr. Edmondson unravels the intricate psychology that binds us to these impediments, compelling us to embrace humility and honesty as the cornerstones of a resilient, fail-well mentality.
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Get ready for insights that will spark your passion and transform your perspective.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so excited today to welcome Dr. Amy Edmondson to Passion Struck.
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Welcome, Amy.
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Thanks for having me.
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Today, we are going to discuss your brand new book that I m holding up here, Right Kind of Wrong, for the audience who might not be watching this on YouTube, which releases the week that this podcast is coming out.
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Congratulations on its release.
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Thank you so much.
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Amy, I have my own book coming out in February and one of the first chapters is all about the science of life crafting or said another way, finding a problem worth solving for you to pursue in your life.
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How did you discover that your problem worth solving was helping people and organizations learn that they can thrive in a world that keeps changing?
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I discovered it slowly, but it started many years ago, right out of college when I was working for
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inventor, designer, educator Buckminster Fuller, who was just a phenomenally creative person.
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And in a sense, he was clear that his purpose, which he had discovered in his maybe 30s, was to figure out what, if anything,
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one human being could do, what problems they could solve on behalf of all of humanity that giant corporations or governments etc couldn t solve.
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Now that s not my purpose but it was quite meaningful to me to discover this
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at the time in his 80s, wonderful, creative man who d had such a full and impactful life, in fact, have a purpose, right, to articulate that this was his purpose.
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And he was quite sure that all of us are here on this earth to use our brains to solve problems on behalf of
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humanity on behalf of others.
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I didn t have any sort of grandiose ideas about what those problems would be on my own.
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I worked with him as an engineer.
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After that time, I wrote a book about his work.
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And then it was time to move forward into what I did not know.
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But I met a very inspiring entrepreneur named Larry Wilson, who hired me to come be in charge of research at his kind of boutique consulting firm.
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And what that company was doing, which was called Pecos River Learning Centers, it no longer exists, was helping companies change their culture fundamentally to be learning organizations.
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I didn t have that terminology right off the bat, but soon in that spirit, we brought in some wonderful thinkers like Peter Senge and Ed Schein and Chris Argyris and others to help us think, like, how do we help companies do this?
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And this was the late 90s.
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And one thing was absolutely clear.
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Now it seems almost quaint, but it was clear to me that the world keeps changing and that organizations, especially large ones, have trouble shifting their complex systems and operations and product lines
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fast enough and effectively enough to meet the changing needs of their markets and of the world.
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So I was fascinated by how hard that was, even when well-meaning people, smart people in leadership roles really saw the need and wanted to do it, it still remained hard.
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And at a certain point, I became so flummoxed by the challenge that I thought, I guess I better go back to school and figure out what s known and do a PhD and get a little smarter.
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And so in the PhD, I kept going with this premise that learning at work is hard.
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And I studied that in health care.
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I studied that in manufacturing.
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And OK, so it s hard, but how do we make it easier?
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Thank you for that backdrop.
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And today we re going to be discussing all things failure.
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I love this topic because I had a peer when I was working at Lowe s always tell our boss who was the chief information officer that we need to learn from failure and we need to fail all the time in order to get better.
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And I remember our boss absolutely hated it.
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He would always say to us, why would we want to fail when we can succeed?
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I watched this battle.
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progress over two years because both of them were named Steve and Steve Shirley would never give up the argument because he was in charge of innovation that we needed to keep failing and do all kinds of projects to fail and the
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boss who wanted success was always fighting him on it.
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But I think it s an interesting dilemma.
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And yes, you re right.
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Having been in companies like Lowe s and Dell and other behemoths and myself, a big four consulting practitioner, I ve seen just how hard it is for these systems to change in these large organizations.
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And it s interesting because one of the very first research projects that you did when you were in your PhD program ended in failure.
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And I wanted to ask, how did that failure end up changing the course of your academic career?
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Because it led to a research paper called Learning from Mistakes is Easier Said Than Done.
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Yeah, so it s one of those stories that in retrospect is such a blessing, but at the time feels awful.
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My research project, I was part of a larger team of medical researchers, and they were studying medication error rates.
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And one of their primary aims for the study was to fully assess how frequently this problematic and sometimes tragic
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event happens of medication errors that either harm or, in worst-case scenarios, kill patients.
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In the early 90s, this topic was coming into awareness, really, for the first time.
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It had not been looked at much before, and so they thought, well, while we re at it, why don t we invite in a social psychologist who can help us understand what, if anything, team dynamics have to do with
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the creation of errors in patient care.
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And so my simple hypothesis, but I think reasonable hypothesis, was that better teamwork, which I would assess with a validated team diagnostic survey, would be associated with fewer error rates, right?
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Makes sense, right?
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If you have better teamwork, you re catching and correcting, you re coordinating, you re speaking up, all of that stuff.
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So fast forward,
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I ve got my team data from month one of the study.
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I wait six months for the medical investigators to have collected the error data as best they could, going from unit to unit every day or every other day.
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And lo and behold, there s a significant correlation between the teamwork measures and the error data.
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but it s in the wrong direction.
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The data seem to be saying that better teamwork is associated with higher, not lower, error rates.
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Now, this was at the time devastating.
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It was such a failure.
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I just thought, I m not going to make it out of graduate school.
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I m going to have to drop out, find another career.
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And
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Because it s just, how can you be so wrong about something so fundamental?
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And so of course, before dropping out, I decided to give it a little thought.
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And the more I thought about it, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the better teams, and I did not doubt the veracity of the team diagnostic survey, but maybe the better teams, higher quality relationships, reported better leadership and so forth.
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Maybe they were not making more mistakes.
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Maybe they were more willing and able to report them.
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I could say a blinding flash of the obvious.
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But what I was suggesting was that there were interpersonal climate differences across groups.
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that had not been anticipated.
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Teams in these large hospitals were not the same.
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That local leadership and local climate might, in fact, vary so substantially that it would change a behavior as fundamental as error reporting or willingness to be honest about what s really going on.
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Now, again, I think in retrospect it seems quaint because, of course, now I think we take that for granted.
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So the title of the paper I ultimately wrote, which was not the title of the paper I would have written had my hypothesis been supported, Learning from Mistakes is Easier Said Than Done, essentially refers to this phenomenon that you cannot learn from mistakes if you re not willing to talk about them.
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Pretty simple, right?
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So that was the seeds of a concept called psychological safety.
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That was an accident, right?
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That was like a retrospective sensemaking of the data.
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But in my next study, I had to test that on purpose.
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Are there interpersonal climate differences across groups?
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If so, is it associated with learning behaviors like speaking up about errors?
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If so, does it lead to better performance?
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And I was able to say yes to all of those questions in a much more structured, systematic way later.
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So that error, that failure led me to a much more interesting research path than I was on at first.
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If you touched on failures and errors, can you level set for the audience what is the difference between failures, errors, and violations?
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An error, which is synonymous with mistake, is when you do something wrong where the knowledge already exists for how to do it.
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That doesn t mean you re bad or lazy or anything like that.
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We all make mistakes.
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It can only be called a mistake if there is a right way to do it.
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You re in familiar territory.
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A failure is a broader concept.
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An error can lead to a failure, but you can also have a failure in new territory where
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literally no one could have told you in advance what would happen when you engaged in a certain action or experiment.
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A failure can in fact be
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Truly the discovery of new knowledge where no error was involved at all.
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It was a smart, thoughtful experiment.
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And alas, you were wrong, like in a sense, my research project.
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And so that was a failure, but not an error.
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A violation is when you deliberately do something wrong.
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That deliberate mistake is nonsensical.
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It s a violation is a deliberate act of doing something wrong to cause damage or mischief in some way.
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Okay.
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Well, I think that s really helpful.
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And I thought it might be helpful to just look at your profession because I know as a researcher, a lot of the work that you do is on me search, but it also is on looking at lots of different failures before you come up with successes.
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Why is it so important for a researcher to have failure along the way for them to learn and create success?
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I think the answer to that is that if you re not having any failures along the way, your questions aren t bold enough.
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You re not taking kind of intellectual risks.
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that you need to take to be a truly leading edge scientist or professional in any field, really, that hopefully many things that you don t end in failure, but some portion of them should, because then that means you re really on the leading edge of your craft.
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That means you re trying to learn something that hasn t yet been learned.
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You ve thought about it, you ve done your homework, but it turns out still you were wrong.
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It was new territory.
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And I think it s so ironic that the majority of people fail to learn the valuable lessons that failures can offer.
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Why is that such an issue in society?
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The first reason is that as human beings, we don t enjoy looking at our failures.
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Sometimes we don t even recognize them because of confirmation bias and various other things.
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We assume we did well and nobody tells us otherwise, but other times we re aware we ve had a failure, but we just would rather move on.
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Wouldn t you?
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I would, I d rather move on and not pause to really look deeply at it.
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Try to understand the ways in which I contributed to that failure.
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The things I did that contributed to it, the things I failed to do that contributed to it, it s just unpleasant and not fun.
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I think that s the sort of first, most visceral reason why we struggle to learn the lessons that failures offer.
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I think the second reason is really the more cognitive or intellectual reason, which is you can t just do it quickly and superficially.
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You have to be thoughtful and analytical about, okay, let s start by saying what happened and think
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systematically and scientifically about it so that we can not pause at the first most superficial lesson, oh well you didn t try hard enough, but get a deeper understanding of what happened and most people don t really want to do that work.
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Well, thank you for that.
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And I released an interview today with Dr. Judd Brewer, who s a professor at Brown.
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I believe he went to Harvard Medical School and got his PhD there as well.
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And we ended up discussing how to break bad habits to overcome anxiety.
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And in your book, you discuss how when we re kids, we learn to dodge blame
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by pointing the finger elsewhere.
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This becomes habitual.
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These habits over time end up leading us to avoid stretch goals and challenges as we get older where we might fail.
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My question for you is why does this combination of human psychology, socialization, and institutional awards make mastering the science of failing more difficult than it needs to be?
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you ve just said it so well, so let me underline a couple of things.
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I think there s this emotional aversion to failure.
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It s quite instinctive.
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We prefer to be associated with success than failure.
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There s a real worry about
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what others will think of us or the stigma.
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We want people to think well of us, not badly of us.
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Also for quite instinctive reasons, you want to be important.
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You want to be part of the group.
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That s where our survival comes from.
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And then also it s natural psychologically to point the finger elsewhere.
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There s something called the fundamental attribution errors studied by Lee Ross at Stanford.
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It says that we rather spontaneously, when something goes wrong,
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We will attribute that, let s say, come up short in some way.
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I will think that s a, either an ability problem or a character problem.
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And I don t think, I wonder what the situation was that led to that failure.
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Whereas if I come up short in some way, I will spontaneously think factors outside my control led to that outcome.
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We d start off with the deck slanted against us in terms of doing the real work of learning.
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And as part of learning, I know that psychological safety comes into play, and this is something that you are very well known for studying.
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How does this concept of psychological safety play a powerful role in the science of failing well?
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It starts with the premise, which I deeply believe, that the science of failing well is a team sport, that most really good failures, let s say, in R&D or in science or other leading edge activities happen by teams and with teams.
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It s where our ideas are richer when we re learning from people with different backgrounds and expertise.
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than ours and the process of diagnosing failures is going to be higher quality when we have more minds looking at it at the same time.
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So that means it s a social activity and psychological safety comes into play there because we can t do that social learning activity effectively
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if we believe that interpersonal risks will be punished in some way, or if I speak up about a mistake, it ll be held against me, or if I ask for help and I don t quite know what to do, it ll be held against me.
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A state of psychological safety is one in which you really believe
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Not that it s easy to take interpersonal risks, but that they re expected and welcome and necessary for us to, say, do our job or be a strong family unit.
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The psychological safety describes this climate where candor is welcome, expected.
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We can be direct.
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We can be honest with each other.
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We can roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of experimenting and then learning from the failures that do happen.
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Yes, I think we all experience the psychological safety net that we want to have around us and this term failure often carries such a negative connotation.
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What is one of the best ways that we can reframe our perception of failure to see it as an essential aspect of success?
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Let me go back to your story of the two Steves, because the boss Steve, who was saying, no, why would you want failure when you could have success, was in fact right about that part, which is, if you can have success, please, by all means,
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Let s have it.
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We don t want failures where success was a viable realistic option, meaning we don t want failures when we have a recipe or we have a good process.
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We have best practice.
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What we want is to support people and enable them.
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to do what they need to do to get those outcomes.
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However, the other Steve was right also, because what he was saying was, but we need R&D, we need innovation.
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Yes, absolutely.
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Otherwise our business won t thrive over the longterm.
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And he was saying the only way to get new ideas, new products, innovation is to be willing to fail now.
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Fortunately, at least for most organizations, that failure happens behind closed doors.
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You don t have the customers in there watching you fail.
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You re doing it in the laboratory.
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You re doing it in the innovation teams.
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This sort of recognition of
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context and the fact that one context is absolutely a context where it s realistic to say, let s try to get six sigma perfection over here.
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But another context is one in which you have to say, if we re not failing over here, we re not doing our job.
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Yeah, I think a great example of that is what we ended up doing at Lowe s.
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When you think of the complexity of having, at the time I was with them, over 1,800 stores, a huge supply chain network.
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When you re introducing new changes to that environment, it s very easy to potentially have errors, not only in the systems that you re introducing, but more importantly, in how your 300,000 employees are utilizing those systems to serve the customer.
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After a whole bunch of failures of trying to big bang implementations out to the store system, we ended up doing this very methodical way of rollout where we d start with a single store, then we d go to a group of stores in a district, and then we would go to several districts, all looking at what errors we might have.
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Are we conflicting with anything?
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And once we put that methodology in place, the rollout rate and our overall success rate went up drastically because we were able to correct errors that we found in the very early stages and then roll it out for much bigger success.
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You can take that example and implement it, whether it s in your family unit or in an organization as well.
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It s such a great story and such music to my ears.
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I don t know that particular case at Lowe s, but it s brilliant.
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And I like to call it, instead of a rollout, which kind of implies there s a carpet and it s ready to go smoothly from here into the future, I call it a cycle out.
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You do it here.
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You discover some kinks, some things that need to be worked out a little better.
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and then you go a little further to some more stores, you learn some more, and so your plan, do, check, act all the way forward until it s done.
2
SPEAKER_01
This cycle out is much more of a mindset of learning as we go, not in a like slow down or casual way, but a really disciplined, rigorous way of learning from our own experiences
2
SPEAKER_01
to keep getting better with this new thing that we re not supposed to know already how it works perfectly at scale.
2
SPEAKER_01
That would be crazy in a way.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not something we ve done before.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we need to do this cycle out process.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, one of the fundamental concepts that you have in the book is that of good failures, or as you call it, the title of your book, the right kind of wrong.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can you help listeners to better understand this concept of good failures?
2
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_01
So a good failure is one that happens in new territory, meaning you couldn t just look up the answer on the internet, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s genuinely new territory.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now that could be new to the world as you re a scientist or new to you.
2
SPEAKER_01
You ve never picked up the game of golf before, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Or a blind date, let s say, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just, it s novel and there s no way to find out the answer without at least being willing to try.
2
SPEAKER_01
So new territory in pursuit of a goal
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hypothesis driven, which is a fancy way of saying you ve got good reason to believe it might work.
2
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You also know that it might not, but you ve done your homework.
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SPEAKER_01
And then fourth,
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The failure to be good, I think, should be no bigger than it has to be to get the new knowledge you re trying to get.
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SPEAKER_01
You don t bet your life savings on an uncertain stock.
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SPEAKER_01
You don t agree to spend a week with a blind date.
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SPEAKER_01
You agree to have a coffee, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
This is obvious in a way.
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SPEAKER_01
This mitigating the risk, like your Lowe s story, the little failures that happened in that cycle out
2
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were good failures.
2
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New territory, right, in pursuit of an important goal with good hypotheses and no bigger than it has to be.
2
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You don t want to risk a nationwide failure of some new service.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think from that, it s good to then articulate the difference between a good failure and a bad failure.
2
SPEAKER_00
And maybe a good way of doing this would be to share a real world example of how the two interplay with each other.
2
SPEAKER_01
let me start by just defining the other two kinds of failures.
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I have three archetypes in the book and one is right-wrong and the others are not.
2
SPEAKER_01
The other two kinds of failure are basic failures and complex failures.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, basic failure, as the term implies, is one that has a single cause, usually human error.
2
SPEAKER_01
In other words, you make a mistake in familiar territory and that leads to
2
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a failure.
2
SPEAKER_01
A complex failure is one that s multi-causal.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s usually a number of things lined up in just the wrong way at the wrong time to produce a failure, but any one of the factors separately would not have led to failure on its own, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not a big enough error
3
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big enough deviation to have caused the failure.
3
SPEAKER_01
But boy, when they all come together, like supply chain breakdowns, for example, during the pandemic would be a good illustration of complex failures.
3
SPEAKER_01
Just a couple of labor shortages here and some parts shortages there.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then pretty soon you ve got the perfect storm of no chips available to anyone.
3
SPEAKER_01
Basic failure thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
They run the gamut from putting the milk in the cupboard rather than the refrigerator and it spoils to a few Citibank employees failing to check the right box, a computerized system that led them to transfer $800 million, essentially the full principle of a loan rather than the interest which they were trying to transfer and leading to that rather massive $800 million loss to the company.
3
SPEAKER_00
Thank you for going through that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And one of the things that I thought was fascinating in your book is I ve always loved flight and space travel and other things like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so it was interesting how you discussed crew resource management.
3
SPEAKER_00
And when I was at the Naval Academy, we had this unique experience of getting different lectures that would come in to talk to us about leadership and decision making in high stress situations.
3
SPEAKER_00
And one of these happened to be the amazing flight crew.
3
SPEAKER_00
I can t remember all the specifics, but they were either on a DC-10 or a Lockheed 10-11 back in the day.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you and me might remember this because as they were bringing
3
SPEAKER_00
this aircraft in and ended up landing, but it did this catapult in the air before it came down.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it was amazing that this even was a success and anyone survived at all.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think it was about 80% of the flight who survived because when they took crews into the simulator, not another single crew, I think it was United Airlines, was able to land the plane.
3
SPEAKER_00
What we learned from their discussion is that this crew, it wasn t the first time that they had flown together.
3
SPEAKER_00
They had flown together several times in the past.
3
SPEAKER_00
But what happened in this flight is they lost all hydraulics.
3
SPEAKER_00
So the only way that they could control the plane, and this was 30 years ago, so I m doing this on
3
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memory, but was that they had to use the engines to control the plane.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so it meant that in the cockpit, there were three people.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so they were all working in tandem to make sure that they were doing the best that they could to
3
SPEAKER_00
control the plane and its altitude as a team.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they said it was that teamwork and knowing from instinctively working together so much and going through checklists that they were able to even have a chance of bringing this thing down and landing it as successfully as they did.
3
SPEAKER_00
What from your research and looking at the airline industry, did they learn about the difference between crew management and those who had worked together versus those who might not have worked together that were coming out of maybe time off before going into a flight?
3
SPEAKER_01
That is such an extraordinary story.
3
SPEAKER_01
Is that the Sioux city?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, that s exactly it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I ve actually heard Captain Bill, forget his last name, speak about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it is, it s so moving and he s so, and I think this is relevant to our listeners.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s, he s so humble, self-deprecating and generous with his credit and description of that story.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it really is a truly remarkable feat that they were able to save so many lives on that day.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was indeed, it was,
3
SPEAKER_01
the epitome of effective teamwork.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think, and I ll describe why I think that was such effective teamwork, and then tell you the results of that wonderful study that was done at NASA by Clay Foucher.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the effective teamwork I think that they modeled that day was started with an absolute explicit admission that we don t know, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
We don t actually have a playbook here.
3
SPEAKER_01
We don t have a solution for how do you land a large craft like this without hydraulics.
3
SPEAKER_01
it s a kind of we re putting it right out there in the open that we don t know and then it s that means we re listening intently to all ideas welcome and not all of them will be implemented not all of them will be good but keep them coming and then also that ability
3
SPEAKER_01
to coordinate and compensate for each other s strengths and weaknesses real time is the marker of a great team.
3
SPEAKER_01
We ve all watched basketball teams on the court or other sports, and you can just tell the difference between a fluid team that knows each other and knows who to pass to and all the rest.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what we think.
3
SPEAKER_01
It gets us excited to even think about that.
3
SPEAKER_01
So now, the study that was done at NASA in the simulator is pretty straightforward, but they were surprised, because it s back in the 80s, by the outcome.
3
SPEAKER_01
So here s the study.
3
SPEAKER_01
They have a set of cockpit crews who are well-rested.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re coming right to work with no flights recently behind them, and they ve never flown together before.
3
SPEAKER_01
and they re put in the simulator and given all sorts of challenging situations.
3
SPEAKER_01
Meanwhile, we have some other cockpit crews that have just come off of several shifts of flying together, real flights, so their so-called fatigued condition, but they ve had experience working together.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, what happened was, indeed, the purpose of the study had been to show that these fatigued pilots would make more mistakes, and indeed they did, but
3
SPEAKER_01
as teams they made fewer mistakes because they caught and corrected each other s errors so that the teams actually the fatigued teams actually outperformed well-rested teams simply because they were better teams they were better able to coordinate collaborate with each other to land
3
SPEAKER_01
the plane, the simulation flight effectively.
3
SPEAKER_01
No one expected that, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
They were looking at fatigue and then instead what they discovered was teamwork.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so then they thought, well, maybe we need to help cockpit crews and now indeed all the whole crew with flight attendants and everybody be better at teamwork and be better at speaking up and better at asking for help because that s going to be where real excellence comes from.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and you could see that play out in various different dimensions, but the one I would think of is imagine a SWAT unit or a special forces team that s going in on a target and having a team that has worked together, rehearsed together, know the intricacies that each member is going to play when they attempt that mission compared to a bunch of people who come together who might be very skilled, but the first time they do that exercise is when they have to do it in real time.
3
SPEAKER_00
And just looking at those examples, you could see how just like those flight crews, one would make such a big difference than the other.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yep.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there are two different terms that we hear a lot.
3
SPEAKER_00
One is fail fast and break things, which you hear a lot in the startup world.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then the other is failure is not an option, which I definitely heard a lot when I was in the military, because let s face it, if you fail in combat, people are going to get killed.
3
SPEAKER_00
Those seem like very conflicting mindsets.
3
SPEAKER_00
How can we strike a balance between these approaches for better outcomes?
3
SPEAKER_01
They are certainly conflicting statements, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
They have obvious contradictions, but the same mindset actually can encompass them both if we incorporate the role of context.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think when you say failure is not an option, what you really mean is we are going to do our very best with what we have to produce success.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we re going to use best practices.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re going to use our skills.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re going to help each other.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re going to be a great team.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because that s what we truly need in this execution moment.
3
SPEAKER_01
When we say fail fast, fail often, we should be, I hope, referring to contexts in which there s no known solution yet.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the faster we get to some kind of viable solution, the better off we all are.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is appropriate
3
SPEAKER_01
for an experimental context, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s appropriate for a new context and almost laughable to imagine that you d want to fail fast, fail often in the operating room.
3
SPEAKER_01
Of course you wouldn t, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Once we re in the operating room, we want to succeed brilliantly.
3
SPEAKER_01
But we want to make sure we ve trained our surgeons and their teams in a simulator where it is possible to fail fast so that they can learn quickly what works and how to recuperate quickly.
3
SPEAKER_01
These two mindsets are compatible as long as we bring in the role of context, as long as we re clear about
3
SPEAKER_01
the goal.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the one thing I would add is, if you aren t clear and compelling about the goal and what you re trying to do, and you use the phrase, failure is not an option, without that additional contextual information that s so valuable, you are at risk for essentially saying to people, I don t want to hear about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that is the worst thing to do.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what you want to say is, we re going to succeed.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know we can do it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you see anything
3
SPEAKER_01
along the way that doesn t look quite right.
3
SPEAKER_01
The faster you speak up about it, the better off
4
SPEAKER_01
Rami, thank you very much for that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I m going to just go back to the audience and remind them that you talked about intelligent failures, which is something that you deep dive in chapter two, your book, and then you went into basic failures, which is the study of chapter three.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then chapter four is your study of complex failures.
4
SPEAKER_01
I wanted to talk for a little bit about basic failures.
4
SPEAKER_01
How does a checklist allow us
4
SPEAKER_01
to cope with a basic failure in a more routine way.
4
SPEAKER_00
I like the word allow because you re right.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s an allowing thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s not a guarantee, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
A checklist, which of course is a list of things that it s really important not to forget in some procedure, whether it s aviation or surgical or just packing for your weekend trip, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Having a checklist helps us fallible human beings make sure we don t miss something that we shouldn t have missed, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
That so we don t get a preventable basic failure, but.
4
SPEAKER_00
Checklists have to be used with intent.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you so-called do it in your sleep, you are at risk for not getting the benefit that checklist allows you to gain.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I do tell a story of a flight.
4
SPEAKER_00
Love these aviation examples because they re so compelling and so important.
4
SPEAKER_00
But there was Air Florida flight 90 back in 1982 that unfortunately crashed into a freezing cold Potomac river in Washington, DC.
4
SPEAKER_00
and killed almost everybody aboard.
4
SPEAKER_00
The pilots went through that checklist that we all know well, right, at takeoff, and they were Air Florida, so they were sort of almost doing it in their sleep when the co-pilot said anti-ice off, or the pilot said anti-ice off, co-pilot said yes, and off they went.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it was a freezing cold, sort of blizzard-y, icy day in D.C.
4
SPEAKER_00
that January day.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so the correct answer was anti-ice
4
SPEAKER_00
on, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
You wanted it on, not off, but they were so familiar with it being off.
4
SPEAKER_00
So in other words, they were using the checklist, but not really just going through the motions, not having their brains fully engaged with the meaning of each of those important items on that checklist.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, now we want to explore complex failures and I thought a way we could do this is I m going to give you another example.
4
SPEAKER_01
And again, this is going to be one since we re on this aviation theme and NASA theme that comes from there.
4
SPEAKER_01
I have the distinct honor of having a very good friend of mine who was the chief astronaut at NASA.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he s one of the most experienced spacewalkers that NASA has ever produced.
4
SPEAKER_01
But when you think about spacewalks or what NASA calls EVAs, you don t think of them being inherently dangerous, but they were actually something that NASA and many of the observers around them feared.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because when you think about constructing something like the ISS and all the spacewalks that you have to do, there are a million things that could go wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s amazing that for so
4
SPEAKER_01
many years, they had done thousands of hours of spacewalks without any major issues until my friend Chris happened to be on the ISS.
4
SPEAKER_01
And this was back in July of 2013.
4
SPEAKER_01
And on July 9th, he, an Italian astronaut, I m going to butcher his name, but I think it s Luca Parmitano, went out to do an EVA and
4
SPEAKER_01
Everything went flawless, but when they got back to the ISS, they noticed that the cap that Luca was wearing was wet.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they came to the conclusion that this was just sweat and it was his first spacewalk, so he was just nervous, et cetera.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, a week later, July 16th, they go back out to do some additional maintenance, etc.
4
SPEAKER_01
Everything s going extremely well.
4
SPEAKER_01
In fact, they re ahead of schedule, 45 minutes into it, when Luca reaches into a crevice to do some work, and he notices that the moisture isn t just on his cap, but it s now in his helmet.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then
4
SPEAKER_01
Chris comes around to do a visual observation and sees a blob because they re in space.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s a blob of liquid that s accumulating in his helmet.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then all of a sudden, NASA recognizes that the issue here is that Luca could drown.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so they immediately order an abort.
4
SPEAKER_01
But on his way back to the hatch, two things happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
One, they go from orbital day to orbital night.
4
SPEAKER_01
So all of a sudden, it s dark.
4
SPEAKER_01
and then two, there are all these precautions that they have to go through because they have to avoid any sharp objects and one of these happened to be an antenna that s sticking out and they can t puncture the suits or they ll decompress and die.
4
SPEAKER_01
Luca has to do this maneuver where he inverts himself
4
SPEAKER_01
And when he does, this blob ends up covering his complete eyes, his nostrils, and half his mouth.
4
SPEAKER_01
So now he s barely able to breathe.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the blob doesn t go away when he comes back.
4
SPEAKER_01
It just stays there.
4
SPEAKER_01
So now he s completely blinded.
4
SPEAKER_01
And at this point, Chris has to help him get back into the ISS, which he does.
4
SPEAKER_01
They then get back in the hatch and Chris has to calmly keep them from not overreacting as the water is accumulating even more.
4
SPEAKER_01
But they had to wait for 30 minutes of decompression before they can take off the helmet.
4
SPEAKER_01
That is a long story.
4
SPEAKER_01
It turns out to have a successful outcome.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think part of that was because not only astronaut training, but Chris was a Navy SEAL.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think it was his training to be able to adapt in complex situations.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the important thing here is this complex failure could have been avoided if they were able to catch the small problem of water being on the cap before they did that second spacewalk.
4
SPEAKER_01
I illustrate that because oftentimes we don t look for these small problems.
4
SPEAKER_01
And why is it so important that we do before they spiral out of control like that example?
4
SPEAKER_00
Such a full and rich story, and it also just fills me with appreciation because you have been a very good and close reader of my book.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re referring in that story to so many concepts in the complex.
4
SPEAKER_00
failure chapter.
4
SPEAKER_00
And one of which is what I call either ambiguous threats or the small signals that something might be wrong that we easily dismiss.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s easy to cognitively dismiss them.
4
SPEAKER_00
We just assume we have this overarching assumption that all is well.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in complex systems, it s a very bad assumption to have.
4
SPEAKER_00
We have it, but then we have to override it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so you re absolutely right.
4
SPEAKER_00
This complex and almost tragic failure
4
SPEAKER_00
was preceded by little signals, little, hello, I m here, signals that were ignored, not because they re bad or lazy people, but because it s natural and normal as humans to assume them away.
4
SPEAKER_00
And what led to that breakdown was a variety of things, none of them on their own bad enough
4
SPEAKER_00
to cause the failure, but the accumulation of water inside the suit, the sharp objects that led to a need to alter their course and their behavior, and it sounds like a handful of other things.
4
SPEAKER_00
that come together essentially in just the wrong way to let a failure through.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, people who work in complex organizations or high-risk organizations are trained, as your Navy SEAL colleague was, to be highly aware, to be not thinking, oh yeah, we won t fail, but to be thinking, where might we fail?
4
SPEAKER_00
to be ever vigilant and ever heedful of those small signals.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now they missed the small signal the first time, but fortunately he was able to respond magnificently in action and prevent the far worse failure.
4
SPEAKER_00
But complex failures are on the rise.
4
SPEAKER_00
We live and up and work in
4
SPEAKER_00
in increasingly complex environments.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so we have to train ourselves to be willing to raise, not worry about people thinking you re chicken little when you say, Ooh, that doesn t look good.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, don t worry about that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Don t be a wimp, but actually praise and reward the people who are willing to speak up early so that we can head these complex failures off at the past.
4
SPEAKER_00
Complexity of our systems is a given, but our ability to prevent most complex failures is much greater when we re more open and more attentive to those small signals.
4
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, when you said at the very beginning of that story, you said, we think of spacewalk as so routine.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s partly because NASA has trained us to think that.
4
SPEAKER_00
They put forward
4
SPEAKER_00
an image of themselves as doing these things that now we can do them easily and do them in our sleep.
4
SPEAKER_00
Nonsense, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
These are extraordinarily challenging, risky, skillful activities that they do, and they should take credit for it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think what we fail to realize is the two years of constant planning that they ve done
5
SPEAKER_01
in a pool environment to get ready for that one event just to make sure that they try to prevent everything that they can from going wrong.
5
SPEAKER_00
Exactly right.
5
SPEAKER_01
As I was telling you before we got on the show, this podcast is really about intentional behavior change.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s about exploring our self-awareness, which is something that you explore in Chapter 5 of the book.
5
SPEAKER_01
Why does self-awareness play such a crucial role in the science of failure?
5
SPEAKER_00
the way I think that might be my favorite chapter or it s the one that I need to listen to the most myself and self-awareness plays a crucial role in the science of failing well because we are up against some hurdles as humans are cognitive emotional we have this predisposition to think we know we think we see reality
5
SPEAKER_00
and we have to keep training ourselves.
5
SPEAKER_00
Here s a cognitive habit to break, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Keep training yourself to remember, yes, I see a partial view of reality and I am almost certainly missing something relevant, important, useful, but maybe my friend John here is seeing something that I don t see.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s a
5
SPEAKER_00
habit of mind to force curiosity where knowing is more habitual.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I m just likely to be confident.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I know what s going on versus, oh, I wonder what s going on.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s just to keep reinvigorating that sense of curiosity to embrace what Carol Dweck would call a growth mindset that understands that the more sort of challenges you take on, the more able you become rather than our tendency to play it safe or
5
SPEAKER_00
play not to lose, as it were, rather than to really go for it and to stretch and go after the things that you re hoping to do and achieve.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, I remember when I was an executive and when I was in the military, I was trained really in servant leadership.
5
SPEAKER_01
But as my career progressed, we ended up starting to take a number of courses related to situational leadership.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that was how do you use empathy and the EQ empathy equation in the way that you re leading and in the situations that you re involved.
5
SPEAKER_01
In your book, you talk about situational awareness, which is very similar.
5
SPEAKER_00
It is.
5
SPEAKER_01
What is the role of humility, curiosity, and honesty in adopting a fair, a farewell mindset?
5
SPEAKER_00
It s just mission critical, the curiosity, the humility.
5
SPEAKER_00
Humility is that sort of reminder to yourself that you don t know everything, that there s much more to learn, that
5
SPEAKER_00
There are challenges that lie ahead.
5
SPEAKER_00
Curiosity is that drive, that thirst to learn more rather than rest on your sense of, I know, I see, I get it.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s something where it s a natural human thing to have, but we tend to have it socialized out of us.
5
SPEAKER_00
And empathy, I think, is mission critical as well.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s that reminder of how would I want someone to respond to me if I were in their shoes?
5
SPEAKER_00
That doesn t mean letting them off the hook or going easy on people.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s about just being,
5
SPEAKER_00
caring and compassionate with the feedback that you give, or the response you have to bad news, or the response you have to requests for help.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I believe all of those attributes are really helpful in sizing up the context.
5
SPEAKER_00
As I talked about before, context really can vary.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you re
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Flying an airplane full of passengers, that s one context.
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That is a context in which, of course, you want to be enormously safe and risk averse.
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You re in a laboratory, that s another context where you want to be taking risks and experimenting with wild ideas.
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So the discipline of situation awareness is really the discipline of saying, what s at stake here, whether reputationally, financially, human safety?
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and how much is known?
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How uncertain is it?
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And if it s really risky and we re in an unknown situation, as your NASA story embodies so perfectly, you are proceeding cautiously.
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The experiments you take are tiny ones.
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Well, what happens if you go upside down?
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Okay, well, that
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Sort of worked, but it didn t work, right?
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You re absolutely careful, cautious.
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You re not going wild.
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If you re laboratory or a simulation, go wild.
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Learn as much as you can.
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Try to see where the failures are going to happen so that you can then prevent them when it really matters.
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Thank you for sharing that.
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And I have done a large number of interviews on the show regarding the importance of systems change.
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And they have primarily been through the lens of overcoming things like climate change or water scarcity.
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And I remember for the last decade of my career, I was a partner in a private equity firm.
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And one of the things that we looked at the most was the megatrends that are impacting society because we were trying to look at futuristic things that are happening.
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such as climate change, such as water scarcity, food scarcity, etc.
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And I think it s important for the listeners to realize that today we are governed by extremely complex systems.
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And it is in these systems that we see them not play out just in politics or in organizations, but they play out in nature.
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They play out in our families.
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How does this ability to see and appreciate systems help prevent a lot of failures that could come our way?
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It s such an important issue and so hard for us as human beings.
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Our brains have not evolved to be spontaneously good at sizing up systems.
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We re really quite drawn to parts.
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We look at the parts, not the holes.
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And the behavior of most systems is created by the ways the parts interact.
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That s where sort of the causal power lies.
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And so to me, for the science of failing well, the most important thing
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to overcome the natural sort of cognitive tendencies to overcome our natural tendency to think first of ourselves and our needs, rather than to think of the collective, like what, because a lot of times the things that would be good for me or that I want will directly harm sort of the team or the unit, right?
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So I have to balance what my initial instincts against something far more important, which is how well will we be able to do and perform the other
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I have to overcome is that I m drawn toward now, right?
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I think about what do I want now?
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What will work now?
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And I discount the future.
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And systems thinking is about recognizing that the future is coming at you.
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And to be able to think a few steps ahead is really mission critical in almost every field.
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To think about, well, if we do this now, what will the impact of this be on our success later, next year, 10 years from now, et cetera.
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So that ability to go from,
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me to we to, and now to later, and then finally to appreciate.
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feedback loops, because we tend to think of X causes Y and on we go, when in fact X causes Y, but then Y turns around to have an impact on X. And so we have vicious cycles, which we all are familiar with that term or virtuous cycles, but we don t spontaneously think that way.
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So we have to pause and step back and say, okay, how is this system behaving and how might my actions either exacerbate or ameliorate the behavior in question?
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Well, thank you for that, because I think it leads into your last chapter eight.
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And one of the things that I think is so important for people to understand is I believe we as humans were created to constantly learn.
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And one of the ways that we are programmed to learn is by learning from the failures.
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And I think any of us who are parents and my kids are now grown, but there s only so many times that you can tell them not to do something and they still do it because they have to learn from their own mistakes.
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And luckily most of those are just errors and they re not catastrophic failures.
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But how do we use this reality of the fact that we are human and that we are going to fail to craft a fulfilling life?
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I titled that chapter, Thriving as a Fallible Human Being, because I want to call attention to the fact of our fallibility.
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That s a given.
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So get over it.
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Let s live with it.
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And let s try to live with it joyfully and productively.
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If we re fallible, if that s a given, what are the things we can do and get good at
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to still have full, meaningful, thriving lives.
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And one is of course, to be okay with the failures that will happen along the way.
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Just know that s a given.
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That s not shameful.
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That s not something that shouldn t have happened.
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That s something that s part of a full and meaningful life.
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Another is to master the art of apology, because you re going to need it now and then to really be willing
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To repair those relationships that might get harmed along the way through some of the failures that you contribute to in your lives.
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Another is to be willing to persist right to pick yourself up and just keep on going and.
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All of these have to do with learning.
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You are right.
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I could have titled that chapter just embracing the learning mindset and the learning orientation because that s what it s really about.
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The people that we look at, the stories that are told,
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in the book and the people that I look at to try to understand what it means to be a great student of and user of failure to succeed wildly are all people who were curious, who were driven, who weren t afraid of the failures they experienced, who learned as much as they could from them.
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So yes, it s really about learning to thrive.
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Okay, my last question would be for a reader of the book or a listener of this podcast, what are some actionable steps that they could take today to start cultivating a fail well mindset in their personal or professional life?
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most important first step is just to get clear about the different kinds of failure.
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Maybe start using the terminology so that, because I think when we say things like failure is not an option or fail fast, fail often, it s superficial and confusing to people.
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Whereas if you say, yep, let s avoid all the basic failures we possibly can, that s going to require us to speak up, et cetera.
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So get clear about the terminology.
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I think the terminology literally gets you halfway toward a healthy mindset and healthy practices around failure.
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I do believe that doing whatever you can to contribute to an environment of psychological safety is another practical thing you can do.
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The best way to do that is to, early and often, acknowledge uncertainty, acknowledge novelty, let people know that you know that we re doing things we ve never done before quite this exact way.
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You can t stand in the same river twice, so you re acknowledging
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reality.
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And reality is that things could go wrong.
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So you re making it okay, making it safe to speak up about them.
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And I think finally, just master the pause.
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That s a habit to develop that don t try to overcome our reactiveness.
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Bad things happen.
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We react.
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We feel bad.
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We feel ashamed.
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We feel angry.
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Rather just take a deep breath, size it up and have a more thoughtful learning oriented response.
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Oh, great, Amy.
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Well, for the listener who wants to learn more about you, your books and your research, where s the best place for them to go?
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I guess the simplest answer is amycedminson.com.
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Amy, thank you so much for being here today.
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I so enjoyed reading your book and it was a great discussion.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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And it was an honor and a pleasure to talk with your mastery of the material in seemingly such a short time.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Amy Edmondson, and I wanted to thank Amy and Atria Books for the honor and privilege of having her appear on today s show.
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Links to all things Amy will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.
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Videos are on YouTube at both Jon R. Miles and Passionstruck Clips.
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You can now purchase my brand new book, Passionstruck, which is all about the science of living an intentional life on Amazon.
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Links will be in the show notes.
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As I mentioned at the beginning, we are now on syndicated radio on the Brushwood Media Network.
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You can find me at Jon R. Miles on all the social platforms.
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You can also find me on LinkedIn, where you can sign up for my LinkedIn newsletter, or you can sign up for our weekly newsletter at PassionStruck.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of a special PassionStruck Podcast interview that I did with my friend, Harvard professor, and number one New York Times bestselling author, Arthur Brooks.
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In this interview, we explore Arthur s new book, Build the Life That You Want, which he co-authored with none other than Oprah Winfrey.
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In this interview, we invite you to commence a journey towards greater happiness.
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no matter how challenging your circumstances.
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Drawing on cutting-edge science and years of helping people translate ideas into action, Arthur, with the help of Oprah, shows you how to improve your life right now instead of waiting for the outside world to change.
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But emotions are not nice to haves or things we try to avoid.
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That s the wrong way of seeing it.
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Emotions are basically a machine language where your brain is taking outside stimuli and then turning it into signals delivered to your conscious brain.
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So you know how to react.
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Emotions are a universal language.
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I don t care if you re born in Papua, New Guinea or Canada, you speak the same emotions.
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The reason is because humans see the same things and they need to translate what s going on in their senses and turn that into a language so you know how to react.
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The problem is that not all those emotions are very pleasant.
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And so the result of it is that if you re reactive, you re just going to react on the basis of those emotions, your life is going to feel like it s out of control.
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Remember that we rise by lifting others.
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Share the show with those that you love.
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And if you found today s episode useful with Dr. Amy Edmondson on failure, then please share it with somebody who could use the advice that we gave here on today s show.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Now go out there and live your life passion struck.