How to Fail Right

Welcome to HBR on strategy, case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts. Hand selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business. We all know Silicon Valley's fail fast, fail often, but when is it okay to fail in the real world? Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson says it depends on how and why you fail. Edmondson is an expert on psychological safety and she's the author of the book Right Kind of the Science of Failing. Well, in this episode you'll learn the difference between good and bad types of failures. One has to do with experimentation, while the other is rooted in inattention or lack of training. Edmondson also explains the downsides of not experimenting enough when your team fears failure. And she explores the tension between paying close attention to individual employees needs and those of the team and organization. This episode originally aired as part of HBR's new World of Work video series in July 2023. Here it.

Right. So if you recognize that funky guitar riff. That's right. This is Harvard Business Reviews, the New World of Work. I'm Adi Ignatius, editor in chief of hbr, and we are back with a new season of the New World of Work. So each week I'll be interviewing a CEO, a thought leader, somebody interesting who can inspire us, can educate us on some of the changing dynamics of the workplace. There are a lot of big issues that come up that we're all facing, I think all of us, whether we're in big companies, small companies, whether we're in the US or somewhere else. So we want to bring in people, have conversations that we hope will help you as you think about how to make your company better, how to strengthen your career. We have a great guest today. She is Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor who's probably best known for her work on psychological safety in the workplace.

Great to be here, Adi. Thanks for having me.

So just before we start to our audience, I'm going to be talking to Amy. We would love to take audience questions later, put them into the chat, and we'll try to get to as many as possible. Your book is about failure, primarily about failure. And let's start there. I was under the impression that we'd sort of come around that we all got that failure is noble and not shameful and provides useful learning lessons. But you're writing a book that seems to be saying that we need to think hard and maybe differently about failure. So talk about what you're trying to accomplish with this book and why you're taking on this topic.

Well, I was with you. And then I kind of poked around and realized that the truth is, many people were still confused about failure. So there is a lot of happy talk about failure out there. There's the virtual mantra of Silicon Valley, fail fast, fail often. Failure is good. Let's learn from failure. Let's have failure parties, let's have failure resumes, and so forth. And the truth is, the future of work will be riddled with failure. We can't just wish it away even if we wanted to. We have to work with it. But I think no one can really take to heart the happy talk about failure unless they have a coherent framework. So you could think of it as the two camps, right? The Silicon Valley, fail fast, fail often, and then the other camp, which is right, I live in the real world. Failure is not an option. And they're both right, or they're both partially right, but neither is terribly helpful nor context specific. And so I think the happy talk, when it's not qualified with a coherent way of making distinctions between the good kind of failure and the not so good kind of, is possibly more destructive than helpful. It drives the honest conversation underground. So I think it's important to talk about the kinds of failure for which we really should be welcoming it with open arms and the kinds where we maybe shouldn't.

I think the best thing you can say about failure is if you have a culture that permits failure, that tolerates failure, it means you're, you're stretching, you're pushing, you're trying to innovate, you're trying to do things that are difficult. And I think of that as a sort of part of the definition of what is a digital company. A digital company experiments frequently and tries and fails and is able to tolerate failure. But I'm interested, though, and I would guess if you talk to most companies, they say, yeah, we do that. That's the culture we have. We didn't used to, but we do that. So I want to push you a little bit more on, you know, you seem to, I, if I hear you, it seems to be saying that's the, the rhetoric, that's the happy talk. But in reality, that's not really how the world works.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's not how most incentives are set up. I'm not saying uniformly that's the case, but most of the time, failure is not rewarded in, in organizations, and people would rather do anything but fail. And, and so I think part of the problem, and you're right, maybe a better way to talk about this is not as failure, but as experimentation. We have to be very pro experimentation, but we have to be pro smart experiments. And I think smart failures are the result of smart experiments. And smart experiments are ones that happen in new territory. Honestly, if you can look up the answer, find the recipe, find the blueprint, please, please do. No need to experiment new territory in pursuit of a goal that's consistent with the value proposition of the organization with a hypothesis. You know, you've done your homework and importantly, as small as possible, right? So that those are the kinds of both experiments and failures we must welcome with open arms. They are discoveries and they allow us to figure out quickly what to try next. But a portion of the book is devoted to, you know, what do we know about best practices for failure proofing that which can be failure proofed? The activities, the operations in your company that are in known territory are ones that should be well set up to make failure extremely rare.

Are there industries that do not tolerate failure? I mean, I was thinking, I don't know, airline pilots, I mean, you don't really want them to fail. This isn't merely a rhetorical question. Are there industries that really don't tolerate failure? And can you look at them and say you actually can get interesting results if you have that kind of policy? Well.

Let'S start with airlines, right? Because clearly none of us want them to be comfortable with failure. And yet I think the reason why airlines have an extraordinary record of success and safety is because they're willing and able to talk about failure. So the failures that they do tolerate happen in the simulator, that there's training, there's a lot of emphasis on speaking up early to prevent something worse from happening. So this is not their safety record does not come from being intolerant of failure, but rather being intolerant of, you know, major accidents. Therefore, we have to be very tolerant of the reality of human error so that we can catch and correct, so that we can train, so that we can allow people to take the kind of risks and experiments we were just talking about in safe settings like the simulator, not in the execution of the real duties. So but I don't think it's possible to say, you know, to describe industries in, in the way your question implies. I think there's variation across companies. So they're, you know, pick an industry, fast moving consumer goods. It's going to be not that hard to find differences in cultural failure tolerance within those industries, you know, across, across companies. So a more sensible way to put that is that some companies, I think are doing better than others in having a healthy tolerance of intelligent failure.

Again, I'm Adi Ignatius, editor of Harvard Business Review. My guest is Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School. If you have questions for Amy, put them in the chat and we'll try to get to some later. So I don't want to just talk about failure, but I do have a couple more questions. And you started to talk about, I guess you didn't use the term, but what a productive failure might look like. But you did mention that they're good and bad failures. And, you know, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about what's the difference? And how does one try to make sure their failures are the good kind?

Sure. Well, in, you know, in known territory where we have a process or a formula for getting the result we want, it's best practice to use that process, use that formula, and get the result we want. So when, you know, a Citibank employee a number of years ago accidentally made a small human error and accidentally wired $800 million to a client that shouldn't have received it, that was a basic unproductive failure. Turns out they were not even able to get the money back. So not celebrating that kind of failure. And you're right, a productive failure is one where we get new and useful knowledge, new knowledge that helps us go forward in, in creating the kind of value we're trying to create in our market for our customers. So we, we discovered something that we could not have discovered without trying it, without the experiment.

And, and would you recommend that.

You.

Know, that, that there be an elaborate post mortem? I mean, I think of, you know, the military, whatever you think about the military, they, they're very focused on doing, you know, detailed post mortem, what happened, what went wrong, why, presumably to learn from that and, and not have it happen again. Do you believe in that? Doing a kind of extensive postmortem on, on something that didn't work out?

Absolutely. I mean, and I think the word extensive, probably a better word, is thorough. It is not the case that a postmortem has to take inordinate amounts of time, but it should be thorough. It should be, it should be analytical and, and look carefully at the different facets of the failure to understand accurately what happened and why, for the express purpose of preventing that exact failure from happening ever again. So a failure, even an intelligent failure in new territory, new discovery, is no longer intelligent the second time it happens.

So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk more generally about the Workplace. You know, really the question is, you know, are we okay? You know, the, the, you, you wrote a recent piece in Harvard Business Review that suggested maybe things are not so great, that, that we, the relatively low levels of engagement and productivity, high rates of burnout, you know, we can speculate as to why that's true. But, but is that, is that, is that accurate? I mean, do you. Obviously, it's hard to generalize, but, but, you know, are we suffering? And if so, how do we respond to that as managers?

Well, I don't have a kind of systematic worldwide data set from which I can make solid inferences about how people are doing. My impression comes from informal conversations, qualitative research, reading, you know, HBR and so many other outlets to sort of see how people are doing. So really, in a way, I'm commenting on the conversation in HBR and so many other sort of business media contexts, maybe LinkedIn and elsewhere. And one thing I think I can say for sure is that the anxiety is real. And people are worried about the future. They're worried about it on so many fronts. They're worried about climate change, they're worried about AI, they're worried about burnout. As you mentioned, I'll come back to burnout. But that anxiety tends to push us toward a retreat to kind of our individual corner. And people start to think, am I going to be okay? And they, they become more focused on their own well being than on the sort of health of the team or health of the organization. And that gives rise to a real potential for erosion, even vicious cycles where organizations find themselves in the trap of responding to requests and issues in isolation, one by one. And so we need a sort of more holistic way of thinking about it. And I see limited evidence of companies sort of being at least described as pausing to think about the larger picture, their value proposition, what it implies for how they must be structured and led to get the necessary work done, and how to organize that work with all its variety and variable needs in a kind of thoughtful way, and how to inspire and motivate people to do it. Well, so let me just briefly go to the burnout issue, because there actually has been some recent data, some studies that have caught my eye, showing that the burnout is systematically higher when psychological safety is lower. Right. So, for instance, it seems to me that some portion of the burnout is associated with loneliness and isolation.

Right.

I think it's fair to say that we can endure many challenges when we feel genuinely that we're in it together, that we're Connected and engaged with our colleagues in trying to make, navigate these challenges.

Yeah, so there are a number of responses to that. And the idea that there's, I don't know, a loneliness trend or epidemic or something like that. I mean, one can't help but think, okay, is some of this related to the pandemic which for many of us broke up teams, created work environments with work from home that in many ways is, is fantastic for people who are, who are balancing their, their work and life. It must take a toll at the same time on something on, on maybe the teaming imperative that you've, that you've written about. Is that kind of, I mean, is that your hunch that the pandemic and our response to it is maybe contributing to this?

Yeah, I do think the pandemic took a toll on us, on all of us. And it created such an obvious uncertainty that was such an obvious disruption. It wasn't sort of the gradual shifts that we're normally used to. It was a very abrupt shift and it gave rise to all these really wonderful and I think productive experiments on different work arrangements. And now it's time for very systematic assessment of what's working and what isn't. And it can't be incremental and it can't also be based on what do people say they want? Because oftentimes what we say we want is not actually what we need, need or truly want in the longer term, bigger picture to get where we need and want to go.

Yeah, I mean, you talked a second ago about trying to have a kind of comprehensive policy and approach, you know, that, I mean, if I heard you right, not, not dealing with people sort of always uniquely individually, but that's sort of the nature of management now. I mean, it seems to me that, and I think the pandemic contributed to that for a lot of people. But you know, we've written about this, that suddenly managers are expected to be, you know, in addition to everything else, you know, almost like psychiatrists. There's an openness for people to share their personal situations, challenges, problems, and that it's the role of the manager increasingly to engage with that in an intelligent. So you end up where, you know, management becomes hyper personalized. But I think maybe you're already on to the risk of that, which is losing the sense of the kind of teaming and the collective, the collective effort.

It's almost as if we've lost sight of tensions and trade offs. I mean, there will always be a tension between me and we. Right. There'll always be a Tension between sort of my desires in the moment and my aspirations over the long term. You know, you know, we, we could think of so many examples of that. If you ask me what I want, you know, pay me infinitely and don't ask me to do anything and let me eat ice cream all day, right. But that's not going to get me where I really, really need to go and want to go. I want to make a difference. And I, I think when we, I think we're, we're right now in a, a sort of a, a moment of not helping people value the collective. I mean, why we as human beings, we're social creatures, that's part of it, but it's also we want to matter. We want to matter to others. We want to matter in, in some way that's larger than ourselves and our sort of hedonistic desires. And, and to matter, I think we have to think of it in a way, in an old fashioned management theory way of the theory of the firm. If markets worked by themselves, we would just have only contractors doing tasks. And it would be efficient, it would be sensible, it would be logical. But it doesn't work because a lot of the work we have to do is inherently collaborative and dynamically so. And it isn't easily parceled out, dividing and conquering style. It requires us to really work together in kind of meaningful ways. The good news is that can be a very engaging, rewarding, you know, exciting experience. You know, the bad news is it's not easy to manage. But I think we can go down that rabbit hole of each person has to be managed differently. Each person, you're almost a psychiatrist to that person. Versus let's step back and rethink. How do we design our activities, our operations so that we create the most value for those we serve?

Yeah, I love that. And I have to say that I don't think companies have figured that out yet. It's funny, the disruption of COVID I think opened our eyes to some flexibility. But I think the things you're putting your finger on, we're trying to solve for that. And I think a lot of us haven't yet and need to keep experimenting. So we're in this age of anxiety or where there's just, as we said, there's burnout and all that. And then you throw on top of that AI, generative AI and a kind of fear, possibly irrational, possibly not, the generative eight. I will be able to do all of our jobs as well or almost as well at almost no cost than what we can do. Now, I assume you haven't done quantitative research, but qualitatively, What's your advice for people as open as generative AI enters the workplace at every level in the public, possibilities become clearer and clearer. What's your advice, I guess to managers and, or employees like how to, how to, how to, you know, cope with this, not get flattened by it, but, but, and maybe benefit from it.

Well, as you, as you indicated, it's a little outside my wheelhouse, except for the effects on people and culture. And so I, I, I speak from the perspective of someone listening at the margins to the many conversations in work and social gatherings alike and media. And I think you're right. I think fear is the dominant emotion. Right. Certainly some are excited, some are super optimistic about the amazing changes to come. But I think casually I hear more fear than optimism. The truth is we need both, we need that sort of, this is here, we need some sort of positive, thoughtful, design oriented approaches to experiment and figure out what's going to work. But I don't think they're going to be simple solutions to the dramatic shakeup of what's possible.

So let's go to some audience questions because we do, we do have them coming in, we have a large and engaged audience and you know, so let's, let's hear what they have to say. So here's a question from Omar from Monterrey in Mexico and the question is what kind of metrics can be used to measure smart failures?

Well, my first response is that's a good idea to have metrics. And one of the things that I've spent the most time studying is how many failures just don't even get the chance to be measured because people don't speak up about them. In fact, this was how I got into this whole topic in the first place was the discovery of dramatic differences across groups, even within the same organization and their sort of willingness to speak up about things that go wrong rather than just things that go right.

So.

Here'S the challenge more broadly than just people not necessarily speaking up. The challenge is the category of intelligent failure covers vast territory. So I think the metrics have to be tailored to the context. And let me illustrate. Vast territory. A well run clinical trial on a new cancer drug is an intelligent failure. When it turns out it doesn't have the efficacy that we hoped it was. In new territory, there was no other way to find out. But do a clinical trial, it's the right size, it's no bigger than it has to be, it's hypothesis driven in pursuit of a goal, right? But so is like a really bad blind date, right? Intelligent failure. Maybe your friend thought you'd like each other, you are willing to go out and have a coffee, you know, smallest possible new territory in pursuit of a goal, all the rest. So, you know, a bad blind date and a failed clinical trial are clearly apples and oranges, yet they both qualify under the category. So I think the best way to answer the measurement question is let's make sure the criteria are adhered to and then let's think about what's the right frequency, given the work we're trying to do, of intelligent failures. Another way to say that is what's the right frequency of experimentation? How often should we be trying new things to push the envelope, to discover new possibilities, even to discover efficiencies? And are we doing that often enough? And the answer is usually no, because most of us would rather succeed than fail, and most of us would rather keep doing what we're doing because we're kind of good at it.

Here's another question along the science. This is from Mohammed in Pakistan. And this is sort of a classic. And you've thought about this a lot, you've answered this before, but I think your words will be. Will be useful for our audience. So the question is, employees may be hesitant to offer feedback that could be perceived as negative, which can impede professional development, hinder organizational progress. How does one tackle this situation?

Such a good question. And it's a good question because it's true, we are very reluctant to do things, to speak up with negative or difficult information because, frankly, it will always be easier not to. It will always be easier to hold back, back than to speak up, you know, candidly and forthrightly about something that you hope could be made better. Right. So the way to make this very difficult thing easier is to set the stage by pointing out how valuable it is. Right. Periodically, you know, I would say even frequently refer to the fact that we need to do this hard thing, we need to do it well. It's if we want to be as good as we can, say as a team. But even individuals who have the ambition to grow and develop in their roles and in their careers have to train themselves to be willing to do this and receive it because of its value. So we gotta call attention to its value. We gotta call attention to the fact that it's hard and then do it anyway and, you know, sort of support each other.

Another question, this is from dawn from Calgary in Canada. So if it's true that we learn acutely from, from mistakes. You know, what are some ways to encourage permission from, you know, our leaders who may be risk averse in their, in their constitution.

Sure. And you know, we're all risk averse and maybe leaders even more than, than, than others, maybe not. But the, the first of all, I make a distinction between mistakes and failures. Now I'm not anti mistake because I'm a human being and I make them, we all do. But a mistake, mistake is not the same thing as a failure. A failure is something that went wrong that we wish, you know, wish were otherwise. A mistake is a deviation from a known practice. Now that could happen because of inattention, because of lack of training, because of exhaustion, you name it. But I think it's helpful for leaders, and others for that matter to talk about the reality that we will make mistakes again because we're human. The very best practice is not to not ever make a mistake, it's to catch and correct them quickly. And then also to make that distinction between smart experiments and new territory that we also want to see more of because it's the secret to future value creation and we welcome those too.

So then further to that and here's a question from Benny from California. So what's the best way to speak to subordinates after a failure to kind of boost morale, communicate that this was a good failure?

It's okay, you know, I, I'm going to say honestly, right. So you can be honest about, wow, this is, this was disappointing for all of us.

Right.

And let's get everything we can out of it. You know, let's learn as much as, as possible. And in fact, given that, you know, something substantial that goes wrong nearly always has sort of multifaceted aspects to it, it's helpful to have a thoughtful and data driven conversation about what happened, not who did it, what happened. So we may go around the team sort of what did you see? And we're really looking for what happened, what contributed to that, what. And that's both commission and omission. Things that you did that may have contributed, things that you didn't do that may have helped. And so it's a thoughtful, deliberately learning oriented conversation designed to help us be better next time.

Yep. So we've got a little bit more time and I want to, I want to, this is a question for me. And when we were touting this episode, you know, I, I said I would ask you about how to re energize your team these days. And we've kind of talked about, you know, that's always a challenge. We've talked about some of the external reasons why maybe people are relatively burned out, maybe productivity is down, et cetera. So what are some thoughts? You know, how do we re. Energize our team, particularly now 2023, where there's a lot of. Feels like there's a lot of stuff swirling around.

You know, I think it's. It starts with sort of personally taking the time to reconnect with your own sense of purpose for doing the job, the role that you are currently doing, and, you know, consider why it matters to you and why what you are doing or leading matters to the world. And having done that, share it, Share it often and, and then just as quickly invite others in to help navigate the necessarily stormy waters that lie ahead. So I, you know, I think it's. It starts with you, and then it's. It's an honest sharing of why you care, why it's challenging, why you very much need and are interdependent with others. Because all of us want to be needed. We want to be needed. We want to. We want to matter.

Yeah. Well, that's, that's great. I mean, I think this has been a particularly. I don't know, I mean, the last few years, you know, the pandemic, I'd say, certainly in the U.S. increased attention to kind of social issues, which, on the one hand, I think felt right to people in the workplace. On the other, you know, brought more sort of challenges into the workplace in terms of what we're thinking about and what we're trying to address. You know, one imagines, you know, there's a pendulum and it might swing between leadership, needing to be very empathetic to, I don't know, the backlash, if that's the right word, to, you know, leaders need to achieve productivity. I mean, that's, that's what it's all about. You know, do you believe in that pendulum or are we in a different place? And if you do, where are we right now on that. On that side?

So I believe in the pendulum. Right. I believe that the pendulum happens, and I believe there may be a better way. So, you know, it's, it's, it's often thought of as kind of empathy versus productivity. And I looked this up, actually. Productivity is defined as the effectiveness of productive effort as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input. Right. Okay. So the first problem is not all work is easily measured for productivity. And the second problem is often it's not the right way to measure excellence. It's a productivity is often a short term measure and it has limited predictive value for the future performance of the firm. Right. For example, one way to be really productive is to just push people to their limits. But that has time constraints. Eventually they will burn out, leave, etc. It's like Buckminster Fuller used to say, it was foolish to burn down the house to keep warm on a cold winter's night. It's kind of that excessive pressure can be the equivalent of that error. And also innovation work in particular, we have case study after case study where the work actually suffers when productivity metrics are brought to bear. So I guess in a way I wish the pendulum were more about excellence than that, than productivity, because I think productivity is really tricky and variable to measure. So maybe I see the pendulum existing, but maybe it's a false dichotomy. Maybe it's not empathy versus productivity. Maybe we need smart, caring leaders who understand the importance of both. And given that that's very challenging, they're open about it being challenging, they're asking for help, they're sharing the, the, the burden of caring and excellence with their teams and, and, and sort of considering again the fundamentals of what it is the organization must do well to stay alive in its market, to perform in its market and you know, talk, talk about it honestly. I mean, I, I, I sometimes think we don't talk often enough about the work. Right. It's supposed to be a little bit of work, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun, energizing, collaborative and full of empathy.

Yeah, I love that. Well, maybe that's a good point to end on. So, Amy Edmondson, thank you for being on the show. Thank you for a lot of thoughts, a lot of thoughts about failure, about teams, about psychological safety, about how to lead in tough times. So Amy Evanson, thank you for being on the show.

Thanks for having me.

That was Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson in conversation with HBR Editor in Chief Adi Ignatius. We'll be back next Wednesday with another hand picked conversation about business strategy from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. We're a production of the Harvard Business Review. If you want more podcasts, articles, case studies, books and videos like this, find it all@hbr.org this episode was produced by Julia Butler and Scott Lapierre, Ann Sanni and me Hannah Bates. Direction and video by Dave Diulio and Ellie Honaine, Andy Robinson and Tristan Mejias Thompson. Our production assistants. Ian Fox is our editor. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Audie Ignatius, Karen Player, Ramsay Kabaz, Nicole Smith, Ann Bartholomew and you, our listener. See you next week.

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