Kim Mills: Have you ever heard of the Hawaii chair? It’s a gyrating desk chair, which came on the market in 2007 and promised to give your abs a workout while you sat at your desk.
Ad: It feels great on my abs. I can really feel this working. Hawaii chair while answering phones, using the computer, balancing books or filing paperwork.
Mills: It turned out, though, that office workers didn’t want to hula at their desks, and the chair was a flop. Today, it’s memorialized in the Museum of Failure, a pop-up exhibition of some of commerce’s most misguided products. Other failures in the museum you might or might not remember: New Coke, Google Glass, the Newton, Colgate frozen lasagna—really, by the same company that makes toothpaste.
The museum is funny, but its exhibits also highlight a serious point, one that psychologists say is underrated: There is no progress without failure. And that’s as true for organizations as it is for individuals. So what’s the difference between simply failing and failing well? How do you get past the emotional sting of failure, recognize its potential upsides, and learn from your mistakes? How can you set yourself up for productive failures in life? And how do companies and other organizations benefit from productive failures in the marketplace?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
We have two guests today. First is Dr. Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. She studies psychological safety, collaboration, and teamwork within and across organizations. She’s won numerous awards for her work and has published dozens of articles in academic and other outlets, including the Administrative Science Quarterly and the Harvard Business Review. Her latest book, The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, was published in September.
Next is Dr. Samuel West, an organizational psychologist who studies and consults on creativity and innovation in the workplace. He founded the Museum of Failure in Sweden in 2017. The museum has since toured the world, stopping in Shanghai, Los Angeles, New York, and most recently in Washington D.C., where the Speaking of Psychology team visited it last month.
Thank you both for joining me today.
So, Dr. Edmondson, let’s start with you. In your book, you talk about three types of failure: basic, complex, and intelligent. What are these three types of failure? Why is it useful to categorize them this way?
Amy Edmondson, PhD: Okay, they are, let’s start at the bottom, basic failure—familiar territory where we actually have the knowledge to get it right and there’s a single mistake made, a single cause, that leads to a bad outcome, a failure. So those are both theoretically and practically often preventable. Complex failures are multicausal. They’re the perfect storms. They’re the handful of factors that come together in just the wrong way to create a failed outcome, generally also in pretty familiar territory. And then finally, we get to intelligent failures. These are, of course, the good kind, a right kind of wrong, and they are thoughtful forays in new territory that nonetheless failed to achieve the results we wanted. So intelligent failures are driven by a goal. They’re in new territory, you got a hypothesis, and they’re no bigger than they have to be to get the learning that you need from them. And I think the importance of a framework is it helps us avoid this sort of dichotomy between failure’s bad, we need to avoid it, and the sort of happy talk about failure, fail fast, have a failure museum, versus making thoughtful distinctions that say some kinds of failures really are bad and we should do our very best to prevent them. And other kinds of failures we should literally have more of, and in fact, celebrate them.
Mills: Dr. West, are the objects in the museum of failure all products of intelligent failure, or do they fall into the other categories?
Samuel West, PhD: I would say most of them fall into the other categories. Some of them are intelligent failures. So by nature of it being a museum with physical products, a lot of these products made it to market when they should never have made it to market. And by that definition, then they would be the bad kind of failure. But I think the underlying aim of the museum is to drive home the point that we need to accept failure in a broader sense, if we want progress or innovation. Now it’s up to the companies and the organizations behind these initiatives to do the right kind of failure.
Mills: Now, I mentioned in the intro that my team and I visited the museum in Washington last month, where incidentally we did try the Hawaii chair on full speed.
West: Good for you.
Mills: Nobody can see me doing this, but you’re just wiggling like crazy. I don’t know how you’re supposed to concentrate on your work when you’re shimmying like that. But while we were there, we talked to some of the other visitors and we wanted to know what they would ask you if they could, Dr. West, and one wanted to know more about why you decided to start the museum and whether it was just for fun or were there deeper lessons that you wanted the visitors to come away with.
West: Yeah, I was doing research on organizational cultures for innovation, to boost that and enhance it. And one of the obstacles that I came across repeatedly was the fear of failure. So despite loads of books on creativity and innovation and management, and despite all the articles and consultants out there, people are still afraid of failing. And even in the coolest companies, even the most innovative companies, they’re still afraid of failing. And no amount of consultants are going to make any difference there. Intelligent people are willing to embrace or at least accept the intelligent or a good kind of failure. And so I started the museum just as a small little, I called it a nerdy innovation project because there was no, I had no ambitions or I didn’t even think of it being interesting to anybody but innovation nerds. So when we opened and got the media attention and the attention of the general public, I was kind of surprised, or I was very surprised, rather. So, yeah, the idea was to create a museum for innovation nerds, for teams that work within innovation, to come and visit and have some productive discussions about failure, psychological safety, the other components that sort of make up that area. And yeah, it has functioned as that, but it has gotten much more attention outside of that realm as well.
Edmondson: I think what’s wonderful about it is that it helps normalize failure and with humor, with a sense of humor. And even though I’m very enthusiastic about my classification system and more enthusiastic about intelligent failures than the other kind, I still realize that failures will always be with us of all kinds, and that’s got to be okay too. The last chapter of my book is called thriving as a fallible human being. And I think that’s what the museum helps people do, realize that failure is just part of life and it makes us human. It’s like a bonding between us rather than isolating experience.
West: I had visitors there. My aim with the museum is, yeah, we need to help people appreciate failure’s role for innovation. My secondary aim was to help organizations understand that they can actually learn more from failure if they put some effort into it—based on an article by Amy. And then I didn’t have any other aims with it. And then as visitors came and gave feedback, there was a third aim that sort of grew organically, which I think is best illustrated—for an example, this couple who came to the museum when it was open in Sweden, they were very enthusiastic about the museum and they spent way too much time there, which I attributed to their lack of English skills. But afterwards, they were so enthusiastic, wanted to talk to me, and they said, we have made a major life decision right now after being in this museum. And I’m like, Hey! They said, we run a small Airbnb in Barcelona, and we’ve decided after visiting your museum that we learning from the Microsoft, Apple, the big boys here in innovation, we’ve learned that it’s okay, it’s good to take meaningful risks. So we’ve decided to, and then—drum roll—change our breakfast menu. So they’d had the same breakfast menu for 20 years, and now they finally decided they’re going to be willing to take that risk and they’re going to put some fresh fruit on the menu.
Edmondson: Wow. I thought you’ve—major impact. You’ve had an impact.
West: Well, yeah, if that’s what it took, then that’s fantastic, but that’s now become one of the third aims to help people feel inspired and less afraid of taking this risk they need to take. Now, this was a fun story, but to do things that are meaningful when there are risks, it’s worth taking.
Mills: Well, that leads me to this question, Dr. Edmondson, which is why do people find failures so difficult, so emotionally painful, even when the stakes are low as they were in the case of changing a breakfast?
Edmondson: Well, I think there’s many factors that contribute to our general aversion to failure. Emotional first among them, and probably some of this is hard wiring that we just don’t like being confronted with our inadequacies. It scares us. It makes us feel that we might be rejected from the tribe. We might literally have a survival problem. If others see us for the failures we secretly worry we might be. So it’s a pretty understandable, maybe natural worry, but of course, it’s deeply unhelpful because it doesn’t help us take the kinds of risks that a full and successful life requires us to take.
Mills: Do you have advice for steps that people can take to get past that emotional sting of failure? I mean, your book details, stories of people who have failed massively and yet persevered and ultimately were successful. What were the character traits that were consistent among people who were able to do that?
Edmondson: Well, that it’s a wonderful question and it makes me think mine is a book about failure, but really it’s meant to be a book about success. It’s about the central role of failure, especially in extreme success, whether you’re an Olympic athlete or an entrepreneur with a successful startup, real success can only come from that willingness to endure for the failures along the way because you will spend some portion of your time in new territory. And so the attributes that I think truly successful people have in common, which allows them to withstand the temporary setback and assault, emotional assault of failure are curiosity, right? They’re sort of driven by that desire to find out, well, what if I try this? What will happen? Persistence, for sure, a willingness to just pick right back up and try again despite the setback, despite the failure and ability to appreciate both their own strengths and weaknesses, but they aren’t tied up in knots about being seen as inadequate in some way. They’re just willing to be more honest, I think, with themselves and others about reality. And so I think it’s mainly about that persistence, that curiosity and that openness, openness to the data of their own experience.
Mills: Dr. West, turning back to the museum for a minute, were some of the items that you included just mistakes, not really failures? I mean, how did you decide on the products that you have in there and how did you get them?
West: The criteria? I like the definition—I can’t remember where I took this from, but the failure is defined as a deviation from expected or desired results. Might’ve been your article, Amy. Might have been. It might’ve been. And so that’s been the guiding criteria of defining what failure is. It’s not always a commercial or a financial failure. So to be in the museum, it had to be a failure of some sort, the artifacts, and they have to have been an innovation. So it can’t just be something—people keep asking me to put in the Samsung phone that caught on fire a few years ago. Remember that on the airplanes? So I was like, that wasn’t an innovation. That was just bad production.
Edmondson: Just basic failure.
West: Yeah, that’s not interesting at all. So it has to be where someone was pushing the boundary or they were trying to do something new.
Edmondson: That’s great. That’s actually great. That’s a nice boundary for your exhibits because it’s true, as you said earlier, that not all of them are strictly speaking intelligent. They’re at least all in the space of innovation. They were earnest attempts to do something new and innovative.
West: I did make an exception for the section of the museum on Donald Trump because there—there wasn’t much innovation going on, but there’s a lot of failure. So that criteria, and then the third criteria is that I have to find it interesting, which is very easy, interested in everything and getting the items was in the beginning. You’re going to both of, you’re going to laugh at me now, but I honestly thought because of my work in the space for years, I thought I could just call up the innovation director of company A, B, C and say, Hey, John, I’m opening this cool museum. It’s going to be really awesome. Send me some of your stuff.
Mills: Let me embarrass your corporation. Yeah, sure.
West: None of them wanted to be part of it. So I just had to buy the stuff online through Craigslist and eBay and whatnot. And that was until we opened. And since we opened, I get donations both from individuals and from companies. Many of the companies that are represented there have donated items themselves, knowing that, I mean, failure is having a bit of a moment right now in the corporate space. So it’s kind of cool to be open to failure. So that’s right now it’s mix, it’s donations from individuals and companies.
Mills: I just want to say some of the things that I saw in there seem to me, not to be failures exactly, but maybe products whose time passed. I’m thinking of Blockbuster Video in particular, but I’m also not convinced that the Segway was a true failure. I mean—
West: Oh, you can’t open that can of worms right there. Well, the Segway—so based on the definition of failure being a deviation expected result, the Segway was expected to revolutionize the way people transport themselves. The Segway was expected to sell $1 billion U.S. in one year. The Segway was expected to—and this is a real quote from a real Silicon Valley big shot, the Segway was expected to be “bigger than the internet,” and city infrastructures were to be built around the future. City infrastructures were to be built around the Segway. So all these expectations have been not even close to being met. So by the definition, the Segway certainly belongs in the Museum of Failure. Their goals clearly were met with failure.
Edmondson: Totally. I mean, it’s still a cool, or was and still is a cool technology product.
West: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Mills: Well, Dr. Edmondson, let me ask you this. When you try something new, there’s always an opportunity for failure. But when you’re taking a leap, how do you set yourself up to fail well if it doesn’t work out?
Edmondson: Well, I think the most important criterion is that you’ve done your homework, and I don’t mean years and years of deep research before you’re willing to try something new. Of course not. But that you’ve done at least the bare minimum to find out what do we know? What do we not know, and what’s my well-reasoned hypothesis about why this might work? You’re not setting out to fail, and that would be sabotage, not experimenting. You’re setting out and hoping you’re really hoping that you’re right because the upside seems good to you, and yet, despite having done so, you set people up to fail. Well, when you just remind them, do your homework, do a quick search, read the literature, whatever, depending on what the domain is, talk to a handful of customers to see what they think. I mean, get your ducks in a row and then go for it.
West: I’d like to add on to that. There’s a quote that I’ve stolen, and I have absolutely no idea who said this, but I love it: “It’s not failure if you call it an experiment.” I mean, you can laugh, but there’s—there’s something really good to—it’s true. Design it as an experiment and say, we’ve done our homework. We’ve got all the information we need. We’re going to take a risk that when it fails, it doesn’t damage the organization or cost lives or suffering. We’re going to test it in a realistic environment, see what happens. And if it fails, hey, great, let’s learn from it. It’s data. To me, that’s the most brilliant type of failure.
Mills: But we have a tendency not to want to share our failures. For example, research journals don’t publish studies with null results. In other words, the results don’t support the underlying thesis. So how can we learn if information is hidden or suppressed?
Edmondson: Well, I think you’re saying that it doesn’t happen naturally and automatically in a lot of our institutions are set up in a way that prevent the sharing of failures in such a way that it would help prevent the production of the same failure a second time, because it hardly needs to be said. But an intelligent failure the second time around isn’t really intelligent. So how do we do better is really the question here. How do we help scientists become aware that someone else has already tried that and it didn’t work? Oftentimes, the answer lies in the networks and the conferences and the more informal sharing that they do and that they’re aware of, to learn as much as they can so that we’re not wasting time and resources redoing a previously failed experiment. But you’re right to point to this as a real challenge.
Mills: Will open data and open science help in that respect?
Edmondson: I suppose that’s the idea. And we have to overcome the human factor, the human factor, which is I want to look good, not bad. I’m much more interested in publishing, publicizing my successes than my failures. But when we can appreciate that this is in our own best interest, especially collectively to share and share widely, then we become more willing to do it.
West: My dream is to start a journal, an academic proper peer reviewed journal, high quality, but the Journal of Null results, statistically insignificant results. And just like, no, you can do high quality research and instead of massaging the data until you get positive results will actually publish when you’ve spent a lot of time, and the differences are zero. It would be much more interesting.
Edmondson: And the reason peer review could work there is because you would only accept a paper if the hypotheses were thoughtful, if they had good grounding in the literature. So this wouldn’t be just silly stuff. No. Yeah, it would be that, yeah, a reasonable person would’ve thought that would work, but it didn’t. Thank you so much for telling me, because now I don’t waste a lot of --
West: I should do the same. Yeah.
Mills: I’ll hook you up with our chief publishing officer.
West: Yes. Yeah. Starting at journal is something you do on a weekend, right?
Edmondson: Right? Not high on the list maybe, but it’s a great idea.
Mills: So, Dr. West, speaking again about the museum, is there any exhibit in there that you feel is the most massive of all the failures? And if so, why?
West: No, you’re asking the most impossible question here. I mean, some of them are not interesting to the visitors, but I find them infinitely interesting because there’s a great story behind them. There’s a quote by Leo Tolstoy that I’ve changed for the museum. The original quote is, “all happy families are alike; but every unhappy family is unhappy in their own special way.” And I like that because it’s true of the items in the museum as well, where successful innovation sort of follows. Yay, makes sense. But items in the museum, there’s so many ways on the tricky road of successful innovation to fail, and they seem to fail in different ways and in different contexts. Some of them, like you said, were ahead of their time. Some were way behind their time. Some are just stupid ideas. There’s all kinds of different reasons for failure. And the biggest one, the most interesting ones, maybe aren’t the most fun items to look at. One of my favorite, and I know people are bored with this example, but I love the story of Kodak and how they invented the digital camera. Do you know when? Do you know what year?
Edmondson: It’s early. It’s early. I don’t know, but I know it’s stunningly early. Okay, 1958.
West: Okay, you were way—you’re way ahead. This, I mean, it was actually—
Edmondson: Crazy, right?
West: Yeah. It was actually equally crazy in the early '70s. And then Kodak became this, they were the richest. They were the Google or the Apple of yesteryear. They were big. They had all the money and the best engineers, and they were the best at innovation, but they didn’t know how, they were unwilling to change their business model. So they tried—up until their bankruptcy, they tried to get people to print photos, which no one was doing, keep buying film in 2012 and buying expensive photo paper and film. So people say, oh, yeah, Kodak doesn’t exist. It was the iPhone that just, no, it wasn’t. They made the cameras for Apple. It was an inability to be flexible with the business model and to innovate on that part of the business. And I’m fascinated, right? So many nuances to it, but at the museum, it’s just a camera, the short little—
Edmondson: You need the story behind it to really understand why it’s a failure.
West: But then I like the funny ones as well. I like the silly ones, the hula chair, or—I got a donation in Brooklyn, a Cabbage Patch doll that was called mealtime or snacktime, and somebody donated it and said, you can have this cannibal if you take care of her. I was like, what’s this crazy man talking about? It was a Cabbage Patch doll that had an eating mechanism, so you could feed it little plastic food items, and then it would end up in a backpack on the doll. It’s a fun idea, I guess. The problem was that it also liked to eat children’s fingers and hair. That one is just funny.
Mills: Well, getting a little more serious for a moment, Dr. Edmondson, you study something called psychological safety. What is it and why is it important to have in order to benefit from failure?
Edmondson: The simplest way to put it is that psychological safety describes a learning environment, an environment where people are willing and able to take the interpersonal risks. That learning behaviors involve speaking up with a crazy idea, running an experiment that might end in failure, asking for help when you’re in over your head, offering a dissenting point of view. Those are all human behaviors that can feel risky at work, and yet without engaging them, your team can’t learn. So psychological safety describes that learning climate where you just believe, yeah, of course. Of course. We do those things around here because that’s what we do. That’s what we need to do to be good, but it’s not the norm. I am starting to see writing out there where some people, some companies are saying psychological safety is table stakes. You got to give that to your employees or else you shouldn’t even be in business, like food and water. It’s like, no, actually psychological safety is an aspiration. It’s an environment where we just do all these unnatural things that are needed for innovation and learning, and we’ve trained ourselves in that kind of fun toughness that we need to be great and to innovate and to have experiments. And so it’s been misinterpreted in that sense, emotional safety or something. And it’s really about learning and candor and being uncomfortable.
West: There’s a big misconception that psychological safety is about everybody being friends and everybody feeling it happens. I see it all the time. No, no, no, no, no, no. It’s not about saying, yes, everything is great.
Edmondson: Yeah, no, because then that makes it so hard for us to disagree with each other. I don’t think that’s going to work, Sam, right? How do we, let’s step back. Let’s think this through again.
West: Yeah, Amy, that was a stupid idea.
Edmondson: And then you’re saying inside your head at that moment, you’re going, I hate her. Right? And it’s just like you can’t help it. You’re human, but it’s an environment where we realize, or we have kind of devoted ourselves to doing it anyway.
Mills: Well, Dr. West, you consult to corporations. What do you tell them when you’re seeing the kind of behavior that isn’t helping them to learn from their mistakes?
West: I mean, a lot of my focus is on psychological safety as first the museum, and what kind of learnings can we extract from the stories of the artifacts in the museum, and especially those that are relevant to the industry or to the client. But then my main focus after that is on psychological safety. And I see it more as starting the conversation about it and sort of explaining. Yeah, it’s really simple. I mean, it’s a simple construct, but it’s very difficult to establish. Right?
Edmondson: Simple but not easy.
West: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like exercise. You’re eating right, simple. It’s really simple, but you just can’t get it right. And I love how psychological safety fits well in with the aim of the museum and gives my clients some things to continue to work with. I have a good story on psychological safety. If you can be bothered, go for it. So I was doing a workshop for a big sort of luxury brand, and they flew in their entire innovation department to the museum. It was all great. There was probably 15 of us in a room, top senior management of the whole operation. We did the introduction round, and there was one guy there who’d just been hired like six months ago. And so I start the workshop. It was focused on psychological safety, and I’ve been doing this a while. I think I’m pretty good at it, but 20 minutes in, the newest part of the leadership team, he’s like, excuse me. And he says it in front of his seniors and he says, excuse me, what is psychological safety? And I felt like, you idiot, that’s what I’ve been talking about. This is—what kind of PowerPoint slides have you been looking at? How simple, do you want me to spell this out to you? That was my sort of gut feeling in—
Edmondson: The inside voice.
West: Yeah. And then I, I felt like, okay, this is too strange. They’ve obviously hired him. He can’t be stupid. He's obviously a smart guy. And then I realized by him being the most junior person on that team, being willing to ask me, I’m not Amy Edmondson, but I’m pretty good at psychological safety to ask me in front of his bosses to say, I don’t get this. Thank you, Mr. Workshop Dude, but I don’t understand what you’re saying. By him asking that, it showed so clearly what psychological safety was. They had it.
Edmondson: He took a risk in that team. He took a risk.
West: He took a massive risk.
Edmondson: Massive risk. And he believed, I think almost by definition, that that was expected.
West: And that was, yeah, if you don’t understand, he wasn’t going to be penalized for it. Nobody rolled their eyes at him. We had a great discussion. I flipped it and said, wow, what a great version of psychological safety this was. But it was just a beautiful demonstration of psychological safety in action in a workshop, which I could have probably improved on psychological safety.
Edmondson: I love that.
West: It was a good example of that.
Mills: So it’s got to be a place where it’s true when somebody says, there are no stupid questions, that there really are no stupid questions.
West: Yeah.
Mills: So it’s hard for adults to deal with failure, but what about kids? What’s the best way to talk to children, to help them to learn, to see the value in taking risks even when they might fail?
Edmondson: Someone suggested to me recently that I should write a book for kids on this very topic, for that very reason, that after a certain age, and I don’t know exactly what age it is, but probably around 5, kids do, in fact start to get failure averse. But before that, not at all.
See, they’d never learned to walk. They’d never learned to talk. They’d never learned to do anything if they weren’t willing to go for it and fail along the way. And yet, I would say sometime in elementary school, they start to get the message like, oh, I’m supposed to have the right answer. I’m supposed to get my worth is about being right, being smart, being accepted, not about taking risks. So I think for parents, first of all, they have to really catch themselves and correct the behavior that’s so spontaneous to say, oh, great job for everything. And instead, comment on process. Oh, interesting how you tried to do it that way. What did you learn? Just keep modeling learning behavior with your kids, celebrating their little forays into new territory, asking them what did you learn from that? And being enthusiastic about the lessons that they deliver, which may be different than the ones that you assumed they learn from that. So it’s really about modeling that learning orientation and celebrating the discoveries more than the outcomes.
West: I have to blame the school as well. I mean about that age 6, they start school and start getting grades, and then everything becomes about getting the right answer rather than learning something. And that’s a huge, I think, I mean, the parents of course have their responsibility, but the school definitely has a responsibility there. And is it the right answer you want, or is it the learning you want? And the school’s all across the world has failed at that.
Mills: Is it possible to be too cavalier about failure? And I ask this because in its early days, Facebook’s internal motto was famously “move fast and break things.” And even Mark Zuckerberg finally backed off from the “break things” part. How do you find the right balance of innovation, risk-taking, and caution?
West: The fail fast and break things, sort of Silicon Valley motto? It’s thoughtless. It’s careless. And so failure costs money. It costs suffering. It costs prestige. It costs relationships. Failure is nothing we ever want. If we’re going to fail, we want to fail quickly and cheaply. That’s true. And preferably often small, small, yeah. The problem with Silicon Valley’s motto, which no one talks about is that Silicon Valley, they’re fantastic at this sort of fail forward mentality, but they don’t learn from their failures. They don’t fail mindfully. They fail again and again and again in the same way. So the rest of the world can look up to them, but they’re not doing it in a very mindful way.
Edmondson: They don’t consistently learn from failures. They don’t take the deep work and time to get the lessons you paid for them. You might as well get them right, but you’ve got to put that extra in. So I think you had two cavalier resounding yes. And my word for it is it’s sloppy. It applies to some circumstances, but not others. And fail fast, but only as fast as possible. Having done your homework, don’t just, this isn’t a matter of just throwing darts and seeing what sticks. It’s a matter of at least having good reason to believe that something might work, because I am not a fan of wasting resources. I’m a fan of learning in smart ways. Learn as fast as you can, but no faster, because that ends up being waste.
Mills: Well, this leads me to a question I have to ask, and I didn’t necessarily want to call him out, but one of the cool things in the museum is the wall where people can put up a post-it about whether they think Elon Musk is a failure or a success, which is it?
West: You’re going to have to edit this one out, but as a human being, a company leader, failure as in many other aspects, but as a visionary, willing to take risks, a success in many ways. So I think we, especially these sort of celebrity superstar, megarich entrepreneurs, we just see them as one unit. They’re not, they can be horrible people, but very good at money, or they can be success, they can be risk takers, and they can be sloppy risk takers that just get lucky. We have to nuance it. So whether Elon Musk is a failure or a success, yeah, I mean, he’s a failure in many ways and is failing quite rapidly now with just about everything. But just a few years ago, he was the best success. So these things vary and we can’t just say A or B.
Edmondson: That’s a really important point. I agree with everything that Sam just said, and I’d add that it’s like it or not, it’s true for all of us. It’s not really the right question to say is a whole person in their entirety and over time a success or a failure. We all have failures and successes, and some of that’s temporal and some of it’s categorical that I can be, as you say, I can be a success in business, but a failure in my home life or vice versa. So it really, let’s get a lot more precise and nuanced with our application of these words.
West: There’s some interesting, there was a book I read on the history of failure, and one of the ideas there was that the concept of a human being being a failure is an American invention. So in the English language, before capitalistic America and this big industrial sort of boom only products and constructions, a bridge or a building could be a failure. But in England, the word failure was only used to describe an endeavor or a bridge. It was—a human being couldn’t really be a failure. But then in this sort of capitalistic society that emerged in the United States, the concept was if you are not rich enough with all this opportunity and you can’t avail yourself of everything in this wonderful new world, you must be a failure. So the concept of an individual being a failure is a fairly new concept. And I’m fascinated with that.
Mills: But England is notorious for having had those debtors prisons in the 1700s, 1800s. So I mean, those people were failures as human beings.
West: They weren’t called failures apparently.
Edmondson: Right? We’re now adding that lens on later, right? Debtors, yeah. They had done something they weren’t supposed to do.
West: And probably illegal according to the law at the time, but they weren’t fed. But it’s in terms of economic, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Or if you’re successful, why aren’t you have money? The money part is the main definition of failure, not just in the United States now, but it’s been exported to the rest of the world, and it’s a strange phenomenon.
Edmondson: I think that’s really insightful. I think that our equation of economic success or financial success with success is very deep. And oddly, as you say, new, I mean new in the grand scheme of things, but not new, certainly not new for the last a hundred years or more. But if you think about it, it’s kind of a weird idea that we’ve gotten so fixated on one scorecard when there’s so many scorecards, and that’s the one we now have societally think is preeminent. Not how moral are you? How many people have you helped? Or how extraordinary is the literature that you’ve produced? It’s all that single scorecard.
West: Yeah, your book is great, but it hasn’t sold well, so you’re a failure, right?
Edmondson: Right. Even though it’s deep, meaningful, thoughtful, what have you.
Mills: Yeah. So last question I’m going to throw at both of you. What have been some of the failures you’ve experienced in your career that taught you something important that maybe made you a better scientist, teacher, researcher. Dr. West, I’ll throw it at you first.
West: I’ve got a lot of them. My favorite one is kind of trivial, but it has taught me a lesson. When I first got the idea for Museum of Failure, I could just feel like this is a good idea. So I immediately bought the web domain museumoffailure.com, and this was in 2016, and I thought, wow, I’m so lucky. I’m so smart that this domain is still available. And I was just blown away. And then I celebrated and had a beer, and I thought, I’m just such a genius. And then I got the receipt email and it said, congratulations, you own “Mu-sum of Failure.” So I must be the only owner of a museum who can’t spell the word “museum.”
Edmondson: That’s so good. Teach me to be less sloppy, attention to detail matters. Oh, that’s so good. I think mine is less interesting. The ones that come to mind are, well, I’ll just say one, a particular paper that was rejected from a journal that I had not even thought was a stretch goal. I thought it was good enough, and I was sort of shocked and taken aback. Again, it hadn’t been a stretch in the first place. And what I did next was I realized there’s really two options. Well, three, maybe one is just give up on the paper. Another is go downmarket, go to an even lower level journal. And then oddly, there’s a third option, which is to go upmarket, take the feedback seriously, make it better, and then submit it to a different, better journal.
And whether cheeky or not, I decided to go that way and it remains one of my favorite papers. It did get in, but not without some really tough criticism, two or three rounds of review to make it a better paper. And by the end of it, I was really proud of it. And it is absolutely crystal clear that the reviewers and the editor made it better, made it the paper it became. So, I think there was two lessons. One, don’t give up. The setbacks are painful, but don’t give up. And two, when you go for harder challenges, you actually are setting yourself up to get better feedback. I mean, the quality of the feedback, not easy, not fun, but being willing to take the tougher medicine ends up with a product I could feel more proud of.
Mills: Well, I want to thank you both for joining me today. This has been a great conversation. I have really enjoyed talking to both of you.
West: Thank you very much. Nice meeting you both, especially you, Amy. Big fan of your work.
Edmondson: Yeah, likewise. Great big fan. Likewise. This was really fun. So thank you.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
Amy Edmondson, PhD, is the Novartis professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. She has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked number 1 in 2021 and 2023; she also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017. She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organizational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets. Edmondson’s latest book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well (Atria), builds on her prior work on psychological safety and teaming to provide a framework for thinking about, discussing, and practicing the science of failing well.
Samuel West, PhD, is an organizational psychologist and licensed clinical psychologist who studies and consults on creativity and innovation in the workplace. He founded the Museum of Failure in Sweden in 2017. The museum has since toured the world, stopping in Shanghai, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C.
