The Right Kind of Wrong: How to Reframe Failure for Success with Amy Edmondson
Amy Edmondson - Harvard Professor, Author and Researcher
Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research on psychological safety over twenty years.
Her award-winning work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and more. Named by Thinkers50 in 2021 as the #1 Management Thinker in the world, Edmondson is the author of Right Kind of Wrong, The Fearless Organization, and Teaming.
In this episode we explore failure – something all of us are familiar with, and something humans are notoriously not great at dealing with.
Failure is often a sensitive topic – in our conversation, Amy Edmondson makes failure relatable and fascinating. You’ll probably leave wanting to fail intelligently more often. You’ll definitely get insight into how to create an environment for intelligent failure in your workplace. And you’ll learn which sport Amy likes to use as her own playground for experimenting with failure.
The world is growing ever more complex in ways both global and personal. From climate change to the economy, from parenting to choosing a career, life is fraught with complicated challenges. For these issues and many others, navigating failure with aplomb is essential.
But when it comes to a problem-solving mindset, we’re often torn between two failure cultures, says Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School. One says “Failure is not an option” and must be avoided at all costs. Another advises “Fail fast, break things” as the path to achievement. They’re each memorable slogans, but neither leads to long-term success.
Instead, we need to reframe how we understand failure —on both a personal and cultural level —and learn to recognize the crucial distinctions that separate good failure from bad. Drawing on decades of original research, Dr. Edmondson shares how we can surpass a superficial approach to failure in RIGHT KIND OF WRONG: The Science of Failing Well.
This episode is proudly sponsored by Neurocapability.
“Amy Edmondson, one of our finest business minds, offers a bold new perspective on human fallibility. With a graceful mix of scientific research and practical advice, she shows how to transform failure from an obstacle to a stepping stone — from a weight that holds us back to a wind that propels us forward.
RIGHT KIND OF WRONG is a guidebook for our times.”
—Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of THE POWER OF REGRET and DRIVE
“No skill in life is more important than learning from failure—and no one on earth knows more about it than Amy Edmondson. Drawing on her eye-opening evidence and rich practical experience, she offers a wealth of insight on how to take intelligent risks and bounce forward after setbacks. If everyone internalized the ideas in this important book, we would all be safer, smarter, and more successful.”
—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Hidden Potential, and host of the TED podcast Re:Thinking
To learn more about Amy and order her latest book here:
The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
For accessible access, view the podcast with closed captions below and access the full conversation transcript.
Episode Transcript:
Spk0 Sally Clarke Spk1 Amy Edmondson Spk2 Alexis Zahner
[00:00:09] spk_0: Welcome to. We are human leaders. I'm Sally Clarke and today Alexis Zahner and I are speaking with Professor Amy Edmonson about her brand new book, right? Kind of Wrong? The Science are failing. Well, Amy's seminal research into psychological safety changed how we think about working together forever. Her latest research delves into failure. Something all of us are familiar with and something humans are not notoriously not great at dealing with failure is often a sensitive topic in our conversation. Amy makes failure, relatable and fascinating. You'll probably leave wanting to fail intelligently more often. You'll definitely get insight into how to create an environment for intelligent failure in your workplace and you'll also learn which sport Amy likes to use as her own playground for experimenting with failure. Let's delve in.
[00:01:04] spk_1: Welcome to we are human leaders, Doctor Amy Edmondson. It is an absolute pleasure to have you here with us today. And before we dive into your incredible work and in particular, your brand new book, we'd love to start with getting to know you a little bit more and the personal journey that's brought you to this important work that you're doing now.
[00:01:23] spk_2: Wow. Where do I begin? So, uh thank you. First of all, thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you. And I suppose my personal journey is one of a came to academia. On the late side. I worked as an engineer right out of college soon discovered that as much as I loved math, I really loved people. My interest was in how people get into the equation and either make things better or not. And yet, I didn't quite know what to do with that insight, but I guess I parked it away and then I had the chance to join a consulting company and I was in and out of organizations for the next few years years and seeing all of their triumphs, but also all of their struggles, especially struggles to learn to learn in a changing world. And it struck me as a really important question to try to shed more light on it and to try to help, but I was completely ill equipped to know how to do that. So at the recommendation of some folks I met along the way, some academics, they said, you know, you really should do a phd. And I said, oh, what's that? I mean, I more or less knew what it was but not the details. So I ended up taking them up on that advice, applying to doctoral programs, getting admitted to one being surprised as anyone could possibly be that you don't have to pay for it, they pay you. So, that was a good thing. And, um, I loved it so much. I guess that I never left and I've been in academia now for, you know, almost 30 years. So it was really, I was think I was driven by puzzles and curious, more and more curious as time went on about people. And when I discovered that there was a job you could do where you write and teach and study people and then write some more and teach some more the rhythm of it. And the combination of activities just seemed to me like a dream job, which it is.
[00:03:17] spk_1: And before we move on, Amy, I'd love to dive into if you wouldn't mind just a little bit around what your phd was all about. Yeah. Sure.
[00:03:24] spk_2: So, you know, I came into the doctoral program wanting to study in some abstract sense, like the learning organization and I wanted to understand what makes it easy and hard for organizations to learn in a changing world and that's too big, it's too big and too diffuse. So what I began to realize, I think in part because my advisor was a teams expert that the team was really the unit of learning. If you think about a large organization or a small organization, the way that organization innovates or adapts or makes better decisions in a changing world, nearly always happens in teams. It might be a top management team, it might be a new product development team, it might be a factory production team, but the learning, whether it's innovation or continuous improvement or problem solving happens in teams sort of within and among people. And so I then wanted to study how teams learn. And the title of my dissertation was very academic sounding group and organizational influences on team learning, which really meant how does individual psychology and group psychology and organizational factors affect the ability of teams in organizations to learn?
[00:04:34] spk_0: Thanks so much, Amy for sharing uh some background on what you delved into in your phd. And as many of our listeners will know of course, that has led ultimately to the fearless organization, your seminal work around psychological safety. And of course, now you a brand new book, the right kind of wrong, the science of failing. Well, my first question has to be what is the right kind of wrong and how can we distinguish it from the sorts of failures we really should be working hard to prevent
[00:05:03] spk_2: is indeed the right question. So let me do my best. So the right kind of wrong describes failures in new territory that occur during the pursuit of a goal. And they are hypothesis driven, which really means you've done your homework, you're not just randomly throwing darts at the wall, you've taken the time to think through this might work because, and fourth, it's as small, the failure is as small as possible. Which means that the risk, the test was small as possible, just big enough to get the information that you needed. And so that describes those criteria are true for a huge variety of failures and a failed blind date. You know, you go out on a date, someone friend thought you'd like each other and lo and behold, you didn't. Is that a waste? No, that's research. Right. That's basically the right kind of wrong because it was new territory. There was no way to know for sure without risking that evening. Similarly, a brand new cancer drug that is put into its clinical trials to test its efficacy and unfortunately fails again. Right. Kind of wrong in pursuit of a goal in new territory. No other way to find out whether it would work or not work without trying and you've done your homework, you've got a strong hypothesis about why this should work. And it's as small as possible. You don't involve more patients than you need to or more time than you need to. And wouldn't you prefer it work? Of course you would. But when and it doesn't. And especially because it's new territory, you have to really train yourself to welcome the new knowledge that it brings. So that's the right kind of wrong. The other kinds of failures. I divide them into two categories. One I call basic failures which are single cause failures. Usually human error. You make a mistake. There is a recipe. It's in familiar territory but lo and behold, you did it wrong for some reason we can dig into why. And that's a basic failure. Those aren't such good news. Right? Are, I mean, it's, I'm not saying they're shameful. They're not, we all do them all the time but they aren't bringing us new information except maybe they're bringing us information about how we're tired or we're not paying attention something like that, but they're not helping us progress into new territory. And then the other not good kind, but also prevalent. I call complex failures. And these are multi causal. These are the failures that happen when a number of factors line up in just the wrong way. Any one of those facts, actors wouldn't have led to the failure on its own. Right. You forgot to set your alarm, but you woke up, you know, a few minutes late. Not too bad. Right. But then again, you forgot to fill up the tank, right. And you're late for an important meeting. So if any one of those things had been changed, the failure wouldn't have happened. So those are the perfect storms that happen due to complexity and again, sometimes not paying attention. And the rest again, I don't think they're shameful. I don't think there's something that we should be lame blaming people for. It's not productive, but there's a distinct difference between intelligent failures, the right kind of wrong and other failures. Thanks
[00:08:05] spk_0: so much for sharing those three archetypes of failure. Amy, it sounds like they really are all three really things that we can learn from and that we also shouldn't be spending too much time if any really in this sort of shame and blame stage of things. Am I understanding that
[00:08:19] spk_2: correctly? Absolutely. So I think shame and blame are essentially never productive or helpful. I mean, that's not the same as saying that taking accountability or understanding what really happened and figuring out how to do better next time aren't useful. They are. But I think the harsh emotions of shaming or blaming generally produce the undesired result of not helping people learn and not doing what you need to prevent the same kinds of failures from happening the second time.
[00:08:48] spk_1: And I can't help think amy with the intelligent failure versus the basic and complex. There's a level of intentionality behind the attempt. Whereas basic and complex seems to be something we've happened upon. Perhaps we're being negligent or we're not thinking or said we're rushed, we're tired, but to fail intelligently requires us to have an attempt at something. Almost assuming that there is a risk that potentially failure might be part of the mix at some point.
[00:09:12] spk_2: That's exactly right. And I think that's actually such an important distinction and I'm not sure I had been making it clearly enough, the intelligent failures happen on purpose. That doesn't mean the failure happens on purpose, but they are part of activities you are doing on purpose. You know, you're in new territory, right? You know, you're trying something new, you know, you're trying to forge new ground. Yeah. Brilliant
[00:09:33] spk_1: and amy as human beings, failure. It's something we all experience, whether it's, you know, on a small level, as you mentioned or perhaps in other instances, something that can feel really, really scary and it's something that many of us don't do well, which is why we're here studying your work on how to fail. Well, what makes it so hard for human beings to fail?
[00:09:56] spk_2: Well, well, in the book, I write about aversion, confusion and fear and let me explain. So, aversion is our natural, probably hardwired aversion to failure. You know, we want to succeed, we want to look good, we wanna win, we don't want to lose, we don't want to fail. It's just very natural. It's part of the human condition. It's almost an emotional reaction to failure that worry that we might not be good enough. And confusion is that we lack the right. We lack a useful framework or useful distinctions for separating the good failure and the bad failure. So that's of course, a key point of the book is to help people make those distinctions and make them kind of effortlessly and happily to cool the heat if you will. And fear refers to the social stigma of failure that worry that, you know, other people will reject you or will, won't want you as part of the group. And that is also a pretty primal fear, but it's distinct from just that emotional reaction as individuals. It's the collective social part of it.
[00:10:54] spk_1: And I can't help but think, you know, coming from an organizational perspective that fear might be a real driving force into personal relationships and in the team environment and perhaps why it feels really terrifying for us to own our failures in those kind of settings.
[00:11:11] spk_2: Absolutely. And of course, this goes back to the work on psychological safety, which, you know, I found in my research on team learning that psychological safety, he was really the biggest factor shaping whether or not teams were good at learning and learning is measured as learning behaviors, you know, quality improvement, asking for help and yes, admitting mistakes and failures and the environment, the sort of the climate in the team just could vary so much from one team to another with allowing learning or not allowing learning and on that spectrum of behaviors, learning behaviors, you know, asking for help, you know, offering an idea, the most threatening of those behaviors is to admit a failure, admit a mistake. And so that's almost the highest level of interpersonal risk. So the one where psychological safety is most important,
[00:11:58] spk_0: fascinating and it's interesting and notice you mentioned also that there's this kind of almost cooling of the jets that sort of has to happen in order for us to be able to fail. Well, which makes me think immediately of that kind of nervous system response that we can have when we start to have a sense of fear or stress response in our bodies. So I can imagine that that sort of intelligence around our nervous system response and feeling able to then sort of move through that to a place of being, as you said, sort of be able to deal with it happily is quite an important skill for us to develop.
[00:12:28] spk_2: Yes, it's very hard to think carefully and analytically when we're gripped by fear, it's darn near impossible. I mean, we're then in that flight or fight mode and for most of us in the modern world it's fight, I mean, it's flight, you know, we're gonna, we just, but we don't run away from the meeting, we just, you know, freeze and maybe are quiet for a while because that fear is such an unhelpful state for really deep and challenging thinking.
[00:12:55] spk_0: Yeah, it really shuts us down, doesn't it? And it brings me to my next question around, you know, I'm really curious if we can sort of shift this to a sort of a practical level, how leaders can support the members of their team to be able to fail. Well, and perhaps if you have an example of where you're seeing a leader create that kind of culture where there is safety to fail. Well,
[00:13:15] spk_2: yeah. And first, let's get clear about what Farewell means. It means it means two very different things, more or less at the, at the same time. And one is to adopt the practices and the mindsets to prevent preventable failures, right. To avoid preventable failures, to be vigilant, to speak up quickly when you see something that isn't quite right. So that we can catch and correct deviations before they lead to actual failures. It's the having checklists and using them wisely. It's, you know, making sure people enough training to do the job that they're doing. Right. So all of those old fashioned mundane best practices to do well, that, which we already know how to do. Great. Right. So that's one aspect that, you know, failing well, is preventing preventable. And then the other kind, which is sort of more fun to talk about, I think is the increasing the frequency of intelligent failures, not because you want to take worse bets, but because you want to have more bets, you know, more experiments, you want to unleash people to engage in more small risky experiments is one word for it or just trying things out that they haven't tried before or asking a colleague what they think about something that they might have otherwise held back. Right. You're trying to push people out of their comfort zone in thoughtful ways on purpose, meaning aligned with the team or the organization's purpose. So that together we're continually stretching what's possible and learning fast from our experiences and from each other. So that's what it means.
[00:14:47] spk_1: Amy. And I can't help but think this requires us to have our like our scientific hat on because one thing I heard you say there was these preventable failures and to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that sounds to me like mitigating the variables that are within our control. But accepting those almost that we're testing in that experiment and in that hypothesis as being outside of our control.
[00:15:08] spk_2: Yes, indeed. But the weather is outside your control, your own behavior is largely inside your control. So making that distinction is really important, some version of the serenity prayer, you know, God grant me the, the wisdom to know the difference as well. But you asked also Sally about what can you do? So now that we understand what failing well is, you know, what can team leaders or just people in organizations do to make a failing? Well, more likely. And it's really twofold. But I think leaders especially have to be willing. Ed Kame who was a co-founder and then longtime Ceo of Pixar said, if we as leaders don't talk about our mistakes, we can't expect others to do it. We've got to do that first. We've got to go first so that they're more able. So some of this is behavioral where leaders are showing that they understand they're not omniscient, they're vulnerable to uncertainty just like the rest of us. And they're also willing to acknowledge where they got something wrong or where they missed something or they made a mistake and setting up. So that's why behavioral is one aspect of the answer. And the other aspect is kind of structures and systems that reinforce people's willingness to experiment and then help collect the data or the knowledge in ways that make sure it spreads because you know, an intelligent failure that you engage in. But if you don't tell Alexis about it and she then goes and does the same really smart thing and also fails the second time, it's not intelligent actually. So it would have been better if you'd shared your lessons with her and then we could have saved her time. What's
[00:16:39] spk_1: fascinating about that, Amy? And it leads me to my next question is around this idea of how we can create a culture that can have failure, coexist with high standards. And I'd love to dive into this a little bit more around what leaders can do to create that kind of culture. You've just mentioned the idea of modeling fallibility that is showing that it's OK to make mistakes and as a leader admitting that mistakes happen and we make them and, and sort of, I guess moving through them as a team or allowing a team to see what that looks like for us. Are there any other suggestions that you can give us there around what leaders can do to create this culture where it's safe to do this.
[00:17:15] spk_2: So I think when leaders are passionate about the value the team or the organization is creating for its customers, you know that if they're passionate about how much what we're doing matters, first of all, that makes it easier for people to stretch, you know, to be kind of plain old motivation, right? I I feel more motivated when you remind me of why say what we do matters like, oh, you know, that makes me feel like I matter and that's energizing and motivating. So oddly, you know, part of the answer is referring to purpose only like coming back to purpose. Why are we here? Why does it matter and related, why you're needed, you know, sort of frequent references to the extraordinary diversity of talents or expertise or backgrounds that people have that all are necessary for us to create this value to serve this purpose. Again, that's motivating. And then finally emphasizing that wherever we are right now today, it's incomplete, we believe that there's more to learn more to accomplish. So I think of high standards as you know, a commitment to high standards is a kind of ambition like we really aspire to do the very best we can. And by the way that feels good too, I mean, it's just, I mean, at some level, wouldn't it be nice to just sort of relax and not work very hard, but not really. But sometimes yes, you know, on the weekends. But I think most of us have a deeper desire to be put to good use in service of something larger than ourselves. So articulating our commitment to excellence to high standards while acknowledging that things will go wrong in their pursuit in part because some of its new territory is really important, right? You have to do and say you have to say both. You have to say we really want to be excellent and you have to say yes, things will go wrong. So what are you doing? You're making it discussable, you're sort of making, I hate to say it this way, but you're making reality discussable.
[00:19:13] spk_1: It's a win together, fail together thing and that it's a collectivist pursuit. And I think that's what purpose does it unites us together as a group. And I know you referenced this in your book. It is about the group achievement. It's not just about the individual failing or attributing blame. It's accountability, but together we win together, we fail. That's
[00:19:33] spk_2: right. I mean, that's such a profound and powerful realization. You know, that we can, we're sort of the sting of failure is when you feel it's isolating you, you suddenly are alone because you screwed up and others are gonna, you know, maybe reject you. But failure can also be quite a bonding experience like, oh, that's happened to me too. Right, when we're, when we're open about it, like, I think we can kind of get through anything as long as we have a feeling that we're in it together. And I
[00:20:00] spk_0: can imagine that also it gives rise to a sense of belonging, potentially within a team as well that when we start to have those basic psychological needs met of sort of understanding and feeling seen or feeling accepted, even when we are making mistakes. I mean, this idea, I think is very antiquated at this point, notion that we all need to be perfect and mistakes aren't acceptable isn't very much outdated. And the, you know, fail, fast, fail often mentality too is perhaps not perfect either. But finding this wise middle ground almost where as you said, I think so beautifully, reality is
[00:20:30] spk_2: acknowledged, right? And another way to think about it is it's not a middle ground, it's not some location between, hey, anything goes fail all the time, go to town and nope gotta be perfect. But no, let's find the middle ground. It's actually more about context, right? It's just to illustrate if you're in a scientific laboratory, you had better be failing or you're not doing your job because you're not venturing into new territory and having leading edge hypotheses that just might work, but more often don't. And that's what great scientists do. That's what inventors do. But if you are in, you know, flying a commercial airplane that is not the place to talk about. Fail, fast, fail often or even hey, mistakes happen. That's ok. No, that's the place where you work together with your team to get it. Absolutely right. And say, right. So context seriously matters. And one of the things I discovered in my research is that I can find both kinds of errors. If you will, I can find the error of people acting overly casually in a dangerous setting. And I can also find the error of people sort of tying themselves up in knots and being overly cautious in a setting where they should just be more playful and more experimental because the stakes are incredibly low or it's incredibly safe or there's no reputation or financial costs. And I think
[00:21:50] spk_0: that takes real wisdom on the part of the leader almost to be able to stay present, to use their expertise in their experience and to be able to really hold space and be very clear about what the right path is, what the right approach to the particular context
[00:22:05] spk_2: is. I think that's right. So it's first become aware, become more aware of context, become more aware of situations that this situation is not like this situation and the dimensions that I offer for articulating what kind of situation you're in have to do with how much uncertainty is there, which is, you know, analytically diagnosable and what are the stakes, you know, how high are the stakes and by stakes. I mean, physical safety, economic and reputational stakes. And, you know, if you're in a situation where any one of those dimensions is high stakes do be cautious, right. Be careful. And if you're in a situation where those stakes are really low, like why wouldn't you try to playfully experiment and learn more when the stakes are low? And part of it is because the sort of the way the lies you're telling yourself, which is why I have to be perfect. No, no, no. Here, the whole the point of this kind of context is to not be perfect. It's to play.
[00:23:00] spk_1: And I noted Amy in your work as well, one of the dimensions of the intelligent failure you mentioned was no unnecessary harm. And I think that's a really important thing to ponder because especially even in an organizational context, I think failure can go sometimes well beyond intelligent failure to almost gambling. You know, when we have people's livelihoods at stake, if this big business decision might result in the layoff of how many thousands of people or whatever they case may be, that context is so critical for leaders to look outside how the failure not just impacts them but actually the livelihoods of other human beings. So I think that no unnecessary harm can point. It is a really important one to consider in that context as well.
[00:23:39] spk_2: I really, I think that's right. It's about making sure when you're thinking about the stakes. You're thinking about them broadly for us, not just for me. And, you know, we're talking about sort of unnecessary harm is really an important point because, you know, I, in the book, I describe the early, early days of open heart surgery and that did lead to harm, but it is arguably was necessary harm and it only involved patients who had no other choice. I mean, they were gonna die because of defects in their heart. And so, you know, they either would die or they could go through a very risky surgery that hadn't been done before and maybe have a chance at life. Some of them lived, but more in the very early days, of course, new territory still hypothesis driven and all the rest died. And, you know, it feels awful to even talk about it, but that was necessary harm on the way to one of today's taken for granted miracles, which is open heart surgery.
[00:24:38] spk_0: And it's that moral sort of decision making that must have gone on at the time to be able to weigh so many competing factors in making the decisions about, uh, that intelligent failure. And I can't help but think also amy about the possibility that by failing and learning to fail, well, it actually can become something that we get quite comfortable with that. We start to enjoy that we see the growth moments for ourselves and those around us is that the case when we start to, I think
[00:25:03] spk_2: it is. Right. Of course, there will always be some failures that sting more than others. But maybe for a really lighthearted example about 10 years ago I picked up, you know, God, help me the game of golf. Right. And if you have not played golf, my husband's very good at it. I hear you. My two sons, they were sort of little boys at the time and they were darn good. And if I was going to see any of them ever, I had to sort of be willing to go out there. Now. I just don't even probably have to describe for you and our listeners, what those, you know, initial forays with the club and the ball were like they were failures, you know, full stop. But they have to say they were reasonably intelligent and, and frustrating but not painful because I had no belief that I was supposed to be good at it yet. You know, it was more about in a way I think of it as like my practice failing well training because it's something, there's things I'm good at all. Right. And then there's things I'm not good at and if you only spend your time doing the things you're good at it feels better, but you're not developing your failure muscles. I can
[00:26:07] spk_1: tell you that golf is a very humbling place to start, that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. And I'm there as well.
[00:26:13] spk_0: I think for me it's surfing is my happy place to fail repeatedly and almost with amusement. Watch my email e ego be crushed every single time.
[00:26:22] spk_2: Yeah. It's almost fun though. Not. I, I don't know, I don't surf, but at least when you're sort of falling off the board you're splashing into the water. And that's a lovely thing. Whereas, you know, when I hit the ball and it just goes that way instead of that way, it's just bad.
[00:26:38] spk_1: Yeah, I think golf for me, I hope they would become my meditation sticks, but they're most certainly not.
[00:26:44] spk_2: You think of it as just a lovely walk spoiled by, you know, an occasional
[00:26:49] spk_1: spoiled by unmet expectations. That's it.
[00:26:51] spk_0: That's it. Now you speak in the book, Amy about how we reframe failure can have a great deal to do with our capacity to fail. Well, I'm really curious about this concept of reframing failure because I think it can be a powerful one for myself personally. And many of our listeners, can you share with us what you mean by reframe failure and perhaps an example? Sure. I
[00:27:12] spk_2: mean, frame is, you know, a frame on a painting is not the point of the painting. It's the container that draws your attention to aspects of the painting. And similarly, um when we have experiences, we spontaneously assign meaning to them, right? You know, if I trip and fall, I immediately say I was clumsy, but I could reframe that by also saying I wasn't paying attention and there was a bump in the sidewalk. Right. So again, a trivial example, but it's a reframe is not inaccurate. It's an accurate shifting of the meaning of the same data to be both more reality based and more emotionally helpful and productive, especially around, you know, what do I do next? So if I don't do well on an exam, I can wallow in shame or negative emotions or I can say, let me think about my study habits and how this might have helped me learn some better ones or maybe, you know, a kind of a fun example is I don't know if you know this research, but bronze medalists are apparently happier than silver medalists in the Olympics about their experience, right? Which makes no sense because silver is better than bronze, right? But what happens is the silver medalists I think understandably spontaneously frame their medal as a loss, right? They missed gold boy, they were so close, but they missed it. Whereas the bronze medallist spontaneously frame their medal as I got a medal, right? I was on the podium, I could so easily have missed it right? Been fourth, which is nothing. So they just spontaneously happened to see that same event even though it's a less good event is in a better light. Now, could the silver medalists reframe? Of course, they could they could say, you know, what I'm not bronze. Right. I mean, this is pretty darn good. I'm that close to the very best in my sport.
[00:29:05] spk_1: Yeah. I mean, it just highlights that comparison. See, to be the killer of contentedness, doesn't it? Or acceptance?
[00:29:12] spk_2: That's right. Or the wrong comparison. The wrong comparison. Here's what we do as humans. We spontaneously compare up. Well, I'm not as wealthy as so, and so I'm not as, you know, whatever you name your thing famous, then whatever. Whereas in fact, we would be healthier if we looked to the left, right where we sort of like, oh, well, you know, I'm doing better than, I mean, not that that's a very good thing to do, but in other words, we got do that framing against what we lack rather than what we have. And certainly the gratitude exercises and gratitude thinking tries to address that. It tries to train us to focus on what we have and the experience, feelings of gratitude for that. That's a reframe.
[00:29:53] spk_1: Ideally, it's that detachment from comparison altogether, isn't it? And just focusing on one's own journey?
[00:29:58] spk_2: Absolutely.
[00:29:59] spk_0: It is. I think difficult in our current society that requires quite a lot of tenacity, I think to really disconnect because it's so much of it is set up to sort of feed into that comparison. But yeah, I, I think for me and understanding a little bit more about that reframing is really powerful because I do tend to have often a bit of a shame response to even sometimes the littlest failures, especially if I'm tired or just off my game a bit. So that's a really helpful tip that I'll be taking forward. Thank you.
[00:30:24] spk_1: Now, Amy, we could spend all day and some talking about your incredible work, both in psychological safety and your new book, the right kind of wrong. Speaking about failures, but we're going to have to unfortunately wrap our conversation up today and to leave our busy leaders potentially with one practical step or one piece of insight. Could you give us some idea of where we could start as a leader to help support our teams to fail more successfully, more intelligently
[00:30:53] spk_2: call attention to uncertainty or novelty or challenge or interdependence or all of the above the extent to which the work you do or the markets you operate in have those features call attention to them because what you're doing is reminding people, you know, what's the opposite of we've got this. You're reminding people we don't have this, but we can do really well. But it's gonna take all of our brains in the game. It's gonna take this being a great team. So essentially just call attention to the nature of the challenge, why it requires all of us do it early and often. And if you combine that with frequent references to purpose and why it matters what we do, I think you can create an unstoppable team that is willing to fail. Well, in service of the larger goal.
[00:31:43] spk_0: Amazing Amy. Thank you so much. It's such a red hot tip. I think all of us can implement in some way. We're so grateful for your time with us today on we are human leaders. And yeah, again, congratulations on this amazing new
[00:31:55] spk_2: book. Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to be with both of you.
[00:32:06] spk_0: Thanks for joining us on. We are human leaders. We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Amy Edmonson. As much as we did to continue the conversation. Join us for pod club, a regular human leaders event where we dig deep into every episode in discussion as a community, learn more at www dot We are human leaders dot com. See you soon.