The Breakdown with Chris Clearfield

In this episode, I speak with Amy C. Edmondson—the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard School of Business—about the concept of psychological safety, which she explored in her 2019 book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. We also discussed the importance of proactively eliciting feedback from colleagues, coming to terms with our fallibilities, and discarding outmoded management behaviors that should be left in the twentieth century.

During our conversation, we talked about:

- The renewed interest in the concept of psychological safety

- J.D. Thompson’s notion of “reciprocal coordination needs”

- How knowledge work does not produce objective or mechanical feedback

- The effect of anxiety on knowledge workers’ performance

- Amy’s Harvard Business Review article “Speeding Up Team Learning”

- The mechanical language of management (which hasn’t caught up with the nature of work today)

- Henry Ford-like management behaviors that are outdated but, nevertheless, still used

- How to understand psychological safety by practicing it (instead of just thinking about it)

- Coming to terms with our own fallibility

- Amy and Chris’s appearance on For the Love of Work podcast

- Learning to “listen up,” not just “speak up”

- Applying the concept of psychological safety to parenting

Ep. 17 – Jim Riley – Are You as Good as Jim Riley at Dealing with Disruptions? by Chris Clearfield

Ep. 16 – Misha Glouberman – Why You Suck at Listening (and How to Improve) by Chris Clearfield

Ep. 15 – Tim Harford – The Undercover Economist on Creativity by Chris Clearfield

Ep. 14 - A Guide to Goal Setting for the Empowered Entrepreneur by Chris Clearfield

Ep. 13 – Making Friends with Failure by Chris Clearfield

I’m really excited to share my conversation with Michael Bungay Stanier. Michael is a really thoughtful, humble and impressive guy. He lives in Toronto and founded a company called Box of Crayons, which helps organizations transform from being advice-driven to being curiosity led.

His two most recent books, The Advice Trap and The Coaching Habit are both really practical and fantastic tools for leaders looking to ask better questions and use those better questions to have a real impact in the quality of work that people around them do and the quality of solutions to problems that they arrive at.

Michael is just himself a curious and delightful human being. We have a really interesting and—as many of my conversations end up being—pretty wide-ranging from poetry and literature to what it really means to have impact in the world and how we can really make meaningful change.

So, without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Michael.

I am excited to share this interview with my friend Oscar Velasco-Schmitz. Oscar is an entrepreneur and one of the owners of Dockside Cannabis, a cannabis retailer here in Seattle.

We chat about his business and the history of political change that led to recreational cannabis being legalized in Washington State—something that is expanding across the United States and world.

But I was also curious to talk with Oscar about how he connects with the mind of his customer, how he deeply empathizes with his customers’ needs, and how he uses that empathy to build customers experience.

Dockside Cannabis serves all kinds of people. It was fascinating to hear Oscar talk about that and also to hear him share his philosophy of providing excellent customer service, even as he engages in what he calls an “industrialized act of civil disobedience.”

I am so excited to share my conversation with my friend and mentor, Roger Martin with you. Roger is the former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, which is the business school at the University of Toronto. He has also been named the world’s number one management thinker by Thinkers50.

My coauthor András Tilscik, who also teaches at Rotman, introduced us. Over the years, Roger has been a real guide for me as I build my own practice and thinking around systems.

-NOTE FOR CLAIRE: or… “I got to know Roger through my coauthor…”

Roger has written 11 books, a lot of which are about systems thinking and unpacking very hard problems into palatable and digestible and, frankly, actionable pieces. They’re all great. 

Two highlights are Creating Great Choices (with Jennifer Riel) and Playing to Win. If you listen to my conversation with David Burkus, you’ll hear us talk about Roger’s playing to win philosophy as applied to our own businesses.  

In this episode, we discuss his most recent book, When More is Not Better, Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency. It’s basically a way of thinking about the broader economic-political system in terms of systems.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

I have a fun and special treat for you this week. It is certainly different.

Today, I am sharing a podcast with you that I was actually on. It’s David McRainey’s fabulous podcast, You Are Not So Smart, which I was a guest on over the summer.

And, man, do we get to it…

We talk about toilet paper shortages, why people join social movements, we talk about my book Meltdown, and his own upcoming book… I know I use the phrase “wide-ranging” to describe these conversations I have… but it was a fun and extremely wide-ranging conversation.

It’s a 1hr 53 min. listen and I am really delighted to deliver it to you today. It’s Thanksgiving week here in the U.S. when this is dropping, so you might have an hour and 53 minutes while you putter about the kitchen chopping vegetables and brining your turkey (if that is a thing you do). Otherwise, I hope you use this hour and 53 minutes of thought injection from David and my discussion. Please enjoy.