Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed - Amy Edmondson

Introduction:

“Intelligent failures provide valuable new knowledge. They bring discovery. They occur when experimentation is necessary simply because answers are not knowable in advance.

Note that healthy attributions about failure not only stay balanced and rational, they also take account of the ways—small or large—that you may have contributed to what happened. Maybe you didn’t prepare sufficiently for the interview. This is not to beat yourself up or wallow in shame. Quite the contrary; it’s about developing the self-awareness and confidence to keep learning, making whatever changes you need so as to do better next time. Each of us is a fallible human being, living and working with other fallible human beings. Even if we work to overcome our emotional aversion to failure, failing effectively isn’t automatic. We also need help to reduce the confusion created by the glib talk about failure that is especially rampant in conversations on entrepreneurship.

For example, meeting with senior executives in a large financial services firm in April

2020, I listened as they explained that the current business environment made failure temporarily “off-limits.” Understandably concerned about an economic climate increasingly challenged by a global pandemic, these business leaders wanted everything to go as well as possible. Generally speaking, they were sincere in their desire to learn from failure. But enthusiasm about failing was acceptable when times were good, they told me; now that the future looked uncertain, pursuing unerring success was more imperative than ever. These smart, well-intentioned people needed to rethink failure. First, they needed to appreciate the context. The need for fast learning from failure is most critical in times of uncertainty and upheaval, in part because failures are more likely! Second, while encouraging people to minimize basic and complex failures may help them focus, welcoming intelligent failures remains essential to progress in any industry. Third, they needed to recognize that the most likely outcome of their prohibition on failure wasn’t perfection but rather not hearing about the failures that do occur. When people don’t speak up about small failures—say, an accounting error—these can spiral into larger failures, such as massive banking losses.

Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach conducted five studies to test the hypothesis that failure, rather than promoting learning, actually undermines it. In one study they asked participants a series of questions starting with identifying which of two symbols from a fictional ancient script represented an animal. Afterward, one group of study participants was told, “You are correct” (success feedback). The other group was told, “You are incorrect” (failure feedback). To see how well they learned from each type of feedback, participants were given a follow-up test. This time they were asked to look at the exact same symbols and asked to identify which one represented a nonliving entity. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Yet those who had been told they were correct in the first round scored higher in their second test than those told their answers were incorrect. Over and over, people learned less from being given information about what they got wrong than about what they got right.

“Use Systems Thinking to Change How We Think about Error …

Rely on inquiry

So Morath faced a challenge: How to help people to see and accept their hospital’s failures? Rather than doubling down on her logic—You work in a complex error-prone system, don’t you see? Things will go wrong!—she instead invited clinicians to reflect on their experiences that week with their patients, then prompted, “Was everything as safe as you would have liked it to have been?” Her aspirational question opened the floodgates. Most people had been in what Morath called “a health-care situation where something did not go well,” and

once they reflected on the many problems they had noticed, they became eager to talk about what had happened and how they might improve…

New language

Another element of the patient safety system was what Morath called Words to Work By—a roster of suggested terms designed to help shift mindsets from blaming to learning. Morath substituted neutral-sounding words such as study for the more threatening word investigation, which put people on the defensive…

Synergy…

As with the system at 3M that supported people’s intelligent failures in ways that encouraged product innovation, and the system at Toyota that made quality improvement second nature, Children’s Minnesota built a robust learning system that turned everyone into an active participant in patient safety. Morath’s approach reminds us that system design is more than simply coming into an organization and flipping a single switch. It’s flipping multiple switches understanding how they work as a system.