以下为本期播客的文字整理稿：
Amy Edmondson: So psychological safety refers to a belief that you can speak up candidly with interpersonally risky content like I made a mistake, or I need help, or I disagree with your point of view. Not that those things are easy, but that you believe they are expected and even welcome. And this is a really important distinction because psychological safety has been getting a lot of attention in the last few years. And often it’s being misunderstood to mean, comfortable or not having high standards or not feeling a sense of accountability to excellence. And really it’s not that it’s simply a learning environment where you believe your voice is welcome and you don’t err on the side of holding back. So what communication helps build it? I think really first and foremost, it starts with the work. It starts with making early and frequent references to the nature of the work and why it requires us to do this.
Matt Abrahams: What I heard there is you have to have the meta conversation about the fact that psychological safety is important. You have to be curious. You have to listen for and seek out candor and be grateful when you hear it. I have been in teams and meetings where I have felt the safety that you’re talking about. And one of the things I noticed that good leaders did in those circumstances were they acknowledged and expressed gratitude when people did act vulnerably or share mistakes. Is that a critical part of this too?
Matt Abrahams: Well, I appreciate that answer. What role do status, power, culture, and expertise play in all of this? Is it possible for everyone to feel similarly psychologically safe? I can imagine there might be some challenges there.
And the hierarchies again, were identical, but in some, I would say even most slightly more than half of the ICUs, the degree of psychological safety between higher status and lower status people was significantly different, but in slightly fewer than half. The psychological safety was exactly the same across role groups. No difference. Now we fast forward to the end of that story. Those with the flat psychological safety pattern had ultimately an 18% improvement compared to their counterparts in morbidity and mortality. So same hierarchy, but what was different? Well, what was different was how those with the power, in this case, sort of the top doc, the medical director, how they handled their status. And these were the ones who actually did things I didn’t tell them to. They were just thoughtful enough to do it. Very similar to what you were just asking me about. So they would routinely say things like, I might miss something, I need to hear from you. Or they’d just reach right out and say, Matt, what did you see last night? I think you were on with patient, so-and-So or they would say things like, thank you so much for bringing that to my attention. They were just in a sense, thoughtful, wise clinicians who did those things and that made the natural differential just go away. So I think it’s really important to say that differences in status, power, culture, expertise matter, but what really matters is how we handle them.
Matt Abrahams: Right? And literally in situations of life and death, as you just described in those positions of power and status, by acknowledging, rewarding and being open to those who have less, it’s helpful. Do you have any research or advice on people who have lower status, who might not feel comfortable sharing their positions for various reasons, what they can do to help contribute to the overall psychological safety of a group?
Amy Edmondson: And I think that’s really important because psychological safety is not sort of a switch that you turn on and now we have it. It’s more something that is enacted day by day, day by day. It’s enacted by each of us taking small interpersonal risks to be the risks of being candid. And it’s enacted by nobody getting really mad at us or kicking us out of the team as a result of our doing that. So we’re always co-creating it. I think the higher you go, the more of an outsized influence you have on that climate, but we all influence it.
Matt Abrahams: It’s something that has to be worked on continuously. Part of feeling psychologically safe is feeling okay, making mistakes and admitting them. This idea of failure is the focus of your new book, right? Kind of wrong. Can you talk to us about unproductive failure versus productive failure? And can you share your three archetypes of failure for us?
And by the way, mostly avoidable complex failures are failures that are caused by multiple factors coming together in just the wrong way. The perfect storm and main difference with basic failures is that any one of the factors on its own would not have led to a failure. It’s the fact of them all coming and lining up almost with an element of bad luck there that creates a bad outcome. And then neither of those are good news. They’re both things we can learn from, and they’re both things we can work hard to try to reduce in our organizations. The third kind of failure are intelligent failures, and those are the undesired results of thoughtful forays into new territory. So intelligent failures have in common that they’re in pursuit of a goal, they’re in new territory. There’s no playbook yet that you could just look up on the internet and follow. You’ve got a hypothesis, you’ve got good reason to believe this might work. And finally, the failure is no bigger than necessary to get the knowledge that we need to make progress. So you readily recognize that as sort of the activity of scientists or inventors or other people as a living, doing things in new territory, creating new things.
Amy Edmondson: Entrepreneurs and technologists in general are routinely going into new territory. So they have to live with the reality that you cannot get it right every time because there isn’t that playbook. And so you have to be willing to experiment, but you want to experiment thoughtfully. You don’t want it to be just random stabs in the dark. You want to have, as I said, good reason to believe it might work. That’s kind of the Silicon Valley ethos.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you for delineating the different types of failure. How can leaders communicate about failures and mistakes in a way that encourages learning and resilience rather than fear and blame?
If the stakes are relatively low, you’re behind closed doors and you’re just experimenting in a lab, the uncertainty is high. Go to town, take bold experiments and fail fast, learn as fast as you can. And of course, if it’s high stakes and high uncertainty, you’ve got to find a way to break that down, to get to little pieces of it so that we can learn more. We certainly don’t want to take undue risks to safety, finances, or reputation. So the job of the leader is to say, what are the stakes here? And then help people think about it and act accordingly. I have seen both errors. I have seen people behave carelessly in very high stakes, uncertainty situations leading to such things as NASA shuttle disasters and worse, and I have seen people behave overly cautiously in domains that caused for playfulness where the stakes were remarkably low, where behind closed doors were experimenting, and yet there’s that human desire to want to get it right the first time, leading to unhealthy hesitation and unwillingness to really experiment.
Matt Abrahams: What I’m taking away from several of your answers is that all failures are not equal, and we need to really be thinking about the different types of failure and leaning into some and then making some very conscious choices about others. I want to share an experience I had when I was an operator working in high tech. I worked for a company that had failure Fridays, and we would all convene for lunch and you could nominate yourself to share a failure. You had that week and the senior leaders would vote on the best failure. You actually got an award back in the day. It was enough to take a partner out to a meal and if you had kids to pay for babysitting. And the idea there was that if we weren’t pushing the envelope, we weren’t growing. And it was a teaching moment because the rule was you could never have the same failure twice win. So we all had to learn from each other. And I remember this vividly, and this was decades ago, this to me seemed like a really powerful way to encourage the kind of things you’re talking about in terms of failing forward.
Matt Abrahams: Yes. And the motto of that company was scary, fun. Which fits right into what you’re talking about. I want to look at a more serious issue. You discuss the notion of the unequal opportunity to fail that exists in many groups and organizations. Can you describe this a bit and share what can be done? Not everybody has the same right to fail in some ways.
Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. I think that’s wonderful advice. And I think also trying to minimize consequences if and when those failures happen is critical. So Amy, before we end, I’d like to ask you three questions. One I make up just for you, and two, we ask all of our guests, are you up for that?
Amy Edmondson: Yes.
Matt Abrahams: I’m curious, when it comes to failure in your own life, what have you learned and how have you best leaned into the failure that you’ve had?
Amy Edmondson: Well, I’ve learned that I do not spontaneously have a healthy response to my own failures, and I don’t have a response to either intelligent failures, which as a researcher I should because I get that stuff intellectually, but still, emotionally, I would’ve rather been right than wrong. So I will go into a kind of emotional tailspin before I catch myself and correct that when say the hypothesis is not supported by data, and I’m even worse at responding to the basic failures, the ones that were absolutely unequivocally caused by my mistakes, I can easily end up ruminating rather than reflecting. So I have to catch and correct myself all the time.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you for sharing that. I mean, you are human and these things can be frustrating and an emotion plays an important role. Let me ask question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why?
Amy Edmondson: There’s so many good answers to that, but the one that I thought of is Nikolai Tangen, and he’s the head of the Norwegian Growth Fund financial fund that supports many activities in Norway. But why I find him such a compelling communicator? He’s got a podcast where he interviews leaders, occasionally academics, but mostly CEOs of companies that he is investing in. He’s a great question asker. He asks good questions, but what he’s also doing is allowing them to communicate their wisdom and their messages. So he’s putting them in the spotlight in enormously thoughtful and productive ways to get, ultimately, I think his messages across using this vehicle of the podcast, much like what you’re doing.
Matt Abrahams: Well, I love that you picked a podcaster as somebody you admire, and the ability to tee people up to share their experience and knowledge is a true art form. So our final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?
Amy Edmondson: I’m going to say clarity, caring, and commitment. So clarity is take the time to think through what is it I’m trying to convey? Be clear about that yourself so others can be caring is remind yourself you really do care about them and the work and what it is we’re trying to do. And commitment, I think is the passion that you bring to it that conveys that you are all in
