The Art of Manliness - The 3 Types of Failure (And How to Learn From Each)

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.440 People often think of failure in one of two ways, as something that hinders the pursuit

00:00:15.380 of success or as something that's a necessity in obtaining it, as in the Silicon Valley mantra

00:00:20.060 that recommends failing fast and often. There's truth to both ideas, but neither offers a

00:00:24.740 complete picture of failure. That's because there isn't just one kind of failure, but

00:00:28.680 three. Here to unpack what those three types are is Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership 0.95

00:00:33.580 at the Harvard Business School and the author of The Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of

00:00:37.740 Failing Well. Today on the show, Amy shares which type of failure is most productive, which

00:00:42.360 types are less fruitful, and how to best use the former, prevent the latter, and learn from

00:00:46.740 failure of every kind. We also talk about how to organize potential failures into a matrix

00:00:51.440 that will help you best approach them. Along the way, we dig into examples both big and

00:00:56.020 small of how individuals, organizations, and families can put failure to work for them.

00:01:01.860 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awimp.is slash failwell.

00:01:17.400 Amy Edmondson, welcome to the show.

00:01:19.540 Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:21.040 So you got a new book out called The Right Kind of Wrong. It's all about how we learn from

00:01:25.720 our mistakes. So you spent your academic career researching failure. How did that happen?

00:01:32.480 Not a lot of people end up researching failure. How did you end up in that field?

00:01:36.160 Well, I suppose you could say it was a little bit by accident. And let me explain that to say

00:01:42.060 I was interested in learning. And even more specifically, I was interested in the problem

00:01:47.120 of organizational learning, that organizations need to keep learning in a changing world.

00:01:54.100 And it turns out that is easier said than done for a whole host of factors. And one of the factors,

00:02:01.140 one of the major factors that just kept coming up again and again in my research was that was our

00:02:06.680 allergy to failure. The reality is things will go wrong, especially in an uncertain and complex world.

00:02:13.180 And if we don't have a healthy response to that, we don't learn. We don't learn and grow as

00:02:19.420 individuals. We don't alter our systems in ways we need to so our organizations are more effective

00:02:24.980 and so on.

00:02:26.600 Well, it seems like in recent years, I'd say in the past 15, 10 years, there's been this mantra

00:02:31.880 of fail early, fail often that's come out of Silicon Valley, where it seems like they're trying to

00:02:37.260 rehabilitate failure, saying it's okay to fail. But you argue that this mantra, this idea misses

00:02:43.960 the mark when it comes to the benefits of failure. How so?

00:02:47.760 That's right. It's not so much that it misses the mark, is that it's very woefully incomplete,

00:02:53.280 right? Or it's not specific enough or not. It's too broad brush. And it doesn't say under these

00:02:59.820 conditions, this is not good advice. And just to illustrate with an obvious one, you wouldn't say

00:03:05.600 to your surgeons and operating room personnel, fail often, you know, have a great time. Of course not,

00:03:12.240 right? You would say, gosh, can you try to get it exactly right? And they would know that there was

00:03:18.460 that job. So the problem with the fail fast mantra isn't that it's wrong, it's that it only applies

00:03:24.780 to certain kinds of contexts.

00:03:27.000 Right. You wouldn't want like a nuclear reactor to fail early.

00:03:29.860 No, no, not even close. Or even an automotive assembly line, you don't say fail fast. You say,

00:03:36.160 hey, how about Six Sigma, right? Let's get it right. You know, we know there might be things that go

00:03:41.480 wrong. But if we can have our quality be at the one error per million events level, we're really good.

00:03:48.440 And there's no reason we can't get there.

00:03:50.180 So what you do in this book is you walk readers through your research that you've spent your career

00:03:56.140 looking at on how we can get the benefits of failure and when it's okay to fail early or fail

00:04:03.140 fast and when it's better to, okay, well, we might make mistakes, but let's try to reduce that. And you

00:04:09.700 categorize failures into three failure archetypes. You have intelligent failures, basic failures,

00:04:16.040 and complex failures. Let's talk about intelligent failures. What makes a failure intelligent?

00:04:22.400 Intelligent failures are the right kind of wrong in my view. So a failure is intelligent. It should be

00:04:28.460 applauded and used as often as possible when in pursuit of a goal in new territory with a hypothesis

00:04:37.040 as small as possible, you turn out to be wrong. So to say that more clearly, a failure is always an

00:04:44.640 undesired outcome. We don't want to fail. We want to succeed. But if that undesired outcome happens in

00:04:51.120 new territory, in pursuit of a goal, you know, where you've done your homework, you've thought it

00:04:56.840 through, you have good reason to believe it might work, and you don't expend more resources or take a

00:05:04.340 greater risk than you have to to get the knowledge you need to go forward, then it's an intelligent

00:05:09.380 failure. And you, um, in the book, you highlight back in the mid-century, the 20th century, when

00:05:15.920 doctors were trying to figure out how to do open heart surgery. This was an example of intelligent

00:05:20.520 failure. The risk was really high, but the payoff, they were in new territory, but the payoff was

00:05:25.540 significant, but they did all they could to reduce failure. Yeah. Right. And one of the ways they

00:05:31.120 mitigated risk, or one of the ways they kept the failures, which must have been, you know, devastating

00:05:36.300 emotionally and intellectually to experience, one of the ways they kept those failures as small as

00:05:42.940 possible is that they, of course, only operated on people who truly had no other choice. You don't

00:05:49.280 operate on a healthy patient and say, hey, this might not work. We've never done anything like this

00:05:53.120 before. No, of course not. They were operating on patients who had very little chance of

00:05:59.480 survival over any kind of long-term. And so in a sense, these patients only hope was a surgical

00:06:07.620 repair. And yet such a thing hadn't been attempted before. So the odds were, you know, not truly high

00:06:15.260 that it would work out well the first time. And I described this, it's such a visceral example of,

00:06:21.700 yes, a series of very intelligent failures that ultimately led us to the stunning success that open

00:06:28.840 heart surgery is today. Yeah. Now it's just a matter of routine. Practically. Yeah. But you also argue

00:06:35.400 that, okay, these are the right kind of wrongs, but we still, even though when we know like we're doing

00:06:40.340 something that's new, there's going to be a big payoff, we still have that aversion. Yes. So what's

00:06:46.920 holding us back from making these intelligent failures? Well, I think that aversion is part of it.

00:06:52.060 And so that leads us to be risk averse. And the word is captured right in there. I mean, you know,

00:06:59.360 many people, in fact, most people are more, you know, are sufficiently risk averse that they will

00:07:06.000 fail to make progress on desired goals or, you know, fail to experience all sorts of things that they would

00:07:13.660 dearly love to do, but they can't. Because if you want everything to go perfectly,

00:07:19.800 then you will not do anything that has the risk of failure. And if you choose not to do anything

00:07:26.880 where there's a risk of failure, then you're not growing, stretching, venturing into new territory.

00:07:33.180 And then the other aspect you talk about too, is that there's that social fear, you know,

00:07:38.000 no one wants to be a loser. No one wants to be a failure. So there's that element as well.

00:07:42.820 Absolutely. I think most people can think of a thing they'd be willing to do behind closed doors.

00:07:47.960 You know, I'll take a risk, I'll try something, and it might fail. But as long as no one else sees

00:07:53.560 me doing it or knows about it, then I'm okay with it. We don't want the embarrassment or the

00:07:57.740 humiliation of the failure. And then you talk about this idea I think people might have heard about

00:08:03.280 of if you want to avoid that social fear, that social stigma, is groups need to develop what's

00:08:09.620 called psychological safety. What is psychological safety?

00:08:12.900 Well, psychological safety describes a climate, an interpersonal climate, where you really don't

00:08:20.780 feel afraid to take risks like speaking up with an uncertain idea or disagreeing with someone or

00:08:27.860 admitting a mistake or acknowledging a failure. So all of those kinds of behaviors, those interpersonal

00:08:34.660 behaviors are quite, they can be uncomfortable because you worry that people might think less of

00:08:40.120 you. You might be rejected. And so in an environment where you know, yeah, that's just what we do.

00:08:45.480 It might not be easy, but I believe my team members will welcome this, or I believe my family expects me

00:08:53.180 to be candid about this. So that describes psychological safety. It's quite literally an environment where you

00:08:59.540 can take interpersonal risks of the kind that are so necessary for problem solving and innovation and

00:09:07.000 ideation and all of those good things.

00:09:09.800 Well, this goes back to a study you did early in your academic career where you thought it was a

00:09:15.000 failure, but you actually found out this actually led you down some new research paths. I think early

00:09:20.100 on you were researching teams, like what makes a good team? Does a good team culture reduce mistakes?

00:09:26.260 And your study found, oh my gosh, this team that looks awesome. Like it seems like they're cooperative.

00:09:31.020 Everyone's fantastic. They actually made more mistakes and you thought, oh my gosh, my hypothesis

00:09:36.740 was wrong. But I think what you found out was like, actually, you know, what happened is this team,

00:09:41.800 the teams that look like they have good camaraderie, they're talking, et cetera. They actually just

00:09:46.560 talk about their mistakes more than the teams that don't have that connection.

00:09:50.540 It's exactly right. And of course it took me, you know, hours to even think that might be what was

00:09:55.460 happening to realize that as a possible interpretation of the confusing data, because the confusing data

00:10:00.700 were suggesting, as you said, that the teams with higher camaraderie, higher quality relationships

00:10:05.640 were ones that also had higher error rates. Now, that just seems, you know, so wrong on multiple

00:10:12.700 levels until you start to realize, well, wait a minute, the error rates, how objective are they?

00:10:19.020 You know, how do we get those data? And you begin to realize that really the only way you're getting

00:10:24.340 data on people's errors is if they're telling you about them or if they're not hiding them,

00:10:29.540 if they're letting them be discovered, which is, you know, not easy for people to do. So I began to

00:10:36.280 suspect that these better teams weren't making more mistakes. They were just more open about them.

00:10:42.180 And later on, I called that difference in climate, psychological safety, found a way, developed a

00:10:50.720 way to measure it, and ultimately found that that measure is very predictive of team performance in a

00:10:57.680 huge variety of industry contexts. And we've had guests on the podcast that deal with family

00:11:04.260 psychology. One thing that you often see is that couples who don't argue, there's probably problems

00:11:09.900 there if they're not having arguments, the same sort of thing. If you don't feel comfortable raising

00:11:13.660 concerns with your spouse, that's a problem. Right, right. It can't be that you just have no

00:11:19.680 disagreements or that you just see eye to eye on everything. There's never a conflict. There's never a

00:11:25.540 trade-off. You know, there's never who's going to pick up the kids at daycare today kind of moments,

00:11:31.300 right? That just isn't, that's probably not possible. So, you know, any relationship, any

00:11:38.080 healthy relationship is going to have disagreements, conflicts, challenges, arguments. And so if you're

00:11:44.280 not hearing any of that, if that isn't happening, it might at first glance seem like a good sign,

00:11:49.780 but it probably isn't. It probably means people are either afraid to disrupt the apparent harmony

00:11:55.880 or maybe one partner, not the other, feels afraid to, you know, to be themselves and just to speak up

00:12:01.780 openly and honestly. Okay. So recap, intelligent failure, it's when you're going for, it's new

00:12:07.240 territory. What were the other factors? Well, it's new territory in pursuit of a goal

00:12:12.120 with a hypothesis as small as possible. So there are four criteria. Okay. And what we're really

00:12:18.360 talking about, of course, is an experiment. I mean, you're acting, but at some level, you know that

00:12:23.540 what I'm trying to do here to achieve a result that I care about may or may not work. And so it's an

00:12:31.120 experiment technically. And you try not to have experiments that are larger than they need to be

00:12:37.180 when there's uncertainty, meaning you don't want to, you know, invest more money than you can afford in

00:12:43.880 an uncertain investment. You don't want to use more patients in a clinical trial than you need to,

00:12:50.020 to be able to demonstrate efficacy of the treatment. That makes sense. So if you're thinking

00:12:54.200 about starting a business, you don't, might not necessarily want to quit your day job and then

00:12:59.500 mortgage your house and, you know, bet it all on this business. There's other small steps you could

00:13:06.000 take to eventually start your own business. Yes. So mitigate risk by doing it incrementally,

00:13:12.500 you know, doing it. And that might sound too risk averse, but it isn't because each of those

00:13:17.220 incremental steps involves some risk, but you're managing risk, which is smart.

00:13:22.960 So another type of failure you talk about is a basic failure. So what's a basic failure and how

00:13:28.440 does it differ from an intelligent failure? Basic failures are pretty simple. They're undesired

00:13:33.560 results that were caused by human error. And human error means there was a right way.

00:13:39.200 You know, you can think of it as a recipe. There was a recipe that could and should have been used

00:13:44.520 to get the result you want, but you made a mistake and it led to a failure. So basic failures are

00:13:51.800 simple. That doesn't mean they're small. They can be big, they can be small, but technically,

00:13:56.960 or at least theoretically, they're preventable. You know, when we're really at our best, when we're

00:14:01.140 alert, when we're vigilant, when we're exercising good teamwork, we can catch and correct most basic

00:14:07.340 failures. Okay. So basic failure would be swapping out salt for sugar in a recipe.

00:14:13.220 Exactly. Exactly. You know, and the cookies will taste or, you know, or the, or the sauce will taste

00:14:19.340 bad because now it's got too much sugar in it and not enough salt.

00:14:23.460 Right. And yeah, but these basic errors, they can be big. You talk about a Citibank employee who

00:14:28.160 did something wrong with the computer and like transferred, I think it was millions.

00:14:32.280 $800 million. So it was essentially, you could think of it as a checking the wrong box in an

00:14:38.460 online form, which means you're not being vigilant enough, right? If, if by, if you have a system

00:14:44.300 that can allow you to accidentally transfer essentially the principle of a loan rather than

00:14:49.960 the interest, it's probably not a well-designed system, but nonetheless, it was a system that needed

00:14:54.840 to be used with great care and human error led to this massive kind of economic loss.

00:15:05.000 And you also talk about a basic failure, unlike an intelligent failure, a basic failure occurs in

00:15:09.840 known territory. So like, you know, the recipe, you know, the protocol for transferring money.

00:15:15.020 It's just, you messed up somewhere along the way.

00:15:17.160 You messed up. Yeah.

00:15:17.860 Right. And to say that it's in known territory and it's not as kind of valuable as an intelligent

00:15:22.920 failure doesn't mean you can't learn from it. We can definitely learn from our basic failures,

00:15:28.340 right? I try very hard to learn from my own basic failures, but the sort of amount of learning is

00:15:34.520 arguably less, much less than for new failures, intelligent failures, where there just wasn't a

00:15:41.020 recipe. So you had no choice, but to kind of create a recipe.

00:15:44.480 Yeah. I think the things you can learn from a basic failure is you learn about human nature.

00:15:49.200 Like when is our tendency to be, you know, not paying attention? When do we have a tendency

00:15:53.900 to neglect things? And so you can develop systems or protocols to counter that.

00:15:59.140 Yes. Yes. Self-awareness and systems or protocols. So, you know, an example of a basic failure would

00:16:05.260 be if you text and drive and then got into an accident, that would be a basic failure. And obviously

00:16:11.180 the thing you learn is pretty darn clear here. Do not do that, which I think most of our listeners

00:16:16.380 know that already, but we know it still happens as well.

00:16:20.480 One of the things that people have done over the years to counter these basic failures,

00:16:24.700 a simple checklist can get you through a lot of things. This started off with pilots during

00:16:30.000 World War II. They have a checklist they go through. And then now in the medical field,

00:16:34.320 they also have very basic rudimentary checklists. You think, why would I need to go through? Did I

00:16:39.100 wash my hands? Did I... Right.

00:16:40.680 But it works.

00:16:42.580 Busy people. You know, busy people have a lot on their mind. And sometimes just to have that

00:16:47.020 concrete checklist in front of you will remind you, you know, put you back into the mindset you need

00:16:53.020 to be to be careful. And of course, Atul Gawande, the fabulous surgeon and author, wrote this marvelous

00:17:01.300 book, The Checklist Manifesto, about the power of something so simple as a checklist. And it's really

00:17:06.540 all about the prevention of basic failure. And it's also the case that just having a checklist

00:17:13.480 won't itself be enough, right? They have to be used with intent.

00:17:18.640 Well, yeah. You highlighted a case of a pilot. There was a checklist. They were supposed to

00:17:22.260 defrost or not. Something like that.

00:17:24.440 Yeah.

00:17:24.640 They didn't...

00:17:25.320 Air Florida. It's a famous and tragic accident. It's Air Florida Flight 90 back in January of 1982.

00:17:32.420 And the pilot and the co-pilot went through the checklist essentially in their sleep. You know,

00:17:39.500 it's Air Florida. So you can imagine that most of the time when you're Air Florida, you're in warm

00:17:44.500 weather. Most of the time when you're saying anti-ice off, the correct answer is off. And that's

00:17:51.620 exactly what they did. The pilot said anti-ice off and the co-pilot said off, you know, as if that was

00:17:57.440 the right answer, on a cold January blistery icy day in Washington, D.C., that was in fact decidedly

00:18:05.280 the wrong answer. Not going through the anti-ice routine led to the downing of that flight and the

00:18:11.540 death of 78 people.

00:18:14.240 Okay. So it's a great application for this in everyone's just day-to-day life. Look at the

00:18:18.480 things you do on a regular basis where you've noticed simple mistakes happening because of

00:18:24.240 you're not paying attention and develop a checklist for that and follow it. And this could be like,

00:18:29.320 you know, when you're packing for a trip, right? Instead of thinking, oh, I forgot, whatever,

00:18:33.380 have a checklist you use every single road trip.

00:18:37.060 Absolutely. You know, I finally did that myself because there were just were too many times where

00:18:41.540 I'd get somewhere. I realized I forgot socks, you know, and then what are you thinking? You weren't

00:18:46.940 thinking, right? You need a little help.

00:18:49.300 And that's why you have the checklist. Okay. So that's basic failure. The next type of failure

00:18:53.360 is a complex failure. What makes a complex failure complex?

00:18:58.360 A complex failure is complex because it's multi-causal. So the characteristic complex

00:19:04.000 failure has multiple factors that contributed to the failure. It's the interaction between the

00:19:10.180 factors that led to the mess because any one of these factors on their own would not cause a failure.

00:19:16.720 So they're not like the basic failures where you just need this one mistake and boom, there's a

00:19:20.320 failure. There could be mistakes involved, but you don't need mistakes involved. You just need an

00:19:25.080 unfortunate coming together of several factors that lead to a kind of breakdown.

00:19:32.160 What's an example of that that we've seen in recent years?

00:19:35.720 Well, recent years, I mean, in one of my research studies in the hospital context,

00:19:41.760 there was a young patient, a 12-year-old boy named Matthew, actually not his real name, but

00:19:47.980 nonetheless, he was mistakenly given, mistakenly meaning by the system, I guess, a potentially fatal

00:19:55.120 dose of morphine. Fortunately, it was caught and counteracted. But in my analysis, I identified like

00:20:02.980 seven different factors, any one of which on their own wouldn't have led to this sort of accidental

00:20:08.540 overdose. The first thing was that the hospital's ICU were post-surgical patients, which Matthew was

00:20:15.580 ordinarily go, was full. So then he had to go to be cared for by people who don't usually care for

00:20:21.480 post-operative patients. So they were kind of less specialized. He happened to be cared for by a brand

00:20:27.860 new nurse who maybe didn't have as good instincts about the processes of care. There was a pump that is 0.97

00:20:35.760 used for this pain medication that was in a sort of dark corner, making it harder to read. You know,

00:20:41.160 there was sort of a printing error in the, or not error, a printout of the concentration that was

00:20:48.380 folded in a way that made it hard to read. So I don't need to go into all the details, but the point

00:20:54.080 is that any one of those factors on their own wouldn't lead you to give this overdose, right? It was the

00:21:00.720 fact of them all coming together at the same time that created the perfect storm.

00:21:05.960 No, this reminded me, when I got to this section, reminded me of Clausewitz, the famous military

00:21:11.200 strategist who wrote On War. And he had this idea of friction. And he talked about this. He says,

00:21:17.880 everything in war is very, he's talking about war here, but I think you can apply this to anything.

00:21:21.780 He says, everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties

00:21:26.920 accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced

00:21:32.440 war. So yeah, friction isn't just one thing. It's a bunch of stuff coming together. And then he goes

00:21:36.840 on and he says, countless minor incidents, the kind you can never really foresee combined to lower the

00:21:43.100 general level of performance so that one always falls far short of the intended goal. Yeah. So in war,

00:21:50.060 as in life, it's not just one thing. It's like a bunch of different stuff that, that comes up.

00:21:54.400 It's many little things. And I opened the chapter on complex failures with a classic and tragic

00:22:00.880 environmental spill back in 1972 called the Torrey Canyon, which is the name of the ship.

00:22:06.380 And the captain himself describes this as, quote, many little things, unquote. And that's,

00:22:13.040 that's exactly the same sentiment. And any one of those little things on their own wouldn't have led to

00:22:18.200 this horrible spill. But the unfortunate coming together of these factors leads to an outcome that

00:22:26.280 nobody wants. Right. It's going to happen. You probably see this in your daily life when you're

00:22:30.140 late for work. Yeah. It's like your kid gets sick and then the other kids lost their homework and then

00:22:36.180 the car needs gas. And then there's more traffic because it's raining and... Right. And it's not one of

00:22:42.260 those things. If one of the things happened, you would have been okay. But all of them together combined,

00:22:45.820 it just created, that created the problem. Right. And the thing about complex failures,

00:22:51.020 because they sound kind of like, oh, well, there's nothing we can do about it,

00:22:54.080 is that in fact, they offer many little opportunities for course correction, right? Because

00:23:00.400 there's so many different factors. In many cases, all you needed to do was kind of notice and alter one

00:23:07.300 of them to prevent the failure. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:23:15.000 And now back to the show. Well, one thing you talk about in the book and in your research is that

00:23:19.860 complex failures are increasing in our modern age. Why is that?

00:23:24.240 Well, I think we have so much more complexity in our world. Information technology maybe is first

00:23:31.940 among equals for this reality, which is we're interconnected in ways that we never have been

00:23:38.300 historically. So the phrase going viral, a photo or a tweet or something that you really didn't want

00:23:47.000 to get attention may inadvertently get attention simply because we're so interconnected. It's just so

00:23:53.480 quick. Things can spiral out of control very quickly. I also think we seem to have more

00:23:59.100 complex and unpredictable weather patterns, more complex and interconnected supply chains that are

00:24:06.280 global so that we're more likely to be impacted by random events in another part of the world

00:24:12.220 in our day-to-day life than was ever possible in history. Yeah, we experienced, I think everyone

00:24:17.260 experienced to some extent the supply chain things during COVID, right? And that's just a perfect

00:24:23.160 example. Everything's so interconnected. You make one small change here, then the distributor has

00:24:28.120 to make a change and the retailer has to make a change and then the consumer has to make a change

00:24:31.960 and then everything just gets mucked up. Few people can't show up for work because they're sick,

00:24:36.700 right? And then that leads to shortages here and, you know, something doesn't get delivered and

00:24:41.320 then that spirals out of control. But you say that, okay, complex failures, we're not completely at the

00:24:48.360 mercy of complex failures. You say there's often warning signs that there's a problem. How do you

00:24:53.640 know when there's a warning sign with a complex failure? Well, you really won't know unless people,

00:25:00.480 let's go back to psychological safety again, because so many times and many of the complex failures that

00:25:06.520 I've studied in company and government settings, it is not the case that the bad news or the failure

00:25:15.000 came in totally out of the blue. It is nearly always the case that there was one or more people

00:25:20.700 who, you know, had a worry, thought something wasn't quite right, but really didn't feel safe to speak

00:25:27.920 up about it in a timely way that might have allowed for corrective action. So psychological safety plays a

00:25:35.680 really important role in our ability to prevent complex failures. And if it sounds like a fool's errand,

00:25:42.380 it really isn't because there's a whole body of research called high reliability organizations that

00:25:47.360 addresses the question of, you know, why do some inherently risky and dangerous undertakings like

00:25:56.820 air traffic control or, you know, nuclear power plants operate safely just essentially nearly all the

00:26:03.780 time, right? And it's through vigilance and mindfulness and incredible teamwork and, you know,

00:26:10.940 psychological safety to speak up and listening to people and thanking them when they raise a concern,

00:26:16.580 even if that concern turned out to be nothing. So there's a set of management and cultural practices

00:26:22.740 that allow us to cope with our complexity and our interconnectedness.

00:26:29.680 And also you talk about there's things you can do to, you can have contingency plans in place to

00:26:34.940 kind of mitigate complex failures. Like I've experienced this with my podcast. Over the years,

00:26:39.040 I've learned that technology is fickle. Sometimes things are working great. And I never know if

00:26:44.760 someone's on a PC or a Mac or whatever. And so I've been able to develop systems where I've got

00:26:52.260 my main recording, then I got a backup of a recording, then I got a backup of the backup

00:26:56.280 and it saved me, but it's helped me reduce some of the risk with complex failures.

00:27:01.280 Exactly. And you've only done that because you've, you know, you may have learned from a failure,

00:27:05.660 right? But you recognize that, yeah, as much as we know as this is not new territory, right? In this

00:27:11.800 point in history, recording a podcast is not new territory. And yet you understand that several

00:27:19.300 factors could come together in just the wrong way. My computer might be different than, you know,

00:27:23.260 the last guest's computer. Exactly. As you said, so you figure out in advance that because things

00:27:28.600 might go wrong, I'm going to think about the backups. And also this idea of complex failures,

00:27:34.120 you talk about the idea that some complex failures are tightly coupled and some are loosely coupled.

00:27:39.120 What do you mean by that? Well, this is work by a famous sociologist named Charles Perrault,

00:27:45.240 who passed away a few years ago. And he just pointed out that when you have highly interconnected

00:27:52.540 complex systems with tight coupling, you're really at greater risk for complex failures. And

00:27:58.400 tight coupling refers to the following idea, that if there's an action in one part of the system,

00:28:03.780 it leads inexorably to a result in another part. So just to have a simple example, you know, you put

00:28:10.600 your ATM card into the slot, it just pulls it right in, right? And it's too late. Like you can't get it

00:28:17.680 back until the system decides to give it back to you, right? So tightly coupled refers to things that

00:28:23.640 once they're underway, you really can't stop them.

00:28:27.140 Okay. So an example of that is that the Citibank employee who transferred $800 million. Like they

00:28:31.480 did that one thing and it was done.

00:28:33.940 Right. Right. So that was a tightly coupled system that, by the way, you know, nowadays we have,

00:28:39.460 and this was only a few years ago, but you know, we have the duo, what are the,

00:28:42.380 help me out here?

00:28:44.140 Double opt-in. Yeah. Whenever, yeah. Whenever I do transfers with my bank account, it has to be like

00:28:48.280 one person and then another person.

00:28:50.340 And then they send you a code, you know, to your phone and then you have to enter that code. And those

00:28:54.940 things are in there. Sometimes they feel very annoying, but they're in there to prevent the tight

00:28:59.600 coupling that would just lead to so many more failures than what would be desirable for anybody.

00:29:06.300 Yeah. One of the takeaways I got from the tight coupling and loose coupling. So loose coupling is

00:29:10.360 the opposite of tight coupling. So you basically, you have some slack. So if you do have a failure,

00:29:14.920 you're able to correct. And it made me think of, you know, just adding more margin in your life.

00:29:21.040 Right. So instead of trying to like get to, to the last minute before you leave, you'll give

00:29:26.840 yourself 10 minutes. Cause you know, that might help you if there's traffic, it'll accommodate for

00:29:31.640 that. Brett, I love that because it's build it in. Like we all know this. We all know we're moving

00:29:36.100 too fast from meeting to meeting, you know, and then you're going to jump into your car and get

00:29:40.520 to that next thing. Deliberately build in, you know, at the beginning of the week or beginning

00:29:45.620 of the month or however you do it, build those buffers in slack and buffers are essentially the

00:29:50.680 same concept. And very few of us have enough of them to actually operate effectively or as

00:29:57.260 effectively as we would like to operate. So build in the buffer.

00:30:00.560 All right. So let's recap what we've talked about here. We talked about the three types of failures.

00:30:03.240 We've got intelligent failures and these are just experiments. Treat your life like an

00:30:08.040 experiment. You can do this with your job. So maybe there's some type of a new position you want

00:30:13.800 to go for. Well, try and experiment with it and see what you can do with it. Or I mean, a date could

00:30:19.820 be an intelligent failure. Absolutely. Trying a new hobby could be an intelligent failure. Then there's

00:30:25.920 a basic failure and that's just basic mistakes. And the way you counter that is a simple checklist

00:30:31.640 can often do the trick. Vigilance, attention. Right. And then we have complex failures. It's

00:30:38.120 multifaceted. It could be any one thing, but they all come together to create the problem.

00:30:42.980 So, you know, paying attention to warning signs, not being afraid to speaking up or pointing out

00:30:48.280 a potential issue, coming up with contingency plans and adding buffer.

00:30:53.740 Love that. Beautiful. Yeah.

00:30:55.780 So that's the first part of your book. You kind of lay this out and you go into more detail and I

00:31:00.100 hope our listeners go and read the book, but I love in the second half of the book, you talk about

00:31:04.840 some mindset shifts that people need to make when it comes to failure. And one thing you talk about

00:31:11.240 is we need to overcome our tendency to find someone to blame for a failure. So how does that help people

00:31:18.580 learn from failures? And then how do you hold people accountable if you don't find someone to blame?

00:31:23.220 Great question. So first of all, it's very natural to want to find someone to blame because it lets us

00:31:29.300 off the hook, like psychologically and emotionally, right? If something goes wrong and I can instantly

00:31:35.100 reassure myself that, Hey, it's not my fault, right? Then I've bolstered my self-esteem. I've kept

00:31:39.860 myself comfortable. I don't have to confront my own contribution to the failure. And so it's just a

00:31:45.840 very natural instinct. I even described in the book, a two-year-old who, when his father has a small

00:31:52.780 sort of collision with the passenger side mirror in driving too close to the parked cars, the little

00:32:00.180 child immediately hears the bang and says, I didn't do anything, Papa, right? It's like, of course not.

00:32:05.840 You're sitting in the toddler seat in the back seat. But this instinct to dodge blame is very, very deep

00:32:13.520 and well-learned, but it's unhelpful, right? It's unhelpful for our ability to sort of learn and grow

00:32:19.500 because even if you're, I mean, I think there are very few times where you're 100% to blame for things,

00:32:27.020 but you always have some kind of contribution that you could look at thoughtfully and, you know,

00:32:34.720 and wonder about and work on doing better next time and so forth. So it's actually consistent with

00:32:42.300 accountability because I think the way many people and many organizations think about accountability

00:32:47.880 is counterproductive. They'll say, well, we need to hold someone accountable and that's almost

00:32:54.080 synonymous with punishment. We need to punish someone or else it'll happen again. Whereas the

00:32:59.140 truth is, you know, when you really punish someone for something going wrong, what happens is it just

00:33:05.220 decreases the chances that you hear about things in a timely way. But, you know, back to psychological

00:33:10.980 safety. But the way we need to think about accountability is to be willing to fully

00:33:17.000 account for what happened, right? To take a clear-eyed scientific look at the events that

00:33:23.640 unfolded, understand what role you played, what role other factors played so that you can really learn

00:33:30.140 its valuable lessons and improve your practices next time. Gotcha. And this isn't to say, you talk about

00:33:38.000 this in the book too, that if someone is being malicious, then like you need, yeah, you need to

00:33:43.960 punish them. Yeah. I'm all for blame when people engage in what I'll call blameworthy acts. Right.

00:33:50.180 It's just that in our organizations and to a certain extent in our families, those aren't the norm,

00:33:56.920 right? You know, the norm is just human beings who make mistakes and are sometimes a little thoughtless

00:34:03.220 and sometimes a little busy and all the rest. But very few people are really waking up in the

00:34:10.060 morning and sort of intent on sabotaging each other. Right. So, yeah, if someone makes an

00:34:15.480 intelligent failure, you don't want to do any blame there for sure. No. No, you want to celebrate it.

00:34:20.160 Yeah, you want to celebrate it. A basic failure, you know, if they were, they didn't sleep enough or

00:34:25.680 they're out partying, then you might want to have that conversation. But it could be something's just

00:34:30.000 going on at work where it made it tough for them to pay attention. Right. I mean, they may have been

00:34:35.280 having, you know, to do cover for other people who are out sick or they may have, you know, had a

00:34:40.980 sick child last night, not got enough sleep. What you want to do is first understand what happened and

00:34:46.120 then figure out what kinds of protective measures to put in place to ensure that that same thing

00:34:52.940 doesn't happen a second time. Another thing you talk about is reframing failures. What does

00:34:57.760 reframing failure look like? Reframing means acknowledging that there's always a frame,

00:35:03.280 you know, like a picture frame. We're looking at reality. We're looking at the events in our lives

00:35:07.840 through frames that are largely unconscious, that stem from our background, our expertise, or,

00:35:14.940 you know, our various biases that we all have. And reframing is learning to kind of stop and

00:35:21.040 challenge how you see a situation. Wonder what you're missing. Ask yourself, is there another way to

00:35:27.280 see this? Right. So if you have that reflexive instinct to just blame, oh, I know what happened

00:35:33.120 there. It's the self-discipline to say, well, I have a partial view on what happened there and I'd

00:35:39.560 love to understand it better before I draw any conclusions. So yeah, I like the idea of just

00:35:44.280 thinking of failures like a scientist. What can I learn from this? I think that's a good reframe to

00:35:50.200 have. And you also talk about one of the things you talk about throughout the book is this idea of

00:35:54.440 context, like understanding the context of failure happens in, how can that help you learn to fail

00:36:00.480 better? You know, that the issue of context brings us back to why the Silicon Valley talk is limited

00:36:08.200 because it only works in certain contexts. And so the way I describe a context with the two dimensions I

00:36:15.660 use to figure out context is one is how much uncertainty is there, right? You know, how much uncertainty is

00:36:22.540 there and whether or not I can produce a batch of chocolate chip cookies, like very little, right?

00:36:27.400 Unless all the power goes out or something. It's almost a guarantee that if I follow the recipe,

00:36:32.360 I can produce those cookies. How much uncertainty is there that I can find a new drug that will cure

00:36:38.080 certain kind of cancer? Well, very high uncertainty indeed. And so that matters in terms of guiding my

00:36:44.500 actions. Number two is what are the stakes? And for me, stakes can be financial,

00:36:50.160 they can be reputational, or they can be human safety. And when you're dealing with high stakes,

00:36:56.520 you proceed far more cautiously, or you should, than when you're dealing with low stakes. And so if

00:37:02.680 you're dealing with, you know, high stakes and high uncertainty, you're conducting your experiments.

00:37:08.860 You'd have to experiment because you don't have the answers, but those experiments should be very

00:37:13.020 thoughtful and very small. Okay. I like that. And you have a nice chart to kind of walk people through

00:37:18.420 that. And so yeah, if it's, if it's low stakes and it's something new, it's like, yeah, have fun

00:37:24.280 experimenting. Yeah, exactly. And I literally have seen both errors in my research. I mean,

00:37:29.700 meaning sort of these psychological errors we make where I've seen people be a little reckless in

00:37:34.360 very dangerous situations and then bad things happen. And then I've seen people be, you know,

00:37:39.200 overly cautious because they want to get it right, or they want to look good in situations where there

00:37:44.860 really isn't a right answer. And the only way to make progress is to get out there and try stuff.

00:37:50.000 Gotcha. So a high stakes context, that's where you really need that mindfulness. Like if you're

00:37:53.900 an air traffic controller. Right. Super high stakes, but really well understood territory. So there's

00:38:00.000 where you're operating as mindfully and vigilantly as possible. Right. And then if you're in a situation

00:38:05.760 where it's new, so like you're doing experimental surgery and the stakes are high, you're going to want

00:38:12.080 to do careful experimentation. Right. Yeah. And try to mitigate the risk as much as possible.

00:38:16.800 Exactly. Okay. I love that. And you also recommend four failure practices. What are those and how can

00:38:22.320 they help us fail better? So the four failure practices that I write about actually in the last

00:38:27.120 chapter, how to thrive as a fallible human being are persistence, right? There will always be obstacles

00:38:33.220 in your path, in anything, you know, that you are truly hoping to do in your life or in your work,

00:38:41.040 right? If you're, if you have stretch goals, there will be obstacles. And so persisting,

00:38:45.700 you know, trying again, not being crippled by the inevitable failures that do happen is one of,

00:38:51.620 one of the practices. Reflection. I think all of us can benefit from doing more explicit reflection

00:38:58.900 that could be formalized and keeping a journal or could be weekly team reflections with your team at

00:39:06.400 work to kind of what went well, what didn't go well, but being systematic about our learning from

00:39:11.740 our own experiences is a super important practice. Well, I know that, um, in special forces,

00:39:18.020 they do what's called after action reports. Yes. So after a mission, they'll just get together and

00:39:23.880 it's very, it's formal, but informal and there's no blame. They just talk about what went right and what

00:39:30.460 went wrong. Yep. It's very clean, right? It's what, what did we set out to do? What actually

00:39:36.380 happened? What's the difference in why, what will we do next time? Very scientific, not emotional,

00:39:42.100 but it's almost storytelling to ourselves about to take our own experience and turn it into an

00:39:49.380 explicit narrative so we can understand it better. Because, you know, we all make the mistake of

00:39:54.080 thinking, Oh yeah, yeah. Right. I had that experience. I'll learn from it. Right. But we won't,

00:39:58.360 unless we pause to do the explicit reflection. And the third one is accountability. And that's

00:40:04.660 very related to reflection because that's being, it's being willing to confront and be honest about

00:40:11.200 the whole account. You know, again, what happened and that willingness to say, ah, here's what I did

00:40:18.040 that may have contributed to that failure. Here's what I did that contributed. Here's what I failed to

00:40:23.420 do that might've helped prevent it. So it's about, it's about being willing to own your role, which

00:40:30.240 can seem scary, but it's also quite empowering. If you think about it, you're facing the fact that you

00:40:36.300 do matter, right? That you, you have an impact and it's important to be willing to take, you know,

00:40:44.160 sort of to own it, I guess is what I mean. And then, and then finally, I talk about apologies as a real

00:40:50.860 valuable practice that we can all learn to do more of in an uncertain fallible world as uncertain

00:40:58.840 fallible people. Apologies play a very important role in relationships. If, if something goes wrong,

00:41:06.200 it's just so powerful to be willing to apologize for it. And, and that means of course, being willing

00:41:12.700 to take account of where you contributed, but good, good apologies. First of all, they signal that you

00:41:19.820 care about that relationship. You care about the other person. They express remorse. I don't mean,

00:41:25.840 you know, they don't have to be like horrifyingly remorseful, but just, I feel bad that I didn't call

00:41:31.400 when I said I would, but you express that remorse. You offer to make amends, you know, how can I make

00:41:36.480 it up to you? And you own your part in it. You don't sort of duck the accountability part.

00:41:43.160 And then beyond that, celebrate good failures, the right kind of wrong in your work with your

00:41:49.240 kids. If they do something that ended up in a mistake, but it's actually, they learned something

00:41:53.120 from it. Be like, Hey, that's, that's great. You learned something.

00:41:56.240 Yes. You know, I divide the, I sort of have the individual practices, you know, that each of us

00:42:01.200 can do, you know, take accountability, you know, reflect and so on. And then the, the kind of collective

00:42:06.380 practices that work in a team or a family or a company, which include calling attention to the

00:42:11.760 context, you know, being very thoughtful about like how much uncertainty or what the stakes are

00:42:16.240 here, encouraging failure, sharing, you know, that detoxifies failure. If we can sort of more

00:42:22.140 cheerfully tell each other about the things that have gone wrong in our projects or lives, it helps

00:42:28.880 a great deal. And then really reward that honesty. You know, if you're in a family and a child sort of

00:42:35.520 speaks up quickly about something, you know, I broke a glass if they're a little kid or I, you know, was it

00:42:40.100 a party I shouldn't have been at if they're an older teenager, being deeply appreciative of that

00:42:45.360 honesty will build the right habits and the right climate for learning in that family.

00:42:51.580 Well, Amy, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book

00:42:54.620 and your work?

00:42:56.120 Well, the book can be found right kind of wrong anywhere books are sold, I hope. And you can go

00:43:02.320 to my website, amycedmondson.com for information about other papers and other writings and activities.

00:43:09.260 Fantastic. Well, Amy Edmondson, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:43:12.160 Pleasure to talk with you, Brett.

00:43:14.520 My guest today was Amy Edmondson. She's the author of the book, Right, Kind of Wrong. It's

00:43:17.880 available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at

00:43:21.520 our website, amycedmondson.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash fail well,

00:43:27.400 where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:43:29.780 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at

00:43:41.200 artofmanlies.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that

00:43:45.160 we've written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven't

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00:43:55.520 with a friend or family member who you think we get something out of it. As always, thank you for the

00:43:59.060 continued support. And until next time, this is Brad McKay reminding you to not listen to AOM

00:44:02.720 podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - November 01, 2023

The 3 Types of Failure (And How to Learn From Each)

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