#60 - Amy Edmondson - Better Teams Made More Mistakes. Here's Why.

So psychological safety is a learning environment where, in order to learn, we've got to be open, we've got to be candid, because the learning is, by and large, collective. We don't just stay in our little lanes doing our little tasks. We're working with others, we're teaming up. And then there's also an environment for high standards that I think excellence comes when we have both, right? When we are mutually committed to high standards, we're motivated, and we want to do the best possible work we can with our colleagues. And we're able to be candid and open. When you've got both, then you've got excellence.

Amy, it's amazing to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Great to be here.

Awesome. So the question I'd like to ask just to get us anchored at the beginning of the conversation is, you know, you've been doing this for quite a bit of time. Your experiences is, you know, you've experienced so many amazing things. You know, fast forward where you are today. What's the role of compassion, trust, and operating from the heart in the work that you do?

It's funny, it's not something I had used to lead me in the work I do, but it is certainly something that emerges from the work I do. So I increasingly believe that the connections between us are the most important, powerful, rewarding, and ultimately effective part of the human experience. And so I think that's heart, but it's when we see each other, when we recognize each other as people and recognize the value that exists in that connection between us, I think something important starts to happen. And that is reflected in— I study work and the workplace, and that's reflected in the quality of the work, and it's more than the quality of the work.

I'd love to double-click into that. So, it's more than the quality of the work. Do you mean you see more value from the core connection between people than the scientific part of the work?

Yeah. So, I mean, my original questions and indeed driving questions have been around work and ensuring the quality of the work, whether that be innovation projects that are bringing some new solution to people that will help their lives in some way or patient care in In a hospital or you name it, any other sort of workplace that comes to mind. And I guess an area of interest to me is how people work together to get things done that no one could do on their own. And so maybe many years ago, I sort of came at this more from the perspective of the engineer I used to be. Today, I think that the nature of our connections with each other are as, if not more important than the output. But of course, the output matters. We don't want to pretend it doesn't because that's where the funding for what we do comes from, whether it's from customers or other funding sources. But the relationships we have with each other are what make work work. work. They turn an experience that is, for most people, consuming more waking hours than any other experience, they can turn that from drudgery to an experience that feels genuinely meaningful, rewarding, and engaging.

It's so beautiful how you describe it. It's like we all get into the workplace thinking it's all about the process and the systems and pushing the boundaries, and it's counterintuitive, but as we mature and as we learn what really shapes the world and what really drives outcome, drives real value, is connecting with the human and making sure that people— it's like, I think something that I read you were talking about, just the performance impact that has on people, just feeling safe and feeling connected to the people around them is—

Yes. And in a way, connected is safe, right? Because if the whole idea of psychological safety, which I've studied at great length, and I define it as a belief that speaking up is safe, that you can speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, mistakes. Not that it's easy or fun to do that, but that you believe it's expected and welcome. And so what that really means is you believe it won't come back to haunt you. You won't be rejected, humiliated, Or worse as a result of speaking truthfully about what you see, what you wonder about, what you need help with. And so it's kind of obvious, but when we feel connected to others, we intuitively appreciate that they aren't going to reject us. They're not gonna kick us out of the tribe for making a mistake or asking for help or disagreeing with something that they may even hold dear, right? So it's Like, we are able to engage in all of those things, which I don't mind labeling learning behaviors. We're able to engage in learning behaviors better when we have real connections with each other.

Yeah, beautiful. All right, so you are here now. Well, if you reflect on your life, are there some stories or particular beats that you feel really shaped you? Like, are there particular memories that come to mind that Kind of woke you up and gave you these aha moments that directed you to where you are today?

Yes. I suppose depending on the random day that you ask that question, I'll think of different things. The first thing that comes to mind for me is that when I was in college, I had the chance to hear Buckminster Fuller speak down the road at MIT. And he was at the time, I think just about 82 years old and he was standing on an enormous stage at MIT. He was trying to answer the question, why are humans included in universe? Why are we here? What is each and every one of you here for? And the short answer was, you're here to solve problems that help make a better world. And it was a long, long evening and talk, but it was such a, not an unheard of idea, but the way he put it in the context of human history was gripping. And I remember almost skipping home to Harvard down Mass Ave. Wow. And this is about 1979 or so, and thinking, yeah, that's it. That's why we're here. We're here to make a difference. We're here to solve problems. We're here to use our brains and each other to solve problems that help people's lives go better. Okay. I mean, that's a little bit abstract. That's a little bit somewhere between grandiose and And vague, but it changed me. I mean, it wasn't inconsistent with my natural inclinations, but it was, okay, now I have to find a way to do that. And that wasn't easy or obvious how to do that, so I rather foolishly just decided about a year later to write him a letter. And to my utter surprise, honestly, he wrote back. And he wrote back and essentially offered me a job. So that was life-changing. And I became his chief engineer, which I put in quotes because I was his only engineer at the time. There had been 2 men in my role before, but they went back to graduate school, so when I came on board in 1980, it was just me and projects, little projects, largely geodesic math types of projects. And it was life-changing because somebody gave me a little role, a little job, and paid me to do this little job to do something that seemed at the time very much to matter.

That's beautiful. So that particular moment in time where you were in that talk, you witnessed that talk, just really moved your life in that direction.

Right, right. Actually, I never thought about it that way because I give talks. It's like, well, wait a minute, because you always think, oh, nothing really happens in a talk. But Then again, it changed my life.

Yeah, lives are changing. Yeah, you're talking and then the people are just, you know, taking different routes. And it's amazing how he like replied right away and gave you that job. You know, like sometimes when you see people who are like that mature in their career, you just think impossible. But it's a reminder that you should just try. Yeah.

And I wasn't even asking for a job. I was literally asking for advice and saying, you know, these are the things that I do and know how to do, but what ideas do you have about how someone like me could be useful? And he just decided to hire me. So that was a good thing.

All right. And then fast forward.

Fast forward. Yeah.

What got you, what do you feel like diverted you into the world you're in now? That's a great

question. So I was, after, I won't go through the whole path, but I found myself a wonderful job working for another, in a very different way, visionary entrepreneur named Larry Wilson. And Larry was in the organizational development management training space, and this was now the late '80s, and he loved to pull together thinkers. And so at the ranch and conference center that he had built, he brought out quite a few professors, people in my field, that wasn't my field then, but it became my field, including, if not especially, Peter Senge, Chris Argyris, Ed Schein. And I was really impressed by their thinking because we were at that point trying to help organizations work as they should and help senior teams and help organizations, big organizations build better teams and sort of do better work and have people feel more engaged and able and empowered. And so after a while, it occurred to me that I was intrigued by these— I think they were all men— and wondered, how do you do that? I mean, how do you get to do what they do, which is to think about these ideas, to do research, to to sort of study, you can study companies for a living. That's pretty weird, isn't

it? Yeah. Sorry to cut you. Out of curiosity, so what were the themes back then? So at that point, what was—

You won't believe it because it's the same in a way, but learning organization. It was how do you, in fact, the little part, my little part in Larry's orbit was to run a kind of little research arm, which we called the Alliance for Learning. We brought together corporate executives and thinkers to share ideas about how to essentially build organizational learning. And so all of them were, especially Chris and Peter, were involved in this topic of how do we help organizations learn in a world that keeps changing? I mean, you might think, oh really? Was it changing then? Oh yeah, it keeps changing. And I was just naturally a student, I guess, of things, of ideas. And I knew very little about how you do research in this area, but one or more of them suggested I really should apply to a PhD program, so I did.

Cool. And then kind of like the concept of researching organizations and making sure organizations evolve and people are comfortable with that change, is that kind of what led to understanding the importance of feeling safe? Like if you're not in a place where you feel safe within an

Yes, but quite by accident. So here's maybe the third story, which is I'm now a PhD student. I did get accepted amazingly enough, turns out that then if you get accepted, they pay you to go, which I couldn't believe. So I was thrilled. And so there I am, I'm a second-year PhD student. First year is mostly coursework. Boy, I was in over my head in every possible way. And then you have to start doing research, and if you don't do research, you're You're not going to graduate. So I agreed to be part of a large and ambitious study in one of our local hospitals on medication errors. And this was back in the early '90s when the whole idea of medication errors was just coming into public awareness. People were beginning to realize that there were unnecessary deaths happening in hospitals due to human error. And so Mistakes, learning. My interest was still learning, organizational learning, but I didn't know how to study it. But then when I was invited to join a study of mistakes, I thought, well, mistakes, learning, those go together. So that's how I got there. So there I am and I'm studying. My simple question is, do better teams make fewer medication errors in hospitals? And the data, After 6 months of hard work and data collection, the data seemed to suggest exactly the opposite, that the better teams, according to a well-validated team survey, had higher, not lower error rates. Error rates. And I thought, that can't be right, until it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the better teams don't make more mistakes, maybe they report more mistakes, that we don't really know what the underlying denominator is. We only know what they let us know. Obviously, the kinds of things that really create harm that can't be hidden don't get hidden, but an awful lot of error is of the dodged bullet type. So I then thought, well, maybe actually these teams that are reporting more errors, they're just more learning-oriented. They're talking about error. And later, much later, I called that climate where they're more honest and more willing to speak up. Nobody loves to talk about error, their own especially, but if you care enough about the quality of the work and the patients and so on, you find a way to do it. And it was later that I called those differences that were very real across teams psychological safety. But I was basically stumbling into what you just asked about, which is stumbling into a recognition that even in the same organization, you can have profoundly different interpersonal climates, and that those climates can make it possible or virtually impossible to learn. Because if you think of learning as a collective endeavor, then you realize it requires us to overcome our natural desire for impression management. We want to look good. We don't want to look incompetent. Or negative or difficult. So we are prone to holding back the truth, and not because we're bad people, but because it's almost hardwired in us. And the irony is we try to seek acceptance from others by looking good. But if you think about the people in your life that you really love and are really connected to and dear friends and family members, they're the people whom you know their flaws. It's because we feel vulnerable enough to say, oof, I got that wrong. And then suddenly I actually like you more, not less. So there's a way in which we are our own worst enemy. We puff ourselves up, we try to look good, like I never made a mistake in my life, and that makes us actually quite unappealing. So in those rare environments, hopefully less rare now, but in those environments where you feel you can be yourself, meaning— I don't mean let it all hang out, but I mean be honest, like, I'm not sure how to do this. Can you help me? Not only is your team better able to learn and perform, but you will ultimately be having a better work experience. And that's psychological safety.

Yeah, I love it. Honestly, the way you contextualize it, as I'm listening to the story, as soon as you said that better performing teams were reporting more, I had a flashback of the early days when we first fundraised 3 years ago. when we did our seed round, investors sat me down and they said, the one single signal we have with investments that we do that shows us if they're going to be very successful or not, they're like, from our data, one of the most important signals is how consistently they report good and bad news on a monthly basis. So initially, I didn't take it seriously, and I was like, okay, cool. And I was reporting the months and the quarters when I knew we were going to do really well as a company. And then when things were bad, I'm like, I don't want to waste my time on reports. Let's fix the I need to put my time into fixing things. And fast forward, at some point, what I learned, when I learned the power of the statement, like setting up the right structure internally and making sure that all of us, like even me, I'm able to— one, it resonates structure, it resonates that like as a team, we're spending the time to talk about the issues and we're learning from them and that there's a system of trust, vulnerability internally, where it was very hard for me to understand that. a few years back. And now I'm like, it's so clear and so powerful. And it's interesting. It's interesting how we looked like— I had to look really bad quite a bit, but I understood that I was looking at the truth. I understood that I'd rather be looking at reality as it is than fooling myself and trying to avoid what's really happening to hope for the best. And that put me in a real learning curve.

It's not fun in the moment, right? Look, confronting reality in the moment is not your first choice. And when you pause to realize that this is what we need to do to be better later, if you can start to value the future as much as the present, which is hard, then you recognize the wisdom of that. So I think of this as the— I call it sometimes the red-green ratio. How much are you hearing that's good news versus bad, agreement versus dissent? If you're hearing an awful lot of green rather than red, something's wrong. Exactly. It might feel good, like, oh, this is great. But then you've got to go, wait a minute, wait just a minute. We're living in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world. How likely is it that everything's green? Not very.

Not very, yeah. I think the team learning to be safe and vulnerable is a very, very difficult journey, but it takes a lot of energy from the leader. But it's I think fundamental to success.

Right. I think so too. I mean, it pays off. And I love the word vulnerable, but I think many people misunderstand it and they think of it as just that Latin root wound. Please wound me, or I'm going to just let it all hang out and tell you about the terrible fight I had with my teenage son today, or whatever it is. That's actually not what we're talking about, I think, in the work environment. Vulnerable means Telling the truth about reality. And it means recognizing things like, I've never done a project like this before. Things could go wrong or unexpected things could happen. It means saying things like, I need to hear from you. I've never flown a perfect flight. I need your input. So it's just honesty if you think about it. Vulnerability is honesty. And then therefore it's strength. Because you're courageous and strong enough and even confident enough to tell the truth about reality so that we can work on it together.

And I love what you said earlier. It's like the paradox or the counterintuitive piece here is the individual might think that they're looking good in the moment, but it really doesn't, like everyone smells it and sees it and it just looks like a weakness, you know, like not sharing the reports for a few months and just sharing when the data is good. It's very obvious, but I feel good. It makes it worse.

It kicks the ball down the field, but it does not, you know, it doesn't help.

Solve the problem. Awesome. And then you were, you kind of brushed on it and you said there are like different archetypes. And I know you mentioned, like, you talk about that in your book quite a bit, where quite a few organizations believe that like you either fail fast or avoid failure, but how would you contextualize the two and what do you think the right path is?

Yes. So I think sometimes there's like 2 failure cultures, if you will, that, you know, failure is not an option, failure is off limits. folks, which certainly makes sense. And people will say, hey, you don't understand. We work in healthcare. We work in banking. We work in power generation. You name it. They say, we can't have failure. I say, I understand. And guess what? You will have failure if you have that attitude. But anyway, and then the happy talk, the kind of entrepreneurship happy talk, like fail fast, fail often. Neither view, they both have merit and they're both incomplete. So the contextualizing, as you say, is recognizing first that context matters, that if you're doing something novel, innovation, if you're trying to do something that solve a problem that hasn't been solved before, there will be failures. It's just otherwise you're not even trying, you're not taking risks. So part of it is how much novelty, how much uncertainty is in your context, and that will necessarily mean there'll be more failures. Nonetheless, failures can be smart, small, and useful, and failures can be destructive and value-free. So what we want to understand is, as I write about in Right Kind of Wrong, there are 3 kinds of failure. There are basic failures, which by the way, we can and should try to prevent them. And those are failures with a single simple cause, usually human error. in familiar territory. So we text and drive and get into an accident. It's completely preventable if you're adhering to good practices. And you put the wrong ingredient in a recipe and it's terrible, right? So those are basic failures where there was a recipe, but for whatever reason, it didn't get followed. There are complex failures, which are essentially the system breakdowns, the supply chain breakdowns in a In a pandemic. Yeah, the sort of handful of shortcuts, deviations coming together in just the wrong way to create an undesired outcome. And then again, those we should do our best to be vigilant and prevent. And then there are intelligent failures, and those are the good kind. Those are the kind that truly help us reach new goals. Right. And they are They're defined as the undesired result of a thoughtful foray or experiment in new territory. And they have in common that there is no solution yet, right? The territory's genuinely new, that it's in pursuit of a goal. You've done your homework in that you have good reason to believe this might work. And then finally, they're small, right? They're no bigger than they have to be to get the new knowledge that we That we badly need. And so scientists, of course, do intelligent failure for a living. And most, you know, a leading scientist is going to fail most of the time, but the ones that succeed are groundbreaking. And then if we're innovators, you know, if we do innovation work, we too are required to fail, or research, we're required to fail in new territory so that we can make discoveries. Mm-hmm. Or even just think in your life, anything as simple as trying to— not simple, simple but not easy— find a life partner. You might go on dates with people that no magic happens, right? You can't avoid that. You can't say, okay, I'll skip that part and just go straight to the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. Yeah, it'll just happen. It's like, well, don't you wish? But that's not how it works. So we intuitively appreciate that you have to tolerate some failures along the way to successes, but then we emotionally act as if we don't want any failure at all, and organizations also. So organizations need to have a healthy failure culture where we do our best to prevent the preventable failures, but we also welcome and Maybe even increase the frequency of intelligent failures. Yeah,

it's like if a team member, to try to contextualize the 3 a bit from my standpoint, if a person is testing out a new feature, make it extremely positive, let them know that it's safe to fail, don't let them feel any level of fear.

Not embarrassed if they fail.

Yeah, and then in reality, basic and complex failures always happen.

Exactly.

And of course, a leader is always like, some basic failures are very, very preventable. And you're like, how did you not do X that causes failure? And of course, we shouldn't celebrate them, but the person feeling also not psychologically safe to share them, but not having clarity on like, that you are given a chance to succeed is important. But I wonder if you take that a bit differently when I contextualize it. It's like, I always face basic failures where I'm like, oh my God, how did this happen? I make some of them. And then complex ones are so painful because, like, you know, you could have avoided them, but they always do happen. Do you suggest that we approach them a bit differently than— I get the intelligent one. It's like very positive energy around them. Like, there's a very high likelihood of failure. Let's go test. Let's research. But yeah, how should I approach the other 2?

Yeah. So, you know, I think there's, first of all, you know, the absolute most important thing is that, yes, they will sneak through and we have to learn from them. So for each one, we want to say what happened and truly understand it with a clear-eyed perspective on what actually happened. And we can and should use that learning to nudge our practices to be even better than they were going forward. And then we have to be open to the possibility that in that process, if we discover that the same person or the same system is routinely creating similar rhyming basic failures, then we really have to be willing to take action because it's not fair. It's not fair to colleagues, it's not fair to customers to allow the implicit waste of that to go on. So it's almost as if we've discovered that there are people who cannot learn. I mean, presumably they can do other things well, but they can't do this well if they're recurringly doing basic failures or contributing to complex failures. So then you have that sort of unenviable task of having to do something about that. But that's rare, right? It's more often the case that we do learn from it and we say, okay, ooh, I'm never going to do that again. So the cheerfulness goes down a little when we're analyzing and trying to learn from complex and basic failures. But the mindset is still, we need to learn. We need to learn because what we care about more than anything is the future. And so when we learn today, we're contributing, we're creating value for our future. And the complex failures, unlike the basic, they're complex. So what we often learn is That was a kind of unique configuration of forces, so it might seem like there's nothing to learn here. However, if you go a little deeper, you often see that what was not unique was a little bit of corner-cutting across the board. We find our shortcuts, we find our ways of dodging safety rules and practices at times, and And those are rarely good. Oh, it takes more time to put on the safety gloves or goggles or what have you. And most of the time I get away with not doing it, but then there's that one time that you lose your vision or something. So you have to get people to be committed to best practices, even when they're a tiny bit inconvenient.

Yeah. I had a conversation with Todd Conklin recently, if you know who I'm talking about.

Yeah, yes, I just met him. Literally last week.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I love him, honestly. I have such a good time talking to him.

He's a character.

He's a character. And he said something that I felt was extremely powerful that I've been testing out, and it's like, has been so powerful for us as an organization. And he said that when a mistake happens, the individual always tends to take the blame, like someone tends to take the blame. Like, I wouldn't label it as vulnerability only, but like, the person would show up and would say, for example, Oh my God, I made a mistake in this contract. I should have had the right renewal clause. I didn't expect this to happen. And a very powerful thing he said is when someone comes in and starts with taking the blame, I say, like, spare me your blame. This is not about you. If we entertain the blame, it's gonna isolate the learning. We're gonna lose an opportunity to learn as an organization. Where did the system fail here? And I think, like, one, I think, like, what you shared now around basic and complex and the reaction as an organization and feeling psychologically safe is a journey that I think takes time. But personally, I can see how small improvements start compounding over time because it's people and it's an art. But that single piece where when something happens, I isolate it from the person and I start focusing on the importance of us having a system around this so that when there are 20 other people who are going to do the same job, we can make sure that we completely avoid it. I found that to be a very helpful approach.

Psychologically, he's absolutely right because psychologically, as soon as there's blame, which is usually someone else blaming, not the person sort of taking the blame themselves, but either way, ironically, either way, it shuts down the learning because everybody else is suddenly off the hook and then they're unable to, or they're not they no longer have to reflect on that really important question, which is, what is it that I did or might have done either through omission or commission that contributed to this outcome? And it could have just been a failure to speak up and contravene an act, or it could be just not really being present and engaged enough, or it could be— actually agreeing with someone that it was okay to cut that corner, right? I mean, there's all sorts of things that when you really look deeply, you can find. But if you short-circuit that learning by, oh no, it's just me, it's on me, then it's not so good.

And honestly, the concept of psychological safety, I'd just love to spend like a few more minutes on it because as much as people try to embody it, mistakes do happen. As you said, like some people make the similar basic mistake multiple times and it's impacting the organization and leaders sometimes feel scared to take action because others— so it's like people have to be stern and performance has to be important for a successful organization, but psychological safety is a sensitive topic that could drive people to feel worried about their roles. So what advice would you have for leaders who care about psychological safety?

You know, a year ago, I wrote an article in Harvard Business Review with Mikaela Keraci called What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety. And part of that article addresses some important aspect of your question, which is part of what people get wrong is that they sort of hear it, they hear a little bit about it, they don't go deeply into it, and they say, oh, it's about being nice or soft or kind, being soft on people rather than hard on people, which by the way is a little bit disrespectful. It's the tyranny of low expectations. In fact, most of us, we don't love it in the moment to be told we got a B rather than an A on some task. But honestly, it's a sign of respect because it's saying, I'm quite confident you can do better. I believe in you, or I'm quite confident we can do better. So the answer to your question starts with recognizing that psychological safety is essentially a learning environment, and learning is uncomfortable. It just is. Most of us would prefer to think we know everything, we're where we need to be, we don't need to learn anymore. But of course, realistically, we know that's not true. And so then you say, well, wait a minute, that means I don't know stuff. Ooh, that doesn't feel good. That means I'm not quite competent at things that would be helpful for me to be competent at, to be more effective. That doesn't feel great, but it also, it's motivating. So psychological safety is a learning environment where In order, in today's work environment, in order to learn, we've got to be open. We've got to be candid because the learning is by and large collective. We don't just stay in our little lanes doing our little tasks. We're working with others. We're teaming up. And so the learning we have to do is kind of out loud and that's uncomfortable. So the most important thing to realize here is that there's both an environment for candor and learning, That's important. And there's various things we can do to build that. And then there's also an environment for high standards that I think excellence comes when we have both, right? When we are mutually committed to high standards, we're well-trained, we're motivated, and we want to do the best possible work we can with our colleagues. And we're able to be candid and open.

Mm-hmm.

When you've got both, Then you've got excellence. Tempting as it might be to say, well, can't I just have one or the other? It won't work.

Yeah. And as you're speaking, I'm like, the biggest enemy I feel I have sometimes is this little judgment that sometimes appears in the process. And people will feel that. And as soon as you're like, how did that person do this? I feel like it crushes both of these things for me.

No, it's true. We don't wanna be judged. So funny, 'cause we do, We do want to be evaluated as great, right? You're a great performer, you're smart, you're a good friend, whatever it is. We want to hit these high marks, but we don't want to ever be seen as coming up short, but you can't have it both ways, right? If you care about these various dimensions of performance, then you have to be willing to learn that you're not there yet, that there's still growth opportunity for you. Yeah. And as soon as there's no growth opportunity for you, you might as well hang it up, stop doing it.

Yeah, absolutely. Taking psychological safety in the way you described it, so many leaders obviously are trying to embody it. It's a topic that is at the forefront of most of the safety organizations that we work with as a company as well. From inside the data and everything that you've learned, What is the part that people don't admit that hold people back from being able to do this or stand in people's way from successfully applying it within their organization?

I think it's faulty beliefs, faulty mental models, such as, I need to be perfect, or it's, in the old days in the safety world, we used to worry about the sort of, especially in manufacturing and physical work, the macho element, that you were more manly and more tough and strong if you didn't embrace the safety equipment and the goggles and the gloves and so on. I mean, I don't see that very much anymore, or at least not nearly to the same degree.

That's great.

But that's a faulty model, right? That's a model that says I'm tough, And I shouldn't need this sort of soft protective stuff, right? And in a way, that's a misjudgment, and it's also failing to take into consideration the perspective of those who love you, who don't want you taking unnecessary risks. And then I think another faulty mental model is just the idea that that we all have in a way that it won't happen to me. I can't truly accept the possibility that I could be killed on the job, or that I could be seriously injured. There's just this— I mean, in a way, it's a part of our psychology that's kind of healthy because it keeps us going, it keeps us motivated, that just That inability to entertain the possibility that yes, this really is dangerous and I too am vulnerable. And then I think a third faulty mental model is that individualism that it's me, it's me, the individual doing my tasks rather than me as part of a complex system where a small action here can have a big reverberation over there. And so when we don't naturally think in terms of feedback loops and systems, we are more vulnerable to behaving in ways that could increase the chances of a safety event.

Yeah, I love that. It's like the way I contextualize what you just shared is we are our own, we are kind of like our own enemy for success.

Exactly.

It's, it's the best thing is to like look at the mirror and just be realistic and try to like confront the reality of the situation and not try to like avoid it and assume that like this, this monster doesn't exist, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We've met the enemy and it is, it is, it is us, right?

It is us. Yeah.

You know, we just assume, you know, we can, we can sort of power through things and, and, you know, if you, if you try hard enough, All will be well.

Yeah, we're invulnerable.

Yeah, we're invulnerable. And then that leads people not to be— it doesn't feel quite right to speak up and say, hey, Musa, I think that isn't the right way to do that. That would be mean or condescending or what have you rather than loving, helpful, enabling, positive. And so when we sort of frame these acts of intervention in a way that you're a nuisance rather than you're a lifesaver, we also are more likely, you know, the bystanders are likely to hold back when they shouldn't.

Yeah, yeah. It's so interesting. I was telling you at the beginning when you first jumped on that we did this breathwork session in the company all-hands yesterday. And the message I got from everyone, and I felt it as well, like when this amazing facilitator Emma jumped on the call and she was like, we're gonna do a breathwork session, the first thing I felt in my heart was like, oh my God, I have work. How are we going to do this now?

Do we have time for this?

I'm busy. I'm busy. I'm busy. And then like 5 or 6 people messaged me after and they're like, oh my God, this is how I felt. And then it helped me realize why am I in this fight or flight environment? And it helped us all calm down, just 15 minutes of breathing. But if we're all in this, if we can't chill on the call and just be like, hey, I'm here, how's everyone feeling? And connect. How are we going to surface real things? How are we going to be creative if we're in this state of, what's the next thing? What's the next thing? So it's like being aware of that is also a powerful play.

It is. I think we've never needed that recognition, that experience more than today because we're just absolutely in a media environment that's just sped up with this and now this and now this and now this. And we've almost become entrained to thinking something interesting should be happening every minute rather than just, you know, being present, connecting deeply with our sense of purpose and our sense of connectedness to each other. It just, I think that's more at risk than it's ever been.

And the fact that the people around you are humans who are going through their issues and you guys have way more in common than you think. And yeah, it's like we have to work hard to remember that, which is crazy. We're just in the system of work. Amy, I have one last question for you. And like something I was reflecting on is with everything that you've done academically and in your professional world, I always feel like you have something in you that like sparks joy when you deliver. Like if you feel someone learns something, you feel like it energized you and it filled you up with light and happiness. If you want to try to deliver that to people listening and there's something you wish they would learn that really, that you feel like is something that comes from your heart, what comes to mind?

Well, first of all, I think that's incredibly observant of you because there is— I sometimes describe it as I can see light bulbs. I can see them over your head. Not all the time, obviously, but every now and then you just realize someone connected with an idea, with a recognition that if they hang on to it, could serve them. And maybe it's as simple as I think the most fundamental thing is our opportunity as humans to choose learning when knowing is the automatic state. We just feel like— I look around even right now and I think I see reality. I don't, right? I see reality filtered through my own biases, background, expertise, and so on. And when I override that sense that I know, And instead choose curiosity, it's just, first of all, I think it's more joyful. I'm more interested in you. I'm more interested in what's happening around me, which is a better state for a human to be in. And I think it promotes quality, safety, and all sorts of other good things. So pause, breathe, and choose curiosity. I think that's the most important. I

love that. I just wrote it down. It's like, in my next meeting, I think just starting off by saying, like, let's pause, take a breath, be curious. It might feel uncomfortable, just imagining that people are like, what are you on about? But the practice of it, I think of— I'm busy. I'm busy. The practice of it. And thank you for sharing that. Thank you for that gift. I'm gonna take that to heart. But yeah, Amy, I really, really enjoyed this. It's been amazing. talking to you, and I know you're super busy, so thank you for finding time for this.

My pleasure. Thank you for, for the invitation.