132. Lean Into Failure: How to Make Mistakes That Work
Mar 5, 2024
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Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor and author of The Fearless Organization, discusses the nuances of failure and its role in team dynamics. She categorizes failures into basic, complex, and intelligent, emphasizing their importance for learning. Edmondson shares her own experiences with failure, urging a shift from rumination to reflection. The conversation highlights how fostering psychological safety can transform mistakes into growth opportunities, making failure a valuable part of effective communication and innovative teamwork.
Creating psychological safety through communication strategies fosters a culture of learning from failures.
Leaders can differentiate and encourage learning from basic, complex, and intelligent failures.
Deep dives
Building Psychological Safety in Teams
Psychological safety, as discussed by Amy Edmondson, involves creating an environment where individuals feel comfortable speaking up with risky content like mistakes or disagreements without fear of negative consequences. Communication strategies to foster psychological safety include emphasizing the nature of the work, encouraging questions, and providing constructive responses. Leaders play a crucial role in acknowledging, appreciating, and normalizing failures, creating a culture where candor and learning are valued.
The Influence of Status and Power on Psychological Safety
Status, power differentials, and culture impact psychological safety within teams. While unequal status relationships can make candid communication challenging, strong leadership that handles power differentials well can mitigate these issues. Research indicates that high psychological safety across role groups leads to improved outcomes, highlighting the importance of how individuals in positions of power handle status dynamics.
Understanding Different Types of Failure and Promoting Learning
Amy Edmondson distinguishes between basic, complex, and intelligent failures, each providing unique learning opportunities. Basic failures result from mistakes, complex failures arise from multiple factors aligning negatively, and intelligent failures are intentional forays into new territory to achieve a goal. Leaders can encourage a culture of learning from failures by contextualizing uncertainty and stakes, allowing teams to experiment thoughtfully and minimizing undue risks.
Effective and productive teams and relationships are based on the ability to communicate safely and to fail successfully. In this episode, Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, shares profound insights on the different types of failure—basic, complex, and intelligent—and their implications for learning and innovation.
In her conversation with host and Strategic Communications lecturer Matt Abrahams, Edmonson opens up about her struggles with failure, highlighting the importance of moving from rumination to reflection. This episode offers listeners a comprehensive guide to fostering an environment where failure is not feared but embraced as a crucial step toward growth and success.