Dr. Amy Edmondson: How to Fail Well

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0:49Welcome to Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. I am your host, Guy Kawasaki. Today, I have the privilege of being joined by Dr. Amy Edmondson. She is the esteemed professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. Her work sheds light on the pivotal role leaders play in nurturing an environment conducive to learning and collaboration. More than 3 million people have watched her TED Talk, How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team. Amy is also a prolific author. Her latest book, Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well, invites us to re-evaluate our conventional perceptions of failure.

1:36It provides profound insights into handling failure with grace and resilience and learning from failure. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. With no further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome the truly remarkable Amy Edmondson.

2:00this is kind of a question that may belie my ignorance in the scientific method you start your book and you talk about this harvard study where your hypothesis was that better teams would have fewer errors and then you know you say that you were proven wrong and it failed. But I would argue that you didn't fail. You just found something different from a hypothesis, right? I completely agree. And that is, in fact, a typical experience of a researcher. Maybe really an optimal experience of a researcher because I did my homework. I had a hypothesis. It was a reasonable hypothesis. The shortcoming wasn't really the hypothesis.

2:45It turns out that But the shortcoming was the measure of medication errors was flawed in the sense that I think the researchers who set out to study medication errors had a faulty assumption that people would be willing to report them for science, for research. And of course, that turns out to be, and I suppose in retrospect, quite a faulty assumption. But what was not expected, I think, by anybody was that people's willingness to speak up about errors would be wildly different from team to team. And so that was interesting. And that got me thinking about a new possibility. But I think the original hypothesis is probably right, that better teamwork does lead to lower, fewer errors.

3:37Again, pardon my ignorance of the scientific method, but is the perspective that you're trying to prove or disprove a hypothesis or you're trying to just investigate and let the facts fall where they may? So what are you trying to do there? The answer is yes. Both. So the way the scientific method in general seeks to advance knowledge is by reading what has come before. So you read the literature and then you say, well, what do we not yet know? You formulate a hypothesis. You formulate a way to collect the data that will help you support that hypothesis. And sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong.

4:19So in a grand sense, you are, in fact, stepping into the unknown and trying to learn whatever it will teach you. But the way you go about that is by doing your homework and at least entering the unknown with as much knowledge as you can from what people have done before you. So is the correct verb testing a hypothesis or proving a hypothesis? Oh, testing is a better word than proving. You're absolutely right. Okay. Because in fact, you can never prove a hypothesis. You can only disconfirm because if it supports it, that's good, but it's not as informative as failing to support it. Okay. This is going to take us down a little bit of a rat hole just for a second.

5:07Okay. So I want to know, why does your book have a prelude and an introduction? It's a prologue. Oh, prologue, prologue. Sorry. I think of a prologue, and I've looked at other books. I often am looking at books for their structure and how they organize themselves. A prologue is a kind of glimpse. It's a compelling story, perhaps, an anecdote, an idea that leads you to want to read more, or that gives you a sense maybe of the author and what she cares about, and maybe where she's coming from. But it isn't – an introduction is almost – if you don't have time to read the whole book, you can often get at least the big picture of the ideas and the territory it's going to cover.

5:58Certainly won't do it justice. But the introduction is the sort of lesson zero of the book or lesson one of the book and gets you started. The prologue is just fun, I think. so a prologue is like when you watch a tom cruise movie or james bond movie it's like that opening scene where he jumps off the building in a like wingsuit or whatever it has nothing to do with the rest of the plot it's just it probably has premonitions about the rest of the plot or it gives you some glimpse into tom cruise's character but you're absolutely right it's a perfect analogy it's just that okay what was that and does it compel me to learn more about this movie so i'm living in silicon valley and every day i hear you know fail fast break things like from your research academic research what's the use of a statement like that yeah that's a great question actually the use of a statement like that is to free people up, to encourage them to take risks.

7:05Now, I would like to add smart risks, but to take risks rather than to play it safe. It's about saying our natural tendency is to play, not to lose. I just don't want to lose the game. I don't want to lose the contest. But what we want instead is to help people embrace the possibility to play to win. And that means you're going to take risk and you're going to do things that may or may not work out as you'd hoped. So I think the use of statements like that is just to free people up and help them unleash themselves. So that does not offend your academic and scientific knowledge? No, not at all.

7:44It's because I understand it as an invitation to try things. But where it offends my academic knowledge is when it is uniformly applied to everything across the spectrum. And for example, it would be nonsensical for a plant manager in any kind of factory, but let's just say an automotive assembly plant, to tell her workers to fail fast and break things. Right? I mean, we can laugh at that. It's obviously wrongheaded. And we want our automobiles to come off the end of that line perfect, every last one of them. And so the statement isn't helpful in either very routine context or very high risk context, meaning physical risk.

8:39You wouldn't say that the leader of a nuclear power plant would not say that, right? The very opposite. And there's a whole literature on high reliability organizations, which addresses the specific question of how do organizations where there's inherent safety risks manage to operate safely, essentially all the time, 100 % of the time, or 99.999 % of the time. And in fact, one of the takeaways of that research is people are not allergic to failure. They're aware of failure. And they're so aware of failure, they do everything they can to prevent it because of what's at stake. Now, if you had your R &D department operating with high reliability organization principles, you wouldn't get any innovation.

9:30If you had a scientific laboratory and a leading university operating with high reliability organizations, they wouldn't have any big discoveries. So it's about being acutely sensitive to context. And I think when people in Silicon Valley say these things, they're smart enough to know what they're talking about, what they're saying, but they may not be translating it effectively for all of their listeners. I might debate you on the first part of that statement, but let's not go there. And since you're the queen of failure, what about when people say failure is not an option? Failure is not an option is, I think, one of the most misunderstood phrases.

10:13Because I think we can attribute it to Gene Krantz in the Apollo 13 mission. And of course, it's been memorialized in the movie and so on. But what Krantz is saying there is, we all know what's at stake here. We know the human lives that are at stake here. And I know that with your engineering training and your big brains and your dedication, you will figure something out. Like you will solve this incredibly challenging problem because none of us can bear to consider that other option. It's a statement of encouragement, of pride, of support, of confidence. It is not a statement of, I don't want to hear about anything going wrong around here, which of course leads things to go underground and have people not speak up about them.

11:11So if Mitch McConnell says failure is not an option, we have to take back the Senate. How would you interpret that? I would interpret that as a statement of wishful thinking, but it's not in the same category as the Gene Krantz story. And oftentimes, let's take Mitch McConnell out, but just say when senior leaders in organizations say things like that, they often may not be intending to do this, but they are inadvertently sending the message that when you say failure is not an option, you're really sending the message i don't want to hear about it right so when it happens because in a complex uncertain world some things will go wrong i guarantee it what they're trying to say of course is please hold high standards and give it your all bravo wonderful but what they are inadvertently saying is don't tell me about it and that leads to way more failures than if you don't make that mistake.

12:12I bet that was a favorite phrase of Elizabeth Holmes. Yes, I am sure you're right. Yeah, yeah, and that's why she's in jail today.

12:37it whenever i meet people they always ask me what it was like to work for steve jobs and i have explained this i don't know 50 000 times the only thing i've explained more is that I'm not part of the Kawasaki Motorcycle family. So with that prologue or prelude or introduction, I would like you to explain the three types of failures. What is this type of failure? What causes it and how to prevent it? And I know no one has ever asked you that before, but I'm going to stretch you, Amy, and ask you to do that. Okay. And nobody's asked it in quite that way, I have to say. Now, I've been thinking about this for a very long time, writing about it, studying it.

13:32And it only dawned on me in the last year or so that I should start with the good kind. Instead of leading up to it, I should start with the good kind of failure, which I call intelligent failure, borrowing a phrase from Sim Sitkin, who's a professor at Duke. And intelligent failures are the undesired outcome of thoughtful forays in new territory. We can call a failure intelligent when it is genuinely novel territory. We are in pursuit of an opportunity. We've done our homework. We've thought about what might happen and we've designed a test of that hypothesis. And finally, the failure is as small as possible to still be able to learn from it.

14:21You don't want to make bigger bets than you have to in uncertain territory. Now, I think intellectually, those four things are pretty obvious, but practically in organizations, it often doesn't happen that way because of various incentives or because people aren't systematic enough, but that's an intelligent failure. So these we don't want to prevent. In fact, for the most part, we would like to have more of them in organizations. Now, they classically happen in research and development, in basic science, in celebrity chefs, or all the places where people are deliberately and are self-aware pushing the envelope.

15:00But they can happen in your own life, too. Let's say you're searching for a life partner. You will have some intelligent failures along the way to finding your soulmate, right? You will go out on a date with someone because a friend thought you'd like each other. And it was a good hypothesis. It was an opportunity to meet someone you might like. And it was just a date. It wasn't a whole marriage. So that would be the same phenomenon, but in a personal setting. So these we don't want to prevent. The other two kinds of failures, indeed, as your question implies, we do want to prevent. So let's talk about them.

15:38The simplest kind of failure I call a basic failure. And it's basic because it has a single cause. That single cause is usually human error. You know, I put the milk in the cabinet instead of in the refrigerator and the milk spoils. So that's a basic failure. That's one that's pretty trivial, but it's one that happens because we're not paying attention or we're not maybe trained in an activity that we're trying to do. We haven't had enough training. We haven't done our homework, what have you. So those are obviously not worth celebrating. and the set of practices that help us prevent them include training, error-proofing, checklists, and various other systems and supports that help us do things right in the territory where the knowledge is already established of how to do it.

16:28You follow a recipe, you don't just guess when you're baking a cake. And so you prevent that failed cake. The third kind is what I call complex failures, and they are, as the title suggests, multi-causal. They generally happen because of a complex mix of factors, some of them external, some of them internal, that come together in just the wrong way to produce a bad outcome. A supply chain breakdown during a global pandemic is a complex failure. The supply chain struggled to deliver the goods and services it needed to because of a combination of things, people sick and not able to come to work, shipping routes being disrupted, storms that might happen and exacerbate the whole thing, factories that got shut down so they couldn't supply some of the things that needed to be supplied.

17:22So that would be a kind of large example of a complex failure. But complex failures are best prevented also by training, by careful systems thinking when people are helped to see how things relate to each other so that they don't make actions over here that lead to some unintended consequence over there that they're unaware of, but they could have been aware of if they actually put their head above the parapet and talked to the right people. So when someone is killed on a movie set by a gun, is that a basic failure because it was a simple thing or is it a complex failure? Lots of things had to go wrong.

18:04It turns out that particular one, which I'm sure we're thinking of the same one on the rust set, I would diagnose it as a complex failure because it had several contributing factors and a handful of at least early warning signs that were downplayed or not paid attention to. And it's a complex failure when any one of the contributing factors, if you change that one factor, you would avert the failure. Whereas if the basic failure is just one bad thing was done, it didn't get stopped and it created the failure. But in the Rust story, you had some unclear how the live ammunition ever made it to the set.

18:53It never was supposed to. It was also then checked by someone right before, I think with just a faulty diagnosis. And about three or four other things happened that any one of which could have caught and corrected the defect and led to it not happening. And in something like that, from a legal liability standpoint, who takes the fall? Well, that's a hotly debated question, as I'm sure you have seen and others have seen in the news. And interestingly, the answer to that question with respect to this particular case has shifted around from the producer to the arms person, the person in charge of the movie weaponry, as it were.

19:38When there's lots of causal responsibility to spread around, my rule of thumb answer would be that the person in charge is responsible, that the general manager, the CEO, and in this case, that would be Baldwin. But it's one thing to be responsible. It's one thing to be the person who must apologize, must do whatever is in their power to prevent the same thing ever happening again. But that's different than the question of legal liability, because it's hard to be legally liable for a complex and unfortunate confluence of factors. And I just want to ask for clarification of this point. You're saying we should not try to prevent intelligent failure?

20:30Yes, I am. Because as long as they fit the criteria, new territory, there's an opportunity here that you or others see. You have done your homework and it's a thoughtful experiment or a thoughtful test. And you are using only as many resources and time as you must, no more. Then it is necessarily producing something of value. You hope you're right and you just produced an intelligent success. But in some fields, like basic science, 90 % of the time, it's failure. So the reason why you don't want to prevent them is because they are where discovery lives. Now, not everyone has to be, at least in their job, a pioneer and a discoverer of new knowledge.

21:19But I think in our lives, we do want to be that because we want to keep growing and learning. So we have to be willing. In fact, we should be most eager to have more intelligent failures. A trivial example, about 10 years ago, I started to play golf. Now, you don't start to play golf at that age and expect it to go terribly well. But it's fun to try something new and fail so badly at it, but then get better at it. And it develops those muscles, those learning muscles, if you will. Well, Carol Dweck would be proud, first of all, right? I started surfing at 60. Wow, good for you. And Madison humiliates me every day when we go out there, but that's a different discussion here.

22:09Okay, taking intelligent failure off the table, and now we're just basic and complex failures, what prevents people from learning from failure? It's a great question. And there's really wonderful research on this. And the big takeaways from it is, and I'll just summarize, we have an aversion to it. We just have an instinctive aversion to failure. I think we have a sort of a deep reluctance to be imperfect because it's threatening. It's psychologically threatening. And so the easiest way is to self-protect from that threat is to just to ignore it, look the other way, not want to spend the time you need to spend to sort of dig into it and understand.

22:52what did I do wrong and what could I do differently? We just have the allergy to it. So that's one bit. Another is the social side, the fear of looking bad in front of others, especially others whose opinions we care about. And some failures, you can learn about them absolutely privately. And then this doesn't apply there. But many failures happen in your lives or at work where in order to really learn from them and bring other people in, you might have to admit, Hey, this failed and I need your help. Or you might have to get help from others in diagnosing what went wrong and getting their advice on how to do better next time.

23:29And that's embarrassing and we're reluctant. We don't want to be seen in a bad light by others, especially others we respect and care about or think their opinion of us matters for some reason. And so that's sort of a second element. And I think the third part is just that it takes a little bit of work to get to the root cause of it. We're very quick to jump to the superficial answer. Oh, it didn't go well, I'll just do better next time. But not to want to do the harder work of really analyzing what went wrong. Flipping the question completely, what do people or what should people learn from success as opposed to failure?

24:12I think we should learn from success to always be a little suspicious of it. Our instinct is to want to say, oh, I succeeded at that. I must be great. I must be talented. I must be a great, whatever the sport or whatever the academic activity or professional activity, rather than realize I contributed to that great outcome, but so did a bunch of other factors. So you don't want to, you know, the phrase rest on your laurels. You don't want to take it as information that suggests you're now good to go. Maybe this brings us back to Carol Dweck as well. A success, it's easy to want to draw the wrong messages from it.

24:53Which is what? I'm infallible? Well, I'm infallible. I'm just great. I don't, you know, so I don't have to keep learning or stretching or growing. It wasn't in, you know, maybe a success. Many successes are the result of a confluence of factors that came together. We've got, let's say, a business environment that's conducive to getting funding for my brilliant idea. I've got a country of laws that helps when someone breaks the law, right? There's a whole context in which a success unfolds and all of the factors likely played an important role in that success, not just you and your ability. How about if you start the most valuable automotive company and then you decide to buy a social media site?

25:42Well, there's an interesting example of, I think, the phenomenon we're talking about because that could be seen as over-attributing success is such a large and global ability that it can be then turned around and applied to anything. Up next on Remarkable people. And mistakes and failure are not the same thing. Mistakes are when I get it wrong, despite the fact that I could have known better. There was a recipe, I didn't follow it. Whereas a failure is sometimes born of mistake, but sometimes it's a genuine discovery in new territory. If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it.

26:25Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. Push comes to shove. What's a better teacher, success or failure? I think they are both important teachers. I would err on the side of failure is a better teacher. but they are both important teachers so long as you do the hard work of learning from them and really making sure you're being analytic and thoughtful in the lessons you take from them. I think many people are good at declaring success, myself included. That's not hard. I wanted to know your perspective on how and when, or mostly when, how do you declare failure?

27:21How do you know that you can't push this boulder up the hill anymore? It's just the boulder is too heavy, the hill is too tall. Because the same people who are saying fail fast, break things, failure is not an option. Half of them are saying pivot quickly. And the other half are saying, if you believe, keep trying, ignore the naysayers. So when do you give up on the boulder? I would like to say there is no single rule of thumb that will apply to all situations with that one. But it is an absolutely wonderful question. And so I'm going to give you an unsatisfying answer, which is that it's going to require judgment.

28:01But I do think we can do better than just judgment. because it's judgment will be better, higher quality judgment, if it is informed by diverse perspectives. Because we treasure and value persistence. Like we love that entrepreneur who assisted. Angela Duckworth's work and Sarah Blakely and Spanx and that sort of, you know, you don't take no for an answer. But at some point, the world could be telling you something. Now, at what point, you know, so how long do you keep pushing the boulder up the hill before you say, maybe this is the wrong hill? Again, I don't think there's a one size fits all answer to that question.

28:47But I do think you have to start listening to the little voices inside your head that are saying, maybe this is the time for a pivot. And those little voices will be well served if they are allowed to listen to other voices of your friends, your family, your colleagues, your spouse, what have you. You know, that you sort of in an earnest attempt to see whether you may have blind spots or you may be missing something in this persistence, this quest to make this thing happen that the world seems to not want to make happen. Get some other input because they will help you figure out whether it's just roll up your sleeves and keep trying or whether maybe now's the time to just pivot slightly or a great deal.

29:32I would make the case that women will be much better at doing this than men because men cannot admit that the boulder is too big or the hill is too tall. I wouldn't disagree with you. And that's why maybe you need the diverse voices. So it's a team sport. This exercising of judgment in unclear territory is almost always a team sport. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So do you think people are more likely to give up too early or keep trying too long? That may be a personality difference. Some people will give up too early. In fact, I'm sure you can think of some. I know I can. We just tried it. It didn't work.

30:16But other people will go too long. Maybe we call them stubborn. Maybe they put their blinders on. But I think that is one of those, at least for me, rare things that's very personality dependent. Do you think that failure is a slippery slope? So if you quit taking piano or quit violin or quit calculus, and next thing you know, you're a lifelong quitter? I hope not. Since I quit piano a long, long, long time ago, I never really got going. I quit law school. Yeah, there you go. I prefer to think of it as maybe if you're quitting everything, as soon as it gets hard, because just about anything worth doing gets hard at a certain point.