We have an incredibly special guest this week on Curious Now! Amy Edmondson, Professor at Harvard Business School, and author of numerous books including Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy and The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth joins us to discuss her concept of psychological safety, how a failed study led to its invention, and how leaders can create organizations that learn.

An initial study with a well-validated tool found a correlation between having better teams and having HIGHER error rates. Reluctant to bring this result to her thesis advisor, she came to an idea: Maybe better teams don’t make more mistakes, but rather better teams are more willing to talk about mistakes.

Bringing psychological safety to the present day, Amy and Jenny discuss how the best examples of crisis leadership involve what Amy calls “situational humility,” the ability to say, “we’ve never been here before,” and then framing the problem as an opportunity to find solutions and seeking and inviting input, along with a continual refreshment of common purpose.

How can individuals create a “learning frame” to grow in a crisis rather than an “execution frame” where you’re just getting work done; being open to hearing feedback both from your colleagues and your work itself as you do it.

While “learning work” can seem in the short term to take more energy or more bandwidth, in the broader view it creates vastly easier work through an increase in skill and understanding. Dr. Edmondson says, “If you’re not an organization that has found ways to hardwire learning and feedback loops into everything that it does, you will get caught unawares in a fast-changing, complex world.”

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/