How Psychological Safety Helps Teams Learn from Mistakes
Introduction
In a world obsessed with perfection, it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that good teams actually make more mistakes. However, a fascinating study conducted in the early 1990s by Amy Edmondson reveals an important truth about the relationship between teamwork and errors. Edmondson’s new book, “Right or Wrong,” delves into the complexities of this subject, highlighting the vital role of psychological safety in fostering a learning culture within organizations. This article explores Edmondson’s findings and provides a deeper understanding of the link between psychological safety, mistakes, and growth.
The Power of Psychological Safety
Psychological safety refers to the environment within a team or organization where individuals feel safe to speak up, share their thoughts and ideas, and admit their mistakes. Edmondson’s research uncovered a surprising correlation: teams with higher levels of psychological safety were more likely to admit their mistakes. In contrast, dysfunctional teams exhibited a culture of denial, making it difficult for individuals to acknowledge their errors. The implications of this denial are significant, as organizations and individuals cannot learn and grow if they refuse to recognize and address their mistakes.
Creating a Culture of Psychological Safety
To foster psychological safety within teams, leaders must create an environment that encourages open communication and embraces the admission of mistakes. Examples from successful companies like Alcoa and Toyota demonstrate how this can be achieved. When Paul O’Neill took over as the CEO of Alcoa, he set a lofty goal of zero workplace accidents. However, he also took a critical step by providing his personal phone number to each worker, inviting them to report any safety breaches. This move instilled a sense of psychological safety, empowering employees to speak up without fear.
Similarly, Toyota implemented the “Andon Cord” system, allowing any production line worker to halt the line by pulling a cord if they identify a problem. This physical representation of Toyota’s commitment to listening to its workers not only creates a sense of psychological safety but also ensures that issues are promptly addressed.
Differentiating Learning from Harm
While psychological safety is essential for learning from mistakes, it is equally important to develop an analytical framework that helps distinguish between helpful and harmful actions. In the field of medicine, this distinction has often been lacking, resulting in costly errors. The introduction of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) after World War II revolutionized the medical field by providing a scientific approach to evaluating treatments.
Prior to RCTs, doctors made countless mistakes without any analytical tool to learn from them. The case of Galen, a classical physician who claimed his treatment cured everyone except those who were incurable, illustrates the lack of evidence-based decision-making. Today, businesses and politics can benefit from adopting a similar approach, relying on data and analysis to determine what works and what doesn’t.
The Importance of Individual Growth
Just as organizations need a culture of learning, individuals must also embrace the opportunity to grow from their mistakes. Adopting an open mindset, seeking feedback, and measuring progress and performance are crucial steps in personal development. However, this process is not without its challenges. Admitting mistakes can be difficult, and committing to improvement requires perseverance and humility. Nevertheless, the rewards of personal growth and success make it a worthwhile endeavor.
Conclusion
Amy Edmondson’s research on the relationship between teamwork and mistakes highlights the importance of psychological safety in fostering a learning culture within organizations. Creating an environment where individuals feel safe to admit their mistakes and share their thoughts and ideas is essential for growth and improvement. Additionally, employing an analytical framework to differentiate between what works and what doesn’t, both at the organizational and individual levels, further enhances the learning process. By embracing the concepts of psychological safety and continuous improvement, teams and individuals can unlock their full potential and thrive in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing world.
Summary
In her book “Right or Wrong,” Amy Edmondson explores the connection between teamwork and mistakes. Her research reveals that teams with a higher level of psychological safety are more likely to admit their mistakes, while dysfunctional teams tend to deny their errors. Creating a culture of psychological safety involves fostering open communication and embracing the admission of mistakes. It is equally crucial to develop an analytical framework that distinguishes between helpful and harmful actions. Individuals must also adopt an open mindset and commit to personal growth by seeking feedback, measuring progress, and admitting mistakes. These principles enable teams and individuals to learn from their mistakes and strive for continuous improvement.
—————————————————-
| Article | Link |
|---|---|
| UK Artful Impressions | Premiere Etsy Store |
| Sponsored Content | View |
| 90’s Rock Band Review | View |
| Ted Lasso’s MacBook Guide | View |
| Nature’s Secret to More Energy | View |
| Ancient Recipe for Weight Loss | View |
| MacBook Air i3 vs i5 | View |
| You Need a VPN in 2023 – Liberty Shield | View |
Receive free updates from FT Magazine
We will send you a myFT Daily Summary email gathering the latest FT Magazine news every morning.
Do good teams make fewer mistakes? It seems like a reasonable hypothesis. But in the early 1990s, when a young researcher analyzed evidence from medical teams at two Massachusetts hospitals, the numbers told her a completely different story: The teams that showed the best teamwork were the ones that committed the most. number of errors. What the hell was happening?
The researcher’s name was Amy Edmondson and, 30 years after that original puzzle, her new book Right or wrong unravels a morass of confusion, contradiction, and happy, glib talk about the joys of failure. She solved the puzzle very soon. The better teams didn’t make more mistakes; They admitted more to having made mistakes. Dysfunctional teams admitted very few, for the simple reason that no one on those teams felt safe admitting them.
The tired euphemism for a mistake is a “learning experience,” but Edmondson’s story points to a broader truth about that cliché: Neither organizations nor people can learn from their mistakes if they deny that they ever occurred.
This denial is quite common, particularly at the organizational level, and for obvious cover-up reasons. But it can be easy to overlook the implications. For example, Edmondson recalls a meeting with executives from a financial services company in April 2020. With hospitals around the world overwhelmed by Covid patients in acute respiratory distress and many economies in lockdown, Edmondson was told that his attitude toward failure it had changed. Typically, they explained, they were enthusiastic about sensible risk-taking and felt that it was okay to fail if you learned from that failure. Not during a pandemic, though. They had decided that failure was temporarily “off limits.”
How absurd. The moment Covid turned the world upside down was exactly the time to take calculated risks and learn quickly, not to mention a time when failures would be inevitable. Demanding perfection in such a context guaranteed heaviness and denial.
It may be wise to aim for perfection, Edmondson explains, but not without laying the groundwork for people to feel safe admitting mistakes or reporting the mistakes of others. For example, when Paul O’Neill became head of the American aluminum company Alcoa in 1987, he set the seemingly unattainable goal of zero workplace accidents. That goal improved Alcoa’s financial performance because it helped instill a highly profitable focus on detail and quality. The case is celebrated in the business books. But it surely would have backfired if O’Neill hadn’t written to each worker, giving them his personal phone number and asking them to call him if there were any security breaches.
Another famous example is Toyota’s Andon Cord: any production line worker can pull the cord above their workstation if they see signs of a problem. (Contrary to myth, the cable does not immediately stop the production line, but it does trigger an urgent meeting to discuss the problem. The line stops if the problem is not resolved within a minute or so.) The Andon Cord is a physical device. representation of Toyota’s commitment to listening to production line workers. We want to hear from you, he says.
Creating this sense of psychological safety when reporting errors is essential, but it is not the only ingredient of an intelligent response to failure.
Another is the data to discern the difference between help and harm. In the history of medicine, these data have typically been lacking. Many people recover from their ailments even with inadequate care, while others die despite receiving the best treatment. And since each case is different, the only sure way to decide if a treatment is effective is to conduct a large, properly controlled experiment. This idea is so simple that a prehistoric civilization could have used it, but it didn’t take off until after World War II. As Druin Burch explains in taking the medicineScholars and doctors groped for centuries without taking advantage of it.
A thousand years ago, Chinese scholars conducted a controlled trial of ginseng, with two runners each running a mile: “The one without ginseng developed severe shortness of breath, while the one who took the ginseng breathed evenly and smoothly.” . With 200 runners perhaps they would have learned something; When comparing a pair, the experiment was useless.
The Baghdad-based scholar Abu Bakr al-Razi attempted a clinical trial even earlier, in the 10th century, but was only able to convince himself that bloodshed cured meningitis. A plausible explanation for his error is that he did not randomly assign patients to the treatment and control groups, but instead chose those he considered most likely to benefit.
Ultimately, the idea of a proper randomized controlled trial was formalized in 1923, and the first such clinical trials were not conducted until the 1940s. As a result, doctors made error after error for centuries, without having the analytical tool available to learn from those mistakes. Almost 2,000 years ago, the classical physician Galen declared that he had a treatment that cured everyone “in a short time, except those whom he does not help, who all die. . . “It fails only in incurable cases.” Funny. But how many decisions in business or politics today are justified on the same basis? A culture in which we learn from failure requires both an atmosphere in which people can speak openly and an analytical framework that can discern the difference between what works and what doesn’t.
Similar principles apply to individuals. We need to keep an open mind to the possibilities of our own mistakes, actively seek feedback to improve, and measure progress and performance when possible. We should not be afraid to admit mistakes and commit to improving in the future.
That’s easy advice to prescribe. It’s not that easy to swallow.
Tim Harford’s new children’s book, “The Truth Detective” (Wren & Rook), is now available
Continue @FTMag to find out first about our latest stories
—————————————————-