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The future belongs to organizations that think like an octopus—distributed, intelligent, and endlessly adaptive.
I'm business futurist and AI keynote speaker Jonathan Brill. In this series, I talk with global leaders, executives, and innovators to discuss how AI and new models of leadership are rewriting the rules of business.
Jonathan Brill (00:00)
The future belongs to organizations that think like an octopus, distributed, intelligent, and endlessly adaptive. I'm business futurist and AI keynote speaker, Jonathan Brill. In this series, I talk with global leaders about how technology is rewriting the rules of business. In today's conversation, I speak with Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, about the concept of psychological safety and its critical role
in organizational transformation. So Amy, tell me a little bit about who you
Amy Edmondson (00:33)
My name is Amy Edmondson. I'm a professor at Harvard Business School where I teach and do research on organizational learning and teams and innovation.
Jonathan Brill (00:44)
Tell me a little bit about how you became interested in areas like psychological safety and that kind of work.
Amy Edmondson (00:51)
I went to graduate school with a sort of single-minded but very vague goal, which was to help organizations learn in a world that keeps changing. So I wanted to understand what it means for an organization to learn, why they're not good at it, and what, if anything, we can do about that. I stumbled into psychological safety in my very first research project, which was a project studying medical error.
in the healthcare delivery setting in a couple of hospitals. And my premise was that better teamwork would lead to better care and fewer errors, and that would be a part of the learning that would have to happen. And I wasn't able to show that that was true. But I was able to show that there were substantial differences across groups within the same organizations in people's willingness
and felt ability to speak up about error, to ask for help when they weren't sure what to do, to admit that something had gone wrong, to point out an error that someone else is about to made. That was profoundly different across groups. It was much later that I called that different psychological safety, that psychological safety as a felt belief that you can speak up with work-relevant content of any kind, including errors.
Jonathan Brill (02:16)
What are a couple of the things that you can do to increase psychological safety, especially when people are stressed or scared and you need to have that clarity, the ability to speak up?
Amy Edmondson (02:29)
The most important thing you can do to increase psychological safety is call attention to the nature of the work. Now that sounds pretty abstract, but if most work is full of uncertainty and highly interdependent, like you and I must work together to get the job done. Under conditions of uncertainty and interdependence, it is a given that things will go wrong. It is a given that we'll be doing something together that's never been done.
in exactly the same way before. So logically, that kind of work is gonna require that you are just speaking up quickly and honestly and candidly all the time. That's how you would achieve excellence in that kind of work. So that's really stage setting. You're sort of setting the stage to remind people we're not in the industrial era anymore where your job is to just keep your head down and do your job exactly as specified.
No, we're in the knowledge era, the digital era, where your job is to team up with other people to navigate uncertainty in an ongoing way. You simply can't do that work well unless you lower your guard and speak up. And then the second really important thing is inquiry. Ask good questions. Wherever you are, reawaken your curiosity and ask other people what they see, what they know. Because when I ask a question of someone else,
They feel awkward not responding. It does matter that I listen. So if I ask a question and then I listen, I have automatically created at least a moment of psychological safety and those moments multiply.
Jonathan Brill (04:12)
love that idea of just asking, what do know that I don't?
Amy Edmondson (04:15)
Exactly, exactly. What do you know that I don't? What are you seeing? What are we missing? What other ideas do you have? What concerns do you have? And notice it's often a what question. It's not a do you have concerns because that one is much too easy to answer in the negative. But what concerns do you have suggests, hmm, you know, if you're any good, you probably have something.
Jonathan Brill (04:37)
How did you learn to start thinking like this or questioning like this? Who taught you?
Amy Edmondson (04:43)
Well, I suppose my first grade teacher or, I mean, my parents, right? We are all born curious. It's keeping that curiosity alive that's the hard part. And probably a better answer to your question of who taught me that was an octogenarian named Buckminster Fuller, who was my first boss. My first job out of college was working for Buckminster Fuller as his chief engineer. The truth was I was his only engineer at the time. The two guys who had my job
before me, both went back to graduate school at the same time. So I had nobody to chief, not that I could have chief anybody if I did have anyone to chief. I was just out of college. I did engineering drawings and calculations for new projects. And Bucky Fuller, again, in his mid to late 80s was the most curious and joyful and sort of creative and appreciative ⁓ person I'd ever met. If you can still be curious,
and generous and inclusive in your 80s seem to me, that's probably a pretty good way to be.
Jonathan Brill (05:50)
It seems like there are two moments in ⁓ any transformation where psychological safety is most important. And I might be wrong about this. You're certainly the expert. But one is at that beginning point when it's clear from the outside that a change needs to happen. But from the inside, it is nothing but clear. How do you open up that oculus?
Amy Edmondson (06:16)
Great question. So, psychological safety describes a state of low perceived interpersonal risk. So, of all of the things I have to worry about, and there are many, the one I don't have to worry about is, will you reject or humiliate me if I say something wrong or do something unpopular or make a mistake? And in my deep heart, I'm thinking, no, you won't.
Right? That you understand I'm a fallible human being, you're a fallible human being, we're gonna roll up our sleeves and try to figure out together where we go. More precisely, your question is, in a sense, how do you sell people on the need for change when it is so much more comfortable to keep doing what I'm doing? I'm pretty good at it, I don't wanna try, change is scary. So here's the connection, right? Change is scary because
Two big reasons, one, it implies that what I'm doing now isn't good enough. And two, it's the unknown. I don't know what it'll look and feel like. So psychological safety matters a lot to make these feelings and worries discussable. And then at least we can sort of entertain the possibility that we're not bad for being here now and the journey ahead just might be exciting.
Jonathan Brill (07:42)
And when I think you're answering the follow on question too, it feels like that first piece, I think about it like Star Wars, right? Luke Skywalker is sitting on Tatooine in his farm town thinking, ⁓ it might be nice to go up in the stars. Then the stormtroopers come and shoot up his farm and he discovers the universe is not at all like he thought it was.
That moment inevitably has to happen and there has to ideally not in painful or violent circumstances. There's another kind of awakening and I think that's what you're suggesting. Yes. Is that there's a there are other paths forward.
Amy Edmondson (08:21)
Let me put it like this first. So I worked for, I don't know if you knew him, Larry Wilson, who was just a wonderful sort of visionary in this space. fact, that's how I learned about Joseph Campbell was through Larry Wilson. He was a voracious reader and connector of the dots. He founded a company called Wilson Learning Corporation that for a time was the largest sales and management training company in the world. And then I knew him later.
Started a company called Pecos River Learning Center. Anyway, ⁓ he made his sort of early mark on the world by being the youngest lifetime winner of the million dollar round table. So he was a very effective salesperson and people were like, well, ⁓ how did you do it? And of course, the key insight was sales isn't about how do I get my money out of your pocket? Sales is about how do I help you solve a problem?
And generally, initially, the question is, how do I help you solve a problem you don't even know you have? And so the four hurdles are no trust, no need, no help, no hurry. And I've got to overcome all four. And the first, no trust is, who am I? You don't trust me. You don't have any inherent need to think I've got your best interests at heart. So we have to connect. I have to forge a relationship with you where...
you can see me and I can see you and there's a just, sort of break that barrier just a little bit. I'm a trustworthy person, you know, maybe because I have this expertise or maybe because we know people in common or whatever it is, but we have to be in a state of at least, and that's where psychological safety comes in as well. No need, I think is what you were talking about, which is I don't, okay, trust you, even like being with you, but I don't have any problems that need solving right now.
And so the second job of an effective sale or an effective ⁓ change journey is to help you see that the current state is not optimal, right? That the current state either will come back to haunt us soon, that there are sort of obstacles or dangers ahead that we will confront if we just sit tight and hope it all goes away. So I begin.
through storytelling or what have you to understand that, ⁓ yes, there is a gap here. And then there's a kind of moment of, uh-oh, I have a gap. I don't see what's gonna help, right? So no help. And the no help, the way you overcome the no help hurdle is by describing what it is we might do, what we might find, what we might try going forward that will, that could work, that could help. ⁓ okay, that's pretty compelling. I'm with you.
and I trust you and I'm like, let's do it. No hurry, of course, is the final hurdle, which is not today, right? Why the urgency? And so your last task is to explain, to sell the urgency that this really is something we have to start now.
Jonathan Brill (11:37)
And how in a psychologically safe way do you sell that? ⁓
Amy Edmondson (11:42)
I think that the psychologically safe way to sell the urgency is this, we are in it together. There's nothing we can't kind of endure and overcome and go through when we're in it together. I think the worst part about change, in a funny way, the only bad part about change is the fear that I'll be left behind, the fear that I'll be alone, the fear that I won't be able to do it. But if we're working together,
If we're gonna team up and figure it out, okay, I'm in.
Jonathan Brill (12:16)
So over the next three years, what is the big change in business that managers aren't yet preparing for?
Amy Edmondson (12:26)
I think it's the far more committed and sincere concern about sustainability. I don't mean just environmental, but as we roll into 2025, I think it will, it must become more evident to everyone that we have work to do if businesses and societies are going to be able to thrive into the longer term.
Jonathan Brill (12:55)
How do you create the psychological safety as a leader in a time of economic uncertainty to open up?
Amy Edmondson (13:05)
The most important thing you can do to create psychological safety in times of economic uncertainty is revise the taken for granted belief that if we sort of do nothing and lay low, that's going to work. So it's not an option to just hide anymore, I don't think. And it just, that's a losing game. There's really no choice, right? There's no choice but to take
interpersonal risks that are necessary for problem solving, for teamwork in general, for innovation of any kind. So it's really just about overcoming the default mindset that just business as usual will work.
Jonathan Brill (13:49)
That's awesome. Thank you.
Amy Edmondson (13:51)
You're welcome.