#115—Amy Edmonson: Cultivating Psychological Safety to Foster Risk-Taking and Innovation

Outthinkers

Amy C. Edmondson the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research over the last 20 years on psychological safety and teaming. Her award-winning work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and more. Named by Thinkers50 in 2021 as the #1 Management Thinker in the world, Amy’s TED Talk “How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team” has been viewed over three million times. She is the author of The Fearless Organization, Teaming, and most recently, Right Kind of Wrong.

In this episode, we dive into the complex territory of navigating risk and failure in the midst of our ever-uncertain world.

In this conversation, Amy shares:

• What psychological safety is—and what it is not, with the central idea being grounded in allowing people the space to experiment and fail.
• The three types of failure, and key characteristics to evaluate what type of failure you might be confronted with
• 5 questions you can ask to evaluate whether a potentially high-risk failure you are about to take is, as she calls it “an intelligent” failure so that you can avoid hindering your team’s pursuit of new ideas while also taking on too much of the wrong kind of risk

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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
1:06—Introducing Amy + the topic of today’s episode
2:55—If you really know me, you know that...
3:57—What's your definition of strategy?
4:17—What is psychological safety
5:06— How psychological safety relates to performance stands
6:48—The Bridgewater case
9:02— Logical link between psychological safety and the right kind of wrong
10:50—The three types of failures
13:59—The unequal license to fail
16:10—Assessing ideas through an intelligent failure lens
20:11—How stakes, reputation and uncertainty influences intelligent failure
23:22—Fast fail or fast scale, shifting organizational culture around failure
27:43—Using AI to eliminate bias in decision making
30:06—How can people follow you and continue learning from you?
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Additional Resources:
Personal site: https://amycedmondson.com
Book site: Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amycedmondson/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmyCEdmondson
Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
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