It's OK to Fail, but You Have to Do It Properly

0:00This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new.

0:36It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

1:09right so if you recognize that funky guitar riff that's right this is Harvard Business Reviews the new world of work I am Adi Ignatius editor-in-chief of HBR and we are back with a new season of the new world of work so each week we will I'll be interviewing a CEO, a thought leader, somebody interesting who can inspire us, can educate us on some of the changing dynamics of the workplace. There are a lot of big issues that come up that we're all facing. I think all of us, whether we're in big companies, small companies, whether we're in the U.S. or somewhere else. So we want to bring in people, have conversations that we hope will help you as you think about how to make your company better, how to strengthen your career.

1:50We have a great guest today. She is Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School. I'm going to come back to a proper introduction in a second. But before we do that, let's hear from our friends at KPMG who are our sponsors for this season. At KPMG, it's our people who make the difference for our clients. Talented teams leveraging the right technology to uncover insights that illuminate opportunity. Ready to make the difference together?

2:25Okay, so as I said, our guest today is Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor who's probably best known for her work on psychological safety in the workplace. She's authored a number of books, including the forthcoming Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well, which will be available very soon in September. So Amy, welcome to the new world of work. Great to be here, Adi. Thanks for having me. So just before we start, to our audience, you know, I'm going to be talking to Amy. We would love to take audience questions later, you know, put them into the chat, and we'll try to get to as many as possible.

3:00Quickly, let me just say, if you're an HBR subscriber watching this, you can head to hbr.org slash newsletters to sign up for the New World of Work, which is an email newsletter where I will offer an inside look at each of these interviews and talk about some of the ideas that came out of them. So that's a little pressure, Amy, to produce newsletter-worthy content today. Pressure's on. I think you can do that. So, all right, so your book is about failure, primarily about failure, and let's start there. You know, I was under the impression that we'd sort of come around, that we all got that failure is noble and not shameful and provides useful learning lessons.

3:41But you're writing a book that seems to be saying that we need to think hard and maybe differently about failure. So talk about what you're trying to accomplish with this book and why you're taking on this topic. Well, you know, I was with you. And then I kind of poked around and realized that the truth is many people were still confused about failure. So there is a lot of happy talk about failure out there. There's the virtual mantra of Silicon Valley, fail fast, fail often, failure is good, let's learn from failure, let's have failure parties, let's have failure resumes, and so forth. And the truth is, the future of work will be riddled with failure.

4:21We can't just wish it away, even if we wanted to, we have to work with it. But I think no one can really take to heart the happy talk about failure unless they have a coherent framework. So you could think of it as the two camps, right? The Silicon Valley fail fast, fail often. And then the other camp, which is, yeah, right. I live in the real world. Failure is not an option. And they're both right, right? Or they're both partially right. But neither is terribly helpful nor context specific. And so this episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once.

5:05So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

5:42Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. I think the happy talk, when it's not qualified with a coherent way of making distinctions between the good kind of failure and the not so good kind is possibly more destructive than helpful. You know, it drives the honest conversation underground. So I think it's important to talk about the kinds of failure for which we really should be welcoming it with open arms and the kinds where we maybe shouldn't. So I think the best thing you can say about failure is if you have a culture that permits failure, that tolerates failure, it means you're stretching, you're pushing, you're trying to innovate, you're trying to do things that are difficult.

6:34You know, and I think of that as a sort of, you know, part of the definition of what is a digital company. A digital company experiments frequently and tries and fails and is able to tolerate failure. But I'm interested, though, and I would guess if you talk to most companies, they'd say, yeah, we do that. That's the culture we have. We didn't used to, but we do that. So I want to push you a little bit more on, you know, you seem to, if I hear you, it seems to be saying that's the rhetoric, that's the happy talk. But in reality, that's not really how the world works. Yeah. I mean, first of all, it's not how most incentives are set up.

7:13I'm not saying uniformly that's the case, but most of the time failure is not rewarded in organizations and people would rather do anything but fail. And so, you know, I think part of the problem, and you're right, maybe a better way to talk about this is not as failure, but as experimentation. We have to be very pro-experimentation, but we have to be pro-smart experiments. So, and I think smart failures are the result of smart experiments. And smart experiments are ones that happen in new territory. Honestly, If you can look up the answer, find the recipe, find the blueprint, please do. No need to experiment.

7:52New territory in pursuit of a goal that's consistent with the value proposition of the organization with a hypothesis. You know, you've done your homework and importantly, as small as possible. So that those are the kinds of both experiments and failures we must welcome with open arms. They are discoveries, and they allow us to figure out quickly what to try next. But a portion of the book is devoted to, you know, what do we know about best practices for failure-proofing, that which can be failure-proofed. The activities, the operations in your company that are in known territory are ones that should be well set up to make failure extremely rare.

8:44Are there industries that do not tolerate failure? I mean, I was thinking, I don't know, airline pilots. I mean, you don't really want them to fail. This isn't merely a rhetorical question. Are there industries that really don't tolerate failure? And can you look at them and say, you actually can get interesting results if you have that kind of policy? Well, let's start with airlines, right? Because clearly, none of us want them to be comfortable with failure. And yet, I think the reason why airlines have an extraordinary record of success and safety is because they're willing and able to talk about failure.

9:25So the failures that they do tolerate happen in the simulator, that there's training, there's a lot of emphasis on speaking up early to prevent something worse from happening. So this is not, you know, their safety record does not come from being intolerant of failure, but rather being intolerant of, you know, major accidents. Therefore, we have to be very tolerant of the research. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra.

10:05Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense?

10:42There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Reality of human error so that we can catch and correct, so that we can train, so that we can allow people to take the kind of risks and experiments we were just talking about in safe settings like the simulator, not in the execution of the real duties. So I but I don't think it's possible to say, you know, to describe industries in in the way your question implies. I think there's variation across companies. So they're picking industry, fast moving consumer goods. It's going to be not that hard to find differences in cultural failure tolerance within those industries across across companies.

11:30So a more sensible way to put that is that some companies, I think, are doing better than others in having a healthy tolerance of intelligent failure. Again, I'm Adi Ignatius, editor of Harvard Business Review. My guest is Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School. If you have questions for Amy, put them in the chat and we'll try to get to some later. So I don't want to just talk about failure, but I do have a couple more questions. And, you know, you started to talk about, I guess, you didn't use the term, but what a productive failure might look like. But, you know, you did mention that they're good and bad failures.

12:09And, you know, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about what's the difference and how does one try to make sure their failures are the good kind? Sure. Well, in known territory where we have a process or a formula for getting the result we want, it's best practice to use that process, use that formula and get the result we want. So when a Citibank employee a number of years ago accidentally made a small human error and accidentally wired$800 million to a client that shouldn't have received it, that was a basic unproductive failure. It turns out they were not even able to get the money back.

12:52So not celebrating that kind of failure. And you're right, a productive failure is one where we get new and useful knowledge, new knowledge that helps us go forward in creating the kind of value we're trying to create in our market for our customers. So we discovered something that we could not have discovered without trying it, without the experiment. And would you recommend that there be an elaborate postmortem? I mean, I think, you know, the military, whatever you think about the military, they're very focused on doing, you know, detailed postmortem, what happened, what went wrong, why, presumably to learn from that and not have it happen again.

13:39Do you believe in that, doing a kind of extensive postmortem on something that didn't work out? Absolutely. I mean, and I think the word extensive, probably a better word is thorough. It is not the case that a postmortem has to take inordinate amounts of time, but it should be thorough. It should be analytical and look carefully at the different facets of the failure to understand accurately what happened and why for the express purpose of preventing that exact failure from happening ever again. So a failure, even an intelligent failure, you know, in new territory, new discovery, is no longer intelligent the second time it happens.

14:23I want to shift gears a little bit and talk more generally about the workplace. You know, really, the question is, you know, are we OK? You know, you wrote a recent piece in Harvard Business Review that suggested maybe things are not so great, that the relatively low levels of engagement or productivity, high rates of burnout, you know, we can expect. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean.

15:09And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

15:44...to why that's true, but is that accurate? I mean, obviously it's hard to generalize, but, you know, are we suffering? And if so, how do we respond to that as managers? Well, I don't have a kind of systematic worldwide data set from which I can make solid inferences about how people are doing. My impression comes from informal conversations, qualitative research, reading HBR and so many other outlets to sort of see how people are doing. So really, in a way, I'm commenting on the conversation in HBR and so many other sort of business media contexts, maybe LinkedIn and elsewhere. And one thing I think I can say for sure is that the anxiety is real.

16:39And people are worried about the future. They're worried about it on so many fronts. They're worried about climate change. They're worried about AI. They're worried about burnout. As you mentioned, I'll come back to burnout. But that anxiety tends to push us toward a retreat to kind of our individual corner. And people start to think, am I going to be okay? And they become more focused on their own well-being than on the sort of health of the team or health of the organization. And that gives rise to a real potential for erosion, even vicious cycles, where organizations find themselves in the trap of responding to requests and issues in isolation one by one.

17:25And so we need a sort of more holistic way of thinking about it. And I see limited evidence of companies sort of being at least described as pausing to think about the larger picture, their value proposition, what it implies for how they must be structured and led to get the necessary work done and how to organize that work with all its variety and variable needs in a kind of thoughtful way and how to inspire and motivate people to do it well. So let me just briefly go to the burnout issue because there actually has been some recent data, some studies that have caught my eye showing that the burnout is systematically higher when psychological safety is lower, right?

18:16So, for instance, it seems to me that some portion of the burnout is associated with loneliness and isolation. I think it's fair to say that we can endure many challenges when we feel genuinely that we're in it together, that we're connected and engaged with our colleagues in trying to sort of navigate these challenges.

18:46Yeah, so there are a number of responses to that. And, you know, the idea that there's a, I don't know, a loneliness trend or epidemic or something like that. I mean, you know, one can't help but think, okay, you know, is some of this related to the pandemic, which, you know, for many of us broke up teams, created work environments with work from home that in many ways is fantastic for people who are balancing their work and life. It must take a toll at the same time on something, on maybe the teaming imperative that you've written about. Is that kind of, I mean, is that your hunch that the pandemic and our response to it is maybe contributing to this?

19:34Yeah, I do think the pandemic took a toll on us, on all of us. And, and, and.

19:57or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners. Sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together.

20:38Shop now at palmolive.com. You know, it created such an obvious uncertainty that, you know, it was such an obvious disruption. It wasn't sort of the gradual shifts that we're normally used to. It was a very abrupt shift. And it gave rise to all these really wonderful and I think productive experiments on different work arrangements. And now it's time for very systematic assessment of what's working and what isn't. And it can't be incremental. And it can't also be based on what do people say they want. Because oftentimes what we say we want is not actually what we need or truly want in the longer term, bigger picture to get where we need and want to go.

21:34Yeah, I mean, you talked a second ago about trying to have a kind of comprehensive policy and approach. you know that that i mean if i heard you right not not dealing with people sort of always uniquely individually but but that's sort of the nature of management now i mean it seems to me that and i think the pandemic contributed uh to that for a lot of people but you know we've written about this that suddenly managers are expected to be you know in addition to everything else you know almost like psychiatrists that there's a an openness for people to share their their their personal situations challenges problems and that it's the role of the manager increasingly to engage with that in an intelligent way so you end up where you know management becomes hyper personalized um but i think maybe you're already on to the the risk which is losing the the sense of the kind of teaming and the collective effort.

22:38It's almost as if we've lost sight of tensions and trade-offs. I mean, there will always be a tension between me and we, right? There'll always be a tension between sort of my desires in the moment and my aspirations over the long term. And, you know, we can think of so many examples of that. If you ask me what I want, you know, pay me infinitely and don't ask me to do anything and let me eat ice cream all day. Right. But that's not going to get me where I really, really need to go and want to go. I want to make a difference. And I I think when I think we're right now in a sort of a moment of not helping people value the collective.

23:22I mean, why we as human beings, we're social creatures. That's part of it. But it's also we want to matter. We want to matter to others. We want to matter in in some way that's larger than ourselves and our sort of hedonistic desires. And to matter, I think we have to. You could think of it in a way in an old-fashioned management theory way of the theory of the firm. If markets worked by themselves, we would just have only contractors doing tasks. And it would be efficient. It would be sensible. It would be logical. But it doesn't work because a lot of the work we have to do is inherently collaborative and dynamically so.

24:07It isn't easily parceled out, dividing and conquering style. It requires us to really work together in kind of meaningful ways. The good news is that can be a very engaging, rewarding, exciting experience. The bad news is it's not easy to manage. But I think we can go down that rabbit hole of each person has to be managed differently. each person, you're almost a psychiatrist to that person. Real value shows up in reliability. You don't have to second guess. Like a set of Firestone all-season tires. They're designed to deliver confidence-inspiring wet weather traction and a quieter ride, no matter the road, season after season.

24:58Firestone all-season tires. For durability, you can count on. Just like people count on you. Firestone, always dependable since 1900.

25:33cleaning even easier so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. Versus let's step back and rethink how do we design our activities, our operations so that we create the most value for those we serve. Yeah, I love that. And I have to say that I don't think companies have figured that out yet. You this disruption of COVID, I think opened our eyes to some flexibility. But I think the things you're putting your finger on, we're trying to solve for that. And I think a lot of us haven't yet and need to keep experimenting. So we're in this age of anxiety or where there's just, as we said, there's burnout and all that.

26:21And then you throw on top of that AI, open a generative AI, and a kind of fear, possibly irrational, possibly not. The generative AI will be able to do all of our jobs, you know, as well or almost as well at almost no cost, you know, than what we can do now. I don't, I assume you haven't done quantitative research, but qualitatively, you know, how, you know, what's your advice for people as open AI, I mean, it's generative AI sort of enters the workplace at every level and the possibilities become clearer and clearer. What's your advice, I guess, to managers and or employees, like how to cope with this, not get flattened by it, but maybe benefit from it?

27:10Well, as you indicated, it's a little outside my wheelhouse, except for the effects on people and culture. And so I speak from the perspective of someone listening at the margins to the many conversations in work and social gatherings alike and media. And I think you're right. I think fear is the dominant emotion, right? Certainly some are excited. Some are super optimistic about the amazing changes to come. But I think casually I hear more fear than optimism. The truth is we need both. We need that sort of this is here. We need some sort of positive, thoughtful, design oriented approaches to experiment and figure out what's going to work.

27:56But I don't think they're going to be simple solutions to the dramatic shakeup of what's possible. So let's go to some audience questions, because we do have them coming in. We have a large and engaged audience. And, you know, so let's hear what they have to say. So here's a question from Omar from Monterey in Mexico. And the question is, what kind of metrics can be used to measure smart failures? Well, you know, my first response is, that's a good idea to have metrics. And one of the things that I've spent the most time studying is how many failures just don't even get the chance to be measured because people don't speak up about them.