Amy Edmondson | The Science of Failing Well

Srini Rao

Amy, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Amy Edmondson

Oh, it is an honor to be here.

Srini Rao

Well, it is my pleasure to have you here. So as I was saying before we hit record, I think that your work has been cited in more of the books I have read and more of the work of our own guests than anybody I have ever known. And I thought, how do I introduce you? I was like, you kind of are like the godmother of psychological safety is how I would describe you at this point. So you have a new book out called The Right Kind of Wrong, all of which we will get into.

But given your background and the nature of your work, I wanted to start with what is one of my favorite questions. That is, what social group were you a part of in high school and what impact did that end up having on where you have ended up and what you ended up doing with both your life and your career?

Amy Edmondson

Wow, so by social group you mean informal. Right, right. Gosh, I mean, I guess I have to say math geeks. If I am to be honest, I was a good student. I was someone who liked, or I don't know if I liked it, but I was hell bent on proving my worth, I guess. And so I was...

Srini Rao

Jocks, nerds, cheerleaders, whatever, yeah. I mean, whatever it was, yeah.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

I was quite popular for people needing help with problem sets.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So, I mean, what impact did that have, you know, on sort of what you ended up doing in the future? Because I know that you have an engineering background before the work that you do now.

Amy Edmondson

That is right. So I mean, it sent me first into the realm of, you know, wanting to go to a good college, wanting to kind of, in a sense, prove that I was good enough and smart enough. I have a very brilliant older brother, and he was at MIT and studying engineering, so I thought I would do that too. Not MIT, but Harvard and study engineering.

And so it sent me down a path of being good at school. And part of being good at school, certainly in high school, is being good at math and science. But it took me a while. So maybe it slowed me down because it took me a while to figure out what I was really passionate about, good at, interested in, and more suited to make a real contribution to.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, it is funny because I have talked to friends about high school math. And I was a good student. But I think one of the things that is so striking about the way that we teach math, and I have talked to friends who are applied math majors, are the way math is taught in high school makes absolutely no sense. You don't actually learn math. Because you don't learn why something is the way it is. You just learn how to do it. Like, I got A is in AP calculus. I can barely add. I am an Indian who is horrible at math, which is like, a big disgrace to all Indians. But.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Srini Rao

This is something that I am, you know, always curious about with educators. You know, one of the things that you talk a lot about in this book, I mean, you teach at arguably the most elite institution in the world. You are an alumni of that institution. And so every time I talk to an educator, the question I always come back to is, if you were tasked with redesigning the education system from the ground up, let is say that you were basically brought into the next presidential administration as the head of education policy, based on the principles in your book, what would you change given that we had?

Amy Edmondson

Hmm.

Srini Rao

just had this huge college admission scandal, and largely the schools involved were schools like the ones you teach at. And I know because I am an alumni of a school like that. I am a Berkeley alum. So I know what kind of a pressure cooker that is. And the idea of being wrong in those environments is terrifying. Like we honestly are never taught anything. I mean, you know, when we were growing up as kids, like my dad would be like, you get bring home an A-. He is like, why didn't you get an A-? Because I got something wrong.

Amy Edmondson

Mmm.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah. Right.

Amy Edmondson

You know, my dad did the same thing, but it turned out he was joking. But kids don't have a great sense of humor, at least on things like that. So it turns out, I mean, what happened was I'd get a 99, he'd say, why didn't you get 100? But it was literally meant to be a joke. But I guess tell that to the amygdala, right? So it is a wonderful question and it is a wonderful topic, which is, what should schools do differently to...

Srini Rao

Yeah, exactly.

Amy Edmondson

truly encourage and build learners, you know, rather than performers and know-it-allers. And I think there is an awful lot, and I do believe that Right Kind of Wrong, this new book, is quite aimed at that topic. And so perhaps the first thing I will say is schools should do a better job of including

failure opportunities in the discovery sense especially. And if you think about it, certainly in high school, and oftentimes this is true in college too, that the main place that people experience failure is if they are on a formal sports team of some kind. And that turns out to be a really important builder of resilience and...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

even mental health, because good athletes who are part of a real team necessarily experience a healthy rate of failures. You just simply can't win every game. You can't conquer every contest. And understand that is just part of it, right? That is part of excellence in any endeavor that you take seriously is that failure comes along. But I don't think we have done...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

a great job of teaching that in the academic setting. I am a big fan and try to use often simulations where people are put in teams or put in exercises, where by definition, some teams will do better than others, some teams will fail, some teams will succeed. And for all teams, even the most successful ones, there will be failures along the way because it is the nature of the task.

and they are designed to occur so that you can learn from them.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I guess my sort of response to that is tell that to the kid in high school who is trying to get into Harvard. Because I just finished reading Adam Grant is new book, Hidden Potential, where he talks about our selection systems and how they are biased towards looking at our past performance. For example, if I am applying to Harvard, and you tell me, yeah, go ahead and fail, having an F on a transcript is probably not going to improve my chances. So how do you integrate?

Amy Edmondson

Mmm.

Srini Rao

opportunities with failure when you have a selection system that is basically designed to root it out almost.

Amy Edmondson

Well, I guess it depends on whether you are asking this from a policy perspective or a parent of an individual child perspective. Yeah. Right, so then we have to say, all right, we are living here in the real world, so we can't give you advice that will backfire, right? Will in fact harm your chances. Although ironically, one of the best ways

Srini Rao

Let is go with the parent of the individual child. There is a lot of parents who listen to this show.

Amy Edmondson

to get into elite colleges is to be on an elite sports team in high school. It turns out, and I am sure you know this, that many of these young kids in their, whether they are playing soccer or rowing or lacrosse or you name it, are being actively recruited and often have an assurance that they will be.

accepted with even just a reasonably good grade point average as early as late in their 10th grade or sophomore year. So, I mean, that is not my expertise. That is another topic. And I am not a fan of those sort of backdoor policies, but they do exist. And since I am a fan of ensuring that your kids get a healthy sort of dose of resilience and failure, maybe those two things go together.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

But more seriously, I am not talking about coming, you know, ensuring that you have an F on your transcript. It is more about ensuring that you are pursuing the stretch opportunities through which you will really learn and grow. And if you are doing that, there will be setbacks and...

Srini Rao

Right.

Amy Edmondson

and failures along the way. Again, failure maybe with a small F, not a capital F. And most colleges can suss out the difference between having taken all easy courses and taking some harder ones. And essays can be written about, and many essays are written about challenges and really challenging things that were overcome.

Srini Rao

Mm.

Amy Edmondson

And one of the reasons that is a popular sort of essay genre is because colleges do want to know about resilience. They want to know about curiosity and drive. Like you are not just doing this to impress, to prove yourself, to impress the adults in your life. You are doing it out of a real thirst for learning and ultimately for making a contribution.

to the world.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Well, I think that one of the things that is so challenging is in the system that we have, it is so hard to think about that. Because I can tell you, when I saw that admissions documentary, I thought to myself, man, I did not have this reaction when I got rejected or accepted to any school. I remember when the Berkeley envelope came, I was like, OK, I got it. And I never saw anybody like, and I am sure you have seen it, the reactions that these kids have on video, it is like, oh my god, this is the end of the world.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Srini Rao

So, I mean, I know you write about resilience, and we will go much deeper into this, but one of the questions I have just right off the bat is there is certain people who, to your point, as you mentioned about the essays, will actually take a failure and make something of it and respond to it in a really positive way, but there are others who don't necessarily. What is the difference? Like, what role does upbringing, genetics, environment, all that play in the resilience that people have inherently? And then, of course, how do they build it?

Amy Edmondson

with.

Amy Edmondson

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

Oh, you know, it is such a, I think it is a multifaceted phenomenon to have, to have resilience. Some of it is going to come from your family, some from the good luck of great teachers, some from your peers. I do think many, it is easy to underestimate the role of, of good friendships and robust learning messages that you can receive from, from people who care about you.

and encourage you, right? And help you think through the disappointments that are inevitable in your life, especially in adolescence.

Srini Rao

Well, let is get into the book. And a couple of things come to mind. The first is, you have an engineering background. So I kind of wonder how that background has applied in your role both as a social scientist and educator, because there are two different ways of looking at things. But I imagine the systems thinking mindset from engineering probably plays a huge role in how you actually organize ideas and how you come up with these concepts. Because like I said, in my mind, you are the godmother of psychological safety. I think your name is literally synonymous with those two words.

Amy Edmondson

Okay.

Amy Edmondson

I am sorry.

Amy Edmondson

Well, I don't know if that is good or bad, but it does make me want to make sure that we are on the same page on what it means. I define psychological safety as an environment in which you believe you can speak up honestly with questions, concerns, mistakes, dissenting perspectives, and that you believe that is welcome and appropriate. Not that it is easy and effortless and comfortable.

Srini Rao

Hehehe

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Amy Edmondson

but that you understand that is what we do around here because of what is at stake. And so I studied it as you know, for a very long time and I kind of observed it to be an emergent property of a group, something that groups develop, healthy teams, healthy work groups develop a sense of willingness to take interpersonal risks, willingness to be candid with each other even though it is not easy.

because they care about the work or they care about the patients they are taking care of or they care about the wonderful new product that they are innovating together or whatever it is that they are doing. That purpose and that goal takes precedence over interpersonal comfort or wanting to look good.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. So one thing, I have a one. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Sorry, yeah, go ahead.

Amy Edmondson

Oh, but the engineer, sorry. You know, sort of the, so it is funny because I spoke to someone recently from Denmark who said, you know, I read the book, I love the book, and there is nothing in it that isn't obvious. And I said, I completely agree. I said, I completely agree. In a way, I almost take that as a compliment because what that means is by the time you finish reading it, you are convinced that I am right, right? And it is, and, but, but.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Amy Edmondson

just because something is kind of obvious in retrospect does not mean that people are living their lives in the way that they need to, or could, to be more effective, more joyful, more adventurous, if they took these concepts to heart. But the reason I thought of that story is that I do believe my engineering background gives me a strong...

biased toward wanting to make things work. I really want things to work as they should. And I observe organizations and teams and social systems of all kinds. And I look at all the factors in place that get in the way of things working as they should. People aren't speaking up when they aren't quite sure about something. That gets in the way of safe, high quality patient care, for example.

I observe people, whether they will acknowledge it to themselves or not, more interested in looking good than being good. And that is not a judgment, that is just an observation that our society, our education, our upbringings can lead us towards some very irrational behaviors that ultimately just don't work out all that well.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, one question before we get into the details of the book itself. Like, so I have a one-year-old nephew and observing how he learns and goes to the world is not only fascinating, but beyond inspiring because he doesn't have any, there is no sort of fear of failure inside of him. You know, he is like the social butterfly. He says hi to everybody, apparently. My sister can't take him shopping without him literally saying hello to every single person. And he literally just started learning to talk

Amy Edmondson

Uh...

Amy Edmondson

Well, then.

Amy Edmondson

Right.

Srini Rao

vocabulary, I think in the last like month is up to 100 words and we are just like, okay, this is terrifying He is going to be smarter than all of us and we all kind of know it. We are like joking. He probably already thinks that But what happens like what happens to that sort of insatiable curiosity because he will go do anything like he will you know If we baby proof something he will go undo it. I mean, even if it hurts him or you know, something falls on his head

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah. Oh, he is an engineer.

Srini Rao

Yeah, he will, oh, he is, he watched me unlatch a baby gate while I was holding him and he watched me like a hawk. And then when I put him down, like 10 minutes later, he crawled over there. He is not tall enough to reach it yet. And then he started fiddling with the switch. And I was like, Oh my God. Yeah, but the thing is that as adults, we don't like an adult. Let is use the baby gate as a metaphor. If they couldn't open on the first time, they'd be like, all right, I suck at this. And that would be the end. Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Incredible. Well.

Amy Edmondson

Forget it. Yeah, exactly. And that is fixed mindset, right? I am born without the gene for opening the baby gate. Nonsense, right? So that is one of those beliefs that we start to internalize unconsciously, you know, that we have fixed intelligence. You know, even the idea that this baby who sounds amazing must be a genius, right? Every baby is a genius in some way, right? We are born with this remarkable capacity

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

for learning and growing and just we are sponges for knowledge or our skills are getting better and better and better. And then sometime in elementary school, relatively early in elementary school, we start internalizing, because we are very smart, the socially sent messages that we are supposed to get the right answer, right? Not, you know, not, you know, try stuff like it, that you don't get a round of applause for getting things wrong. Um, and,

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

And so they start to over learn what Carol Dweck would call the fixed mindset. You know, we start to, kids even, they know how to do this. They start sorting the kids into smart and not so smart. And then they don't want to be found out as not so smart. So they both consciously and not start to hedge their bets and not do the things for which they might be found out as not smart. Now, some kids just never,

lose it, right? They just, they are perpetually, they stay on that curiosity track and they are just more motivated to try things and see what happens than to look good and hedge their bets.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, it is funny because I, in my notes, I tagged one of my other blog posts. I wrote this blog post called how the search for right answers has destroyed higher education, which is, you know, a bit sort of facetious. Yeah. But I had a quote from Naval Ravi Khan then here. He said, one of the problems is that schools and our educational system, and even our way of raising children replaces curiosity with compliance. And once you replace curiosity with compliance, you get an obedient factory worker, but you no longer get a creative thinker.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah, yeah, provocative on purpose.

Amy Edmondson

Right.

Srini Rao

And you need creativity. You need the ability to feed your brain to learn whatever you want. And I followed that up by saying, right answers lead to good grades and open the door to elite universities, but they close the door to discovery, exploration, and growth. To reverse this pattern, we could stop conditioning students to believe their grades reflect their potential. And even Seth Godin in the Icarus Discession said, the right answer is the enemy of art. So I think that makes a perfect segue into talking about sort of the structure that you define for failure, because I think that you really kind of

Amy Edmondson

Mmm. What do you-

Srini Rao

like teased it apart and really dissected it by giving us a real like deep dive into the elements of failure. So let is start by talking about the sort of core definitions that you opened the book, which with our failures, errors and violations, because I think it is important that people understand that before we get into the rest of the conversation.

Amy Edmondson

Hmm.

Amy Edmondson

Sure, absolutely. So I define failure, this is very colloquial, but as an outcome that deviates from desired results. It is like an undesired result. It is the bad, not the good result. And I define error, which is synonymous with mistakes, as an unintended deviation from pre-specified standards, procedures, rules, recipes, et cetera.

By definition, you don't do that on purpose. If you do it on purpose, then it is a violation or sabotage. But mistakes are not on purpose. Whereas some undesired results, some failures are.

Some failures are indeed the result of mistakes, but other failures are the result of incorrect hypotheses.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, it kind of made me think about sort of, you know, would we deliberately violate something? Because I thought about it. It is like, well, OK, somebody might say, OK, I am going to deliberately violate this sort of tried and true rule and come up with something better as a result. Because I remember, yes, my tag, I tagged a note titled deliberate, you know, violations. But that is a good point. Yeah. So let is talk about generating an intelligent hypothesis so that we can kind of segue into the concept of intelligent failure.

Amy Edmondson

That is an experiment. Yep.

Amy Edmondson

Sure. So to generate an intelligent hypothesis, whether in a formal sense as a scientist in a laboratory or in an informal sense as a high school kid, wondering whether they could try out for that team, you do your homework first. You just find out as best you can what is already known. And then you are stuck with what isn't yet known, but you'd like to know.

And so you are designing a test or an experiment to help resolve some of that uncertainty, to help you learn something you don't yet know, you know, in, at least for you, new terrain.

Srini Rao

Okay, great. So, yeah.

Amy Edmondson

But it should also be in pursuit of a goal. And again, this is going to be part of my definition of intelligent failure, right? So don't, this is, I think it is, your well-designed experiments are those that are hoping to take you a step closer to some goal. And they are thoughtful in that you have done some of the background thinking or researching that you need to do to...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

figure out what is worth testing.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So I mean, these are what you call the four key attributes of intelligent failure. And I thought a perfect way to actually demonstrate this with a story was the Amy Web Online dating experiment, which I told you I saw that. And I was like, I literally copied that section, put it into my note taking app, and typed into the AI. I was like, reverse engineer this for me so I can use it. But I thought it was such a great example of what you are talking about here.

Amy Edmondson

Hahaha

Amy Edmondson

It is really funny.

Amy Edmondson

Absolutely. I mean, so Amy Webb, who is an amazing thinker and I guess she is called a quantitative futurist. So she is a person who is really into big data and using it to solve problems and predict the future. So she decided that she would join the world of online dating apps and

and she was really truly hoping to meet someone to spend her life with. And one of the dates she actually got from this app was with a guy who at the restaurant, they went out for dinner, ordered tons of things from the menu to eat and even several bottles of wine, expensive wine. And it wasn't...

actually terribly interesting. So this is a failure, right? He wasn't really fun to talk to. And at some point, the bill arrived, he excused himself to go to the restroom, and never came back. Right? So not only was this a sort of wasted evening, which is pretty painful in its own right, but she ended up with a bill that was roughly equivalent to a month is rent at the time. So that is the setup.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Now she wanted to learn, of course. And so she was curious, but how was it that the dating algorithm had sort of sent her this guy? Like what had she done wrong that led to this being a supposed match? And so she decided to set up a kind of experiment, maybe we will end an intelligent failure here, by she created fictitious

She is energetic because she created 10 fictitious profiles for men that were sort of just contained qualities she really was hoping to find in a date and life partner. And then she waited to see what kind of women these fake profiles would attract. Now, she didn't, you know, she didn't want to deceive any more than she had to, so she didn't sort of, you know.

Srini Rao

Ah.

Amy Edmondson

lead any of these women on to think they really existed. But she analyzed the profiles of the ones who were connecting with these guys and realized that she, of course, had many of the attributes they had. She just hadn't thought about it that way. She was kind of a geek, if you will. And so she realized she had to put in, because as a result of this experiment, she realized that she had to put into her profile.

more than just her resume and her successes in her field, but include words like she is fun and adventurous, which she is, and maybe a better, made a better photograph, put a better photograph up. She'd been very sort of quick and, I don't guess, sufficient the first time around. And then she also learned that it was sensible to wait.

almost a day before answering a message and so on. And she in a sense cracked the code. She did meet, she put a new profile up for herself, a more successful profile in terms of being able to track the kinds of people she was looking for. And then she did in fact meet a man who she married and is still married to and they have a daughter and so on and so forth. So she...

I think the most important thing about this story is that this, you know, this, a failure like that might have sent mere mortals, you know, away from such an app ever, you know, forever. That is that. Don't like it. Didn't work. Terrible waste of a night. Paycheck. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, anger would be just, but I guess you could also use some of that anger as the driving force to kind of crack the code.

Srini Rao

I mean, a month is rent would definitely piss me off. That would piss me off a lot.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I mean, I love that because it was such a great story and it is such a great example of like taking a very data-driven approach to something that doesn't work. And I think that most of us, I think, try to get this sort of, you know, while we sort of feel good approach to like dealing with this, it is like, you know, pick yourself up by the bootstraps, whatever, you know, feed ourselves with platitudes. But this was such a, such a different way of thinking about failure.

Amy Edmondson

Yes.

Amy Edmondson

Right, right. Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Yes, and it is not, you know, that is, I think you are right that we often get this message, you know, oh, failure. Yes, let is be resilient. Try, try again, but not, okay, unpack it. What happened? What are the key insights? Where are the shortcomings? You know, what, what are the actual contributors to the outcome rather than just the sort of quick and dirty, oh, I didn't try hard enough. But what nonsense, it wasn't that you didn't try hard enough. It is that you didn't have the right.

You know, the right hypothesis, I guess.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Let is shift and get into the next concept, which is basic failures. Because you say, unlike intelligent failures, which occur in unknown territory, basic failures involve errors in well-trodden terrain. Basic failures are not the right kind of wrong. In the continuum of failure types, the furthest from intelligent failures, basic failures are unproductive, wasting time, energy, and resources, and they are largely preventable. And I loved some of the things you talked about here, because they were all just small, stupid things that all of us do all the time.

Amy Edmondson

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

Right.

Srini Rao

Like I literally have had days when I am like, I can't find my keys. And the dumb thing is I have like a little tracker on there. I just hadn't activated it. And the funny thing is that I still haven't activated it. Even though I have an app for it and everything. It is been a while. It was like about a month ago and I like even wrote a note to do it. I still haven't done it, but in my mind, that is like a kind of an example, but talk to us about basic failures. Cause he seemed like they happen in everyday life.

Amy Edmondson

Right. Ah! Right.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

It is absolutely, so basic failures are failures caused by a single cause, usually a mistake. You know, you can't find your keys. So you put them down somewhere. You can't find them. You know, you put the, you, um, you make, you make a mistake in the recipe and you get, you get a bad dish. Um, and they are preventable. I mean, it is sort of, it is obvious that they are preventable because they are in familiar territory. And when we are at our best, we have,

prevented them. So I have a slide in a new talk I am giving about this that I can't help but call it the boring slide because it is so boring. And the basic things that prevent basic failure are things like training, checklists,

Amy Edmondson

Speaking up when you are not quite sure. I mean, blocking and tackling. That everybody, in a way, brush your teeth. Everybody knows this. And of course, there is a deeper level of, well, why don't we do it? And I think it is partly because we don't appreciate how much real value there is to be found in

preventing basic failure. We think of them as idiosyncratic and unimportant and maybe even small. But one of the basic failures that I describe in the book is Air Florida Flight 90, which thankfully was 40 years ago, but it involves a flight that where the cockpit crew, the pilot and the co-pilot went through the takeoff checklist as one is required to do, but essentially...

you know, in their sleep or essentially as a rote exercise rather than a mindful exercise. And despite it being an icy cold January day in Washington, DC, when the first officer said, anti-ice, they kept and said off and they just went on from there, APU, running, start levers, idle, right? Off they went. That one error, that one mindless error, the proper answer to anti-ice was

on and it should have been turned on but the failure to turn that on led to the loss of 78 lives a few minutes later right and that is so that is a basic failure and it maybe I bring it up because it demonstrates how you know the mindful inclusion of practices like checklists and the codification of best practices that checklists represent um and you know the

the willingness to converse thoughtfully in the process of even doing very familiar work is a source of enormous value. It is really important to put these best practices in place in your life, in your companies.

Srini Rao

Hmm. Yeah. Well, I will tell you what I thought of when I read that. I thought of the check engine light on my car. And I thought to myself, I am like, you know what? This is like one of those. The check engine light is basically what you call potentially ambiguous threat, which I know you go into later. But I remember every time I have ignored that, the lesson I learned is like the longer you wait to get that thing checked, the more expensive the repair gets to be every time.

Amy Edmondson

Right.

Amy Edmondson

Yes.

RAIN!

Amy Edmondson

Yeah! Right.

Srini Rao

Like, it is never been without question. I learned that the hard way, and I was like, okay, that is it, I am never doing that again.

Amy Edmondson

Right. This is the topic of preventative maintenance or, you know, as you say, you know, just there is a little signal there that maybe it is, maybe we have moved slightly beyond preventative and it is time to, you know, truly get this thing checked out. I mean, it might be a nothing. It might be that programming that the car company is now put in to sort of make sure you come back, but it might actually be a something. And we just don't think preventative maintenance or maintenance period is like worthy.

of our cognitive effort, right? It is not worthy of our attention when in fact, I would argue there is enormous value there.

Srini Rao

Well, let is talk about assumptions and cognitive biases, because I think this is really important when it comes to both the combination of like, you know, taking prescriptive advice from people. And we will talk about that a bit more when we get to context. But you say that assumptions are taken for granted beliefs that feel like facts because we aren't consciously aware of them, we don't hold them up for scrutiny.

many are harmless, we can safely assume our car is parked where we left it the night before. If we stop to challenge every assumption we'd make, we'd never get out of the door in the morning. But then you go on to say, when presented with the choice between admitting mistakes or protecting our self image, the decision is easy. We want to believe that we are not at fault. So we find every reason to justify what we did as correct, which basically you say is the fundamental attribution error, which exacerbates the problem. So you have got these two conflicting things going on, right? Like we know that we are making these assumptions that we take for granted.

Amy Edmondson

Ha ha.

Amy Edmondson

Right.

Amy Edmondson

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

Right.

Srini Rao

Because it is funny, I joked about this, I have been working on a book about cognitive biases titled Everybody is Full of Shit Including Me, because in different contexts that is actually true. Like the same advice that is life changing in one context could be absolutely destructive in another.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

You know, we have to, you are right. I mean, I don't think there is so much contradictory as two powerful forces that lead us to not behave as rationally as we might otherwise behave, right? So one of them is that very strong desire to look good to others and to ourself. And so, you know, we just almost instantly push the blame somewhere else, right? It wasn't me, I didn't contribute to that outcome.

And in a way that is, it is an error. Well, it is technically an error, but it is also emotionally an error. Because in fact, think about the power and self-confidence entailed in going, oh, I did that. I contributed to that failure, to that bad outcome. There are things that I did or didn't do that.

allowed that to unfold as it did. That is actually quite empowering because you are recognizing that you now have an opportunity to go forward and take a different path. And so you are both strong enough and smart enough to recognize it, but you are also kind of courageous and confident enough to say, yeah, that is okay. But I am a fallible human being, I can make.

I can make an error and go forward. I don't need to distance myself from it, pretend it didn't happen, et cetera. It is clearly from a place of greater wisdom. So once we appreciate that, right? Once we appreciate the greater wisdom involved in fully taking accountability, taking into account how we contributed, even if it is just a small way, is quite empowering, quite self-empowering.

And then, so that is kind of the part where we have got to override our self-protection instinct to have more of your nephew is instincts of like, what is next, right? Okay, I fell down. I picked myself right back up. Like I am eager and I am eager to go forward, not backward. And the part about assumption making is harder because by definition,

Amy Edmondson

when we are making assumptions, we are unaware of making them. And for that, I think of two things. One is just that the occasional or maybe periodic pause, the pause to become more mindful. Okay, wait a minute, what am I missing? I am sort of assuming as if, now I wonder if that is, what would happen if that weren't the case? And the other part of that is to...

to say, well, I wonder what other people might think. Maybe I will ask my spouse, maybe I will ask my good friend or my colleague, how do you see this? I think assumption, breaking out of our assumptions is a team sport.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Well, let is get into complex failures. Because I think the most obvious one that we have seen and that I think anybody can relate to is all the things we saw during COVID. And I know you use those as really, those are just easy examples, I think, for people to understand what this is. But you basically say that the complex failures have more than one cause, none of which created the failure on its own. Usually a mix of internal factors, such as procedures and skills, collides with external factors, such as whether or suppliers delivery delay. Sometimes the multiple factors interact

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

one another, sometimes they simply compound as with the straw that broke the camel is back. So talk to us about that and one, how they occurred and basically I think that will make a nice segue into building the systems to avoid them.

Amy Edmondson

Yes, so they occur and again, they come in small and large sizes, consequential or less consequential failures. And what makes them challenging is that they have so many causes and any one of them on its own wouldn't lead to the failure. So we are tempted to not care very much or not notice the small deviations that are going to add up and produce this bad outcome.

That is the downside. The upside is there are many, many handholds. Like if you are doing rock climbing, you are looking for viable handholds. Well, complex failures give us many small opportunities to wake up and notice that something is a miss that might matter. That little light on your car. Let is say you just decide, okay, I am going to interrogate that. Am I going to take that one seriously for a change? And...

see what I can learn and just decide to engage more wholeheartedly with those small signals.

Srini Rao

So basically you have what you call the sort of three practices for getting good at the science of failing well, which are situ contextual awareness, self-awareness and systems awareness. So let is start with context, which is probably the topic. I can't stop beating like a dead horse because where I see context go awry is with prescriptive advice like

Amy Edmondson

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

Good.

Amy Edmondson

Hmm

Srini Rao

I feel like self-help books are completely context blind. And the people who read them are even more context blind. So one, why are we context blind? Because people will come to me and ask me for advice on podcasts. And I am like, I have no idea how to grow this thing because I started 13 years ago and I was the beneficiary of good timing. I can't replicate that for you. And yet we...

Amy Edmondson

Yes.

Amy Edmondson

Yep. Right. Yeah, it was unique.

Srini Rao

But the funny thing is that we use outliers as role models, and we think we are going to replicate the results without taking into account the most obvious variable of all, the person that you are staring at in the mirror, which right there is part of the context, but genetics, timing, environment, all of these are contextual variables that distort the effectiveness, and yet we are largely context blind, I think, when we go looking for advice. So...

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Yes.

Srini Rao

Talk to me about how we actually raise our contextual awareness, or do I have to write a book called Everybody is Full of Shit Including Me?

Amy Edmondson

Yes. Yeah. Yup.

Amy Edmondson

I guess I am not a fan of books that can't be mentioned on morning television with their title. You might have to, everyone is full of stuff, right? I don't know. But the, yes, I am glad you want to start there because to me, context is the most important concept in the book. And it is because, in fact, one of the reasons I wrote this book is that our failure conversation has been context blind forever.

Srini Rao

I am going to go.

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

You are either in the camp that says fail fast, break things, etc., or you are in the camp that says, no, failure is not an option, not here in the real world where I work. And both are right and both are incomplete. It depends. So if you are in a context where very little is known, there is a viable goal that you are pursuing, you have no choice.

but to fail and fail well, right? To have thoughtful tests, hopefully small enough that nothing really horrible goes wrong and no one gets hurt so that you can learn more and progress towards your goal. Your podcast 13 years ago was not your podcast today. It was an experiment. It was, you got better and better, it got better and better, and so on. But the two simplest and most essential bits of context that I like to look at are,

What are the stakes? And first and foremost in human safety. If you are in passenger airplane as a pilot, you are mindful, alert, awake, using your checklist. You are treating that context with the seriousness that it deserves. If you are in a laboratory, you should be having fun experimenting. So the...

The stakes, are the stakes high or low in human safety, economic and reputational domains? And what is the level of uncertainty? Is it high or low? If the uncertainty is very, very high, we have no choice but to experiment to learn more. If the uncertainty is very, very low, well, let is use best practice and let is use it.

mindfully, particularly when the stakes are high. So this is, I think so many failures, so many of the failures I have studied would have been avoided by a deep and thoughtful awareness of what kind of context is this.

Srini Rao

Well, it is funny, and maybe you did have an illustration in the book for this, because I know you had a bunch of them, but I just like as you are saying that, I am imagining a four quadrant model for this.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah, yeah, I did all this funny. It is four quadrants, but it is got six potential quadrants, because I have basically very consistent contexts like manufacturing. And then I have well-understood contexts like patient care or surgery that still have a lot of variability or passenger air travel. So I call that variable context. And then I have laboratories or dating that is a novel context.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

that is three categories, and then there is high and low stakes. So that potentially gives rise to six cells, but there is really only four meaningful ones because the upper right two, you know, the variable and novel context where the stakes are high are both areas for just very, very cautious, you know, mindful experimentation and execution. And the, you know, the lower...

the lower right is also unique in a sense. We really don't have a clue what is going to work, the stakes are super low, let is just go to town having fun experimenting. And so it ends up being a two by two, but a kind of a slightly off kilter one.

Srini Rao

So the thing I wondered about is where creative work falls into, you know, these different contexts, because I like, I thinking about this, just let is take publishing as an example, since we are talking about a book. I mean, I have had people come to me and say, I want you to coach me to help me write a million, you know, sell a million copies. And I am like, well, I have no idea how to do that. I have never done that. And it reminds me of the concept of naive realism that you write about later in the book. And you say a lack of situational awareness can spawn a variety of preventable failures, usually due to a cognitive bias called naive realism.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah, great.

Amy Edmondson

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

mind the person who literally has no audience, no, you know, online presence is like, I want you to help me write a book that sells a million copies. I am like, I don't even know how to do that. That is naive realism. But yeah, so

Amy Edmondson

Yeah, right. A best seller.

Right. Nobody does. So I would say that is, you know, that writing a book is in the domain of very high uncertainty. I mean, it is, well, sorry, it is totally novel. Like, if you want to write a book at time zero, that book does not yet exist. There are no words on a page. So maybe a proposal, but that is your first step is write a proposal. So, um, so it is, it is enormously uncertain.

how those sentences are going to string together and whether they will be any good and so on. You have no choice, but the stakes, at least at time zero are pretty low, right? You are not yet going to fall flat on your face and fail wildly invisibly in front of all the world because you haven't even begun. So treat it that way. I think a lot of times people who want to write something, maybe not a book, maybe even an article, they tie themselves up in knots because they are so anxious about.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

failing, right, about it not working, about it not being good. No writing is good at the beginning, right? People always say, how did you learn to write so well? It is like, well, I just write badly and then I clean it up and clean it up and clean it up. Like I said, I am actually not, I don't know if anyone is a good writer. Some people are probably very good writers. I am not a good writer, but I am a heck of an editor. Like when I write bad, I can then look at it and go, oh, that is bad. I am going to make it better. And.

Srini Rao

Yep.

Amy Edmondson

Most days I sit down and look at yesterday is writing. It is horrible, but after I have sort of rolled up my sleeves and spent a little more time with it, I have beaten it into some somewhat of submission. So I think writing a book or writing anything is novel, creative as you said, is sort of novel almost by definition, not always, and initially at least low stakes. And so you should have a free yourself up.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. I am just laughing.

Srini Rao

there.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

to experiment and pay close attention to what you are producing, whether it is interesting, show it to some friends or colleagues to get feedback as you must in order to really make it better.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it is funny for you to mention editing because James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, he told me the exact same thing. And that book has sold millions of copies. He said, I am not a great writer. I am a better editor than I am a writer. But you know, it is fine. You kind of have like dissected the psychology behind something I said in one of my books where I said, you know, there is probably no greater time in the life of creative when then when you don't have an audience. Even though it is a thing you crave, because at that point you have nothing to lose. Like there is nobody expecting anything of you.

Amy Edmondson

Mm.

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Yes. Yeah. Yes. That is exactly right. And yet we don't act like that. You know, we act like we are anxious and reluctant and you know, and it is like, no, you don't have anyone to offend yet.

Srini Rao

No, we are...

Srini Rao

Well, the two most common responses I got in survey data from our readers when I asked, what is the thing that is keeping you from doing this creative thing? Fear of public opinion and fear of creative judgment. And I am like, by who? That is the most amazing part.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah, yeah, right. Well, and you are not going to just overnight have a million people look at it and go, it is crap, right? What is going to happen is no one will even get to see it unless it is good enough to get to see it, right? Because you send your proposals out and they get rejected. So then, you know, that is okay, you got a rejection. That is painful a little bit, but it is not a reputational blow because nobody else saw it.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Well, let is finish this up by talking about both system and self-awareness, because I think that as a content creator who basically has all these different automations running, I finally understand systems. And I never really thought they were. I will give you a ridiculous example. I had bad grades in college. So at Berkeley, if you are aspiring econ or business major and your grades suck, you go to environmental econ. And I remember sitting in a class my senior year.

Amy Edmondson

Mm.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Srini Rao

And this professor was explaining how to use a utility function to maximize the amount of milk that you could get from a cow. And I thought to myself, this is the dumbest thing I have ever done in college. I am never going to use this fast forward to now 25 plus years later, I have a course called maximize your output. And the entire course is based on a premise of maximizing the content you can create using your existing knowledge.

And I thought to myself, wait a minute, that is the exact same thing in a different context. And I realized, I was like, oh, so it was useless in one context, but useful in another. And to me, that is a system at work in a lot of ways.

Amy Edmondson

Wow. Yeah, that is, that is true. See, that is what we, you know, our natural way of thinking, and it is then made worse in the school system, is to go narrow, go small, look at parts, you know, to become the expert in some element, some part, rather than to sort of step back and develop an appreciation for how the parts fit together. And yet the behavior of most...

companies, technologies, every kind of system you can imagine, is determined more by the relationships among the parts than by the parts themselves. And so it is really developing this appreciation for the ways in which things work together and how that affects outcomes, particularly the outcomes you are trying to achieve.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, can you, so I gave you the example of, you know, using knowledge to create content. But do you have any others specifically with systems? I mean, like in our day to day lives, for example, I think we can build, because Ramit Sethi talks about this even in his finance work. He talks about like systems being ways to completely automate behavior that you want to have happen.

Amy Edmondson

Yeah, it is, um, gosh, I don't even know. It is funny. I mean, this is the, this, this one is the hardest one because it is, um, there is so much depth, I mean, to, to systems thinking, and I am not doing it justice in, in one chapter in the book, but the cognitive habit of pausing to think who or what else will be affected by this decision or this action. And what are some of the

downstream consequences of doing this now on other things that we care about. And just that simple shift really, it is a shift from me now, which is my instinct, what do I want and I want it now, to us later, right, in the future. And part of wisdom and part of...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

of just becoming, you know, growing up and trying to make a difference in some realm is to, delay gratification is too simple, but to think more fully about the various effects of small actions that might even be thought of as shortcuts in the near term. I know this is too abstract.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

You know, one of the studies that really brought this home for me was with Anita Tucker at BU, where we were studying nurses and in their day-to-day life, they just encounter on average like a problem every hour or so, you know, something that is not functioning the way it should that needs to be fixed immediately so that they can continue their, you know, their patient care work. And what we found was only about eight

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

percent of the problems that we studied in very detailed ways led nurses to either report them or either take action or ask someone else to take action to kind of prevent its recurrence and part of that and then That meant that they were sort of doomed to continue to face this small tide of you know little problems where things just weren't working as they should and

It is in part because people just have a hard time seeing that this, what your grandmother called a stitch in time saves nine, that, you know, if you, if you do some little extra work right now, it will really make your life better later and, and tomorrow. And by the way, make other people is lives better too. But we are so in the here and now and, and yet we can of course learn to be in the us and later.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean I think that if anybody explained this concept so simply that it finally clicked for me was Ray Dalio in principles where he talks about first second and third order consequences and You are like you are right like that one decision and most of us don't like I you know, I know I have written about it in a blog post It is like okay, like let is say you want to move to some other country you think all right I am going to get to go live in this foreign country That is the first order consequence as you move but what if you grow apart from your family like people don't account for those things I realize like we are really bad

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Exactly, exactly. Right, right. And yet we can, and we can become aware of temporal discounting and we can form a little kind of quick brainstorm to just think those things through and it doesn't take a PhD to come up with like five or six second and third order consequences. And then we can look at them thoughtfully and decide whether we are as happy as we were a few minutes ago to do this thing.

Srini Rao

because of temporal discounting, right?

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating. It is funny because you mentioned that somebody said everything in this book was so obvious. And despite it being obvious, I think that you really dissected something that so many of us are so uncomfortable with and haven't for a long time. So I want to finish with maybe one other area. I think that feeling like an imposter is something that is...

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Yes.

Srini Rao

deeply tied to this, because I will tell you, when I got into Berkeley, I still did, and I remember to this day, I was like, this was a mistake, like there had to have been a screw up. And then I remember at the end of Adam Grant is book, he writes a story about how he thought, he said there is like 50% of students at Harvard who actually think they deserve to be there, and he said another 50% think some mistake was made. And I...

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Mm-hmm.

Amy Edmondson

Absolutely. Yep, me too.

Srini Rao

fall into the second category for sure. Because I remember I had an admissions officer come to my school and I was in all state band and I was like, she was like, oh yeah, that will work out great. At the times I am like, what are the chances that she somehow remembered that out of 10,000 applications? Yeah, exactly. So talking about that, because honestly, I realized at a certain point that it didn't matter like,

Amy Edmondson

Right, very low, very low, yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Yes.

Srini Rao

Book deal with a publisher, like raising venture around a funding. I am like, wow. And Jennifer Wallace wrote this amazing book called Never Enough, when the achievement mindset becomes toxic. And I am like, what the hell? Like no matter what you achieve, you still feel like a failure?

Amy Edmondson

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson

Right, well, you know, I like to say, I mean, I say this with a smile. It is like once I, and of course I have to keep re-recognizing this, but once I recognize that I am a fallible human being and every other human on the planet is also a fallible human being, it takes some of the pressure off. Like, each of us is a fallible human being living and working with other fallible human

Amy Edmondson

We all have a perfect right to be here, wherever here is, whether that is the job you currently have, the college you are currently in, and look forward. Don't worry so much about how you got here, but look forward as to what are you going to do with it? What small difference do you want to make with the opportunities that you have by virtue of the various experiences you have had?

And that is the question. And sort of live, if we can live a little more joyfully with our fallibility, that was the hope with this book. We all are fallible. We can, once we are okay with that, we can, I think more easily increase the percentage, at least, of intelligent failures that we have in our lives and decrease, maybe wildly, the percentage of basic and complex failures that we experience in our lives.

and then have lives of more joy, adventure, and even accomplishment.

Srini Rao

Beautiful. Will that be such a beautiful place to wrap up our conversation? So I have one last question, which is how we finish all our interviews with the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Amy Edmondson

Say it again? Oh, unmistakable, right. A recognition of...

their purpose in life, I guess. I think once you recognize, not necessarily in a super formal way, but become comfortable with who you are and what you want to contribute, then I think unmistakability follows.

Srini Rao

Beautiful. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us to share your story your wisdom and your insights with our listeners Where can people find out more about you your work the book and everything else you are up to?

Amy Edmondson

Well, I guess the book is a great place to start, right? Kind of wrong, the science of failing well. amecedmondson.com is a website with somewhat incomplete information, but I try to keep it up with my recent articles and so on.

Srini Rao

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.