Amy Edmondson, Harvard Professor and Author of “The Fearless Organization”, on Balancing Psychological Safety and Accountability

Transcript

Amy, welcome to the show.

Amy Edmondson 00:01:25

I do have a correction.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:01:27

What’s a correction?

Amy Edmondson 00:01:28

I did not coin the term psychological safety. I did coin the term team psychological safety, but psychological safety was in at least the clinical literature, and it was a little bit in the management literature as well. It hadn’t gotten a lot of attention. But what I did was measure it. I found a way to measure it, and I showed with that research that it tended to live at the team level, meaning it varies across teams more than between individuals and even more than between firms, companies. So I get too much credit for having coined the term. I didn’t. I might have come up with a different term had I coined it, but I did add on that team level aspect of it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:02:13

Yeah. So, actually, that’s super interesting. Probably a great first place for us to dive in then. So the term, I think a lot of people are familiar. So you took the term and applied it to teams and actually measured it. And so im curious, what was that process like to measure it amongst teams? Like, what was the like, do you ask everybody the question and then average it on a per team basis, or how do you come up with those measures?

Amy Edmondson 00:02:39

You know, it started by accident. First of all, I was part of a larger study of medication errors, and it was about teams and their effectiveness. But because it was a study of errors, I just randomly threw in a little item that was as follows. If you make a mistake in this unit, it’s held against you. You know, just seemed like an interesting item. It turned out that item was very predictive of whether people reported errors, which kind of makes perfect sense. And so then I got fascinated by it because these patient care units were in organizations that had very strong cultures in their own right. So it struck me as odd that different units on different floors would vary so much in terms of their norms about speaking up.

Amy Edmondson 00:03:27

And I thought, if it’s true there, I wonder if it’s true in other organizations, too. So I set out to measure that in a manufacturing company, and I knew that was a very powerful item, by which, I mean it really predicts outcomes and people. It has variants. People really do have differences in terms of whether they feel their colleagues will hold it against them if they make a mistake. You know, we’re all human. We’re all going to make mistakes. The question is, do you think it’s okay to be a fallible human being, or are you just going to try to cover that up? And so at the time, I was thinking of it as interpersonal climate, which it is. Right.

Amy Edmondson 00:04:09

And so what I had to do next was study teams in another context. Just interview them, talk to them, tell me about your team. And the more I learned, the more I believed there really was kind of palpable differences in people’s comfort, especially with candor. Right. With speaking up, with asking for help, with offering a different point of view. So I developed six other items, survey items, that kind of get at various aspects of that. So they are things like, it’s easy to ask for help in this team, or it’s easy to bring up problems and tough issues in this team. And the seven items hung together really well statistically, and they had quite good predictive validity in terms of the team learning behaviors and the performance of the team.

Amy Edmondson 00:04:58

So because of that, other people picked up on the measure. Right. Because it’s a good measure for understanding something about team performance and team dynamics.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:05:08

I love those questions. And so I feel like some of them are used in organizations when they do their yearly employee survey. And so this is a really good way to measure objectively whether you have a fearless organization or not, or potentially give you some data on that.

Amy Edmondson 00:05:26

Yes. And as I wrote in, I think it’s chapter five of the fearless organization. There’s no such thing as a fearless organization. First of all, there will always be fear, and we all should be afraid of certain things, like, say, a very dangerous virus, or we should be afraid of competition by a competing company. You know, we should take those threats seriously and do our very best, but we shouldn’t be afraid of each other. So when I think about the fearless organization, what I really mean is a place where you can be direct and honest and ask for help and offer different points of view. Now, empirically, what I have found is that most of the time, organizations aren’t homogenous, they’re heterogeneous. Different teams are likely to be much higher in psychological safety or much lower in psychological safety.

Amy Edmondson 00:06:18

So you can have an organization, maybe 500 people, but don’t assume that everybody’s having the same experience with respect to interpersonal climate.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:06:27

Yeah, so this is really, you know, it is very interesting, and like you said, some fear is good for the right type of fear. One question I have is, having seen and interacted with many companies over time, do you feel like there are some companies or some sectors that have adopted these ideas better than others?

Amy Edmondson 00:06:49

That’s a great question. My answer will not be systematic. You know, I haven’t sampled all companies to come up with great answer to that question. But in my experience, first of all, it’s really making the rounds in healthcare delivery.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:07:03

Oh, interesting.

Amy Edmondson 00:07:04

You know, it’s in hospitals and clinics and even, you know, overseas national health services in the UK, it’s hard to find a place that isn’t at least working on this. So now, working on it and getting it done are two different things, but it’s certainly become something very, seen as very important in healthcare, maybe because it’s adjacency. This has also been my experience that in, in pharmaceutical companies, there’s just a lot of interest and a lot of attention to this, because they understand they’re, it’s a knowledge intensive industry. They really need people to share ideas and take risks and, and they won’t do that if they’re really afraid. Afraid of the boss, afraid of their colleagues. So those are two tech also sort of just tech companies. I think there’s at least a nod and in some cases, a great deal more to the recognition. Again, knowledge intensive businesses are more aware, certainly, than they used to be, that you really want what’s inside people’s heads to get outside their heads.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:08:09

Yeah. It’s interesting that you mentioned the other two as the first examples. Obviously, my mind goes straight to tech. It feels like, especially for startups, that are there’s always a new startup that’s coming about. A lot of the tech companies are newer and more recently established, and so as a result, they’ve had the chances to take these new management practices or learnings and just apply them from the get go. One of the questions that comes up a lot in the world of trying to understand the psychological safety versus accountability. This is kind of like a hot topic, which is it’s good to fail and you should be able to talk about anything and not worry about it. But then how do you hold people accountable to it? So how do you resolve this, at least what looks like a dilemma?

Amy Edmondson 00:08:58

Well, I take out the verses, so everywhere I go. Many, many people see this as psychological safety versus accountability. It’s actually psychological safety and accountability. I truly believe not only that you need both, but you can have both, that they’re not in tension, although it can feel that way. Psychological safety is about that belief that I can speak up honestly and it won’t lead to shame, embarrassment, blame and the rest. And accountability. If you define accountability, which I do, as a very high, deep commitment to performance, then not only can you have both, you must have both. If you define accountability as blame, then they are immediately intention, because blame will lead to hiding, full stop.

Amy Edmondson 00:09:54

And the question I ask managers is then how much hiding can you afford? Do you want people hiding the truth from you? Because if you don’t want that, and most people would say they don’t want that, then you really do need to work hard to create the conditions of psychological safety, which is really almost synonymous with the conditions for learning, the conditions for candor. So what does it mean to have high accountability? I think it’s really a sense of psychological ownership. I’m actually working really hard, even when you’re not looking. But I’m working hard because I care about the customer, about the product, because I get some satisfaction from doing a good job, because my teammates count on me, whatever. Lots of different factors lead us to want to do our very best. But if you’re trying to get people to do their very best by monitoring them or scaring them, it’s just a whole lot less effective than trying to tap into that part of them that wants to contribute.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:10:56

So it seems like psychological safety is more about creating environments where candor can flourish, where people don’t hide things. And that can go along with this idea of just holding people accountable and holding them to performance. And so maybe they’re interrelated, but they’re not necessarily in conflict with each other, right?

Amy Edmondson 00:11:16

And let me just add the next layer, which is context matters, right? We want people to feel committed, to perform well. And in some contexts, compared to others, that commitment will, almost all by itself, will produce the results. In others it won’t. Let me illustrate, so let’s say I’m a scientist in a laboratory in a big pharmaceutical company, or a small, or a small biotech company. My accountability, my sense of ownership for producing a particular result to cure some terrible disease is intense, right? It’s real, it’s powerful. However, Mother Nature may not cooperate with me. So I can be working really hard. I’m doing really smart experiments, and as hard as I work and as smart as I am, I may not get the result I want today.

Amy Edmondson 00:12:15

I might not even get it next week either. It might be ten years from now. So here’s a person holding the highest standards, high accountability, but not getting the actual results yet that we want. Now, if I’m over here in manufacturing, and it’s really a clear formula for how do we produce this item, then I can expect that effort will produce results like nearly 100% of the time. So context matters, uncertainty matters. And I’m struck by how many managers sort of talk about effort and results as if that were a straightforward relationship. It’s only straightforward in high certainty contexts, but in high uncertainty contexts, it’s very different there. We need to be looking for really good process, really good strategy, really good effort, but not assuming that really good effort will translate magically into the, the results that we want.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:13:14

Yeah, that’s really important. And it just kind of clarify things. If it’s, you’re right, if it’s a defined process, maybe more effort equals more results. But a lot of times, especially some of the most difficult problems are always, sometimes unknowable. Like it’s possible it can’t be solved. You don’t actually know. You don’t know. And so this is a really tricky situation.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:13:34

And I like what you said, which is, well, you can look at the inputs, or you, the process is right, or the inputs. And maybe sometimes the inputs actually also means the people, maybe it’s not the right people who are working on the problem. I did have a question, which is just around this. How do you create more accountability within your organizations? Are there things that you’ve seen or maybe companies you’ve come across that you think just do a really good job of fostering a place where people are accountable? And yeah, you can speak highly maybe about some practices that you’ve seen.

Amy Edmondson 00:14:07

Yes. So a classic one is Southwest Airlines. And this is a company that, from my perspective, not so very long ago, was new. It’s not a new company now. It’s a very old company. But this is a company that was founded on the idea that employees throughout the organization would need to give it their all to turn those flights around quickly to get to the gate, turnaround time from arrival to takeoff. If we really team up, do our very best work, we can get those planes back in the air where they’re making money, they’re not making money on the ground, and you really can’t command that, I promise you. Right.

Amy Edmondson 00:14:47

There’s so many ways to slow it down or to, hey, I’ll finish my sandwich, whatever. But Southwest managed through its culture, through its leadership example, through its messaging, internally, to convey that that is the number one thing we need to do. And literally every employee felt accountable for those turnarounds, but within the context, of course, of safety. And so it’s a sort of remarkable commitment, in a sense, to performance and to a feeling of accountability for that performance that can’t be commanded. Right. It can only be inspired because it’s so distributed, thousands of gates around the country. So that would be an example that just is so illustrative of how it has to happen on the front lines with that commitment. Now, I had an amazing PhD student 15 years ago now named Faisa Rashid, and she did a study of accountability in teams and in a sort of ad agency pr firm, and she was able to show that accountability attitudes really varied across teams also, you know, much the same way that psychological safety can vary across teams.

Amy Edmondson 00:15:59

And the way she measured it, I thought was magnificent. It was essentially as this, what we were talking about before, that sense of felt accountability. But it was, it was where people thought they had believed they had permission to hold each other accountable. It was perfectly acceptable in these teams, these high accountability teams, to ask, hey, you said you’d get that to me by Tuesday, and it’s Wednesday. Like, where is it? Like, that wasn’t seen as pushy or rude. It was seen as what we do around here again, because we care. So I think the best way to think about accountability and the best way to build accountability is as almost a sense of positive peer pressure. So I will be here and doing my best, but I’m also empowered to encourage you to do your best, which is pretty unusual, if you think about it.

Amy Edmondson 00:16:52

And yet, isn’t that the standard that most managers and most organizations really want that to be the case? So you’ve got to normalize the notion that this is caring, this is positive, culturally appropriate behavior. This is not you being a nudge or me being a jerk. Right. It’s what we do. Well, why would we do that? Because we care so very much about the company or about the customers or about being the best team we can possibly be.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:17:24

Yeah, this one is particularly interesting, and I think these ideas are probably related because there’s probably an element of, in this organization, am I allowed to positively encourage someone else? And what if that someone else happens to be senior to me? Is that an okay thing? Can I say that it’s not good enough to say my boss’s peer as an example? And so this sounds wonderful. How do you, like, if you were to say, tactically, like, here are some things that you might do to create that kind of an environment in your company where it’s almost self reinforcing, where you hold yourself to high standard, and people do that amongst peers, and it’s perfectly okay for there to be that kind of candor. Are there steps that people might take to at least move in that direction?

Amy Edmondson 00:18:09

Yes. And oddly, I think, maybe counterintuitively, it starts with clarity about the goal, whether that to you, means clarity about the purpose or clarity about those whom we serve and what good looks like. But you cannot emphasize often enough the purpose, the goal, make it aspirational, make it exciting, keep putting it front and center, because that’s what motivates us. And so if people really sort of buy into it, you know, a part of my heart and soul, a part of my identity, is tied up. Not all of my identity, but some important part of my identity is tied up with doing a great job for our customers. And I’m reminded often about what that would take. Right. It’s not just show up.

Amy Edmondson 00:18:59

Right. What that would take would be a willingness to take risks, a willingness to share my ideas, a willingness to nudge you. So it’s kind of being clear about the goal, the purpose, and then raising the questions of what’s that gonna take? So that in a way, people are trying to answer that question spontaneously in their own minds. Like, I can tell you what behaviors I’d like to see. I can put them on the wall, fine, that’ll be moderately effective. But if I can sort of describe where we’re going and then ask you to figure out what that’s going to look like to get us there, then in a sense, you’re co authoring the culture and the behaviors rather than feeling like a passive recipient of them. So it’s kind of using inquiry to keep drawing people in so that they begin to realize and socialize what good looks like.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:19:59

Yeah, and that’s really interesting. It makes me think that it’s almost the wrong question in a certain extent, which is that’s just a secondary measure, and it’s potentially a byproduct of do you have enough clarity? And are people motivated about the mission, the why? And they will figure out those other things if they’re motivated enough about the first one. So it’s the wrong domino to tackle first if the right one is the goal and the clarity.

Amy Edmondson 00:20:25

Yes. Where’s the leverage? And I think the leverage is in the goal, the clarity about the goal. And then I. Over time, we also start to just care enough about each other and care enough about what each other thinks of us to show up as the best version of ourselves.

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Aydin Mirzaee 00:22:02

So Southwest did a really good job at this. Are there organizations that come to mind that also did a good job?

Amy Edmondson 00:22:08

Yeah. So Pixar comes to mind, and I write about them a little bit in fearless organization. And this is another company. I mean, it’s such a wonderful company because we all know their products, and they have accomplished, in many ways, the way southwest accomplished the unthinkable. They just became remarkably profitable with the lowest fares because of their operational abilities to turn flights around and do it safely and do it well. Pixar accomplished the impossible feat of essentially every single film they release is a success. It’s a hit business, right? It’s a business where most movie houses have some winners and they have some losers. Pixar, I should knock on wood or something, but they have winners.

Amy Edmondson 00:22:55

Why? Because they do. You know, they force themselves to do the critiquing inside, and they build a culture, and they build processes and routines and rituals, which is a kind of accountability. And it’s certainly a kind of psychological safety where it’s our job, even though it’s uncomfortable, to be critical and honest about the developing product, the scenes, the computer imagery, all of it before it’s released. We don’t want the customers in the theaters to critique this for us. We want to do it first so that by the time it’s released, it’s really, really good. So it’s a company that had clarity on what they were trying to do, particularly in the aftermath of their stunning initial hit success, Toy Story, and realized what’s it going to take? Like, what’s it going to take to do that again? It won’t be luck, right. And it won’t be just because we got this great success. We’re going to be able to produce it again.

Amy Edmondson 00:23:54

We’re going to have to build a culture and processes and hire the right people and all of that to be able to do it again and again and again. So reverse building again, like reverse engineering the goal and being very thoughtful about what’s it going to take and how will we have to be to do that.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:24:12

Yeah. So it seems like it’s the sort of thing that once you’re able to do it, once, if you’re very specific about it, you can reverse engineer it, like you said, and figure out how to do it again. And I think at that point, there’s probably a lot of clarity, just like in the southwest example, about what the main goal is, and so people can drive towards that. And you gave some really good advice on how to create a more accountable organization. I would say that if, on the psychological safety side, if some of the listeners were to do a survey and they were to ask the questions that you asked, and the results aren’t very good, and it turns out that they have a very fearful organization and the wrong kind of fear. What are some practices like, can you turn that around? What steps could you take in order to kind of turn the ship around and make it much more fearless? Organization.

Amy Edmondson 00:25:08

Yes. In fact, I’ve got a couple of recent case studies that I’ve written where that is, in fact, the story, like, how do we create a more psychologically safe organization? The short answer is really three. It’s almost beginning. Setting the stage during and follow up. But that’s an oversimplification. Basically, setting the stage is emphatic and clear reference to the uncertainty or the novelty or the interdependence, you know, the challenge of the work we do. So what that does is really give people permission to not know, or permission to experiment, or permission to speak up when something’s not working. You’re clarifying this is related to the goal, but it’s not quite the same.

Amy Edmondson 00:25:53

It’s more being clear about the nature of the work we do. This is knowledge intensive work. We’re going to get it wrong in a changing world. Whatever it is that’s true for you, what you’re trying to do is create the rationale for psychological safety. Like, we’re not doing this because it’s the latest fad or whatever. We’re doing this because if we don’t have people speaking up quickly and candidly were at risk, we could miss something or we could fail in a way that was preventable. So being clear about that context setting and then inquiry, the most important tool that any manager at any level should master is the art of asking a good question. And a good question is not a leading question, generally not a yes no question, but more of an appropriately open question, like, what ideas do we have? What might happen if we play that out? You’re asking for people’s best thinking.

Amy Edmondson 00:26:50

And when you’re asking, just like you’re doing right now, it becomes incredibly awkward. If a manager or even a peer asks you a question, try it. It’s almost impossible to stay there quietly, so you’re lowering the threshold for speaking up by simply making it demanded. And then thirdly, be very thoughtful about your response. If someone brings you bad news or someone disagrees with you on a point you really care about, do not get angry. Do not make it a negative experience. Do everything in your power to make it a positive experience. I don’t mean be fake about it, but just, wow, that’s a different perspective.

Amy Edmondson 00:27:29

I hadn’t thought of that. Here’s how I’m thinking about it, but what am I missing? Give them the respect of your attention and make sure that you’re always thinking about it in a future focused way. Like you’re sort of, what might that mean? Not how the heck did that happen? But where do we go from here? Or how can I help? You’re making all of these encounters as learning oriented and forward facing as humanly possible. That’s how you create psychological safety. So I wrote a case study a few years ago, actually 2020, on the risk management organization at SEB, which is a large nordic bank. And risk management is a context where psychological safety could matter very much. If people aren’t speaking up about the risks they see the bank is at risk of losses that were otherwise preventable. So the way they went about it was, it fits in with that context of stage setting and inquiry and response.

Amy Edmondson 00:28:26

But they decided to really develop and build the skills of the managers throughout that organization, the risk organization, you know, and train them in perspective taking. You know, being, having better, higher quality conversations is fundamentally risk management is really about making good decisions, and you make better decisions when valid information is shared candidly and helping them learn the skills of perspective taking. Learn the skills that I just described of psychological safety and keep putting those in a strategic context of the actual decisions they were trying to make. And it really did change the culture. And then it started to spread to other parts of the bank. So that would be one recent example.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:29:14

Yeah. So it seems like if you want to create a learning organization, it’s very closely tied to being able to create a psychologically safe environment. And I assume, just like your example of Pixar, when you start to see the right sorts of behavior that you’re encouraging, probably, you know, just speak up about it. This thing happened in our company and we saved this because someone spoke up.

Amy Edmondson 00:29:38

Right.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:29:38

And reinforcing. Just keep doing that.

Amy Edmondson 00:29:41

Yes. Share the stories. Like, I think organizations with a positive, especially learning oriented culture, have their apocryphal stories. Maybe not true, almost doesn’t matter. Everyone knows those stories. Everyone knows the story of the middle manager who made some mistake or something went wrong and was called into the office of the chairman. And the chairman said, and they were expecting to be fired. And instead the chairman said, fire you? Why would I fire you? I just spent $50,000 educating you.

Amy Edmondson 00:30:13

And those stories, oh, they spread like wildfire and they tell people they’re important. They tell people what we care about around here.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:30:22

Yeah, it reminds me of the story of Amazon’s original desks being doors they bought from Home Depot or something just to encourage frugality. But yeah, those are the things that really work. So I did want to also talk about your more recent book. It’s had a lot of accolades, financial times and Schroeder’s business book of the year. And it’s called the right kind of wrong. And maybe a good place to start is what inspired you to write this book.

Amy Edmondson 00:30:49

You know, I’ve been looking at failure, mistakes, and failures, I guess, as part of my just abiding interest in learning organizations for a long time. In a way, psychological safety was a detour. It was a detour because the research kind of demanded that I follow these interesting findings, and then it clearly played an important role in learning, especially in teams. But one of the things that organizations have to learn from is failures. And yet my sense of the conversation out there about failure is that it’s bimodal. It’s either fail fast, fail often. Isn’t failure great, or, I’m sorry, I live in the real world over here, and failure is not an option. And neither of these perspectives has a whole lot of nuance, and neither is really explicitly acknowledging the context aspect.

Amy Edmondson 00:31:42

So fail fast, fail often is great advice for an entrepreneur, a scientist, an inventor, and so forth. High uncertainty environments where fast experiments are necessary to make progress. There literally is no choice. Not great advice for a plant manager, a cardiac surgeon, or any number of other people. So the goal in this book was to kind of clarify there really are three kinds of failure, and only one of those three kinds is good. I call them intelligent failures, but they’re the undesired results of very thoughtful forays into new territory. And importantly, they’re not huge. You don’t have a catastrophic failure and call it intelligent.

Amy Edmondson 00:32:26

It’s managed. It’s in a laboratory. It’s in a simulator. It’s a small bet, not a company destroying bet. And this is obvious. Right. But it’s not always practiced wisely. And I think part of that is because our emotions around failure are so acute at times that we don’t think as rationally about it as we could.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:32:48

Yeah, so this is interesting. It reminds me of the. One of the things that we like to talk about internally at our company is just, for all the bets there is the, you know, 80% of the time, let’s do the things that we know are gonna work, but 20% of the time, let’s do things that are probably not gonna work, but those are the things that are kind of gonna expand our ability to be able to be more successful. And so there’s probably, like, a good balance. What I would ask is, how do you like. Are there examples of intelligent failure that you’ve come across that we should all learn from?

Amy Edmondson 00:33:22

Yeah, there’s. One of the things about intelligent failures in companies is that most of them, almost by definition, are happening behind closed doors, so we don’t get to hear about all of them, whereas we do often hear about the less intelligent failures. But a couple that I write about in the book and that are widely known because they were reported in the press might illustrate the point. So, Olimta, 20 years ago, Eli Lilly had a new drug, Olympta, for a particular cancer. They were very gung ho about it. You know, really, that doesn’t. You know, it’s the end of a lot of scientific research. And they did clinical trials, as one must, before releasing this to the market.

Amy Edmondson 00:34:03

And the drug did just fine on the safety trials, didn’t hurt anybody. But then in the efficacy trials, which is where you are recruiting all sorts of patients with the disease, and I giving some of them the drug and some of them a control, it didn’t show a significant difference. So that’s a failure. I mean, it’s a really big failure, no bigger than necessary, because you get only the number of patients you need to show whether or not it works. So that’s disappointing. Deeply disappointing. And the physician leading the trials looked into the data, as one would, and discovered that, in fact, some of the patients that got the drug did quite well. Their cancer went into remission, but others did not.

Amy Edmondson 00:34:46

Okay. Is there anything he asked, that differentiates these two groups? Indeed, there was. The one that did not do well had a folic acid deficiency, which is essentially a B vitamin. So that meant that all they had to do was add the folic acid to the drug and then it would convert from a failure to a success. Right. Now, not all failures are that easily resolved, but any failure you don’t learn from will certainly not produce a success. But it’s a good example. One, because it’s disappointing.

Amy Edmondson 00:35:20

But with learning post failure, learning, a solution was found to go forward, to ultimately create a drug that became what saved many lives and was a billion dollar drug for Lilly. So it shows this sort of the essence of intelligent failure is it’s the kinds of disappointments you will experience that are on the path, even though you might not know it at the time, but they’re on the path to success.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:35:44

Yeah. So, I mean, this brings up a good question and something that is really hard to answer, and I don’t think that there is necessarily a right answer, but I am curious to get your thoughts on it, which is, how do you know when to give up? And so this is. Maybe it refers to a new initiative. It could be a new business, maybe it could be a mini initiative within a company. And so understanding that there’s right ways to fail and wrong ways to fail. When do you kind of decide that we should end this?

Amy Edmondson 00:36:15

Yes. You can almost think of, it’s like persistence versus stubbornness, right? Are you being persistent, which is a good thing, just doubling down, working hard, or are you being blind to the data that are telling you time to pivot? And my best answer to that, because it’s always going to be a judgment call, but I think it’s a judgment call that we can make with science. And the real litmus test is, do you have a valid hypothesis for why going forward makes sense? I mean, what is your argument? What is your hypothesis to believe that this next round will go differently than the last one? I mean, what are you varying? What’s your argument now? And can you get others to agree with you, other experts or friends, colleagues, what have you? Because if you’re the only one who believes this is possible, it may not be a good sign. I mean, there’s always the. The rare story that will disprove that one, but. So an example would be Sarah Blakely, the famously youngest female billionaire, self made in business history. She had an idea, or her shapewear product company, and her sisters, her friends, loved her mock ups. You know, this is, like, fantastic.

Amy Edmondson 00:37:40

We want it. So there was all this sense that she wasn’t alone in thinking this would be a product people would buy. And she famously went to many manufacturers in the Carolinas, and they all turned her down. Right. And finally, one took her on. Now, if you were her friend back then, would you have said, like, give up? Like, you just keep getting a no and you keep going back out there getting another no? I think she was right to persist because she knew that the little hurdle she had, big hurdle she had to get over was the hurdle of, will someone manufacture this for me? But she was pretty confident that if so, there will be buyers. Whereas if you can’t get someone to manufacture it and you can’t get anyone in your circle to say, yeah, I want that. There’s a certain point where you’re not getting enough positive data to justify the persistence, and now it’s time to pivot instead.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:31

Yeah, I love the idea of just looking at data, and sometimes it pays to just, you know, from first principles asking the questions. So Sarah might have asked the question, like, do people still want this? Is this still a problem that needs to be solved?

Amy Edmondson 00:38:44

Exactly.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:45

And so there was reasons to keep persisting. It might be hard, right?

Amy Edmondson 00:38:48

But you have reasons, but it can’t.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:50

Just be, you know, I’m not going to give up because I never give up.

Amy Edmondson 00:38:53

Right. That would be foolhardy in a sense.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:57

Yeah, yeah. So it makes a lot of sense. I mean, these are super important concepts that really make the difference in organizations that can innovate time and again and figure out the next products in the next markets. And its super insightful conversation. Weve talked about a lot of things, building, learning, organizations, psychological safety, obviously accountability, clarity, and also making the right kind of wrong decisions or mistakes. And so the question that we always like to ask everybody who comes on the show is know, for all the managers leaders always looking to get better at their craft, are there any final tips, tricks, or words of wisdom that you would leave them with?

Amy Edmondson 00:39:38

Master the art of the good question. Just actually hold yourself accountable. The end of each day, pause to think like, how many good questions did I ask today? The answer should not be zero, and a good question can even be to an employee or a team member. What are you most excited about? Just giving people that platform to express themselves in a work related way is a game changer.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:40:04

That’s great advice and a great place to end it. Amy, thanks so much for doing this.

Amy Edmondson 00:40:08

Thanks for having me.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:40:10

And that’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Supermanagers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript at www.Fellow.app Supermanagers. If you like the content, be sure to rate, review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode. And please tell your friends and Fellow managers about it. It’d be awesome if you could help us spread the word about the show. See you next time.