Amy Edmondson: Practical Tips for Leaders & Fostering Positive Failure (Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School)

Simon Brown00:32So hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Simon Brown. I'm one of the co-authors of the book, The Curious Advantage. And today I'm here with my co-author, Paul Ashcroft. And we're delighted to be joined by Amy Edmondson. Hi, Amy. Great to have you. Yes, welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast. So.

Paul00:43Hello.

Amy Edmondson00:49Glad to be here.

Amy Edmondson00:55Thank you.

Simon Brown00:56To kick us off, so you're the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, number one on the latest Thinkers 50 Worlds Most Influential Management Thinkers, and author of seven books, this one included, and 60 scholarly papers. So Amy, tell us a little bit about your story and how did you end up here? That was a great start.

Amy Edmondson01:18I guess through curiosity must have kept me going all of these years. Absolutely. And of course it's true. And it's true in a very fundamental way in that I think the right answer or the accurate answer to how did I get here is by following my nose, meaning a complete lack of a grand plan, certainly. And a career journey that has involved

Paul01:21Good answer.

Amy Edmondson01:48twists and turns and restarts and ultimately landed me as a researcher and professor at Harvard where I've now been for quite a long time.

Simon Brown02:02And over that time, how do you see that management and leadership has changed our reality, changed the world since you started?

Amy Edmondson02:11Do you mean how our ideas about management and leadership have changed? Yeah.

Simon Brown02:14Yeah, I guess I have our understanding and yeah, observations around management and leadership.

Amy Edmondson02:22You know, I think there's a growing chorus, a growing and broadening chorus of writings and speakings and just plain old recognition that the world we are operating in is a very complex, uncertain, interdependent place, such that, as Churchill apparently once said, plans are worthless. But planning remains essential. So I think the new leadership mindset is one that has a great deal more in common with scientific mindset than the management mindset of old. The management mindset of old was one that essentially broke things down into parts and then found the ways to manage and measure the parts as accurately as possible.

Simon Brown03:13Uh-huh.

Amy Edmondson03:20so as to ensure execution to spec. Whereas today, I think fewer and fewer of us are under the illusion that we have that kind of clear line of sight looking forward. So management and leadership today are more about setting the hypothesis about where we need to head and what that might involve and helping people. take bold forays into new territory and helping them make sense of sometimes puzzling data. It's, again, it sounds an awful lot more like being a principal investigator than being an old fashioned manager.

Paul04:01I think we fully agree with that. And you mentioned this at the start, that curiosity led you to where you've got to today. And you mentioned the mindset of the leader changing. What does the cure? What's the role of curiosity in the mindset of a leader these days? How important is it?

Amy Edmondson04:16Well, I don't think you can be a leader without, I mean a good leader without curiosity, because if you're, if, as I described, the sort of ideal leader is part, you know, principal investigator or akin to leading a robust scientific undertaking, then they had better be very curious about the data, right? Very curious about what people, whom they are leading and managing, are discovering out there in that new world that we're trying to succeed in. So it's... Curiosity plays a central role because it's without... I think you didn't need curiosity in the older models of management. You just needed deadlines and deliverables and targets, and then you could easily check... whether or not reality was matching up to those. But that didn't require curiosity. Curiosity is how you approach reality when you say, I really need and want to learn from what's actually happening rather than from what my hopes and predictions were for what would be happening.

Paul05:39Hmm. Is there someone in particular that you admire or you think does this really well, who gets it? Who leads with curiosity in your view?

Amy Edmondson05:48Well, I mean, I think many, many people lead with curiosity. Probably, you know, a couple that come to mind because they're so different would be Ed Catmull and Alan Mullally, right? They're different ones in, you know, very creative enterprise of sort of animated computer animated films, Pixar and the others, automotive. an automotive turnaround, now retired, but at Ford Motor Company. And yet, I think both could be easily described as full of curiosity in a genuine sense.

Simon Brown06:30And what does that look like? So it's great to have role models to sort of, so what have you seen to sort of observe that shows that curiosity?

Amy Edmondson06:34Yeah.

Amy Edmondson06:39Well, it's two things, one simpler, one structural. And the simple one is just they ask a lot of good questions. They just ask questions. If you don't, I mean, if you're curious, you will not have to remind yourself to ask good questions, which, by the way, is good leadership practice. But curiosity will naturally drive question asking. And the structural one is sort of setting in place rituals and activities that require sharing knowledge, data, experience, whether those are weekly executive committee meetings that are designed to share what's going on, seek and offer help. Or Pixar's brain trust process, which is a...

Simon Brown07:30Hmm.

Amy Edmondson07:32intermittent process to kind of take a look at the developing product and critique it and figure out where it's falling short and where it could be better.

Paul07:45Amy, you said in the intro that your path has led you down a few rabbit warrants along the way. And I know one of the things that you write about is psychological safety. So if we're going to be curious, uh, and we have a problem or we go down a rabbit warren and start to discover that things are going not quite the way we want. Um, how does psychological safety play a role in that and what can we do to, I guess, help people be more successfully curious?

Amy Edmondson08:13Well, I suppose it makes sense to think of curiosity as an individual phenomenon. Individuals are curious and they bring that curiosity to their team. Let's say I've got curiosity, I've been nurturing curiosity and I come to a team where there isn't a sense of psychological safety, by which I mean a sense that you can speak up openly without fear humiliation or rejection. And so if I'm curious, I want to ask questions, but if I think asking questions will make me look bad in this particular group, I'm just going to be stymied in my ability and desire to do that. So, you know, curiosity will flourish in a psychologically safe environment. Also, if I'm curious, I'm willing to experiment. If I'm willing to experiment, things will sometimes go well and sometimes go wrong. That too, I will not be so willing to do if I'm not in, if I don't perceive my environment to be a psychologically safe environment for those kinds of experiments and questions and missteps and dissenting views and all the rest. So curiosity and learning are hand in hand and psychological safety is all about really, it's just fundamentally an environment where learning is possible.

Simon Brown09:42was something I read this morning. It was a survey, I think of 4,000 leaders. And it was along the lines of things I wish people had told me that they never did. And one of those was along the lines of, I don't need to know, as a leader, I don't need to know the answer. And I guess many feel we do need to know the answer. And what I'm hearing from you with the questions piece is actually if we're asking great questions,

Amy Edmondson09:52Huh.

Amy Edmondson10:02Right!

Simon Brown10:12We don't need to know the answer. We can use our experience or intuition to ask great questions. But.

Amy Edmondson10:12Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean... That's the very first thing, you know, if I put up a chart in my head of, you know, the old fashioned management 101 versus, you know, think like a scientist, the top row would be has answers, has questions. I don't need to know the answers, but I am responsible for coming up with good questions.

Simon Brown10:33Yeah.

Simon Brown10:41Yes, yeah, and it's from my experience and from my knowledge and everything else that helps me to ask the right questions. Yeah.

Amy Edmondson10:48Yeah, right. And by the way, I think one of the jobs of a leader is to help others develop the ability to ask good questions. That is a skill, and it's helpful. I mean, it's one that can be nurtured.

Simon Brown11:08And how so we've had quite a few conversations on this podcast over the last few months around generative AI and the change in the world, I guess that is coming as that through your new book and I guess your research of the old book, how are you suggesting to leaders? And maybe it's a leading question coming from what we're talking about. But how are you how are you advising and guiding leaders or organisations to navigate through the unknown?

Amy Edmondson11:30Yeah.

Simon Brown11:37comes from generative AI.

Amy Edmondson11:42It's a little bit of a leading question, but not really, because I think there's different ways to take it. And I mean, maybe this is the leading part. It's got to start with genuine curiosity, because I think there's a natural tendency and desire to say, okay, I'm gonna conquer this thing, right? I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna become an expert. I'm gonna know what's going on. rather than to think, I wonder, excuse me, I wonder what this might be good at. I wonder what this might help with. I wonder where the risks and dangers might be. And so to be approaching all of the opportunity that lies ahead from a place of I wonder. is a far more powerful approach than one that says, okay, we're gonna wrestle this one to the ground.

Paul12:50Amy, in the right kind of wrong, you talk about these three main types of failure, simple, complex, and intelligent. Yeah, sorry, basic, complex, and intelligent. Could you tell us about each one and maybe give us an example of what you mean by these? It's a lovely, lovely concept.

Amy Edmondson12:57Basic, yeah.

Amy Edmondson13:07Yeah, so basic failure is a single cause failure and in known territory, in familiar territory. And so, I mean, a kind of a tragic example of a basic failure was Air Florida Flight 90 back in 1982, where the cockpit crew failed in the middle of a winter storm to use the anti-icing, because they went through the checklist and in a rote manner said anti-icing off. check, you know, and then just went on as if, you know, did it in their river real sleep. So that simple mistake led to the complex, the basic failure of an airplane crashing into the Potomac River and the massive loss of life that entailed. So it's, you know, basic failures can be tiny, you know, you. sort of forget to charge your cell phone and miss an important meeting, or they can be enormous, like the one I just described, but they are in terrain that is well understood, and you make a mistake. And complex failures are the proverbial perfect storm. They're the multi-causal failures that are... caused by a combination of factors coming together in just the wrong way, where any one of the factors on their own would not lead to a failure, but the fact of them lining up because of the complexity of our lives and our systems and so forth, lead to complex failures. There's so many, again, I guess to stick with aviation. The Boeing 737 MAX crashes, both of them were complex failures, multi-causal, not simple, not single, but a whole set of factors truly unfolding over a long period of time. And I go into detail in the book about that. But there's also, of course, less tragic examples of complex failures.

Amy Edmondson15:22at work and in life. And then the third kind, which is the right kind of wrong, are intelligent failures. And these are the still undesired, but thoughtful forays into new territory. So they are an intelligent failure is one that is in pursuit of a goal in new territory, with a hypothesis. You've done your homework. You've got good reason to believe this uncertain experiment might work.

Simon Brown15:27Hmm.

Amy Edmondson15:51and alas, it doesn't, and they are as small as possible. You're not betting unnecessary time resources on something that may not work. So you make it be the size it needs to be to get new knowledge, but no bigger. So a clinical trial, thoughtful clinical trial, you've engaged the right number of patients to test the efficacy of a new compound that we hope will work. and our science suggests it will, but we run the trial and alas, the drug fails to show efficacy. That is an intelligent failure. There was no other way to get that information than to try it. You couldn't just look into your crystal ball.

Simon Brown16:37And then what do we do with those intelligent failures? Because I guess part of them being intelligent is we don't leave them there.

Amy Edmondson16:42Yes, yeah, you're not done, right? You're not done yet, right? So, and of course, careers are full of intelligent failures too, but the intelligent failure, what we do with them is we learn from them. We learn as much as we can, as quick as we can, and use that information to design the next experiment. And so, and the next experiment may be a success, or it may be a failure again, but it'll be a new failure. It won't be the same old failure. It will have been informed by this one.

Simon Brown17:14And why is it so hard for organizations to grasp this? I think because... Yeah.

Amy Edmondson17:20I know, because it's so obvious, right? I didn't, yeah, it's so crazy, isn't it? I mean, I think there's two answers. One is psychology and two is incentives. So, psychologically, we still have this sort of sad human preference for success over failure. No, that's not all that sad, but it can lead us astray, right? It can lead us to make...

Paul17:23hehehehehe

Amy Edmondson17:46errors of our own making. So we're reluctant to do the smart experiments in the safe ways we could do them to then have more successful real launches, let's say real product launches. So we don't do our homework to get the kinks out of the system in a timely way. And then, of course, incentives compound on that because incentives kind of at every level and in every project. We want everything to go well, rather than having the incentives be lined up to say, okay, find out where it doesn't work, you know, and find out quickly so that we can then correct and pivot and go forward.

Paul18:30Is this what you mean by like a smart pilot, Amy, some of the things that you were talking about there? Tell us more, what's a smart pilot as opposed to just we're gonna have a go and see what happens.

Amy Edmondson18:36Yes.

Amy Edmondson18:39Right. Yeah, I mean, a not smart pilot is like a demonstration project, right? It shows, oh, here's this new thing and look how great it is. And it's great because you've rigged it to be great. You know, you've over invested in it. So a smart pilot would be one that you do find the bits that don't work. So it would be one that the first of all, the test is in, is it representative? conditions. It's not sort of an idealized, you know, let's get our best people on it and too many of them. We're representative of reality, of the real operating environment. It's one in which people are not, there's no incentives to sort of have a success of the pilot. There's incentives to learn from the pilot, again, so that you can tweak and make the project better. And it's not, it's clear to everyone that This isn't just to prove, it's to learn. And generally, a successful pilot would be one that, at the end of it, you now know five things to change, some number of things to change to make it better. But if you don't have anything to change after the pilot, it probably wasn't a very good pilot.

Simon Brown19:55But setting that up, I mean, if I look at how over many, many years you set up pilots, you, the perception at the end of the pilot has, if I think historically always been the thing works and proves, proves the bigger piece. So you then take the commitment on the bigger piece. So again, this needs a change in our thinking, I guess. Um, yeah. Uh, and yes.

Amy Edmondson20:15Great, great. Yes, it does. Because we designed it to succeed, to prove. Are you working to prove or to learn? And they are at odds, because proving will lead you to cover up the wrinkles and to overcompensate for the weaknesses.

Simon Brown20:29Yes.

Simon Brown20:34Exactly.

Simon Brown20:39And I saw you talk about that in the book around how the team wants the pilot to succeed. And therefore in the pilot, everything is successful. But then in reality, it doesn't work. Why? Because the team glossed over things and made it work. But that's going to require a major shift in all of our thinking as we set up pilots. And are you seeing people embracing that in your conversation so far or?

Amy Edmondson20:52Right.

Amy Edmondson21:00Right.

Amy Edmondson21:07Yes, you know, it's, as you said before, Simon, it's in a way, I think everybody gets it intellectually. It's just, can we put it into place emotionally and from an institutional incentives point of view, right? So we get the logic, you know, we're, we're living and operating in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world, right? So we need to have smart experiments, we need smart pilots. Um, but then everything in us was like, well, Mine's going to be the exception, right? Mine's going to be perfect right out of the gate. Illogical, though that may be. So we need to work together to kind of overcome our natural foibles in that sense.

Paul21:52Hey, my love, you talk about how to turn strangers into a team. Um, it's one of my favorite talks that you gave, but also to extend that, but how do you build effective communities? I think that's what people are, are wondering these days, even beyond their own organization. What are some of the things you've learned about that?

Amy Edmondson22:02Yeah.

Amy Edmondson22:09Paul, it's such a nice connection because it is, in fact, how to turn strangers into a team is really about learning. It's fast learning about and from each other. It works when I'm curious about who you are, what you bring, and what you're up against. willing also to share, vulnerably, honestly, that about myself. So then suddenly we have something akin to a real relationship because of that honesty. I've told you what I'm worried about, I told you what I'm trying to get done, I told you what I think some of my strengths are, and I've heard yours. So that those kinds of relationships start with mutual learning and then allow us to move forward to learn together and sort of conquer. the uncertainty that lies ahead.

Simon Brown23:08Does that also then require the creation of that psychological safety to be open, I guess, about those traits and share? Yeah.

Amy Edmondson23:15Yes. And I think we create, it's like, I don't think you sort of, let's step back, let's create psychological safety, then let's get to work. It's more, you know, we create psychological safety by getting to work by, and when I, you know, when I think about those relationships, you know, building relationships with strangers, as it were, there's a gradient, right? You know, you might start with, well, here's the goal, you know, my department wants me to be achieving. That's pretty easy to share. My concerns, the things I'm up against, the things I'm worried about, my anxieties, that's a little harder. And then my strengths, the things I think I offer, that's harder still. But we ratchet up, we ratchet up the sharing, we ratchet up the learning. And if it goes well, we've built psychological safety as a by-product.

Simon Brown24:10And something, I hope I'm not misquoting you here, but something that I've heard you reference at some point is how psychological safety is often misused as a term and sort of misattributed. So can you tell us more about that?

Amy Edmondson24:21Yes.

Amy Edmondson24:25Sigh, big sigh. Yes, because I guess, I came at this research so many years ago with this fundamental interest in learning, quality improvement, and ultimately innovation and so on. So I come at this with a learning lens. And I realized that often the interpersonal climate makes it hard to learn, makes it hard for us to learn. So that was my interest, that was my sort of discovery.

Simon Brown24:27Yeah.

Paul24:28Hehe

Amy Edmondson24:54And I still care about those things, first and foremost. And so it's upsetting when people take psychological safety to mean we must be nice to each other. Because nice often means holding back the truth, right? And not being candid. Whereas to me, psychological safety is about permission, felt permission for candor. Psychological safety does not mean that

Simon Brown25:06Hmm.

Amy Edmondson25:23I should expect a round of applause for every utterance. It doesn't mean that I should feel comfortable and nobody should push me or stretch me harder than, and I think probably the simplest way to put this is that no, psychological safety is really not about being comfortable. It's about knowing that it's okay to be a little uncomfortable.

Simon Brown25:47Mmm.

Amy Edmondson25:52because of what's at stake, because of the sort of the challenging work that we're trying to do together. So that let's not let interpersonal discomfort get in the way of excellence in our chosen field here.

Simon Brown26:08So it's actually creating permission and a comfort with discomfort of, yeah.

Amy Edmondson26:12Yes, it is. It's a comfort with discomfort. And we get to, fortunately, you know, it makes it more palatable, the mutuality of it, right, that we get to kind of support each other in that learning environment.

Simon Brown26:29So we're talking with Amy Ebbenson. Amy is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair that was established to support the human interaction that leads to the creation of successful enterprises for the betterment of society. She's author of seven books and over 60 scholarly papers published in academic and management outlets, such as Admin Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, and many others. She's a sought-after keynote speaker with a worldwide following. So curiosity features very prominently in the new book, Amy. How important is being curious? Ha ha.

Amy Edmondson27:09It's probably job one. I think curiosity, I talk about curiosity and vulnerability and humility and empathy even, but curiosity, maybe because it's the most cognitive, which is where I'm most comfortable, but curiosity is the driver of all of the rest. Because with without curiosity, we're just less likely to remember to ask good questions, to remember to kind of experiment and see if this works, right? Just to keep asking ourselves and each other the question of what would happen if? What if we tried this?

Paul27:56And I love how the subtitle of the book, the science of failing well. I'd rather like, because I think you are sort of redefining your relationship with failure. Yes, okay, we don't just want, I guess, to make the basic or simple mistakes or fails as much as we can avoid those, right? But.

Amy Edmondson28:04Yes.

Amy Edmondson28:09No. Right. The book is as much about, in fact, I haven't added up the pages in this way, but there's probably even more pages devoted to the prevention of preventable failures, the basic failures and the complex failures that we can and must work hard to prevent, take up a fair amount of space in the book. Whereas the intelligent failures are the ones I think we need to work hard to promote and to increase the frequency. of. And by extension, if we have more intelligent failures and fewer basic and complex failures, then the ratio will be much healthier too. The ratio of intelligent failures to the rest should be dramatically higher.

Paul29:00Exactly. I think you've been a career long curious person, Amy. How would you define curiosity?

Amy Edmondson29:09Gosh, it's probably a formal definition that you guys are familiar with, but I mean, I think it's just a drive to learn, a drive to know more, and maybe a recognition of the...

Paul29:13Yeah.

Amy Edmondson29:28inevitable presence of gaps, things you don't yet know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul29:34There's always something you don't know. There's always something you don't know that's worth exploring. I love that. Yeah. Very, very nice. May we be cheeky and ask, what are you curious about at the moment? Maybe something professional, something personal.

Amy Edmondson29:39But yeah.

Amy Edmondson29:44Oh, gosh. Well, guys, at the moment, I'm curious about when my voice will ever come back to normal, because this has been a very long wait. But, well, I am curious about AI. I'm certainly curious about what the opportunities and the risks are going to prove themselves to be in the coming months and years.

Paul29:50Right. You and all of us.

Simon Brown29:50Hehehehehehe

Amy Edmondson30:14And I'm also curious, I mean, I'm trying to force myself to be just curious rather than despondent about the kind of global and political drift toward authoritarianism and almost giving up on the project of self-governance.

Simon Brown30:32Hmm.

Simon Brown30:45that's a future book in either of those areas.

Amy Edmondson30:48Yeah, not probably it's going to exceed my expertise for a good long time. But there is something in there. I mean, there's something in my wheelhouse and your wheelhouse in that fundamentally these breakdowns are a breakdown in curiosity, right? A breakdown in desire to mutually, you know, to learn together and to develop greater understanding and appreciation.

Simon Brown31:07Mm.

Amy Edmondson31:16not only of each other, but almost of possibilities in the world. Like, what, I keep thinking, you know, what could we do if our primary goal was how do we make the world work? You know, rather than our primary implicit goal being, how do we beat the other guy? And it's just, it's like a fundamentally different way of thinking and operating in the world. And it seems to me to have gotten...

Amy Edmondson31:44you know, more rare rather than more common. And we need it to be more common.

Simon Brown31:50Yes, I think it's extrapolating that the research that Francesca Gino did around curiosity looked at the benefits for team working and the benefits for communication and if that works at a micro level I wonder if that could work at a macro level with some of these geophilistical challenges.

Amy Edmondson32:07Yeah.

Amy Edmondson32:11I think so. I mean, Chris Ardress, who was one of my great mentors, you know, had a, you know, his work was all on learning, organizational learning, but his observation was we have a sort of programming, which he called model one, that sort of programs us to want to win. You know, I want to win an argument. I want to win an interaction rather than to learn. The programming involves, you know, face saving rather than essentially generating new opportunities, new possibilities. And it's so strong, it's so strong. It's cognitively strong, it's socialized in us. And it's an ongoing project to kind of overcome that and be model two. And model two was learning oriented and fundamentally creative, wanting to create more value together and for the world.

Paul33:10and the media and the social media doesn't help as soon as you put a foot in some place, everything is amplified a thousand, a million fold. I wonder in organizations if there's something to learn there as well, why some people want to hide their experiments a little going back to that and wanting to try and succeed.

Amy Edmondson33:12No.

Amy Edmondson33:17Yeah!

Amy Edmondson33:22Yeah!

Amy Edmondson33:27Right. But social media seems to me almost a codification of model one thinking, right? Because it's all about proving, winning more likes, right? Now, it's not about mutual learning and, you know, course correcting and, you know, being wrong in the right kinds of ways.

Simon Brown33:49So something we do on the podcast, Amy, is offer the opportunity to ask us some questions. So is there anything you'd like to ask us?

Amy Edmondson33:59Well, yeah, how do you alter curiosity or nurture curiosity? What are your best strategies for that or techniques?

Simon Brown34:09Yeah, echoing, I think a lot of a lot of what you've said. So asking questions, creating psychological safety to be able to experiment to be able to try things to be able to fail. Creating that environment in the team so that people feel they can be curious, creating the incentives for people to be curious. So very much aligned with many of the things that you've talked about, which I guess is encouraging.

Amy Edmondson34:37Yeah, yep, yep.

Amy Edmondson34:41Yes, yeah.

Paul34:42One of the ones we talk about in the book is comfort. We have these seven C's of curiosity, Amy, which are, I suppose, dotted around the things that you and Simon have just mentioned. But one at the end is confidence, which I wanted to come back and ask you about again, to sort of turn it straight back to you. That one of the things we found during the research is confidence comes from learning you can do it when things are going wrong. Not just that you can do it when things are going right. Don't just practice, practice to succeed, but practice to...

Amy Edmondson34:50Yes.

Paul35:10also fail. Do you see some parallels there? Did you look into confidence at all?

Amy Edmondson35:14Oh, yes. You know, I talk in the book about failure muscles. I mean, you know, playfully, right? It's not a real thing, but it's a metaphor because when, you know, but if you haven't failed at something, you are, you know, that you have the exact opposite of confidence, right? You're you're terrified because it's around the next corner might be that failure. And it's only after.

Paul35:34Hmm.

Amy Edmondson35:40you know, experiencing failure and realizing, oh, I'm okay, right? I'm still here and all is well. And I learned and it actually took me somewhere new and interesting and good that builds that builds those, you know, those failure muscles, which is in fact, which is a kind of confidence. And that's why people say, and I think it's true that sports are a really good arena in which to develop failure muscles as well as regular muscles. because in any sport that you take up, there will be both successes and failures, right? It's never, it's simply an impossibility to only succeed, to only win. And so it gives people who get very serious in team sports or even individual sports have far more experience than the rest of us in having those failures, living through them and realizing they're okay. In fact, they learn something and they go on and it's part of their ultimate, you know, championship success.

Paul36:41Right.

Simon Brown36:49What makes me think is whether there's anything we need to change in the school system to actually encourage that sort of failure earlier. You mentioned in the book around the case study with IDO and how they were hiring sort of all these super bright people who have been incredibly successful through their schooling and then put into an environment where they need to be failing in order to be able to innovate fast and that's really hard. So is there something we can do?

Amy Edmondson37:08Yes.

Simon Brown37:17could be or should be changing in our education system.

Amy Edmondson37:18Yeah, I mean, maybe, you know, science certainly, a lot of times science is taught as, you know, here's the experiment, follow it, and it's already a known thing, right? It's not a real experiment, it's just a demonstration project. And I think that's true in, you know, it doesn't have to be just science, it can be creative writing, it can be, you know, non-creative writing, you know, history writing. But to really show people how it's... how their successes, their capabilities grow from the failures as much as from the successes, right? So if you get a, as a kid, you don't wanna get the red mark on your paper, but if you learn to see the red mark, my mother was a teacher and she had a colleague who called herself Mr. Red Pen. I don't know why Mr., but anyway.

Simon Brown38:14Hahaha

Amy Edmondson38:15And it was really to make that point that the red pen is your friend, right? If you're not getting any red ink, you're not learning. You're not stretching, you're not getting any feedback. You're not getting anything useful out of this exercise.

Paul38:30I love that. I have to be honest because that again is a fundamental shift in how we approach, let's call it failure, but in the end, just learning something, right? And if you teach, yeah. And if you teach that into children, then as we get older and older in our lives and in our careers, then of course, seeing a bit of a red mark on our copybook, perhaps isn't going to be quite so devastating. We might be, we might be, yeah, exactly. It's a gift. Exactly.

Amy Edmondson38:39Yeah, it's a reframe.

Amy Edmondson38:52No, it's a gift, right? It means the teacher cared enough, right? Because if you have no red marks, it's like, what did they do? Did they even read it? Did they, you know, I'm eight years old. Is my paper, you know, perfect? No, I'm not a, you know, I'm not a professional writer. I'm a little kid. So if there's no red, it's a mark of not caring rather than a mark of perfection.

Simon Brown39:16So we've, we're coming towards the end of our time. We've covered an awful lot, just looking back through my notes and we've gone from your career being essentially all about curiosity and not having that grand plan, but sort of following your nose along the way. How the role of management and leadership has changed to be more hypothesis driven and the answer is no longer there. We can't just break things down and execute and follow the way that we did before. and how we need to learn from what's actually happening. Two things are how we need to ask questions and how we need to set in place rituals and activities to be able to shape and some great examples that you shared with us. We looked at how curiosity is sort of more of an individual trait and then the impact of generative AI and how that's... that's going, or how people can tackle that. So asking the question of, I wonder what might be the risks, what might be the opportunities and getting in there to play. We talked about then the content of the new book. So particularly the three types of failure around basics, complex and intelligent failures and how we don't want those basic failures, but we do want lots more of the intelligent or good positive failures. Need those to outnumber the others. We went, dived into psychological safety and how that's very, how hard that is. We talked about smart pilots. We went into how we need to rethink completely pilots. And so I think that's going to be a hard one for many of us. When we think about a pilot, it's not that it needs to be successful. It needs to actually be something we can learn from. And yeah, that's a complete mindset. that I think we all, mindset shift that we all need around pilots. We looked at mutual learning. We looked at how psychological safety isn't about being nice. It's actually around candor. It's not about getting a round of applause and it doesn't have to be comfortable, but yeah, maybe we need to be comfort with the discomfort around it. And then, yeah, we dive deeper into curiosity, being around the drive to learn, the drive to know more.

Amy Edmondson41:18I'm sorry.

Simon Brown41:37and some of the things that you're currently curious about. So covered a lot. If there was one thing from all of that, Amy, to leave our listeners with, is there one takeaway you'd like to leave everyone with?

Amy Edmondson41:50Wow, well, you know, maybe that's such a great recounting. I don't know how you did that. I think the takeaway might be, well, I have two. One is that our spontaneous ways of thinking about our situations are usually unhelpful. And we can rise to the occasion of sort of rethinking, reframing, and approaching it. in a new way, generally that's one with curiosity. And maybe the other just big takeaway is that what we're really talking about is navigating uncertainty. Uncertainty is here to stay. And we can't navigate it effectively by pretending it's not there. We gotta really put it front and center and approach it with a sense of realism and curiosity.

Simon Brown42:47that, so lots of homework for us all. Indeed, indeed, but yeah, there's lots of guidance in here though with hints and tips on how to do that.

Paul42:48Yeah, love that.

Amy Edmondson42:50Yeah. Well, easier said than done.

Amy Edmondson43:00I love seeing the little placeholders there, terrific.

Simon Brown43:03Oh yes, I've been busy scribbling all over it, so there's lots of valuable lessons in there.

Paul43:05Well-thumbed copy.

Amy Edmondson43:06Yeah, yep. And here's the US version. Same exact content, different cover. So.

Simon Brown43:13Ah, 30.

Simon Brown43:18Aha, interesting. So massive thank you, Amy. It's been a great conversation, and thanks so much for joining us.

Amy Edmondson43:22Very welcome.

Paul43:23Yeah, thank you so much.

Amy Edmondson43:25Alright, thanks for having me.

Simon Brown43:27So you've been listening to a Curious Advantage podcast. We're always curious to hear from you. If there was something valuable or useful from this conversation, we encourage you to write a review for the podcast on your preferred channel, saying what this was and why and what you've learned from it. We always appreciate hearing our listeners' thoughts and having a curious conversation. So join us today at hashtag Curious Advantage. See you next time.

Paul43:53Brilliant conversation.

Amy Edmondson43:53Sure.

Simon Brown43:54Thank you so much.