How to fail well (to become a better entrepreneur) | Author and psychologist Amy Edmondson

0:04Failure, especially in new territory, as a human being trying to live a full life, failure is going to come along with the territory. embrace it, accept it, know that instead of it being shameful and embarrassing, it's actually a source of connection and relationship with other people. You will make mistakes, you will have failures, and you'll get through them. Welcome to Secret Leaders. Today I'm joined by Amy Edmondson. Amy is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, A renowned author and in 2022 was recognized by Thinkers50 as the most influential management thinker in the world.

0:44She's known for her work in the research of psychological safety, the notion that the most successful teams are those in which people can speak up and admit their mistakes. She's with us today to talk about her new book, Right Kind of Wrong, Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive, and I can't wait to hear more about it. Amy, welcome to Secret Leaders. Thank you so much for having me. So I'm sure I missed a few things out in your introduction, but let's get straight into it. Why do we hate to fail? Well, I think we come by it honestly. We have a natural aversion to failure. We would rather succeed than fail.

1:21There's an instinctive worry about fear. I mean, about failure, excuse me. And so that's quite natural. our social environment and our upbringing exacerbate that natural aversion to failure. So I think it's pretty straightforward, right? We want to succeed. We want to be thought well of, we want to do well, we don't want to fail. And talk to me a little bit more about the aversion then. So instinctive emotional response to failure. Like, you know, when you say instinctive, is that, you know, from like people often talk about, you know, the ancient days, the caveman days? Is this like a fight or flight kind of situation?

2:00I think it absolutely is. In fact, it's quite closely related to the fight or flight, that amygdala triggered response that leads us to panic a little bit. And if you think about it, long ago, days of hunter gatherers, we would have been at risk for death if we somehow got expelled from the tribe, right? If people decided we were not worth having around, we were in trouble. Our success, our life depended upon others' willingness to sort of connect and associate with us. And so I think that's where it traces back to. But certainly from a very early age, most of us are given strong messages about getting things right, getting the right answer in school and not failing and and our our failures are greeted with derision or humiliation and our our successes are greeted with applause so we'd rather have the applause just as you were saying it i was remember remembering watching you know a recent planet earth david attenborough you see this try you know group of monkeys basically and if they don't stay together if the fittest doesn't survive doesn't manage to keep up and succeed like you say it literally can be a matter of life or death and all descended from monkeys.

3:12It was really interesting to see that being a real thing. It's so visceral. And today that doesn't describe the modern world to the same extent at all. And yet we have those vestiges in our emotional systems. So when you talk about, you know, we're taught it from a young age, how do you think that's changing? So what have you seen in your career about that narrative and that attitude? How have you seen that changing through your lifetime and I've got a part two. Well, I think that we're very influenced today and it is changing education by Carol Dweck's work on mindset. And I think we have a greater appreciation, certainly than when I was in elementary school, that children need to try new things and be allowed and encouraged to fail and sort of get comfortable with that discomfort of failure, because that's where learning and stretch and accomplishment really come from, is that willingness to try something that might not work out and experience the disappointment of it, but it's not crippling.

4:18It's not fatal. And so I think we're much more aware culturally, at least intellectually, we're aware that failure is a stepping stone to success, that without a willingness to take risks, it's very difficult to accomplish great things. but intellectually understanding that and kind of emotionally taking it to heart are two different things. Yeah. So obviously Winston Churchill was, it reminded me when you said that, you know, success is not final, failure isn't fatal, is a perfect example of this. I was reflecting how, I've spent quite a lot of time in America, live in the UK, been very fortunate to travel to lots of different parts of the world, and I spent a month in Japan.

5:00And the reason I'm bringing up these three places is I think culturally America is probably the furthest ahead in the curve with the attitude of you know failure isn't fatal the UK may be somewhere in the middle and you think about somewhere like Japan great shame cultural shame around the idea of failure and it's very baked into you know the culture about pride and success and everything else so I'm curious as to your own experience these are sort of cosmetic perspectives I'm not an academic on the topic but this is, if you will, a visitor that spent time in different countries, what I observe.

5:34I wonder what you think academically and what you've seen as the progress we're making in the narrative around failure in different parts of the world. Well, I think the narrative is one thing, and I do think we're making progress in the narrative. And I think you're right that the U.S. narrative around failure is quite advanced, shall we say. And there's virtually a mantra among entrepreneurs about fail fast and we learn from our failures. And probably no great entrepreneur just kind of immediately shows up as a great entrepreneur with a great company. They have to have had their prior failures for us to really be willing to bet on them and think they're going to succeed.

6:17So there's all of that rhetoric. There's that narrative. I still think, even in the US, that we have a very hard time emotionally and psychologically kind of coping with our own failures. We can love to step back and celebrate the idea of failure and celebrate the failures of others, perhaps. But at some deep level, we think, no, I'm going to be the exception. I'm going to skip the failure part and just go right to a wildly successful new company or discovery or idea, et cetera. And how do you think this sort of plays out in industries? Because I suppose I'm thinking right now in science, science is a process of failing and proving and failing and proving.

7:02It feels a bit natural there. It's not sort of a shame attached to it. Whereas in other industries, and maybe that's why technology is quite good with it as well, because technology is quite often rooted in the scientific aspect. Do you see a broad range of how people behave around this? Yes, absolutely. You know, the idea of intelligent failures and fail fast and all of that live in science and technology. I mean, that's their bread and butter. They get that. They get that at a very deep level. Now, I'm married to a scientist. I live with a scientist. And I know for sure that he still prefers success, right?

7:35That if he and young scientists in his lab have a hypothesis and they run an experiment, and many of these experiments take weeks for the cells to develop in the cultures. and so on, when it turns out they're wrong, it is deeply disappointing. They far prefer to be right, make no mistake. And yet, so how do they live with it, right? How do they go to work each day knowing that 80 % of the time they're going to fail? I think the answer lies in two things. One, they understand this is the sport they signed up for, right? It's a sport where you're going to fail more than you're going to succeed. They also absolutely delight in that 20 % or whatever the percent is.

8:15The discoveries, the experiments that do work are so exciting and they lead to big papers and big contributions and successful careers. So they learn to live with that challenge. So their failure muscles are more developed than the rest of us. But I think they learn that. They don't naturally have it. They're not sort of different kinds of people than you or eye. Yeah. I mean, interestingly, failure is one of my favorite topics. We even have a sub-series on secret leaders all about failures. They're just 15 minute episodes on failures because we believe you learn more about those than you do just from success stories.

8:53And there's a great book I read years ago called Black Box Thinking. I don't know if you've read it. Oh yes. Matthew Siyad. Matthew Siyad. Yeah. And that was sort of the first time as I, you know, this is so, it's two examples I will just always stick in my head. Obviously, Black Box Thinking coming from the aircraft industry, airplane industry, which has something like the lowest rate of fatal failures like in any industry full stop because it's so innately focused around discussing and bringing up failures. And you compared it to the medical industry where you get sued for making mistakes. So people hide it.

9:27And, you know, you track that over time and you have like the safest industry in the world versus this calamity that should be exponentially safer. But there's a lot of shame attached to it. So yeah, I'd love your opinions on this because I rarely get to speak to an academic on the topic. This is such an important and interesting phenomenon. And you're right, there are industry level differences. And of course, anybody in aviation or healthcare, for that matter, would bristle at the idea that failure is good. They'd say, hold on, you don't live in my world, right? In my world, failure is bad. But as you say, in aviation, the only way they've gotten to their extraordinary safety record is through awareness of failure, you know, not through ignoring it or wishing it away or commanding it away, but by literally knowing it's around every corner, you know, they're obsessed with it.

10:17So because of that heightened awareness, then there's more thoughtful interrelationships in the cockpit. And there's, you know, more analysis of the small things that do go wrong and more willingness to look at the close calls to figure out what you can learn from them and make yourself even safer tomorrow. And I don't think it's, you know, I think what you say about health care is absolutely true. They have a less good safety record than aviation, but to their credit, they do have a harder problem. The nature of patient care, it's enormous, you know, there's a lot of knowledge about how to do it well, but it's also enormously variable.

10:53and every patient is in an important way unique. And so the care is customized and complex and 24-7, you know, the handoffs are complex. So it's actually a really hard job. Now, their attitudes need to keep up with that reality, right? If people in the care professions think, okay, when something goes wrong, there's a culprit, let's find them, let's sue them, let's jail them, that's not going to help us become safer. But when they say, wow, we work in a complex, customized, error-prone system, then they're more able to adopt the behaviors that we've seen in aviation. They're more able to say, hold on, that doesn't seem to be the right thing to be doing right now, to speak up, to catch incorrect.

11:45And so what I have seen in my research is tremendous variance across teams, across healthcare systems, in the culture of learning and in the safety culture. All begs the question, why become an expert on failure? I'm a glutton for punishment. It's a topic I have been long interested in, I think, in part because like every social psychologist, you sort of are drawn to things that worry you, drawn to things that are hard and painful for you. So I think I have always been quite ashamed of my shortcomings. And I remain so today. You know, that's painful and hard to live with. Or let's get scientific about it and realize we can have fun with it.

12:33That in fact, failure, especially in new territory, as a researcher or just as a human being trying to live a full life, failure is going to come along with the territory. embrace it, accept it, know that instead of it being shameful and embarrassing, it's actually a source of connection and relationship with other people. I mean, I like you better when I discover that you're fallible, when I discover, when I get to know some of the things you're worried about or that you've, you know, that you're, that you think you've done wrong. Then, then suddenly we move from acquaintances to friends. I mean, you never become true friends with someone who's just giving you their flawless exterior.

13:14Do you have a couple of examples of failures in your life that you've experienced sort of outside of the academic space? Many. I guess I try to include in the book, you know, failures because I don't want to sound like I'm just a great scientist and I know it all. So I had to include, you know, basic failures where I just did something stupid and and suffered a failure. And, you know, they include such things as long ago as an undergraduate in college. I failed to do very much studying for a multivariate calculus exam. And I got an F on the exam. I literally flunked the exam. I mean, this is a, you know, this is at that point a young person who's essentially never gotten an A minus.

13:59So it was pretty devastating. And, you know, I had this idea in my mind. I was pretty good at math and all the rest. Nonsense, right? I mean, you have to study. So that was a bad one. More recently, a few years ago, I entered an alumni sailing regatta. I'm a very good sailor. I've raced a lot in my life. And now this turned out to have been a very windy day and high performance boats, the kinds of boats that really are for the young, you know, not for folks like me. although I, you know, I can hold my own, but I, and I did okay, not, not well, but you know, not dead last in the race. And then heading into the dock, rookie error.

14:39I'm going, I'm heading dead downwind into the dock. Any experienced sailor, which I am one, knows that when you are heading down, when you are in a dangerous situation, if the, if there is the tiniest shift in the wind, which in the Charles river is rampant, happens all the time, that boom can go flying across the boat And it can be a lethal weapon, like a baseball bat to the head. And I'm just chatting away with my crew. I know better. And boom, literally, here comes the boom. I didn't see it coming. It happened in less than a second, I imagine. And next thing you know, I'm in the Charles bleeding profusely with a pretty big head wound that ends up taking nine stitches and taking up the time, the valuable time of clinicians who surely have something better to do.

15:29than to clean up after my basic failure. So I felt terrible about it. And I, anyway, I obviously, I mean, here I am illustrating that my intense fallibility as a human being. What about emotional? Have there been any sort of like emotionally triggered failures or, you know, poor judgment throughout your life? Of course. Yes. You know, and without having, you know, a specific moment in mind, I have, you know, many more times than I like to admit, you know, said things that I shouldn't have said in, you know, in say an argument with my husband, I mean, that were uncalled for and unhelpful, for sure, right?

16:18So that's a kind of, you know, it's a failure of self-control, I suppose. And most of those kinds of things, we can pick up and move forward. And of course, they're usually bilateral in nature, but they're never praiseworthy. They're never helpful. I mean, we'd be, and I, I'll just speak for myself, I'd be much better off if I had the capability and the self-awareness to pause, you know, and think it through, right? Think through what will happen if, and make more thoughtful and considered responses. Now, I imagine most of our listeners have found themselves coming up short in their personal lives at various times, even if it's just the things which I've done as well, if, you know, not being there for a child's performance or game or so forth and because of work commitments or whatever and feeling bad about it.

17:17So we all have those deficiencies that we've produced of our own volition. And this is a podcast about leadership. And I do think that we owe it to ourselves, our colleagues and our organizations to do better at work. Maybe we should do better at home to, but really we should do better at work. And I'm always, I truly remain kind of surprised at a deep level when I hear stories, and I still do, the modern era where there are manager leaders who yell and scream at people or throw things or otherwise engage in bullying behavior and it just seems almost to me impossible to imagine not taking that leadership responsibility more fully more seriously and just pause stop you know challenge what you were about to do and choose something else instead it's quite fascinating to think about it as at some point in the last hundred years that would have been the norm yeah and never helpful but never helpful but actually you know progress was made and you know things were created and people did live fulfilling lives but at some point the weird niche voices that are like there's probably got to be a better way over time it must be quite encouraging to think you know over time they become the prevailing sensible most optimistic and pragmatic ways to build value and build careers and create new things in the world that people actually need and want.

18:58And the previous dominant theory of what good management looked like, or what normal management looked like anyway, suddenly starts to become the niche. That must be quite an interesting thing to sort of track over time, like the sort of cultural behaviors around that. Yes, it really is. And I think it correlates with, so it's probably loopy causality here, but it correlates with the degree to which innovation becomes more and more important to business success, the degree to which product life cycles are shrinking so that you've got to be sort of learning oriented. You've got to be, your company has to be spending some significant portion of its energy, like developing new things and, you know, and developing people quickly to fulfill the roles that are needed.

19:45So, you know, as the need for learning increases, then the need for a different kind of leadership also increases. So I know that the prevailing narrative, science, academia, and also personal experience all point to the fact that quite often your greatest failures do lead to your best opportunities. It's absolutely been the case in my life. Very hard to see it at the moment, but over a period of time, you noticed that they really were. What happens in the rare times as an academic, what happens in the rare times where that theory is actually proven wrong? in quite a big way. Have you seen that where, you know, a failure really hasn't created much of a good opportunity or anything?

20:24And how do you assess that? Well, you know, sometimes we're not, we're just not patient enough. So Thomas Edison, confronted by a lab assistant who said, gosh, you know, all these failures must be really hard for you. He said, failures, right? I haven't failed. I found 10 ,000 ways that don't work right now. That's probably apocryphal, but it represents a very true statement about an inventor who's willing to keep going. So sometimes if we're not patient enough, if you stop at 900, then it does look like nothing was learned. But I think a much more important point to make and phenomenon to recognize is that not all failures are created equal.

21:06I think we can learn from all failures, but not all failures have equal learning value. and what I call intelligent failures are the best kind. You know, that's the gold standard. They're the ones we learn a lot from because they were designed for us to learn from them. They were experiments. They were, okay, we don't actually know what's going to work, but we've thought it through and this might work because and we're not going to expend excessive energy or funds on trying it. And we try it and lo and behold, it's wrong, right? So it was designed to give us the learning we just got. We keep going.

21:44But let's say we have a failure caused by just not trying or a failure caused by failing to do our homework, not reading the available knowledge about how to produce this result we want, which was readily available if we'd only taken the trouble to look and we fail. Very little is learned from that. So they're not equal opportunities for learning. and then some failures happen, you know, the occasional failure is just plain bad luck, right? You had a beautiful thing all set up and along came a hurricane and wiped it away. Not your fault. What do you learn from that? Stay away from hurricanes? It's not a very generalizable lesson.

22:24Yeah, I guess you learn that nature is cruel and you just cannot account for everything in your life. Right. So you prepare, you can learn to be prepared. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, prepare for the unexpected. Correct. Which is obviously one of those things people say and then you realize in the cold light of day that's virtually impossible to do. But that is what life experience will give you over time. Okay, there's a really great statement that you talk about, which is, you know, failure is inevitable in work, which I think is fair to say if you're pushing boundaries or you're not pushing enough boundaries, you're going to fail in work.

22:59So how do you fail well? How do you do it with the right mindset? that? For me, failing well encompasses two categories. And one category is smart experiments, right? They are thoughtful forays into new territory, right? You have good reason to believe it could work, done your homework. It's not excessively expensive or wasteful if it doesn't turn out the way you had hoped. And so that's, you know, that's basically the scientific method. So it's when it fails, it was a good failure, as we discussed before you learn from it. The other aspect of failing well, though, is preventing as many preventable failures as you can.

23:38You know, don't chat with your crew when you're sailing downwind in a hefty breeze in a shifty river. So it's using the available knowledge, the best practices, the teamwork, the vigilance, the training that we have available to do the things we already know how to do with excellence, right? With attention. And so there failing well means, you know, it's the Toyota production system, you know, 99.99 % of the time, it's perfect, you know, one in a million might slip through with a little flaw in them. So that's failing well by not failing. So I think, you know, you talk a lot about the four essential tools for failing well, I'd love to go through them if we can.

24:24Yeah, so so the four criteria are one, it's new territory, right? There's genuinely no way to find out what you need to find out to make progress without action, without trying something. Number two, it's in pursuit of a goal. We're not just sort of having fun experimenting, but we don't have any clear idea of where we're trying to go or what we're trying to develop. And number three, it's you've done your homework. You've done the work you need to do to get up to speed on what is known, whether that's talking to customers or reading the scientific literature, you name it. You know, if someone else has sort of done this same startup before and it failed wildly, find out why.

25:04Do something slightly different. And number four, it should be as small as possible. It's so that the action, the experiment, the initiative should be no bigger than it has to be to get the knowledge you need. So in clinical trials, for instance, you do the power calculations to find out how many patients do we need to get an effect size statistically if this drug actually works in curing the disease. And you don't want to involve any more patients than you have to. And so that's, you know, it's just a concrete illustration of as small as possible, because as small as possible is going to be a judgment call.

25:45There's no, you know, one right answer for, well, how big is too big? It's you have to use your judgment, use your expertise to sort that out. I think about failure, Yeah, a fair amount. I'm an entrepreneur, so it's pretty common. Tell me a little bit about the mindset that we need to actually fail well. Do you have some good examples of things that we can do and think about? Yes, you know, I think the people who fail well, and especially those who fail well for a living, and entrepreneurs would be one of the categories where that can be true. They're quite driven, but they're quite goal-oriented.

26:18They want to expand what's possible for themselves or for their communities. So they're driven. They are curious. They really, it's like a genuine desire to find out what happens if, you know, they don't want to just sit around and read about it. They want to try it. And thirdly, they are very tolerant of failure, but they have stronger failure muscles than the rest of us, right? But they kind of, like Thomas Edison, the famous quote, they're more willing and able to bounce back to withstand the disappointment that each failure brings. So for listeners, do you have some examples that we can sort of jump to and go and explore ourselves what good failure looks like?

27:06So actually, I mean, part of this exploration is having rituals and opportunities for people to share their failures. It makes us all feel so much better when we learn about other people's failures. It also is vicarious learning. We can really learn from them. So many companies have things like Failure Friday, CNS, the big retailer, has that, for example, or Failure Awards. Tata has a failure award. And this is not, of course, these awards aren't for sloppy work, mailing it in and you didn't do well. These are always awards that are given for someone who really tried something bold and failed, because the point is to encourage other people to do likewise.

27:50In academia, there's kind of a growing interest in failure resumes. I described how, you know, I've had many, many papers rejected from journals that I really hoped would get in. And, you know, you could, I actually haven't, but you could publish a resume of the rejections. And one thing I have done well and honestly is share with my PhD students, one after another, all those rejection letters, you know, in a way. First of all, so they can see that, oh, even she got those letters. It doesn't have to be so painful. And secondly, because they really do point to errors or flaws that the papers had that maybe they can avoid, even though I didn't at that time.

28:33So these kinds of little rituals are just, I think they tap into our humanity, right? Our desire to connect with each other, our desire to be together, our desire to know that we have this in common. And they shape the culture, right? They really make it, they make this very important aspect of reality more discussable and more tolerable. One of the ways that you suggest as well that I really enjoyed and never really thought about was picking up a new hobby. Yes. Can you talk about why that makes sense? Sure. Yeah. I mean, when I say that for individuals as opposed to companies, although I think it probably applies for companies, too, you know, one of the ways to become a better failure is to fail more often, of course.

29:19So one of the ways to do that is to try something new. And maybe it's a little it's a bridge too far to go have more failures tomorrow in your professional life. But you can have them in your in your the rest of your life, the other part of your life. So a very dear friend of mine in her 40s joined. She lives up in Vermont in the U.S. And she joined a hockey team as a complete neophyte. She knew how to skate. But that was about it. And I remember thinking at the time, wow, I mean, that's brave. And you're not going to be good at it. And aren't you sort of already a little busy? And but it became she indeed she was, you know, not very good at it.