Episode 173: Building a Healthy Failure Culture for Innovation and Learning with Amy Edmondson, Professor at Harvard

In this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, host Melissa Perri is joined by Amy Edmonson, professor at Harvard Business school and author of the new book: “Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.” Join them as they discuss the science of failing well, what is psychological safety and the distinction between leadership and leaders.

Amy has been at Harvard Business School for nearly twenty eight years now as their Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management. She is a prolific author; her most recent book, the Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, is the Winner of the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2023 and is the Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2023. Amy has appeared on multiple other podcasts, such as “The Psychology Podcast” and “Better,” to discuss Failing Well. Amy was also a guest recently on The Psychology Podcast, discussing Failing Well. She has also recently written for the Guardian: “The big idea: why we need to learn to fail better”.

You’ll hear them talk about:

02:42 - Amy is an expert in failure. In product management, failure is a hot topic. It’s important for it to be okay to fail for an experiential and innovative environment to thrive. Innovation comes with failure. Amy distinguishes between intelligent and unintelligent failure by identifying four key characteristics needed. First is a pursuit of a goal, second is there isn’t an existing formula or process, third is you’ve done your background research and fourth is that the experiment should be no larger than it needs to be.
09:01 - To create a healthy failure culture you need to create an environment of psychological safety for everyone. It’s important for people to feel safe to fail to encourage them to share their ideas and not hold back when contributing to innovation. Amy suggests that leaders can promote psychological safety using a combination of behaviors and tools. For instance, leaders should always be willing to go first and acknowledge their own mistakes,therefore leading by example. Psychological safety in a work culture is incredibly important. Without it, people stop telling the truth.
27:28 - There is a distinction between leadership and leaders. A CEO is in a leadership role and there are many people that are influenced by them. This doesn’t mean only a CEO is a leader or display leadership qualities. In fact, individual contributors that display leadership behaviors are important to every team. They might not be in a leadership role, but Amy believes that leadership can start with anybody; it is a behavior and attitude, which is infectious when embodied.

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Previous guests include:

Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer at Doodle, Jason Fried, Co-founder and CEO of 37signals, Hubert Palan, Founder and CEO of Productboard, Blake Samic, Former Global Head of Product Operations at Stripe and Uber, Colin Anawaty, Chief Product Officer of First Dollar, Quincy Hunte, Global Transformation Product Leader at Amazon Web Services, Ellen Chisa, Partner at boldstart ventures, and Leon Barnard, Education Team Lead at Balsamiq

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