Your Change Pilot Should Probably Fail | Amy Edmondson | Modern Change Management & Leading Change

I'm Michael Bungaistania, this is Change Signal, this is the podcast where we cut through the bladder, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in Change. If you've ever had a Change Project struggle, maybe even fail, then this is the perfect podcast episode for you. Amy Edmondson is a giant in the world of business thinking, and she is known for being the champion of psychological safety, which you have surely heard of. But what's at the heart of her work isn't a model, it's not a philosophy, it's this. Where we pause to realize that each and every one of us is a fallible human being amongst other fallible human beings, it's like, okay, now we can get on with it. It's that need to look good at all times is so the enemy of change and effective change management. Amy is a professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School, she's the author of numerous books digging into how organizations work, the most recent of which is building a fearless organization, a field book for creating psychological safety at work, and her work is influential enough that she is currently at the top of the thinkers' 50 ratings. Now change and failure skip hand-and-hand through our organization. It is a safe bet that you've got a scar or two from this change work, I know I do, so Amy, welcome. Thank you, glad to be here. I'm glad to have you here, okay, so psychological safety, you've been talking about it for decades, it is well-known, well-loved, found on posters all over the world, abused, misunderstood, reduced, simplified, stupified, a year ago there about you wrote an article about what people get wrong, about psychological safety, I mean, what does drive you nuts about how people misinterpret and misuse this idea? I love that question and I first want to say that I don't blame people for getting it wrong because I think the term itself invites getting it wrong, the term which was not my coinage, it was already in the literature, by the way, the literature on organizational change, a wonderful book by Warren Beness and Ed Schein back in the '60s said that as part of enabling people to cope with and execute change, they needed to have psychological safety. So what is it? It's a belief that you can take interpersonal risks without fear of bad consequences. And what people get wrong is they hear that term and they think it means being comfortable or being nice or being causative and honestly, in a funny way, it's the opposite of that. It's really being able, being freed up to learn, to confront the discomfort of learning because I really think learning is uncomfortable, it's necessary but it's not comfortable. And psychological safety is a condition that enables learning. So there's an irony here that people think it means being nice, being carful, no one should have any discomfort at work. And I think still, you know, work is work and learning is hard, but necessary. That phase of becoming consciously incompetent is the essence of what learning is. But you're like, exactly, I realize how much I suck at the moment, that's not a comfortable place to be. Right, it's not comfortable but it is necessary. Right, I also love the shadow to Ed Schein, who I worked with a little bit and I thought was fantastic. Peter, his son's been on the podcast. How would you frame the relationship between change and psychological safety? Well, I would start by saying, as Ed and Warren did so long ago, that psychological safety is a condition that enables change, that without some degree of psychological safety, it's hard for people to make the behavioral and structural changes that need to be made because it's hard to take risks and change requires risk. And so I think it enables change, but it particularly enables the kind of change that requires learning. Right. So if you say there, you know, there might be some changes that, you know, we're going to change from red to blue packaging, I mean, big deal. It's not going to be uncomfortable. It's not difficult. Just do it. There's other change that requires us to become more innovative or, you know, something that is going to require different kinds of behaviors to achieve the goals we want than those kinds of changes involve interpersonal risk. Right. Now, inherent, I think, in the idea of change is the idea of failure. Yeah. Like you're possibly moving away from some form of failure, either really obvious or kind of imminent, and as you move into the change process, there's going to be just stuff that doesn't work around that. Right. Part of what I really enjoyed in your book, the right kind of wrong, is you teasing apart this idea of failure and saying, okay, it's not just our thing, there are different types of failures. So maybe you could set that up for us. Sure. And I agree. You know, the relationship between change and failure is important too because change is often necessitated by a recognition of failure or a recognition of impending failure. If we just keep doing what we've always done, so we've got to change. But in thinking deeply about failure, it becomes clear that there's a vast difference between failing to do things we should know how to do, where there is a recipe, where there is a process, and we just either weren't paying attention or weren't yet trained enough to do it, and failure in new territory. Right. So when we're doing something genuinely new, there's a high likelihood of failure, and there's truly no way to avoid encountering some failure. So failure in new territory, which I call intelligent failure, is the kind of failure where you're trying something that might work, but it might not. You just cannot know until you try it. And you're trying it at a scale and size that is not going to be catastrophic if it fails. Right. It's an experiment. We're going to try something. It will be disappointing if it fails, but it won't be catastrophic if it fails. It's an above-the-water line mistake, not a below-the-water line mistake, as somebody once said. Exactly. Yeah, in fact, I like to say that mistake, and I may never succeed in making this distinction take off, but a mistake, which is dictionary definition of a mistake, is an unintended deviation from existing knowledge process protocol. Right. And it's unintended, right? You didn't mean to do it, and it would be possible to do it right. Whereas a failure is an undesired result. And so some failures are caused by mistakes, but some are not. They're caused by experiments that didn't work out. And some mistakes lead directly to failures, but some mistakes, you know, don't. You sort of make a mistake with the recipe and put the raw ingredient in, that's a mistake, but the result is delicious. That's not a failure. I'm going to jump in here and say, as obvious as this when Amy says it out loud, I'm sure I've been collapsing mistake and failure in on each other forever. But it's true, isn't it? I mean, a good process can have a bad outcome, particularly, I think, when we're dealing with this emergent stuff around change. No mistake, but still a failure. That is really helpful. Like, don't use these words interchangeably. And, you know, honestly, the reason I think it matters is because- It does matter. Yeah. People say, you know, an organization say, oh, yes, we're supposed to be okay with mistakes. I think, no, actually not, right? I mean, I think we should aspire to minimize mistakes. We should be vigilant and careful, and we should speak up when we see someone doing the wrong thing, and we should ask for help when we don't know what to do. Like, we should strive toward mistake-free life. Because there's a known better alternative than the mistake. Right. Right. But we should not strive for failure-free life. That doesn't exist, and the only way to produce it, if it did exist, would be to take no risks. And that's not a good idea. Now, part of this idea of intelligent failure, you set up this idea of running small experiments. You've used that phrase. Actually, that's something that's come up often from other guests on the podcast. The first thing I'd be curious about is to say, look, I'm all in on this whole idea of small experiments. But how, in your experience, if I'm a change agent, a change leader, how do I persuade my senior leadership to get comfortable with this idea of groping our way into the future rather than following a nice, solid, clearly laid out plan with milestones and everything else? Context matters. Right. So if I'm talking to senior leaders, if, let's say, the change in question is, let's implement lean in our manufacturing sites. There actually is a magnificent playbook to follow. So let's follow it. And let's train people and let's figure out what processes need to change how, and let's do it carefully. Let's do it fast. Let's do it beautifully, right? Yeah. No problem. But now, if the change is about coming up with a new value proposition or anything that can roughly be described as innovation, you just don't have that option. The only available option to you is to experiment, preferably small, safe, non-dangerous ways, not in reputationally harmful ways. Right. They need to be comfortable with appreciating what the context requires. And nowadays, more and more. of the context is requiring the kind of change that requires experiments, that is iterative, that's inventive and inclusive. And there isn't a playbook. If there's a playbook that works, use it. And if a senior leader pushes back and goes, I mean, look, I get what you're saying here, but we've got this playbook, and it's a pretty good playbook. I'm going to follow this playbook even though it's not exactly about this thing that we've got on our hands. There's some of your magical influencing skills to try and do this because in a perfect world, a leader goes, yeah, you're right. We need to feel our way into this because there is no playbook for this exact thing. Peter Block wrote something on this, or it's the answer to how is, I don't know, we're about to find out kind of ranting against best practices. I don't know, and we need to find out is I think the mindset or the approach. Oh, it's nice. You know, Ronnie Heifetz distinguished between technical changes and adaptive changes. And I think there's many different sort of similar distinctions where there is a kind of change that can then follow the playbook, but then there's the other kind where like it or not, we're going to have to be working together to solve problems that we don't yet fully understand or know, we don't yet know how it's going to work. So I think I would never want to try to convince someone of that, but I would instead want to engage them in, you know, a thoughtful conversation around, what's the value proposition you're seeking to embody or implement? Right. And what's the gap that we're trying to close in the sense? And what are your thoughts about how we can close that and then dig into them and dig in to try to better understand which ones are realistic and which ones are still a little bit fuzzy that we're going to need to learn more to figure out how to close that gap. Yeah. So it's more about, I think I'd approach it through inquiry rather than advocacy. Yeah, that's great. I've been using the metaphor as like we need to understand we're orienting here. We're not using a Google map. Right. You're finding your way to the next milestone and then you're reorienting and finding your way beyond that again. It's a compass rather than a map really. So small experiments sound great. I bet you people get that wrong all the time. How would you coach me to run and design a good small experiment? Not one that will involve me. Right. Sinking the company or sinking my own reputation in my own career. I told this story in my book teaming a long time ago. It's a story that I can never quite get out of my head and it's not unique because it's emblematic of something I see a lot. And so this was a new technology telecommunications company and it was a new technology for high-speed internet access 25 years ago. And customers wanted it. They wanted to roll it out. They wanted to massively top down do the change thing. But of course, what do you do? You do a pilot first. Right. So the pilot which was done in a completely non-representative sort of stylized designed to succeed environment was a smashing success. Right. The technology worked perfectly. They had all the best customer service reps assigned to the pilot and just stunning success. And they said, okay, great. The technology is great. Now, let's roll it out. Well, that rollout was not only a failure. It was a fiasco. Right. So the pattern is doing the experiment, but rigging the experiment to succeed. Right. Which really means you didn't learn very much. That's not an experiment. That's a formative act. It's a demonstration project. And a demonstration project is not what you want. And then because you really didn't learn very much from the pilot, the real launch ended up being this massive failure. So you clearly want to do it exactly the opposite. You want the real launch to succeed. You want the pilot to fail. Yeah. Not fail because it's sloppy or careless. Right. The pilot finds the edges. Right. Exactly. Find the edges is exactly right. Find where the failures points are so that you can fix them before this goes to scale. So they say, well, wait a minute. That's so obvious, Amy. Like, you know, it's just logically obvious how could that error be made? And how could it be made again and again in companies around the world? And the answer is the incentives and the culture and the mindset is just a rigged the wrong way. You know, if you're putting charge of this pilot, you just think my job is to make this thing shiny, successful, perfect. And then I'll get promoted or I'll get a bonus or whatever. Because most people aren't getting, you know, rewarded for failing. Well, they should be getting rewarded for failing for failing the right way, intelligent failures that are small, smart, and full of knowledge that you couldn't get any other way. Yeah. So some misunderstanding how you measure success or failure on a pilot really success and failure is measured by the quality of data that you get. Exactly. And your ability to make future decisions based on the data that you've been given. That's right. That's the metric. And that's hard. I think that's the whole point because the way I like to think about change is it's research. That's great. Now, after these messages from our partners, a counterintuitive finding about psych safety that will significantly shift your focus on how you maintain it and how you think about it in your organization. Amy is very easy to find from her books to her presence on LinkedIn. And you'll find her at her website, amecedrenson.com. That's amecedrenson.com. Pick up her books. They are terrific. You know, part of your recent writing around psychological safety has been the insight that as obsessive as everybody is around creating and building it, actually what often happens is it erodes over time. It gets less, strong, less safe over time. What are the factors that erode psychological safety and how might they connect to a change experience? I suppose one factor is the misunderstandings of what psychological safety is eroded because as one leader told us a subordinate told her you didn't agree with my idea in that meeting. So you took away my psychological safety. Now, psychological safety doesn't mean you agree with everything you say or that you always get your way or that you always get a vote. It means that you can speak up without fear of consequences. But if people think that psychological safety is, you know, I see nice. Kumbaya everybody's going to agree all the time. They'll be no conflict. They'll be no discomfort. Then you can easily see why it's going to erode because that just doesn't describe a healthy workplace. That doesn't describe a place where innovation happens or difficult decisions are made. So that leads to its erosion. Yes. But probably the more sort of mechanical description is it is easy to harm psychological safety, right? A by accident, right? So let's say I bring you bad news and your face just gives itself away, right? You look very upset or you blurred out a kind of emotional response. So now I'm not going to do that again anytime soon. Whereas if you have a positive response, it doesn't make it easier. It doesn't harm my ability to bring you bad news, but it doesn't help it either. So there's an inherent asymmetry that, you know, this game of candor and honesty in bad news is always a little bit slanted against us. So it's easy to erode and harder to build, but you have to make something that is inherently a challenging moment into a positive experience. And you can say things like, wow, thank you so much for bringing that to my attention, right? It's still bad news. It's still a problem. We're going to work on it, but it's, oh, I appreciate you, right? I appreciate that you brought it forward, you know, because you know that's not easy. Yeah. Part of what I'm doing is that change leader is also managing my stakeholders, as they say. And right, particularly thinking about managing up because that's tricky and hard and messy and power laden. But tied into that, Amy, perhaps is the question of how are you responsible for your own psychological safety? Because there's part of what's built into this, which is like, yeah, I should have psychological safety rather than what's my agency? What's my role on that? Well, I think the flip side of psychological safety, and I literally, it's two sides of the same coin, I really, is courage. I think a lot of low psychological safety is simply habitual. It's thinking, oh, I can't say that. And not thinking, well, why not? Perhaps hit pause here, just to reflect on Amy's point. I mean, in this moment, right now, in the situation you're in, are you operating from a, oh no, I can't place, or from a, well, why not place? What's really going to happen if I bring that bad news, if I offer a dissenting point of view, you know, there's that cartoon, it's antique, New Yorker cartoon of the executives in suits and ties around the table and the boss says, all those in favor say, "I," and you know, one after another, they all say, "I, I, I, I, I," but the thought bubbles are saying things like, you know, heaven forbid, and no, no, a thousand times no, and you think, the cartoon's funny because we all recognize that phenomenon of, you know, just it's easier, it's natural to agree with the boss, but do you think a single one of those hypothetical ones? men are saying, "If I say no, I'll get fired," like not very often. If you did, if you paused to say, "Wait a minute, what's leading me into false agreement rather than speaking up truthfully?" And if you thought it through, you'd say, "Oh, there's something so automatic about hierarchy and agreeing with the boss, but that isn't going to help us serve customers or win in a competitive marketplace." So therefore, I'm going to do the, you know, it's not courageous like, you know, going into the battle, but it's a certain amount of courage that says, "I see it differently." Like, no, I'm not sharing an eye here. So I think we do have that responsibility. In fact, in, right kind of wrong, I have a whole chapter on self-awareness, which is that need to become more aware of the counterproductive self-talk that really is anti-learning, anti-learning, in the sense that you prevent yourself from learning, but also you're preventing your colleagues from learning. Yeah. And just take a deep breath and choose learning. And choosing learning is also choosing to engage in a little bit of courage. Yeah, for sure. As you even say that Amy, I'm thinking, you know what? I'm differently courageous and different contexts. It's helpful for me to go, "What are the situations where I am least brave?" I'm most likely to comply and collude and offer up false agreement and whatever else, and work out solutions to those specific moments, rather than it's kind of generalized, "Oh, I just want to be brave." Right. It's like, "No, with this person, in this moment, this is where I am about." So what do I need to do? What language do I need to find? What body posture do I need to strike? It might allow me to access that. I think that's a really good point because if you have just a few sort of stock phrases that you can rely on that you've thought through in advance, it can help in those moments where you're either going to speak up honestly or freeze or, you know, hold back or offer the false agreement. So just, you know, a few little, they're almost like scaffolding. That's right. If you've got scaffolding that can crop up the move. Are you your first two steps into the move? You know, that quote from things clear, which is adapted from others, you know, we don't rise to the challenge we fall to the level of our training. So train yourself. That's right. For example, I often will share with people at all levels, really, the distinction between a good question and a not so good question, but a good question that is genuinely inviting the thinking of someone else. So that's often a what question or a how question, not a yes, no question, certainly not a leading question, but, you know, what ideas do you have? What are customers saying about that? Oh, how might a competitor approach this, right? I mean, just that the generative questions. And if you have a bunch of those in your pocket, you can bring them out in those moments that you need to draw others out. That's fantastic. I mean, obviously you're best known for all your work and psychological safety. And you've mentioned this in the conversation, one of your earlier books is teaming. Yeah. And I noticed in those days, you were Amy C. Edmundson, but your success is now that you can drop the C now because you're like, you're the Amy Edmundson. I've always loved to see simply because my mother, I guess, my parents gave me such good initials. So I always sort of stick that in there just for that. That's right. In the most recent book, the publisher said, no, no C can't have a C. I guess for the reason you're saying, but I don't really care. But you're right. I hadn't figured out that your initials are ACE or a such a nice way to frame it. If I'm leading a change team, based on your book teaming, based on what you've continued to think about and learn from teaming, what's an unexpected piece of guidance you now might give me around what it means to have a team that flourishes, feels safe and has impact? You know, part of the reason I wrote that book and called it teaming, which by the way, was a word I first heard Ed shine used in a seminar at MIT. And he said, sure, it's a propose of nothing it seems to me. I mean, I don't even remember. But he said, we've got to stop talking about teams and start talking about teaming. And that was like a light bulb for me. Not a noun. It's a verb. Right. Exactly. Not a set thing. It's a developing thing. Right. And that was because first of all, I had been studying teams in hospitals and they really were remarkably fluid and dynamic. Do you ask someone tell me about your team? They'll be like, well, which team? I'm on the hematology team or I'm on this ward. You know, as Hackman Richard Hackman would put it, a bounded group of individuals who are responsible for a shared goal, where a bounded is important. It's like, no, what if you have unbounded or fluid or dynamic membership? Right. More and more of the world was looking like that. Right. Right. And so then what teaming did was try to say, well, what are some of the things we have to get right to do that well? And, you know, in no particular order, one of them, psychological safety was an important piece of it. You've got to have that willingness to take into personal risks because this is inherently challenging. Another was you have to learn to manage conflict because we're not going to agree. We're not going to agree partly because of different interests, partly because of different expertise. But we're going to find ourselves in positions of conflict all the time. So we're going to have to learn to work through that in productive ways. Right. And we're going to have to expand boundaries. Right. Higher article boundaries, expertise boundaries, geographic boundaries. We're going to have to get good at boundary spanning. No, I've had Leon Davy on the pod talking about good conflict. And she's lovely about that. She's like, it's your obligation to seek conflict. Right. That's where they, the thing is, that's where the heat of the moment is boundary spanning is an interesting term. Teach me how to boundary span in a way that I may not know. Yeah. First thing you need to do is say, what boundary do I need to span? You have a goal that goal might be a new product. Who else will need to be a part of this to help this thing be really good? You know, maybe we'll need someone from marketing. We'll need someone from engineering. Maybe even someone from a calentake to help us figure out how this will work financially. But so you're thinking through, what are the skills or what are the levels or what are the interest groups who will need to be a part of it? Maybe it's not a productive thing to think of those as boundaries, but we each come from different domains. And so they're like little countries in a way. And so, you know, if you go visit another country, you go with a desire to learn, like, what do they eat here? And what norms and customs do they have here? And you're incredibly curious. Well, then we go work with someone from engineering and we think, oh, these people are pain in the neck. They're, you know, they're rigid or they're, and you say, no, no, no, they're just, they're from a different country. So understanding that there is, there are boundaries to cross, I think is step one. And then step two is get super curious about what they bring, what they know, what they're up against, what their aspirations are, you know, either in general or for the project. And I think with three basic questions, you know, what are you trying to get done? What are you up against? What do you bring? And you need to know that about me. We can know enough about each other to work together effectively. That is a fantastic question to end on. One, I first heard from Peter Block actually. Now, I think it's a question that an ally asks somebody who is a partner, somebody who wants to encourage and support and understand what the real challenge might be. So do add that to your question list. Now, if you're asking me, what am I up against? Well, I'm up against the perpetual challenge of having people find this podcast. And if you can help me, they're fearless. What a mouth seems to be best. So if you enjoyed this episode in particular, ping, send it off to somebody that you know. There's more at the change signal.com, most noticeably our free change signal series on new truths and counterintuitive moves. Hey, thanks for doing the work. I'm glad you're here.