Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well with Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School

we live in such complex times and so many things can sort of come together in just the wrong way at the same time that we're vulnerable to them. But what I like to point out about the complex failures is that given that not any one of the factors wouldn't cause the failure on its own, you need several of them. That means that complex failures give us multiple opportunities to catch and correct, right? There, All you have to do is kind of remove one, maybe two of the factors. The failure's avoided.

Hi, welcome to the Mind Body Space Podcast, where you can stress less and boost your resilience just by listening. Please subscribe and share to support this free evidence-based content curated just for you. I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD, a board-certified radiologist and lifestyle medicine specialist, and I'm here to help you thrive in today's complex world. Join me as I meet fascinating experts in education, neuroscience, meditation, and lifestyle medicine. To get the podcast and special tips right into your inbox, head on over to mindbodyspace.com/podcast and sign up for the newsletter. I'm so honored today to have as my guest Amy Edmondson. She is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, and her award-winning research on psychological safety spanning over 20 years has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Psychology Today, Fast Company, and of course, Harvard Business Review, as well as many other publications. She was named the number 1 management thinker in the world by Thinker50 in 2021, and her TED Talk titled "How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team" has been viewed over 3 million times. Amy's here to discuss today how to fail well. As human beings, we naturally feel pain when we fail or make mistakes. And if you're a leader or a parent, then, well, we also feel the pain when our team or our kids fail. But Amy's new book, "Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well," teaches us how we can understand and reframe failure, both on a personal and cultural level. Amy emphasizes that there are crucial distinctions separating good failure from the bad. The good failure is what researchers call intelligent failure.

And it's not easy.

It takes reflection, research, planning, and hard work. And of course, practice. Practice accepting those painful emotions that often come with failure. Those instinctive desires as human beings to avoid pain, confusion, and fear. But Amy says, quote, "It's not easy or obvious to know how to fail well." But with so many critical and complex issues facing us personally in business and in the world at large, we must learn to frame failure differently as a source of information, as a part of our personal development, and as an experience shared by everyone. End quote. I learned so much from this conversation and her awesome book, Right Kind of Wrong, goes deeper into all the topics that we discussed today. So I highly recommend that you grab a copy and please enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Hello there.

Hello. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to talk to you.

Thank you for having me.

You're often listed as the top 50 thought leader. However, I think you're also a leader in communication because honestly, we can have brilliant thoughts all the time and never communicate it to anybody, right?

But you—

thank you— have such clarity, and I just loved listening to a lot of the podcasts you've done lately. And your TED Talks. So I'm really excited to be here with you.

Well, you are so kind and it's so, it's something I've been working on. I've been working on clarity for a very long time. So I'm always trying to find a way to, how do we explain that? Right? How do we explain that clearly or in a way that works? So thank you very much. Nothing could matter more.

I was wondering if the books came first or Speaking clearly came first or kind of together. I mean, obviously writing a book will really help you, right?

In clarity. Yes, exactly. I think one of the ways I try to get clarity is through writing, and sometimes that's articles, sometimes that's book. There's something about having to put it down in words that makes you realize, ooh, I don't yet understand this well enough.

It always feels like that, right? Yeah, exactly. And this is such a comprehensive book. I love this book. And my only worry is that we're not gonna get to everything I wanna talk to you about. I wanted to start with your three archetypes. Types that you describe in the book about failure. Yeah. If you could just explain that to the audience, that would be great.

Yeah. There are 3 types of failure and only one of them is good, actually. So let me start with the good one. I call these intelligent failures and they are the undesired results of thoughtful forays into new territory. I can break that down. I mean, more definition. An intelligent failure is a failure that happens in new territory in pursuit of a goal driven by a hypothesis, or at least good reason to believe it might work. And finally, and importantly, it's as small as possible. You don't make bigger bets than you can afford. The reason I call it intelligent is it's literally the only way to get the information or to get the knowledge you, you want to get in pursuit of some goal. Those are intelligent failures. It's really, you could think of those as the kinds of things that scientists do for a living.

Now, and you also said that it doesn't cause a lot of harm or it doesn't cause harm, right?

Right. And that's why the small, you know, the smallness means doesn't cause harm, economic, you know, safety, reputational. In a way you could think of it as a managed risk, right?

Hmm. I love that.

Problem is we don't even want to do those, right? As human beings, we sort of want to be good at everything already, or we want to be perfect, or we want to get it right the first time. And that's unrealistic when we're going after lofty ambitions or, you know, or, or, or new activities or making new friends. We would love to not experience failure, but it's painful. It's painful. It's always painful, even when it's the smart kind. But if you make that your goal, really the only way to achieve it is just to not take risks, you know, which means no adventure, no new hobbies, no new sports. No new friends, right? You just have to sort of play it safe.

And you talk about even relationships.

Absolutely. Anyone who's an adult who has spent some of their life dating people in search of a partner has— not everyone, I guess a few people are lucky enough to know their soulmate early in life and just on it goes from there. But most of us have had a lot of failures along the way to a successful, meaningful relationship that endures. So the other two types, I call them basic and complex. Now, a basic failure is a single cause failure. It's some— you make a mistake, you have a failure. You've looked, God forbid, down at your cell phone and you, you know, crash into something in your drive, right? That's a failure. It's a basic failure. Utterly preventable. Not something to celebrate. It is something to learn from, right? I think all failure, you know, the good and the bad. They're all sources of learning. Complex failures are multicausal. They're the perfect storm. They're the kinds of failures that happen when not one, but several things happened, maybe out of the ordinary at the same time and led to a breakdown. Any one of the factors on their own would not have caused a failure, but the way they came together led to a bad outcome. Many healthcare-related failures fall into this category, right? Where, you know, people are mostly doing everything right, but a couple of things either go wrong or are different in an unusual way, and it just comes together to create that mishap.

So you've done a lot of research with the medical field, right? And I'm a radiologist. Oh, you were aware of that, but Now I teach resilience and mind-body medicine.

Yeah.

So I teach the science of resilience now, but I used to, well, I, I am still a radiologist. Somebody just recently said to me, once a radiologist, always a radiologist. And there was a lot of, you know, misses in radiology, which I wanna get back to, but I also wanna talk about the complex failures. And I just wanna ask you, is there ever really a basic failure? 'Cause I really related to that story you told about when you were in that, I think a regatta where you were racing with people and then you got hit with the boom and you had to go to the hospital. I think you got stitches, but that type of thing, even though you looked up for a second, you didn't see the downwind turning, that, that is a complex failure because there were things happening that were also out of your control maybe. So I don't know. Sometimes you're tired or, you know, circumstances.

It's true.

I mean, yeah.

And it's funny 'cause toward the, at the very end of the book I say, and, and periodically, you know, keep in mind A lot of these things aren't black and white or completely dichotomous. They are judgment calls. And I judged that failure to be a basic failure because I made a, I made a mistake that an expert like me in, in, I'm an expert sailor, should not make, right? I was overly casual. I was glad the race part was over. I'm just sailing into the dock now. I'm sailing dead downwind. Any expert sailor knows that if you're sailing dead downwind, especially in a lake or a river where the wind is always shifty, you are vigilant. You're on top of it, right? Because that boom can flip over at the tiniest shift of the wind. It's not even a question of if that'll happen. It's almost a question of when it will happen. And so you pay attention, right? It's a mistake if you're working with dangerous equipment. Let's say you're in a machine. Shop working with a dangerous drill, you wear your safety goggles. And you know, if you don't and something goes wrong, it's a basic failure. Absolutely preventable.

Mm-hmm. Which scares me because a basic failure of what you mentioned before, looking down at your phone when you're driving, everybody does that. I mean, almost everybody, which is so scary because that is a basic failure that happens all the time. But then I have to question the system. In which it happens, why, you know, why it happens.

Why did you feel you have to look down? I mean, were you late for a meeting or feeling stressed or you had an argument with your teenager or something, right? I mean, I guess the reason, because you could say, I really understand, Amy, why you're distinguishing between the intelligent failures and all the others, but why make the distinction between the basic and the complex, given the potential subjectivity? And for me, it's because The basic failures are the kind that we can minimize to near zero when we are willing to follow best practices, right? When we're just, we use the checklist with intent. We sort of say, okay, you know, I may think I'm pretty good at this, but I'm going to bring my full best self to it because I know how to do this. I'm going to try to do it really well, not do it in my sleep, right? So there's a kind of category of things that for all of us in our lives, go wrong that are highly preventable. Now, size matters, right? It's okay if you sort of casually, you know, as I say, put the milk in the cupboard, right? I mean, the failure, but the size of that failure is so small as to not worry about it too much. The problem with basic failures is that some of them can be, you know, just that single error and it can lead to, you know, 9 stitches in the emergency department, or, you know, as it happened in the— I write about one at Citibank where someone made a single error. And accidentally transferred $900 billion, right? Which is like crazy, you know, $900 million. Sorry. You know, it's a crazy, um, millions, billions, you know, it's lots of money. They accidentally, uh, transfer almost a billion dollars.

Right. But wow.

But so the categorization isn't about size. It's about type. And then the other thing is I think the complex failures are both on the rise and quite pernicious, right? Because this, we live in such complex times and so many things can sort of come together in just the wrong way at the same time that we're vulnerable to them. But what I like to point out about the complex failures is that given that not any one of the factors wouldn't cause the failure on its own, I mean, you need several of them. That means The complex failures give us multiple opportunities to catch and correct, right? They're— all you have to do is kind of remove one, maybe two of the factors, the failure's avoided.

That straw that broke the camel's back.

Right, right, right. Just find that one straw, find one straw to take out. Right.

I love your breakdown and the archetypes and the types of failures because for me, the human body which I am trying in my latter part of my career to prevent and to keep people well in the first place.

Right.

Because when we go to medical school, we're learning about all the chronic diseases, all the complex failures that the body has, but we never really learn about how to prevent it in the first place. Right. Right. We learn about everything that can go wrong, and then we put band-aids on it. We surgerize it, we give pharmaceuticals. Uh, but we don't actually learn the prevention part. And that to me is so fascinating as a mom. I know you're a mom, right? Yes.

Two sons.

So when we're mothers, we want to prevent harm to our children, preventing all of these diseases. Like you said, there's so many little components that come to, and I think how I am interpreting your simple versus complex is that the simple is things like everyday simple behaviors, like Brushing your teeth or just basic hygiene, eating fruit, you know, getting sleep. So all these in itself are isolated and small mistakes, but then they literally add up to 80 to 90% of chronic illnesses.

Wow.

Um, including cancer, heart disease, all the big things. So, but to me, there's the simple systematic failure day to day choices that we make, and then it can turn into a complex failure perhaps. Yeah. Maybe I'm interpreting it in my own way.

And what I like about what you're saying is it's my goal too. I'm not a failure fan, right? I'm a success fan. I mean, I want—

well, failure. Yeah. And you're, you said failure is great and I agree with you.

Failure is part of life, right? It's not our favorite part of life, but if we don't embrace it as a necessary part of a full adventurous life, then we do ourselves a disservice, right? The, in a way, the book is really about health and wholeness, not in a literal sense, but it's, it's about what do we need to do both to happily embrace the things that go wrong in new territory? Because if you're lucky, you'll experience lots of those. And then also mindfully prevent as much as we can of the old stuff that doesn't need to happen again. I mean, we should hope for lives without car accidents. Right? We should, we should hope for lives, you know, without unnecessary trips to the emergency department.

I wholeheartedly agree with all of this. Absolutely. Going back to the medical field, you know, this sort of flippant phrase, failure's not an option. So then you've met a lot of doctors by now. So we feel like sometimes failure's not an option because it's somebody's life, you know? And when I was training back in the '90s, we used to have M&Ms and they still have M&Ms mortality. And you would never want to be the presenter. Center there. Yeah. Because not only did that mean something went wrong.

Yes.

You were in front of your colleagues, your superiors, sometimes 100 people in an auditorium, and they weren't compassionate or kind because this was somebody's life on the line. You're on the stand.

Yes.

And you're being, you know, cross-examined.

Yes.

Yes. And that has evolved now. I hear that the M&Ms have gotten more and more not so formal and big, and they haven't really, they're not recording it. They're not even maybe sometimes documenting things because there's so much concern about discoverability with lawyers. And how would you advise physicians or medical systems to deal with that type of thing?

To begin with, I do agree with you. I think they have gotten better. My husband's also a physician, Iman. He too trained in the '90s, but is now a dean of our own medical school here at Harvard. I think the recognition has been that learning is essential. And fear tends to drive out learning, right? And nobody, it's like there's nobody in those auditoriums who is in favor of harming patients, right? Occasionally you get some criminal in there. We, you know, about one, right? But the point is all humans are fallible and all systems are prone to breakdown. So if we take those as a given, then we know that Like it or not, some things will go wrong. Now, most of them, and this is our goal, right? Most of them can be caught and corrected before harm occurs. But if we act as if things are not supposed to go wrong and people are not supposed to be fallible, then we will lose the battle of catching and correcting, right? It just will simply not be culturally and psychologically possible to do the work we need to do to catch and correct human error, system breakdown, and so that we can actually achieve zero harm. In the meantime, like while we're on that lifelong journey, we are going to do our very best to learn from every miss that we make, right? So when there is a need for a Morbidity and Mortality Conference, we engage in it with full respect for the gravity of the situation, but absolute intent to learn every morsel from it possible. And that's the goal, right? So that can be not nice, but kind, right? That can be kind and respectful to the patient. That can be kind and respectful. Um, there's an argument to be made that the people, that the clinicians who were involved in, especially, you know, an unnecessary death, are also in a state of great pain. And that it's not to create an equivalence there. But if that human reality isn't respected, you will not do these important rituals well enough to get the knowledge that they bring.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the physicians are devastated as well. Like, it's not equal to the suffering of the person who's been affected, but you know, there is a high rate of physician suicide.

That's right.

And September being Suicide Awareness Month.

Yeah.

You know, we can also emphasize that, yeah, this whole failure, being able to speak about failure without the shame or the stigma, mm-hmm, can really help with this type of situation where there's, you know, lawyers, doctors, dentists, high rates of suicide.

It's not about minimizing the importance of this, but it is about doing it with the care and the rigor that it deserves.

Absolutely.

You're an expert in psychological safety. I know that you wanna redefine this term now.

I defined it the same way from the very beginning, but it's taken on a life of its own. So my definition is psychological safety describes an environment in which people believe they can take interpersonal risks, like speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, and even mistakes. And short way of saying that is a sense of permission for candor. So it is not about being nice. It's not about being comfortable. It's, it's about being willing to learn really together and recognizing that's not comfortable and it's not easy, but it, it is great in terms of if you really want to do new things, if you really want to be a part of a great team, you know, if you want to innovate, you have to have that willingness to take those kinds of interpersonal risks.

And so when we have this feeling, you, whether it's organizational or within your own family or in your classroom, that people can speak up, then you can, I know you speak about this as well, tone down your amygdala reactions.

Yes.

And be able to really problem solve and come into your frontal lobe to be able to see something from a different angle or to be creative. Yeah. Because you're not gonna be creative when your fight or flight system is, right?

And that's, you know, to go back to the, your failure is not an option rhetoric. The problem there is it creates fear. It creates hiding. It creates an unwillingness to speak up because the message was clear, right? The message was crystal clear. Failure is not an option. Unfortunately, that doesn't make failure go away. It just makes people unwilling to talk about it, which of course puts you at even greater risk of causing actual harm. But we have to have empathy, or at least I have empathy for clinicians who say, yeah, yeah, but you don't understand. I mean, I'm really, I have life and death here. I say yes. Right. And. Context matters. So if you are operating in a situation, you're acting in a situation where there's high stakes, like life and death, and any kind of uncertainty, then more than ever you want to invite the quiet voices in, right? More than ever you want to do whatever you can to make sure that you get it right.

If you had to give advice to a leader or of an organization, or even a mom who's running a family. How would you balance that psychological safety with high standards? High standards.

Great question. And I don't think of it as a balance. I think of it as a both/and. A great family has permission for candor. We want the truth, right? We wanna hear. It doesn't mean that bad behavior will be just tolerated, right? It means that we have a clear line of sight on what we need to work on. Or, you know, if you have teenagers, you want them to absolutely not hesitate for a second to pick up their phone and call you when they need a ride home because they don't feel what's going on is safe. And they won't be yelled at because, oh, why'd you get yourself into that situation in the first place, right? That you'll just be no questions asked. You get a ride home. That's psychological safety. You know, commitment to high standards is something else. And I think you, you both articulate it, but you also help inspire and motivate whether it's your team or your children, you know, to do the very best they can with what they've got, right? And to be willing to take the interpersonal risks of honesty, which also includes asking for help when you're in over your head. If you do both, you have the chance at creating a kind of learning zone where people are stretching, you know, trying hard, doing things they haven't, haven't maybe done before. They're honest about what's really happening. That's where ongoing achievement and excellence comes from. It doesn't come, you cannot say, well, I'm just going to have high standards around here. Therefore, you know, failures, I don't want to hear about it or problems. I don't want to hear about them. You know, so I think for, for parents and for educators, educators, it's, you know, start by recognize human fallibility. And system fallibility as a given, right? That's the kind of the whole, that's the real world. That's the world we live in. Practice what I'll call sort of critical failure skills, like persisting in hard things. If you try something new or you take calculus and, you know, it's going to be hard, you're going to persist. You're willing to persist through setbacks, through failures, self-reflection and collective reflection, whether through those kinds of, you know, after-action reviews or just your own. You might keep a journal, you might Be honest with yourself about what you're doing, what you're learning, and taking accountability. You know, when something goes wrong, take a look at, hmm, how did I contribute to that? And how did other factors contribute to that? And be willing to look at both, not just how, oh, well, I was kind of a victim here because, because, because. And also, you know, master the sincere apology because it will come in handy and it is important.

So when you say sincere apology, what are the components of a real apology that works?

It's first, it's acknowledging something went wrong, that harm occurred, if it's a small harm or bigger harm, and acknowledging your own role in it, right? Not making excuses, but saying, I came up short in some way, in whatever that was, or I was careless, or I was not thinking. It's, it's really taking responsibility. Resist the temptation, which is ever present, to make an excuse, right? It wasn't my fault because— just do it. And then in many cases, offer to make amends. Like, you know, I will not be late again, or what can I do to help make it up? Right? So it's just a kind of open, honest willingness to own your part in it.

And it takes practice, right?

It does take practice. And you know, the beauty of a good apology is it not only helps the person that you may have harmed, but it actually helps you. You know, it turns out there's research on this. It makes you feel better, more whole, uh, more positive emotions as a result, because really what you're doing is, is repairing the relationship. Just a little, it had a little tiny harm to it and now we can kind of make it whole again.

And isn't that also where confidence grows, where you can actually be aware of yourself, aware of your shortcomings, aware of your faults, and then be able to admit it? I think the most confident, magnetic people are the ones who can sit there and say, oh yeah, I know that about myself.

And absolutely. It's so, um, it's so attractive, you know, and people make a mistake in thinking, oh, people will like me better if I have this sort of perfect exterior. You know, I'm always getting things right, not getting things wrong. Truth is no, we actually like people who are honest and whole and, you know, about their shortcomings.

And compassionate, of course.

Compassionate, vulnerable, right?

There was something that you said on your podcast with Greg McKeown.

Oh yeah.

That I found really interesting that you said the idea of a mental model, that we have a mental model of what is happening in our reality, and that if we could remind ourselves that all of what we perceive of the world around us is a mental model, right? Then it could literally launch us into, I think you said freedom, maybe. Free us, launch us. And it's awesome. I love that because it's so true.

I mean, it's so hard to do, right? I, I, you know, I talk about all these things because I'm not yet good at it, right?

Diligent.

And here's a way to think about it. It's very hard to learn. I think most people would say, yeah, I want to learn. I want to be a learner. Very hard to learn if you already know. We are hardwired to have this experience of knowing, right? That we, we mistake our mental models as reality itself. Right? Those are the mental models that are in our heads that we mistake for reality itself.

You know, especially highly educated people like doctors and PhDs and lawyers and, you know, we are supposed to know certain things, but then at the same time you have to keep that, you know, in Zen they say beginner's mind, right? Right. Right.

Yep.

And it's that person who can come up with a new idea that nobody has thought of before, because otherwise we have all these cognitive biases that are keeping us from seeing what's happening.

Yeah. And this is not the same as saying you have to sort of, you know, beginner's mind. It's not saying, oh, you have to abandon your expertise or not, not own your expertise. It's, it's, uh, more of a, I have a valid point of view. Right? After all, I have a great deal of expertise. I have a valid point of view and I am almost certainly missing something. You can own your expertise and you can say, hey, but I'm still curious. I really want to know about that stuff I don't yet know.

Our blind spots, right?

Yep. When I teach my students who are high achieving perfectionists, most of the time I teach them about the neuroscience of the brain because the brain is actually inside your skull.

Yes.

An organ of perception. It's not a measure, it's not a physical measurement. You're not taking the temperature of the room. The only part of our nervous system that actually takes accurate chemical measure is our olfactory bulb, which actually is a chemosensor. But everything else, your brain is integrating, and even the smell you're integrating into your memories, it brings up emotions, et cetera. So your brain is really an organ of perception. It's not. Reality in the physical sense.

That's right. And we just have a hard time thinking about it that way. It's hard to recognize that I'm not just sitting here seeing reality. I'm seeing the reflection of reality in my brain.

Yeah. Based on our experiences, based on our past and our, you know, what we learned and what we're used to, the people we're around, et cetera. I wanna go back to that point you were making about biases and being able to step outside of your expertise to see what else could be happening that I'm missing. James Groupman wrote that book called How Doctors Think.

Oh yes.

And he talks about that whole commission bias where you're, uh, acting instead of inact— inaction. 'Cause the patient comes to see you, you wanna do something, you wanna alleviate their pain. Here's a medication. Or you have satisfaction of search. And this used to happen all the time with radiologists. Where you see something on a CAT scan or whatever, and then you're done cuz you're like, oh, I found that huge tumor and now I'm done. You stop, your brain just kind of— relaxes. Yeah.

Right.

He also talks about, but the availability error and the tendency to apply what you commonly experience or see and making that diagnosis into that patient, like just fitting the square block into a square hole and not really thinking outside of your expertise. I wanna ask you about somebody like Sam Bankman-Fried.

Oh, shit.

Right? Like, how did all of these incredibly savvy businessmen and women make that kind of mistake? And do you see a parallel in what I just talked about and that kind of massive mistake?

You know, it's funny because it's often hard to know where to draw the line or when you're trying to understand something from the outside, the extent to which something is fraud versus error. Fraud is the successful, for a while, perpetration of a lie, right? You know, Bernie Madoff or Theranos, and you kind of, you know, you're doing something and speaking about it in an untruthful way in order to achieve a result. Error, you know, is sort of, I really, really honestly believed this would work and it didn't. And of course, it's not always clean cut either. Sometimes you have a little healthy or unhealthy mix of both, but there are certainly many preventable failures in business that come from problematic incentives, complex systems, new businesses. New ideas operating in very complex environments, maybe not fully aware of their interdependencies with so many other factors in the world that then, you know, lead to these sort of catastrophic outcomes.

So would you call that a massive complex failure because so many people were on board with the same idea and they just couldn't see the reality of the situation?

Yes, it's certainly a complex failure. I don't think it's a basic failure. I don't, I don't believe it's intelligent, although what it would, could be tempting to say, oh yeah, it's new territory. We don't know about this crypto stuff and so on.

Mm-hmm.

To have an intelligent failure in new territory, you have to have high-quality conversations, you know, with, you know, honest, open debate, really trying to get to the bottom of what works, what doesn't work, get diverse voices into the mix and try to really make the very best bet you can.

So I think what we're taking away from here, if we could summarize some of the big points that you wanna make and how people can apply it to their own lives, is to really become aware of some of your own fallacies. Maybe learn a little bit about your brain, read Right Kind of Wrong, and, um, you know, figure out what it is that are your shortcomings just as part of being human, right? And understanding your cognitive biases. That would be so fun.

Absolutely. I decided to call the last chapter of the book, you know, where you try to bring everything together, Thriving as a Fallible Human Being, because it's all about being healthy and happy and, and successful in various ways. And I think it's harder to be those things when you don't come to terms with the fact that you're a fallible human being.

Now, what do you think about AI coming in and maybe helping us be less fallible, perhaps?

Great question. I mean, first thing I think about AI is it is genuinely new territory. I mean, we've had AI for a long time, but the, some of the new technologies that have come out are genuinely new. They're far ahead of where a lot of experts thought we would be at this moment in time. So we are standing in this brave new world. That means by necessity, there will be lots of experiments. That means by reality, there will be failures, right? There will be things that don't work out as hoped or expected, but we'll muddle through. We'll try to figure out what worked and how to make AI a good team member and how to make AI helpful, especially in doing some of the things that feel like they're hard and drudgery.

And drudgery because of like enormous amounts of detail and That's an excellent point because the human brain is like, we're just wired to really create, connect, and it's hard to do those drudgery things like driving, right?

Driving and, and, or, or doing a, you know, a massive report on some area that takes, requires a lot of background reading and, you know, then pulling together details from here and there and making sure you get the citations correctly. I mean, that seems to be something that one could get help with.

Mm-hmm. And there's a lot of other fields in medicine where I think it's gonna be so helpful, you know, because there's that fallacy, you know, there's that study. He's Harvard, Trafton Drew. He did the gorilla study, the attentional gorilla study.

Yeah. Yeah.

So he put a, a little image of a gorilla on a chest CT scan and had radiologists read it, but he also put a, a large lung cancer and 83% of the radiologists missed the gorilla.

Wow.

'Cause again, like it's in context, you don't look for a gorilla.

I'm looking for a gorilla. And once you find the tumor, you think you're done, right?

So, yes. Well, your brain does. And again, there's that fallacy, like it, you either tell the physician, oh, there's something wrong with you, you missed something, or well, your brain doesn't see that. 'Cause sometimes you don't see the keys that are in front of you.

The confirmation bias leads us to tend to see what we expect to see rather than what's really there.

Exactly. Yes. What we expect.

Yes.

Uh, the framework of the mind. If you could go back to your teen years, or you could just imagine yourself as a mom telling your teenagers, knowing what you know, having written all these books and being an expert in psychological safety and fallacy, what would you tell yourself?

The number one thing I wish I could have told my younger self is don't worry so much. Don't sweat it. Don't be so anxious about how it will all turn out. It will all turn out, right? It was, I. I wasted so much time worrying about failing at this and that, or, uh, just bundle of anxiety and, and I don't think any of it really helped. Maybe some of it helps you study because you don't wanna flunk school, but, but most of it was unhelpful and draining.

And mm-hmm. What's good anxiety then? Something that you can take action towards, problem solve? Yeah.

Good anxiety is the sort of rational anxiety, which is moving.

Mm-hmm.

This is a calculus exam. It's hard. It will take effort. So now I'm going to sit down and do it. That anxiety is okay. You know, calculus exam, I'm so stressed out about it. I can't even sit down to think and do the studying. It closes the mind rather than says, yeah, this is worth a little bit of attention and hard work.

And what would you tell yourself in your older years, in your 20s, when things are changing? Maybe you graduated from college and I know you worked with Buckminster Fuller, right? The geodesic dome. That's incredible. Did he show you anything as a mentor about making mistakes and like trying new things? And that must have been amazing.

He was wonderful about that. He used to talk about the only mistake we make as human beings is thinking we're not supposed to make mistakes, right? That, you know, that's just, it's sort of an error. He wrote a little essay called Mistake Mystique, right? That, you know, mistakes are part of being human. He said, you have a left foot and a right foot for a reason, right? If, you know, if nature had wanted us to just go in a straight line, we'd be, we'd be on a wheel, right? But you're going to go this way and you're going to go that way and you're going to find your way through. So he would talk gleefully about the first time he built a geodesic dome that he hoped would stand. Of course, it just collapsed immediately and thought, okay, great. What do we learn? So that was my first. Mentor, my first, um, boss, my first job. That was my first job, right? A guy who just kept—

that's amazing— hard from failures and how, you know, and he told you to just show up or something, right?

And you, you just went, yeah, just show up and, and learn and experiment and have an adventure with this, you know, one and precious life.

What happened to that G.O.D. syndrome?

Well, you know, they're everywhere. If you look around, you'll see them everywhere. They're over oil tanks, there are many stadiums. Anytime you want to span a large diameter without an ability to have internal supporting, uh, elements like columns, because you don't want columns in the way, the chances are you've got some kind of triangulated geodesic structure.

Wow. That's so incredible that you worked there. And you also talk about IDEO and Pixar and all of these places where creativity rules, but it's a lot of high-tech technical skills. So what did you learn from investigating these? I love IDEO. At one point, I wanted to apply to them during my medical career.

Well, I love their cheerfulness on the, you know, the positive affect at IDEO and Pixar and places like that. There's just a kind of energy around creativity and a non-self-consciousness about failure. They understand that's the sport they're playing. Right? They're playing a sport where if you're doing it well, you will have failures.

Wow. So if you are going to tell your kids how to do this, how would you tell them? If they're little kids, where would, when would you start?

Mine are, yeah, mine are in their 20s, but, um, uh, first of all, you know, think about the things you're really interested in. You know, don't do the things other, you think other people want you to do or other people should, will think you're, you know. Good or successful if you do them. Like, what do you really care about? What's the difference that you want to make? I think a life well lived is a life where you have the opportunity to make a difference in something you believe matters. You know, that could be the health of your fellow human beings. You know, that can be, um, you know, renewable energy and the sustainability of our habitat. That can be teaching kids to grow into thoughtful humans. Be part of society, right? It's, there's so many different things you can do that matter. And it's really about spending the time to think about what you care about and then being willing to work really hard to make a contribution to it.

I love that. One last question. You know, babies try to walk and they will fall down a million times and not complain. How do we squash that out of a child? And why are we so afraid to fail? Because we're obviously curious as a human brain. That's what brains are, curious. And what can we do to prevent that?

I love, I love that you asked this because it is true. It's your child is learning to walk and no parent would ever think, oh my gosh, they shouldn't fail. They should just stand right up and walk, you know, and, and we, we love it. We enjoy it. We laugh with them. We have a lovely time. And then fast forward, somehow we get it into our heads that they have to be, they can't have failure. They have to succeed because we erroneously believe like the stakes are so high. And, you know, if anything goes wrong, you know, they won't succeed. They won't, they won't have a good life. Right. Well, that's not true.

Right.

In fact, this is why I think, I mean, there's many domains where this is true, but sports, for instance, right. One of the, one of the good things about sports is you'll experience a lot of failure.

Right.

If you, if you are on a baseball team or a soccer team or play tennis, you will, you know, lose almost as many games as you win or maybe more. And it's, and you understand Of course, right? That's part of the activity and you develop your failure muscles. When parents make the mistake of trying to shield their kids from failure, trying to prevent failure at all costs, what they really prevent is learning, you know, stretching, adventure, and even joy.

So do you think that if we support it in that way that we could raise kids that don't feel the pain of solving their first calculus problem?

Yeah, I think so. I had two of them. The older one had this tremendous ability to just engage with hard things for the longest time. At two, you know, the big, the jigsaw puzzles, he just wouldn't stop. At 14 or 15, he would just sit there with a math problem for two hours, right? In a way that honestly, so many of his peers would be distracted and want to go off, text, whatever.

Right.

And the younger one, I think, had an unusual appetite for hard things. Things, just for that joy of mastering something hard. I mean, they both did.

And we— do they have times when things don't come easily to them?

Sure.

My kids are, are very smart, but if something doesn't come easily, sometimes they get frustrated when they were little. Yeah.

They experienced that.

I wonder if we could reframe that.

Let's say something suddenly doesn't come easily, right? You're, you're used to things coming easily and suddenly there's a challenge on your plate that doesn't seem to yield easily. And one, you know, we can come in and sort of swoop it away and spare them from that struggle or give them the space to keep at it. And wow, you know, what joy when you finally master it. I mean, there's much more joy in mastering something hard than in checking off the thing that's easy.

Wonderful. I want to thank you and I want to shout out to Katie Begg, founder of Authentic Social, connecting us. Both of our conversations, hers and ours, were amazing, and I'm so grateful to have met you. Thank you so much for your time.

A pleasure. Thank you for having me.

That was Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Her book, Right Kind of Wrong, by Simon Schuster, has already earned praise from Daniel Pink, Angela Duckworth, Adam Grant, Kim Scott, Tom Peters, and many more. It's also been shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroeder's Business Book of the Year. So grab your copy and start failing intelligently. Please connect with Amy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram under Amy C. Edmondson. You can find the links and more in the show notes below and at mindbodyspace.com/podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Please forward this to a friend, a family member, and anyone who needs to stress less. And soon enough, you'll be surrounded by more Zen people. Your support makes everything possible. So subscribe and head on over to YouTube to my Fall Asleep Easy channel to get a good night's sleep and for more lifestyle medicine tips. Sign up for the newsletter to get the podcast episodes and extra tips right into your inbox. Until next time, this is Dr. Juna wishing you and your loved ones wellness.