So roll us back a little through your career because you start the book very much with a personal failure, which turned out to be the ignition key for the entire body of research that you've produced since, including everything on psychological safety, for which you're well known. So I do, I opened the book with this personal research failure, which at

the time, or at least in the moment of this failure, was devastating, scary. I thought maybe I'd have to drop out of my PhD program. So I was a second-year PhD student working on a study of medical errors in two nearby hospitals. And my hypothesis was that better teams, according to an old and validated survey instrument, would have fewer medical errors in adverse drug events than the less good teams seemed like a pretty reasonable hypothesis. And when I got the data, at first I was very happy because I saw a significant p-value, a significant correlation in the data. So thought, yes. And then I looked more closely and I realized that the correlation was in the wrong direction. So I had failed. My hypothesis had failed utterly, 180 degrees off from what I had predicted would happen. So then came the moments, even hours of despair, almost despair, until I did what you must do in these situations, which is to sit down and think, what could this mean? This is not an accident, right? These data are trying to tell me something. And it occurred to me, perhaps a blinding flash of the obvious, it occurred to me that maybe the better teams aren't making more mistakes. Maybe they're more able and willing to report the mistakes that do happen. When these trained medical investigators are coming by, they're just more open. Now that was my new idea. I couldn't just declare that to be true. I had to do a fair amount of follow on work to sort of suggest that really was a plausible hypothesis. But that insight became the seeds for my later work on psychological safety, where I went out and tested on purpose. Is the interpersonal climate in the workplace differ in terms of people's willingness to speak up candidly about what's really going on? And if so, does it predict outcomes of interest, like learning behaviors and performance, especially at the team level? And I was able to show in a variety of industries, not just healthcare, that that was the case. And that work became very successful academically and ultimately, practically.

It feels as though, obviously, psychological safety is important to the whole question of being able to address intelligent failure without blame and so on. But it feels as though this book is driven also by, can I put it, a sort of irritation with what you call the failure craze, because clearly we're often being urged by entrepreneurs and innovators to embrace failure and celebrate failure. What is it that that irritates you, if it does irritate you about

that? What irritates me is that it's almost necessarily a mixed message because people know, no, failure is not good. Everything in our culture says success is good, failure is bad. So when people are glibly saying, fail fast, fail off in failure party, celebrate failure, what that does is make people think, okay, we're not really being truthful with each other. And it's sloppy. It's sort of acting as if that's good advice across the board, when in fact that's good advice for entrepreneurs, again, assuming they're thinking through what they're trying as carefully as possible for scientists, for inventors, it's not good advice for air traffic controllers. It's not good advice for surgeons. And it's not good advice for anyone who hasn't thought carefully about the meaning of context and how different contexts call for different behaviors, especially with respect to risk taking.

Right. Talk us through an example of that because this is the other part of if you like the matrix that you've got these

three types of failure, but you've also got these three contexts that you just... Yes, yes. And the three contexts that I just think are archetypes of work environments are consistent where you can have a very high degree of confidence in what will happen next, right? And just as an extreme case is the automotive assembly line or any machine paced assembly line, you can stand there with a stopwatch. And every 57 seconds you will see a vehicle come off the end, right? And unless something unusual happens, which occasionally happens, but not often. So that's a consistent context. Fewer and fewer of our work environments are in the consistent context in the knowledge or digital world that we live in. In the middle are variable contexts. And those are the contexts where we have a high level of knowledge about how to achieve the results we want, whether it's in the operating suite or in aviation or in a newspaper, right? And there's a lot of variability. You know that you don't have a perfect line of sight on what the future will bring. We don't know who's going to walk into our busy emergency department today, but we know that people will walk in. And so there's high maturity of knowledge and professional capabilities and an awareness of or there needs to be an awareness of uncertainty and unexpected events. And then if we keep going in the spectrum, I get to novel contexts where we don't yet have the knowledge we need to get the results we want. So scientific laboratories are indeed apartments.

So the question of one example that occurred to me is you talk a lot about part surgery. Obviously in its developing stage, this was a novel context. You bet. You know, probably more of a consistent. Now it's variable. I don't think it's ever going to be consistent. I talk to the surgeons.

They'll say, yep, you know, I can do this and I can do this very reliably and very well, but I am paying close attention to differences.

Right. Right. One thing that occurred to me, I suppose, is, you know, obviously lots of successful people don't mind talking about the failures and what they've learned from them. And you quote a lot of them in the book, but ultimately they are success stories. And that's one of your points. But I wonder to what degree you're troubled by the people who failed and disappeared. And in fact, one of the other books on our book award short, this, Bent Fleaverie's book, How Big Things Get Done is about huge mega projects that go wrong. And we can talk later about how, why failure is in vogue at the moment. But he has this example of the Sydney Opera House architect, whose project was a disaster, not entirely through his own fault, and then disappeared from sight. And we no longer have, he used to, Bent used to have a trick of asking audiences who was the architect of the Sydney Opera House. And very few people knew because this Danish architect had disappeared from sight. I just wonder whether there's a missing piece here of people who failed and then were no longer available.

Well, it's true. And I think there is a missing piece. And I mean, I think I need to back up and say, you know, ultimately, this is a book about success. Yeah. And it's about the role of failure and success, which doesn't mean that failure is a guarantee of success, as you're pointing out with this example. So I think my hope is that we can have honest conversations about it. And the aspiration is to help people have smarter failures so that the beeline towards successes is clearer to them and to others. And there will always be counter examples, and there will always be people whose failures were so crippling that they could never move beyond them. But I think we'll find very few extraordinarily successful people who didn't have the failures along the way. Right.

You talk very interestingly in the book about the unequal license to fail, the fact that some people, women in business, ethnic minorities, aren't as free to fail as those who have traditionally held the privileged positions of power.

Talk to us a little more about that. I mean, it's the only thing I have to apologize for is that that doesn't come in until chapter 8. So I, you know, I probably could have gotten out of it. It would be a whole other book, actually. The whole other book, indeed, with a lot of evidence to support it. Now, the last chapter is called thriving as a fallible human being. And in a sense, that's my overarching thesis that we are fallible and that's okay. We can thrive anyway. And it's important to be clear-eyed about that reality today. So the aspiration, my aspiration would be that we all have equal license to fail in the future, that a person who is failing, who is an underrepresented group in some organizational context does not feel that I can't take the kinds of risks that those in the majority group can take, because when it doesn't work out, it will then reflect badly on other people like me. Right.

We don't seem close to that, really. No, we don't.

We certainly don't.

And I mean, does that advance? Does that equality of license to fail advance alongside equality of representation, do you think?

Yes. I mean, almost by definition, because what the phenomenon I'm alluding to is about underrepresentation. So then you're more likely to be seen as a member of that group than just as

an individual. Yes. When we stop talking about the glass cliff, for example, will have reached a point of- And as some people have pointed out, if more people who are currently not represented are seen to be mediocre, that might be a sign of equality as well.

That's right.

I wanted to talk a bit about what's happened since the book came out. We talked just after the award ceremony about the absence of Elon Musk in the book, who clearly is a sort of, as one of the other books on the shortlist, Walter Isaacson's biography points out, he is somebody who is part of this fail, fast fail, better culture. And he's not in the book. I mean, is that just a question of timing? I think it's mostly a question of timing. The

manuscript was turned in quite a while ago at this point. And he was before he took over Twitter. It was before he was in the news every single day. Like, if I were to talk about Musk now, I would say he has a sort of an inconsistent record, I think, in terms of failing well. I mean, he has clearly done some extraordinary things in the space exploration that would qualify as failing well, new territory, worthy tries. And I think he's been rather cavalier with Twitter. And there almost seems to be an almost a deliberate destruction of value in that domain. And then, as you have alluded to in the past, some of his sort of personal life failures and successes

also seem to be a mixed bag. He is, I think quoted in the book, or maybe it was after one of the failures in the Isaacson book about preferring success. Yes. This is obviously a demon

thing. We all prefer success. Let's just be real about that. And if you want great success, especially as a pioneer in any field, you're going to have to tolerate some failures along the way. Isaacson quotes Musk as saying he's really anti psychological safety, because people shouldn't feel comfortable at work. From that, I come to the conclusion that neither Isaacson nor Musk have actually read the work on psychological safety. Because psychological safety is in fact explicitly about being okay, being uncomfortable, doing things that are uncomfortable in service of the goals, of the patient, of the innovation project, being able to disagree with the boss, being able to talk about failures and mistakes, to ask for help when you're in over your head. All of those are uncomfortable behaviors. And so, I mean, I don't mind my work being talked about by Musk, but I just wish that he would actually read it.

Yes. You and I have talked before about what's happened in the last few years, which is that safety has become conflated with sort of safe space, don't intrude on my comfort and safety. And that's the antithesis. It's

the antithesis. Yeah, it's become, in some people's minds, equivalent of I should get all my needs met while I'm at work. And really doesn't matter what impact that has on the work or my colleagues, etc. Yes.