Amy Edmondson (organizational behavioral scientist)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm the Duchess of Duluth and I'm joined by Mr. Milford.

Hello.

Hello. Today we have Amy Edmondson on, and she is a professor at Harvard Business School known for her research on psychological safety.

Yes.

She has a very cool book out right now called Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well.

Yeah, this was really interesting. To be clear, which we get into, but it's probably good to note now, psychological safety is not...

Safe spaces. Yes. Right. From colleges that we've heard about.

Yeah. It's more like feeling free to speak.

Make errors, actually. It's almost antithetical to the... It could be. Could be. But not.

He's an armchair experimenter.

He's an armchair experimenter.

Thank you. We're both wearing jumpsuits.

Oh my God. We didn't even plan it.

And today I look like a little child.

You sure do.

Little boy. You're almost in a onesie.

Almost?

It's true. Yeah. It's true.

I mean, I'm monochromatic.

Yeah. That's the theme. We're all monochromatic. That's right. You know what I underestimated?

It's clearly on the way out.

Let me see. Yes, but it was gruesome. Well, there's that, but on my thigh.

It was much worse.

It was so gnarly looking that a friend was over and she was looking at my leg and she said, what is that? And I said, if I told you I had flesh eating bacteria, would you believe me? And she said, a thousand percent. I think I'd believe you if you said you had Ebola. I mean, it was just.

It looked bad.

Yeah, it was bad.

Where'd you get it?

Great question. Two theories. Either Martha's Vineyard or Wellesley, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, Massachusetts.

Yep.

Yeah.

Could be either one.

You live in Cambridge.

I live in Cambridge.

Are you familiar with Wellesley? I've never been there. Yeah. What an adorable place.

It is adorable, isn't it? And I don't know if you saw the campus at all at Wellesley College, but it's beautiful.

I didn't.

It's very idyllic.

Historically, was that a women's?

It's still. Oh, it's. It's not only historically. It's one of the very few. Oh.

And where are you from originally?

Manhattan. Okay. Attached. I always feel a little sheepish about that. Really?

You're the double whammy. Because I have many friends that went to Harvard, and they generally will just say, I went to school in Boston.

Yeah, yeah. Which is a big mistake, because then you get the follow-on questions, and then it sounds like you think there's something special there.

Yeah. You can't win.

You can't win. You have to just say. Just say it.

I'm at fucking Harvard.

I went to Harvard, right? I mean, there was one thing I was good at when I was young. It was like grades. Grades. You excelled.

What were your parents doing in Manhattan, though?

My dad worked at Time, Inc. He was a manager. He wasn't a writer or anything. Ultimately, his little area of expertise, I think, became managing technology. It was like the laser scanners that made photos better and took away the need for all of the reproductions and all those layers of colors that they used to have to do to make a magazine.

Well, then, in some ways you have carried on. It's not that far off.

No. And my mom was a teacher.

What type of teacher?

First grade, middle school. later. When we were little, she was part-time and only did admissions work.

It was a managerial family.

Yeah, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Because she did become the head of the middle school. The kids that nobody else really wanted to deal with.

Right. No. That's a rough patch. I was hardest on my teachers. Yes.

Yeah.

Do you know Ben and Matt? Ben and Matt?

Well, of course not because she's from Manhattan.

But Cambridge.

Wait a minute. You know Ben and Matt. Oh, oh, yeah. Sure, sure. The mascots.

Yeah, I have to ask. One day someone will say yes.

Every now and then someone will say, you're from New York, do you know? You're like, what planet? are you from? City of 12 million people or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah.

Do you miss it greatly?

Yes, and I love Boston. I'm very happy where I am, but boy, New York, there's something just deeply home about it.

Well, I just imagine the level of nostalgia I have for Michigan, where I'm from, and it's not New York.

But it's home.

But New York is, you know, it's a world city. It's spectacular. It's the best city in the country. I agree. So you then compound that with your nostalgia.

I like visiting. I love sort of, oh, like I'm home. My feet another way around. I don't have to think. But I also feel like I've got this whole other life.

Okay. Wait, New York, I had one other thought about.

Amy just hung out with Adam Grant.

Are you friendly with him?

I am, I am. I always forget how young he is. I told Monica, I heard the podcast with him. It's like, wait, he was after Tal? Although I guess Tal and I overlapped a little in the Ph.D.

Well, he's a wunderkind, right?

He went straight to graduate school. He didn't work in a company.

Well, when I was researching you and I see organizational behaviorists, and I'm thinking, well, that's very similar to Adam.

Yeah, but not.

Okay, great. So I want you to delineate. But then I just naturally thought, are they friends or are they foes? Because you need two people in the same profession who both write popular things.

We're definitely friends. Adam has been very generous, consistent with his giver idea. He will often talk about my work. He's done research on it.

He's a human bibliograph. Like, he can cite...

That's the intimidating bit.

Okay, great. I'm glad you feel that way, too, because when we interview him, which is pretty often, I think, how are you citing these papers?

We were on a panel together the other day in this conference, and someone would mention something and be like, oh, yeah, that's like the such and such study. Pretty obscure stuff.

In Switzerland in 82.. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, so how would you delineate the difference between... He's an organizational psychologist.

Yes, and I think the main thing is he came to the field with this interest in individuals and what makes them tick and what motivates them. And I came to it because my undergraduate degree was not psychology, it was engineering. Much more about how do we make things work as they should.

Okay, like systems.

Yeah, systems and organizations. And in part because most people spend most of their waking hours at work. It ought to be not just engaging, but ennobling and functional. All of that time ought to be sort of meaningful to them.

Yeah, you don't want it to be, like, sacrificial.

So I wanted to make work work as it should, because of people, but also more because of society. Society is broken in ways that ultimately trace their roots back to organizational behavior. Not individuals per se, or at least that wasn't my lens. My lens was decision-making processes are broken. Incentives are often broken.

You did a lot of work on... You didn't invent this concept, I think it's from the 50s, but psychological safety. And I guess, a trigger knee-jerk, that might sound a little similar to safe classroom. So I'd like to immediately distinguish that we're not talking about a place free of critical...

In fact, we're talking about the opposite. I often step back and think, why did I call it that? I created this mess. I first used the term well before this modern, safe space, safe classroom. I'm not anti-safe space.

Right. The thing I read when reading about psychological safety I liked was an atmosphere where one can take chances without fear and with sufficient protection. Thus, a climate is built which encourages provisional tries and which tolerates failure without retaliation, renunciation or guilt. The point that I like is, no, it is a place to take some big swings, but it's a place that when you error, you're not going to be guilted and excommunicated over it.

Exactly. Because I think we're very afraid of being kicked out of the tribe. We don't want to be rejected. And so if I'm always there's some little calculus in my head going on at all times that if I say that I might, you know, fill in the blank. Yeah.

This is the endless drum I beat, which is as an anthro major, for me, knowing we're social primates, knowing that status is at the very forefront of our brain at all times, whether we know it or not. The excommunication piece is a strong one. But even if you don't have fear of actual rejection from the tribe and not being able to have food or water or shelter, the intergroups status is also going to determine everything we get. We're afraid to mess up, because we also think we might slide down one notch, I'd imagine.

That's right. And that's a loss. And we're far more afraid of a loss than of missing out on a potential gain. Maybe what I had to say was going to help the team and maybe there'd be gratitude as a result, but maybe not. And so there's this calculus.

Will I even be credited?

So uncertain. Whereas if I stay silent, who gains? I do. When? Now.

Right. Easier to do. But now, OK, not to get into the individual, but of course they're working in concert. So one thing I might think is people have a predisposition. So I'll say for me personally, my dad was just as alpha as it got.

Or maybe ran the whole. Who knows?

But had it in him clearly genetically, I unfortunately inherited that. I hope I'm a 2.0 version of that. But I think I have a genetic advantage over many people who I feel like it's just in my genes to strive for that, to be confrontational, to perhaps be provocative and pushing agendas. There must be some individual variations of just aptitude for it.

There are for sure. And what the data I've seen and the data I've collected suggest is that there are differences between individuals and there are differences between companies. But the biggest source of difference is between groups. So it turns out to be an emergent property of a group. If we've been working together for a certain period of time, we develop certain norms about, yeah, it's good to confront.

It's interesting, though, because you say like aptitude for it, but I almost think it's like appetite for it.

Yeah.

It's not just being good or bad at it. It's am I interested in having a dance?

Well, I mean aptitude in the sense that if you were taking biometric measurements of my cortisol levels as I approach confrontation, I bet mine would be a lot more manageable than other people's. I think they would have a spike of adrenaline and cortisol. biologically that would prevent them from being as ambitious as I am, I think. I mean, I think people have different base levels of those things.

Absolutely. I mean, they have differences in aggressiveness. They have differences in outgoingness.

I bring it back to this great doc you must watch, called Chimp Empire. if you've not watched it already. You're inside two different chimpanzee troops and you're kind of watching this jockeying for Alpha. There's a couple of the chimps that are destined to try. And then there's many others that aren't.

So am I. In so many ways, our current lives depend on the functioning of our current systems. And our future absolutely depends on our ability to create better systems. Because when people are just individuals striving for their own needs to be met, it gets pretty ugly pretty quickly. Everything's here and it doesn't work.

Now, which one do you think is harder to change? I think we all acknowledge humans are nearly incapable of change, right? So are systems and groups easier to change or harder?

Probably equally hard. And it's not either. or. Groups are made up of individuals. And as hard as it is to change individuals, you think, well, wait a minute.

So right. So then we get back into the social primate thing, which is weirdly. an individual will change immediately to match their group.

There's a couple of major shifts we need to help people make. all the time. It's really swimming upstream, because you're right. Individuals left to their own devices are not going to do all the right things that society needs.

Can't stop eating, drinking, doing all the things they don't want to do.

Yeah, and that's just the little stuff. But how do we combat climate change? How do we create a free and fair society that gives everyone an equal chance to thrive? Making even a dent in that requires us to swim upstream against human nature. I mean human nature is I want my needs met.

And I think the saddest part of that is it's not always a lack of selflessness. It's actually a fear that they're not part of the we. It's not that they wouldn't be willing to. It's that they don't feel it in their heart that anyone wants them a part of the we.

That brings us to belonging. That deep need for belonging is so great. The flip side is fear. I'm not going to belong, which is a kind of death.

As we talk about fear and the topic of your book, let's start with how you get from psychological safety to focusing specifically on failure and right kind of wrong, the science of failing well.

It's funny because I stumbled into psychological safety by studying errors in hospitals. I didn't set out to study psychological safety. I wouldn't have even known that was a thing to study.

Yeah. It's not terribly sexy either. No. Yeah. It's so unsexy.

In fact, when I was a junior faculty member and assistant professor at Harvard Business School, I had more than one senior colleague sort of take me aside and said, we think you've done very good research or we wouldn't have hired you, but you really got to drop this psychological safety thing because it's not a big idea. I said, yeah, no, I think you're right. I can't get all of that. Yeah. I mean, they got these studies going.

I just got shot by a bolt of lightning. Right when you started saying, I worked for General Motors for 14 years. And I was about to say, whoa, did I watch a culture that had been stuck in another time period?

Couldn't learn.

They had been Silicon Valley, but they weren't anymore. They still thought Detroit dictated how the rest of the country, and it was really wild to witness up close.

Really wild. And of course it's not their fault. It's the combination of human cognition, group dynamics, and organizational structures and systems. I think if we fast forward, I don't know how far, but time moves faster now. We'll say the same thing about Google, right?

Yeah. They'll somehow.

They'll somehow find themselves with General Motors syndrome.

Yes. That's crazy. you just said that.

Or big three syndrome. It's sort of the writing on the wall. So I was there in the mid 80s, and we were trying to sort of change their culture. And I thought naively, because everywhere I looked in the rest of the world, California, East Coast, everybody's driving Hondas and Toyotas. Of course, you get to Detroit and everybody's driving American.

No, we're in a bubble. No joke. I just had Terry Crews on here, who was from Flint, and they were firebombing cars all the time at the plant.

Right. Which is a great way to keep yourself from learning, right? Yeah.

Just erase anything.

Attack the better product. Don't look at it. Yeah. Don't study it. I was at General Motors, and they had this whole lab where they took apart every competitor's car to just kind of look what's working.

They're very bright. Who's the smartest engineers in the world are there?

And more often than not, they were stymied. They said, how do I get my organization to change? And they had no answer for that question. Middle managers, at whatever levels, they knew what they should be doing, but there was no easy way to turn the ship.

Can I tell you the thing I observed as a young person working there? And we were a vendor, so I would be at the dinner table, and it was at that time. GM was very, very structured. And you had eighth levels at the top, separate elevators. Anytime.

The latest technology.

Yes. And they'll never be heard. They won't be heard until they've climbed that ladder and their ideas are no longer new or original.

It's both a true statement and just a metaphor for all the rest of it. Yeah. For how organizations close themselves off to signals that they may be doing something wrong, just like people do. So I was interested in that. So a brand new PhD student, 10 years out of college, I had no idea how research was produced.

It's a gilded cage. It's gorgeous on that campus.

Well, yeah, it's gorgeous on that campus. And, you know, I get to go in and out of companies all the time. So I get the best of both worlds in a way. But I quickly realized that there was no obvious scholarly way to study the learning organization and why they don't learn and how to help them learn. I didn't even know where to begin.

The stuff we may have read in the Malcolm Gladwell book. Absolutely. About the Korean Air chapter.

It's such a good chapter.

It's my favorite chapter.

Me too.

It's so encouraging, right? Yeah. We maybe do have the ability to correct.

But wasn't it interesting? They had to speak English.

Yes. Right?

Because their own language had so much, you know, what the French called tutoyer, where you cannot see each other as peers. No. Because of the language, it just embeds, reinforcing the problem every single minute of every single day. Richard Hackman was approached by some doctors, some researchers at Harvard Medical School who wanted to study medication errors. And they thought that Richard might be able to help them show whether there was a relationship between teamwork and medication errors.

It's obvious right away.

It's statistically significant. It jumps off the screen. Oh, I'm excited. No, no, no. Because then I squint, and I look, and I realize, it's in the wrong direction.

Oh, my God. I'm jumping to a thought. Yeah.

Jump.

The good teams were more honest about reporting their errors. You got it. Yep. They felt safer to admit they failed.

Right. Because they had established a climate where people trusted each other, and they also were aware and they talked about the fact that things will go wrong. The only question is, do we catch it and correct it quick enough to not hurt anybody? Oh, wow. And so they had, I think.

Well, what I would argue, too, is that they all felt valued enough that had they errored, they would not be rejected. Yeah.

I mean, they didn't think, okay, if you made a mistake, it means you're like a lousy nurse. It was like, I made a mistake. People do. Days are long. The work is hard and complicated.

Right.

Having that insight was a far cry from proving it. Yes. And ultimately, in that study, I wasn't able to prove it. I had a hunch. What I was saying was the error rate measure was flawed.

Can we real quick define good team versus bad team?

So good teams were ones that surveyed.

Listen to Taylor Swift.

They don't answer UNICEF. No, they were, you know, this is all survey items. And the survey items would be things like, in this team, we respect and work well with each other. Or, you know, the team leader gives us helpful feedback on how to get better. I really look forward to coming to work with these people in the morning.

Self-organizing. Yeah. We just had an expert on self-organizing complex systems.

Who'd you have?

Neil Theis. He's a liver pathologist at NYU?

No, at...

Harvard? Might be a colleague. What is it?

Grossman School of Medicine. Oh, that's NYU. Oh, at NYU. You're right. I'm wrong.

I can admit I'm wrong.

It's impossible.

You're fired.

Yeah, you're fired.

You embarrassed me. See how easy that was?

Yeah.

We've had a lot of practice.

We've had some ups and downs with that.

Well, we've done 700 episodes, and we've both been wrong multiple times per episode. So the math is staggering. But anyways, his hobby is self-organizing complex systems, and we were so delighted and fascinated with the scaling symmetry across the universe of this. It was mind-blowing and elegant.

Well, you know, that was the doorway I walked through to get to the room I'm in now. Really? Because when I was an undergraduate, I took a course, just almost by accident, called Synergetics, the Structure of Ordered Space, with this wonderful crystallographer named Arthur Loeb, and it was all about how nature has her own organizing principles, which explain why, you know, a virus can look like a geodesic dome, because nature will arrange herself in the least energy way. And so you see all these.

And without a grand designer.

Without a grand designer. Incredible. In fact, the grand designer would just get in and muck it up. Complex adaptive systems, they're self-organized. So we're just.

Yeah, minimally we can see. when we're out of pattern with the rest of the self-organizing, or the systems that collapse that we're mirroring, we would go, oh, well, okay, that has too many divergent properties. This has not enough. Right. All that stuff.

So then that was a paper. The second year project, it was called Learning from Mistakes is Easier Said Than Done, which is true. And then I thought, well, if this interpersonal climate thing is real, I have to set out to study it on purpose the next time. Right. So I ended up getting a nice Michigan company, Herman Miller, to let me in.

Could you, maybe, because that feels a little ambiguous to me, what learning behaviors?

It's a great question because it is. It's abstract. So concretely, that means everything from asking for help when I don't know what to do to offering an idea to my teammates that might work, to admitting a mistake, pushing the project forward. Right. I'm willing to do the things that help us learn.

Doesn't he have, like, some sort of quiz you can take on it?

But the book was essentially about how we cognitively, interpersonally, and organizationally close ourselves off from unwelcome truths. I thought, God, that's so cool. And I get to graduate school and realize that's not how people write at all. They write these impenetrable papers that nobody can read. But I digress.

Yeah. Okay. Because right out of the gates, I have assumptions. Knowing that you were studying a sales team, a management team, a production team.

Ten of each.

Yeah. So right out of the gates, my hunch is the sales team probably operated.

In each category of team type, they had variants. Okay. Right. So some sales teams were great. You know, some, oh, how do we get more performance?

The reason I would suggest that is you find out so immediately in sales. It has the most immediate feedback.

In sales, you either make the sale or you don't make the sale.

It's quick.

Whereas in new product development, it might be five years before you know whether your team did a good job. But there's still people evaluating your team who can sort of say, yeah, they did a good job. My ratings of performance relied on independent measures from the people who evaluated the team's work. So if you were a management team, there was a senior person who was able to tell me whether they were a good team or not.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

From the perspective of HR, they would say everybody. They would say we have no status, we have no power. Many, many do. I think. in well-run organizations, it's really a team.

If you are an engineer and you have an issue at work, you're going to call HR. But when you're in HR, they have the exact same problems that every other organization is going to have.

You mean like behavioral problems?

Sure, just organizational issues.

Gosh, I don't know.

It's like who's monitoring the internal affairs division of a police department. I don't know. They're monitoring the police department.

We don't need to get bogged down in that, but that is a curiosity. So anyway, to write this paper that got accepted in this good journal, one of the reviewers, you don't know who they are, right, but they're these sort of people who tell you everything's terrible and they're not going to publish it. One of them said, I think what you're talking about is psychological safety, when I was sort of describing it as interpersonal climate. It was a term that was in the literature, but it wasn't very well used. And so when a reviewer tells you, I think you're saying X, suddenly you're saying X because they're the gatekeepers.

Especially relative to Google's time on earth, you know, predates Google. That's right. Just about.

I mean, it's essentially simultaneous with the founding of Google. Right. My husband is a physician scientist and he, in his PhD, discovered a certain molecule caused chronic myeloid leukemia. And exactly 10 years later, someone had developed a drug to cure chronic myeloid leukemia. Wow.

Well, and we're at an interesting time for you to write this book because it is very ubiquitous, this notion of failure. I think obviously the tech revolution in Silicon Valley, they've made popular this one option, which is like fail fast. And I forget the second half.

Fail often.

Fail, yeah. Break stuff. That's one kind of thought pattern. Fail up. That's show business.

Two ethos, and they're both wrong or they're both partly right.

As is every thinking thing.

Of course. Yeah. Both of them are sort of not realizing that context matters. If you fail early, fail often, take that to the factory. It wouldn't last one day on the job if you were trying to fail often on the assembly line.

Take it to Boeing.

Or take it to the cardiac surgery operating room. Yeah. Right? Bad idea. Versus.

Also, I'll add aircraft as opposed to your car, almost everything is designed with second and third redundancy systems. So they already know there is some likelihood that this thing will fail. But we always have a backup and then we have a backup for the backup. It's an admission that failure is inevitable. And now we have to have the solution real time for the inevitable failure.

Being high performing in spite of fallibility is the goal. Not wishing it away.

So even the thing that doesn't permit failure really just has the illusion of no failure. But there's already in the system built in an expectation of failure.

The oft quoted line, failure is not an option, attributed to Gene Kranz at NASA during the Apollo 13 failure crisis. People use that line to suggest, oh yeah, failure is not an option, like you can't have failure. What he was saying was, we can do this. We've just lost a primary oxygen tank. But I look around this room and I see people with amazing engineering skills, incredible creativity, fantastic teamwork.

But there's many popular ones. There's also like burn the boats, right? This is a very popular approach that leaders want to suggest.

I don't know about that.

I've never heard that.

When you get to the invasion of the land you're invading, if they burn the boats that they arrived on, the soldiers know they have no choice but to win.

There's no other choice. There's no retreat.

Oh, wow. So there's a lot of leaders in business that love this. burn the boat approach.

Which seems a little foolhardy to me.

Well, if you read any books about military.

Let's have a plan B.

Retreating is a very important aspect and logical and smart decision at times.

I can understand the sort of the psychological principle of give it everything you have and be smart. You know, the sort of Silicon Valley fail off and break things. culture is great in innovation contexts. Science, invention, art, book writing. That is a place where that makes sense, right?

Yes. Let's go over the three types of failures.

Right. In fact, that's a very important part of this conversation, right? Because when you're saying fail, often, you're not saying have lots of stupid mistakes. I would never be in favor of being reckless. I'm anti-waste.

I think you say it most beautifully in the intro of the book, where you say, most of us go out of our way to avoid experiencing failure, robbing ourselves of adventure, accomplishment, and even love. That's when we can't let failure stand in the way or our fear of failure.

I loved your episode with Dan Pink. And I love the idea that many regrets people have was that they didn't ask someone out. Boldness regrets. Yes. Where they didn't go for it.

This is what destroys so many marriages, because these two unrequited lovers cross into each other on Facebook 20 years later, and they finally get to say, oh, I was in love with you. And they go, what the fuck? I was in love with you. And then everything blows up.

Yeah, exactly. That's why I put love in there, because sometimes we're just not willing to go for it. We take the safe date, the person who won't reject us down the road versus the one that we really hoped to be with. So let's talk about intelligent failures the first time, because those are the ones where fail fast, fail often makes sense. So intelligent failures are those that are still undesired, but they're in new territory, meaning you couldn't just Google it to get the answer.

Will you give the example of the $800 million?

So the $800 million mistake was at Citibank a couple of years ago, when some employees failed to check all the right boxes in the electronic transfer and essentially accidentally transferred the principle rather than the interest of a very large loan, having instantly realized their error. It's not a judgment error. It's a slip. By definition, a mistake is something you don't know you're making. If you're making it on purpose, then it's sabotage or a violation.

I think those are most of my mistakes.

Are decisions? I don't think so. They realize immediately what they've done and they try to get it back and the client says no. So they have to go to court and the judge in a kind of odd ruling, maybe didn't like banks, or I don't know, but they didn't allow it to be reversed. Some call it a finders keepers ruling.

I want to know who got a free $800 million.

It was a company, not an individual.

Okay, well, that's less exciting. I would love a farmer to get.

Yeah, wouldn't that be great? Yeah.

So a basic failure is the mistake.

It's not a mistake. It's caused by a mistake. Okay. Because I can make 10 mistakes a day that don't, thankfully, lead to a failure.

Cause a failure. Okay, I see. Also, we had somebody on who was talking about in doctor's offices, accidentally checking the wrong prescription medication box on the computer, and then that person dies.

That's a basic, believe it or not, that's a basic failure.

Yeah.

It's big, it's tragic, but it's still basic, right? Cause it was that simple, single slip in known territory where there was a right answer, but we can often check the wrong box and nothing bad happened. Right.

I would imagine these increase with repetition as well. I remember reading recently that people were driving off the Bay Bridge. This is, I don't know, five years ago, and they were driving off the Bay Bridge asymmetrically in morning commute traffic. And they're talking about how much of your automatic system is driving you to work and how really unpresent people are while it's happening to the degree that they were driving through these.

Something was blocked off.

Yes. And the brain's doing this. And I think so many repetitive things get filed into your automatic. That's true.

So the risk of getting really good at something is that you stop paying attention. Yes. But inattention is very often the cause of a basic failure. And when anyone says, you know, I can do it in my sleep, that's probably a signal that you should nudge them not to.

Right, right. As well as you could.

In reality, you can't do it in your sleep.

Right.

And then complex failures, which are multi-causal. They could be caused by several mistakes, but they don't need mistakes. Complex failures are the failures that happen when a handful of factors line up in just the wrong way, any one of which, on their own, would not have caused a failure.

This is what almost all airplane accidents are.

Absolutely.

There's almost no single failure. airplane accident.

There are a few. Air Florida Flight 80 in 1982, which took off from National Airport and crashed into the icy Potomac, killing almost everybody aboard, was a basic failure. They run through the checklist and the captain says, anti-ice. Co-pilot says, off. It's a snowstorm happening out there, right?

For everyone who hates flying, that's the worst story that anyone could possibly have heard.

Yeah, I have a graduate student who's doing research on aviation accidents, and he had the unhappy allocation in the conference this week to speak about his research. The very last session of the conference, which is right before everybody's about to fly home.

No.

That was me listening to Dr. Death, the podcast, and then getting an operation that next week. No. I said to the nursing staff, I'm like, please speak up if you see something wild going on.

Intuiting my research, right? Do speak up. In fact, later, I looked at teams in the operating room, and the difference in willingness to speak up was associated with all sorts of good outcomes, as you can imagine. So the complex failures are on the rise in our very complex, interconnected, interdependent world, which is sort of a depressing statement. But the good news is the fact that they're multi-causal means.

And we all pretty much have a deep fear of failing for numerous reasons. I was wondering if we could go through some of the reasons that people fear it so much.

We've been talking a lot already about that primal fear of loss of status or actual rejection, or if people don't think well of me, I'll die. It's this kind of primal fear about the group, about society, about others.

Yeah, but it kind of works down from group to group, right? Because at first you're trying to hide your failure from your peers, but you also then hide it from yourself. If you can't admit it to the group, sometimes maybe you're less likely to admit it to yourself and then explore why it happened. How do we avoid doing it again?

There's a real relationship between individual denial and face-saving or impression management in the group. Because if I don't see it myself, I can't share it. They reinforce each other and lead to this widespread problem that we have culturally with failure.

I had to go to AA for 20 years to learn how to admit failure.

I think we can do it, obviously, but we're swimming upstream, against cognitive, sociological, anthropological forces that have made impression management front and center. We want people to think well of us and to like us. The crazy thing is that, you know, whom do we like? Well, we like people who are vulnerable and honest. I know.

I tell young men all the time, if you're on a date with someone and they tell you about their five breakups and the other person was the problem all five times, get up and walk away. This person has no interest in figuring out what they've ever done wrong. And you'll be the same. You'll fit right into that pattern.

That's right. I mean, if you look back and you can't identify a single regret or a single thing you did to contribute to the impasse.

I don't want to be with that person.

Nobody does.

I don't want to work with someone who can't admit.

No. And that's the tragedy, really, because people are looking for love and connection and they're actually pushing people away.

Because they think they're presenting, well, I'm a pretty flawless person. You should snatch me up.

And if that has been true since the beginning of the species, it is now true in an exacerbated form because of social media, because we're just presenting a culled version of only the best photos and only the highlights. We get deeper fulfillment and joy from genuine connection, a relationship with someone that is based on the truth rather than on faking it. But we deprive ourselves of that experience as well.

OK, now, so that's aversion.

Well, that was actually the fear part. So I say aversion, confusion, and fear. And the fear is sort of the social. Aversion is almost just instinctive.

Right. Knee, jerk. I broke this. I'm going to walk away really quick.

I just don't like it. I like things that succeed, not fail. I like me when I succeed, not fail. So that's just almost instinct.

Confusion to me is the one that I'm a little less clear on.

So confusion is really where we started out. Wait a minute. Someone over here is saying fail fast, fail often. Failure is a big category. And if you don't appreciate the very different phenomena under that big category, no wonder you're going to be anti-failure.

Yeah, I'm not going to check a box and I'm going to give away $800 million.

Right, right. And then I'm going to never be employed again. So if we had a sort of clear-eyed appreciation for basic failures, then we could sign up to say, let's prevent them. Complex failures, again, let's prevent them. Let's understand them better.

Yes, I love that. Now, in the book, you have an antidote to this. So how does one create a farewell mindset?

A farewell mindset, it's both cognitive and emotional, and the cognitive being thoughtful about the strategies, for both taking smart risks and also for being careful when the situation calls for being careful. In a way, the most important thing here is just context matters. There's really two dimensions of context. you need to think about. How much uncertainty is there?

Right. There's a few things people should be doing. So they should be persistent, although you differentiate that from stubbornness.

Yes, well, persistent is so many words that are like valued, good words. There's another word that kind of means the same thing, but it's like a bad word.

Also, this is just a serenity prayer in AA, which is like, give me the knowledge to know the difference. Yeah, or the wisdom to know the difference, right?

And I think that's an important distinction between knowledge and wisdom, because knowledge implies that there is knowledge. And I think wisdom implies that you're going to have to use your own judgment. Into it a little bit. Yeah. There isn't a right answer here, but it's up to you.

Yeah, girdles were in the 20s.

Right, right, right. We don't do that anymore. So you could say, okay, she was stubborn or crazy to just keep trying. But she had a valid reason to think that it was worth trying. The ones she had mocked up for her friends and family members, they loved them.

Acceptance. Acceptance, yeah. Accept reality at some point.

Yeah, like listen to the data. Listen to the data of your own experience. Rather than just what you wanted to have be true.

And then calling it pivot. That's a part of reframing.

And this came from a wonderful guy named Jake Breeden who was working in the pharmaceutical sector. And, you know, he'd read all the stuff out there written by people like me and others. A lot of Silicon Valley stuff too. Saying, let's have failure parties. And he just couldn't sell it, right?

Monica and I's main hobby is a game called Spades. And you play with a partner.

Love it.

And half the game is trying to figure out when you're both going to pivot.

Yep.

As partners, without saying pivot. And go in another direction. Yes, mid-game.

Yeah, because it's all just information. As opposed to failure, you can think of it as like, okay, I just gained a lot of information to now do something different. Right.

That's why I love the quote attributed to Thomas Edison, which is, I haven't failed. I just found 10,000 ways that didn't work. Right. It's exactly the right attitude. Yes.

And dating, that is the same thing. You go on a date and it's bad. But then you leave with more information of what you want or don't want. Right. Or what you will do again or won't do again.

It's the old, I can't fail, I can only learn and grow.

Right.

And then, of course, people have to reflect. Now, I'm super into Formula 1. And at the end of every race, the entire team does a debrief, right? They get on their headsets. Everyone's got a computer in front of them.

And I love that, because they're deep in the details, right? They're looking at the actual data, frame by frame. That's not fun, right? No. It's just not fun to go look back at all the stuff we screwed up.

Especially if you just got out of a car that you finished last in.

It's like, can't we just go forward?

No. It's like examining how you tripped. Right.

Okay, I tripped. I won't do it again. No, no, no, no. We want you to look at it. But I can't help thinking that by making it a team sport, it becomes more palatable.

Oh, it is. Some of my very favorite and funniest moments were getting off stage. Holy shit. There wasn't one laugh. Oh, my God.

But the inclination is to feel embarrassed. Even if it's in a group, I'm the one that ruined it, or whatever. There's a fear of that.

But the fear of it is usually worse than the actual reality of it. Yes. Because what happens instead is you did something just absolutely embarrassing. What happens is your friends, your team members, are so full of empathy.

Well, our mirror neurons are firing. We know how we would feel. And we are just intrinsically compassionate to that immediately.

And we want to make it better. In a funny way, we now like you even more. Yes. Because you had that moment.

And it's really hard to convince yourself. This happens all the time. This whole thing is why I do apologize. But when people come in that have relapsed, almost unanimously, the person comes, they're ashamed. They're embarrassed.

They don't even want to tell the truth.

Yep. And then they are assuming everyone there is going to go through what they did wrong, what they should have been doing differently. And there are some of those, sure. But generally, it's always met with true gratitude. Thank you for reminding us what's on the other side.

It's like a booster shot. Yes.

And it's hard for that person to imagine that that's true. I've been in that situation. But I know it's true when I'm on the other end of it. And I'm like, oh, my God. I'd hate to say thank you for doing this.

And certainly, thank you for telling us. Yes. I mean, that to me is sort of one of the great lines in the organizational world is when you can say thank you for letting us know. It's genuinely true that you can appreciate the clear line of sight.

That's right. Yeah. It's such a service people do.

One thing that I think helps, and again, I study the things I struggle with. So I'm a scaredy cat, so I study psychological safety. But most people, when you talk about accountability in an organizational setting, that means punishment. But the word is really account. It's a story.

If you think of it as accounting. Accounting. Yeah, exactly. Like doing inventory of your stock. Right, right.

That's potentially empowering that I can see it and own it.

And I would just argue that it's almost all anyone's looking for. Like you're living in such fear that you've made a mistake or you've erred and you're going to be rejected. And everyone has an expectation that everyone's going to fail because they are failing all the time. The only thing they're looking for is like I just would feel safest if I knew you knew when you messed up. We can fix that.

Right. And then I feel a little more confident. it won't happen again, at least not the same way.

I feel safer. But if you're in denial that you played any role in this, it's just going to repeat itself over and over again. It just makes you very pessimistic about the relationship.

Absolutely. For good reason, because it probably will repeat.

So you think you're preventing someone from not being attracted to you. But, in fact, you're ensuring they won't be attracted to you because you're dangerous.

Well, apologies exist to repair the relationship harm that happens when you do something wrong. There's a range, of course, from things you do wrong and you did absolutely by mistake, human error. Those still need to be apologized for all the way over to...

You were malicious.

Malicious harm. Right. They only work if they're done well. And done well means taking accountability, acknowledging your role in it, acknowledging the harm that was done and promising to make amends or offering to make amends. That can mean so many different things.

Yeah, you can pay someone back. Right. And I think you have to fight strongly the urge to explain to people why you did it. Because that sounds like you're justified in what you did.

Yeah, and it's a fine thing, because an explanation can be OK, but an excuse is poison. It basically negates the apology.

Yeah, if you're saying, I had no other option but to do that, that's not actually an apology. No.

But if you say, I failed to show up for our meeting, I got a phone call from my mother and she just tripped and fell, and I am so sorry. I forgot to call you to say I had to take her to the hospital, right? Right. It's probably helpful for you to know there really was this legitimate challenge in my life. You didn't hit a happy hour.

What we want to know is that you're conscious of our feelings and you're operating in this relationship with some level of concern about me.

That's right. And in fact, that's the key element right there. It's about you. It's not about me. Right.

Regardless of my intention or my motive. Yeah, but a lot of people will say, I got tired of people judging me by my actions and not my intentions.

Sorry. You're going to be judged by your actions.

That's right.

All of us as fallible human beings need to make sure we appreciate that the impact another has on us does not accurately mirror their intentions. I think in ordinary social relationships, the impact that we have that's harmful or I think you insulted me in some way is not driven by bad intentions. Thoughtlessness, maybe carelessness, but not bad intentions.

Yeah. Not straight up, nefarious. Okay. You mentioned social media. We kind of talked about it a little bit, but maybe just the last thing I would like to talk about is parenting, as someone who has a couple children.

Yeah. There's so many messages in our culture, and then often in our families, that reinforce this need to be perfect.

And we even have systems in place to demonstrate perfection. So an A is perfect.

And you want an A. And if you get an A minus, God forbid, or B plus, you might as well give it up these days with great inflation.

And join the army immediately.

So, as parents, it's so important to help your kids not fall prey to perfectionism. You know, it sort of seems almost tempting. Like, oh, if they're perfectionists, that's going to be good because they'll work really hard and do really well. But what ends up happening is they'll take the easy test, right? They'll take the easy class, because it becomes so painful psychologically to be shown to be imperfect.

Well, yeah. And then you're also reinforcing or formatting their brain. to be results-driven, period. Yes. And to never enjoy process.

And that's the beautiful work by Carol Dweck on growth mindset versus fixed mindset. She describes the fixed mindset is what most of us have most of the time, which is that belief that our intelligence is fixed. You know, if I do well on something, it shows I'm smart. If I don't do well, it shows I'm not. So I'm going to go out of my way, largely unconsciously, to not show to myself or the world that I'm not smart.

Well, you're incentivizing it. That's where the attention's going to come from.

That's right. That's where the attention's coming from versus just results. And I think so many of us grew up where the attention was 100% on the results.

Well, also, it's just easier. As a parent of two, eight and 10-year-olds, you show me stuff all day long. It's just easiest to go like, oh, my God, that's incredible, because you just want to move on from that.

But then you're reinforcing this. Okay, that was incredible. What if the next one's not incredible? Like, what if the next one's just okay? Right?

But they'll stack four rocks and be like, look at that.

Yeah.

I know. Yeah. Yeah, right.

There's really nothing to say. It's like, yes, you did.

It's hard to know what to say. They, like, climb a little bit.

It's like, hey.

Get curious. Like, you know, instead of thinking, okay, what am I supposed to say? You think, oh, I wonder.

Why did you think this was going to be impressive? This is four rocks.

Why did you call me over here?

Look, I wonder why. Yes, you've been going underwater for like eight years now.

But here's another one. So one is trying to encourage the growth mindset through talking about process and interest and curiosity about the decisions and the activities. You know, and rewarding when they try something really hard that doesn't work out the first time. I mean, no kid would ever learn to ride a bike if you didn't do at least some of that. That first go around is not pretty.

Yeah. I do a good job. sometimes, and bad times. I try to tell them, like, their scores.

We all do that. That one's perfect. That's the whole point.

That's your receipt. I'm like, that's your receipt right there. You got a receipt for riding motorcycles. That scar on your knee, that's your receipt.

Yeah, that's right.

Get a bunch of those.

It's very tempting as a parent to want to remove the experience of failure from your kid's life. The snowplow metaphor. Helicopter parent. And reduce the barriers to your happiness and achievement in ways that you don't even know I'm doing. But in fact, kids need failure experiences to build those failure muscles.

Well, this gets back to my judgmentalness about accountability. I think if you really get honest with yourself as a parent, you're uncomfortable watching them suffer. I am heartbroken when I see my daughter fail socially or these other things. It is excruciating for me. And so if I'm a thousand percent honest, if I'm trying to intervene, I'm actually trying to reduce my own suffering.