The Mindset Economy
From the creators of the successful Evolving Leader podcast, comes their new show The Mindset Economy.
The central question this show explores is:
How will we work, live, and belong in a more uncertain world, where machines can think?
The hypothesis behind the show is that as quantitative work - routine, low cognitive work - is automated, Human Advantage will come from qualitative work - creativity, judgement, social intelligence etc. This show explores the changes taking place; how leaders will respond to creation of the new economy being ushered in by the mass adoption of AI, and how we can accelerate Human Advantage.
The Mindset Economy will feature a broad diversity of voices: from leaders at the edge of this transformation to performance scientists and AI thinkers and social philosophers.
The Mindset Economy
How To Create Conditions That Maximise Human Impact with Amy Edmondson
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Most leaders say they want candour. Almost none of them have it.
Amy Edmondson, Harvard professor and the world's leading researcher on psychological safety, argues that the problem isn't culture, it isn't trust, it isn't people. It's the invisible interpersonal risk that makes speaking up feel more dangerous than staying quiet. In a world where AI is accelerating the pace of change, that silence is becoming increasingly costly.
Edmondson sits down with Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, authors and leadership experts who have spent their careers working at the sharp end of organisational change, to reframe psychological safety not as comfort, but as permission for candour, a subtle but important distinction that changes how leaders should think about the environments they create. She explains why intelligent failure is a capability to be built, not a mistake to be tolerated, while learning, not knowing, is fast becoming the defining leadership skill of the AI era.
For anyone leading teams through uncertainty, this episode offers a sharper understanding of why high-quality conversations are the most underleveraged asset in most organisations, and what it actually takes to have them.
Reading from Amy Edmondson:
Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed (Penguin, 2024)
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Wiley, 2025)
Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)
Social:
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YouTube @TheMindsetEconomy
The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.
One thing we do know is that when we don't have all the answers, our job is to be learners. And I think another thing we know is that we're not always good at it's not our natural state. We need to pause, take a deep breath and choose learning.
Jean Gomes:Welcome to the mindset economy, the show where we explore how to live better, to work smarter and feel more connected in an increasingly uncertain world where machines can think. So we have got this incredible opportunity to speak to one of the world's leading thinkers about how we relate to the world. Amy Edmondson, we are delighted to have you on the show. Thank you so much for finding time in your schedule to talk to us.
Amy Edmondson:I'm honoured to be here.
Jean Gomes:Excellent. So welcome to the mindset economy. This show is about helping people to positively adapt to a profound set of new realities at home, in our communities and we're obviously at work. Can you give us a sense of the broad picture you have of the world right now and how you're feeling about 2026
Amy Edmondson:oh, my, you know, I guess we've gone from VUCA to Bonnie. We're in the almost the perfect storm, when you consider the combination of geopolitical unrest, technological uncertainty, particularly brought in on steroids by AI and divisive issues and so forth. It's never been quite this challenging before.
Jean Gomes:And how does that relate to what you're you're finding every day, you know? How does that materially affect you in what you're doing.
Amy Edmondson:Well, I mean, it affects me in two ways. One, just personally, I sometimes feel quite overwhelmed. And, you know, and, and I toggle back and forth from nothing I've ever done matters at all, because it's just this is too big and and doesn't seem to be navigable. To thinking, hey, wait a minute, maybe this human stuff is this learning stuff, which I've spent the last 30 years exploring, is more important than ever. And so one thing we do know is that when we don't have all the answers, our job is to be learners. And I think another thing we know is that we're not always good at it's not our natural state. We need, you know, we need to pause, take a deep breath and choose learning.
Jean Gomes:Well, that's amazingly reassuring to hear you saying that. I think a lot of people listening to this show will go well if Amy Edmondson saying that I'm okay feeling like that too.
Scott Allender:That's how I felt as soon as I heard it. I'm like, Oh, I feel related, yeah.
Amy Edmondson:And I think, well actually, you just said something really I think that connects to something really important, which is, we must make this discussable. But the the private anxiety is intolerable, but when we have the sort of shared opportunity to name it and say, What does this mean? And how can we, you know, how do we go forward? Then I think we're better off as humans.
Scott Allender:So let's, let's dive into the concept that you've spent a great deal of your career focused on. Hopefully you're not tired of talking about it yet, but I talk about it quite a bit. I've, I've, I've had a great deal of interest in this idea that you've presented years ago, and that's this idea of idea of psychological safety, and it's a concept that is often misunderstood and therefore misapplied. And there's a lot of failed attempts at trying to create these cultures of psych safety. So before we go any farther, maybe you could set the stage of, you know, what is psychological safety? How do people get it wrong, etc.
Amy Edmondson:Well, I think that the shortest way to put it is it's a sense of permission for candour. More little fuller is that it's a belief that your work environment, your context, is safe for speaking up with work, relevant ideas, thoughts, concerns, descending views and even mistakes and failures. So it's permission for candour how it has gotten misunderstood. And, you know, partly, certainly a great deal that is the fault of the term itself is that it's gotten misunderstood as being nice or feeling comfortable. It's psychological safety. Is not, I repeat, not about feeling comfortable, because it's a it's an environment, it's a learning environment. And learning is never completely comfortable, right? There's always a little bit of anxiety about in in the act of learning. We don't like having been wrong or incomplete before. You know when we're learning, when you learn, you're taking risks. So really, what it is is a sense of that it's okay to be uncomfortable, and it's okay to be uncomfortable with my colleagues, with my friends.
Scott Allender:And why is that important?
Amy Edmondson:Well, it's it's important because this is so I hate to say it so simply, but it's important because learning is important. I mean the whole idea of the mind. with and around others, and involves interpersonal risk. That means we need to lower interpersonal risk so that we can learn right. You can learn privately, all by yourself, without worrying about how you look, but when you're in a team or doing things with others, where the team has to be engaging in learning behaviours like asking for help, like sharing ideas, like admitting mistakes, like experimenting, you can't do that. It turns out people just are less willing to do that in a non psychologically safe environment. So in a nutshell, it matters for the quality of the work. Without psychological safety in doing knowledge work, you just can't get the quality of the output that you need and want.
Jean Gomes:And there's a very pivotal statement in the fearless organisation where you say, it's not that people don't feel these things. They don't feel fear in a psychologically safe environment. It's the regardless of feeling those things, they are able to overcome that and say what needs to be said.
Amy Edmondson:Yes, it's, it's so it's, I like to say that psychological safety and courage are two halves of the same, you know, valuable coin it. Because, yeah, as human beings, it's always going to be, in fact, it's, you know, you're missing, you know, a jean or something. If it's not uncomfortable, you know, to say, Hey, I think I was wrong here, or I need your help or right, there's always going to be that time that need to take a breath and say, Okay, I'm going for it and feel as you say, feel that fear, but do it anyway. The what psychological safety means is that that it doesn't feel impossible, right, or it doesn't feel extremely awkward or unlikely to work out well for me, if I do that, right, it's like, okay, I don't love doing this, but I know my you know, they had my back. We're here together. We're all human beings, fallible, human beings trying to do the best we can. And that's the environment I'm in,
Jean Gomes:And one of the areas where people feel most unsafe is in the power dynamic, where somebody is more powerful in an organisation carries more weight, and particularly organisations are very hierarchy bound the big and the big move in all of this is around the leaders and what they need to do. What do you see as the kind of core shift there?
Amy Edmondson:Well, I think that's true, and I never want to underestimate the degree to which any individual, even not in a leadership role, can can influence the the interpersonal climate that they're working in, but, but you're absolutely right, and you know, the more hierarchical, or another way to put it is, the more an organisation takes hierarchy seriously, the more psychological safety is threatened. But so so hierarchy can be thought of as a risk factor, but it's not it, you know, I'm not saying get rid of hierarchy. I'm saying get rid of hierarchies pernicious effects. So hierarchy is okay, so long as it is well handled by the and particularly by those who are in higher status or higher power roles. And by well handled. I mean, they will show up every day, honestly, saying things like, we've never done a project like this before. This is new. I think we need your ideas. We need your input. Or this is high risk work. Anyone can spot something that others miss. We need to hear from you, right? So, naming, naming the context, naming the reality, in a way that says, I understand, I and we are deeply in need of your voice and just doing that first and then proactively, as you're doing right now, asking questions like, What are you seeing? What are customers saying? You know, what ideas do you have? It is very awkward for a person not to answer a question. You know, I I couldn't do it, right? If you're asking me a question, wouldn't it be nice if I would just sit here quietly? Right? I can't do it. It's almost impossible. So that's what leaders need to do. They just need to demonstrate their curiosity by saying, What are you noticing? You know, what are we missing? Who's got a different view? Be be proactively curious. That creates psychological safety, and, of course, respond productively. You know someone disagrees with you, uncertain territory. You say, Thank you, right. Thanks for pointing out that. Alternative, right? It's, it's, it's going to help us get to a better solution by the end.
Scott Allender:It is such an important distinction, the way you frame the idea that this is not about creating comfort, but reducing interpersonal risk, and where leaders aren't doing what you've just said, how do team members, how can they help influence,
Amy Edmondson:yeah, you know, it's so it's, it's, it's funny, because what I what I will say, is it's the same exact behaviours. Now I understand they will have, you know, the higher power you are, the more what you do impacts more people it impacts, and the more we sort of pay attention to it and take it seriously. But just imagine you're you're a team member. You're a member of a team. What you can do is exactly the same. You can call attention to the novelty or the uncertainty or the of the work like or the high stakes. You know that it's high risk work, patient safety, for example, right? You can sort of say, okay, you know, we need to do our best, because things could go wrong here. You can ask questions. Anytime you ask a question of a colleague, you know, what thoughts do you have? You're demonstrating in that moment, interest in them. You're showing your respect for what's going on inside their heads, and that it just even if, in a very small way, makes a real difference, so you can show up. I guess you could say it this way, you can practice leadership without being a leader. And leadership is are things that you do to make others better, or to show others that they matter, that so that we can, together have the positive impact we're trying to have.
Scott Allender:I was going to move on to the sort of what you're seeing in the work you do with leaders in this space. So, you know, let's, let's picture you at a C suite with a mix of advocates and perhaps sceptics, and, you know, some disengaged people, because they see this as a sort of soft topic, and they are misunderstanding what it is. How are you advising them to wake up to the realities of not embracing this kind of thinking?
Amy Edmondson:Well, I It's so funny. I mean, I probably nothing is more annoying than, you know, calling this soft because maybe we've known for a long time that the soft stuff is the hard stuff. I mean, we we can all learn technical skills and then, you know, use them well, but learning the skills of effective human interaction and mutual understanding and sort of self awareness and learning about yourself to become more effective. structured in place, they just won't happen. Today is never the day to kind of do an, you know, to do a debrief, or to do so they have, you have to put some of those, you know, in place in a very firm way. Now let's talk about high quality conversations. So high quality conversations, this is just my working definition. It's number one. Everyone in the conversation is either contributing meaningful bits or listening intently. They're not on their phones. They're not holding back relevant stuff. They're not bullying disrupting, you know, taking us off course. They're either contributing to the issue at hand, or listening intently to learn from others. That's number one, obviously, that's, you know, we're just talking about psychological safety here and and sort of earnest in intent to do the best you can. Number two, there's a healthy mix of what Chris Arjun is called advocacy and inquiry, what we might call statements and questions, because if everybody's just pontificating, making statements, you know, probably nobody's really learning. But if there are, in fact, sprinkled in there genuine questions, you know, the kind where I asked you, Jean, I really need to know your views, or What experiences have you had with with this issue, I'm I want to fill out my picture, right? So, so you hear that if you were to record them, you could look at the transcript and say, Huh, look at that. That's a genuine question. That's a and then the statements, too would be the kind that are not trying to pull the wool over each other's eyes, but trying to genuinely say, here's how I see it, here's my logic, here's my here's my evidence, right? We're, we're truly taking seriously the burden of data to, you know, to not just share with you my high level opinion, but to really share with you how I got there and what I know and what I've seen, and then, thirdly, anyone involved in that conversation, that high quality conversation, that we're getting somewhere rather than a tennis game, or we're going around in circles, or, you know, people are holding back and tiptoeing around the boss. We have that sense that just by being part of this, I'm getting smarter.
Jean Gomes:This is fascinating. And I'm wondering, you know, like, when we, when we this whole shift towards an economy that's more centric on the human qualities rather than the things that can be tangibly measured, which is where businesses are currently obsessed in how do we measure these things? Do you think, I mean, is that a false Chase, or is this something that we we can move towards from your perspective.
Amy Edmondson:I mean, it's a great question. We the measurement. You know, all measures are faulty, and we need them. I mean, we need to, we need to use them and appreciate their limitations. But also we triangulate, we get their strength. So there's survey measures, you know, like survey measure of psychological safety, for example, which doesn't use the term psychological safety. It things like, if I make a mistake on this team, it's held against you, you know, reverse scored, or it's easy to ask for help when I don't know what to do, things like that. So you can do that. But I'm, I'm intrigued now, like having defined high quality conversations, as I just did, it seems plausible that, since people are recording just about everything anyway that we could have, we could analyse them on those criteria, and maybe with, you know, maybe with help from AI, probably because otherwise it's pretty labour intensive. And we could get a score, you know, on we could have a one to five on all three of those criteria. And we could, because nobody's judging us. It's just our earnest desire to get better, you know, next week than we are this week. So we could sort of say, All right, you know, that was a three. But, you know, we can keep leaning in, and we can keep being willing to be assessed like that for our learning Ness as a team.
Jean Gomes:Yeah, I'll give that a go. Next week, I'll get our management meetings recorded and assessed from from those three points and see what happens.
Amy Edmondson:I mean, I probably should add that, you know, high quality conversations. That was a high standard what I described. And I don't think you need to do that for you know, where should the holiday party be? Right? It's just, just do it right? But it's when we're here we're going to make a high level higher or we're going. To launch a new product, or we're going to acquire a company, or, you know, anything that is is has potential risks and and is is is meaningfully consequential. Those are the ones where we are, we must become determined to slow down. I don't mean Do it slowly, but, you know, pause and have a high quality conversation.
Michelle Beagley:Mindset is the interplay of how we feel, think and see, in this rapidly changing world where machines can think, our mindset will profoundly influence our economic success, well being, and our capacity to embrace uncertainty. Welcome to the mindset economy.
Scott Allender:This might be going a little bit off topic. Well, not off topic, but this might be venturing into an area we don't want to go. But as you were talking, I was sort of thinking, excuse me, as you were talking, I was thinking, I feel like I know leaders who create these conditions that psychological safety is possible and we can have these high quality conversations, but it's a mix of very different personalities, and there's still people in that room who are very verbose and are the ones who have no problem sharing ideas, and other people who are really good at listening, but even at the expense of sharing their own ideas, they don't speak up as naturally. Have you? Do you have any thoughts in that space about how leaders can think about this sort of motivation, specific kind of realities that everybody's dealing from.
Amy Edmondson:So, yeah, personality I mean, yeah, there are personality differences, for sure, and I think that the best approach is to make it discussable. I mean, everybody doesn't have to weigh in on everything, of course. And if there are sort of recurring patterns where there are people who are just always holding back because they're more reticent, or Scott, I could not be more interested in what your thoughts are about this issue. You know, let, let's hear them. And it's almost, in a way, you've got to help people understand, you know, because most of us feel like we're being sort of, you know, polite and deferential, but you're also cheating your team out of your insights, which you shouldn't be on this team, if your insights don't add value to this team. So, I mean, I don't, I can, I can be a tough guy, but, but I, or I can be, but it's like, it's, it's got to be somewhat true, right? If I'm going to invite you in or, or at least, point to the pattern, the like, the I know I notice your silence, it may be fine, or it may be problematic. How do I know, right? Because I can't, I don't have X ray vision inside your head. So, so I think, you name that, and conversely, someone who is taking up all the airspace in the room, I would say they too need, you know compassionately. They need and deserve some feedback, because they're if you are in the presence of or on the verge of being in the presence of eye rolling, and you're going to be the last one who knows it. And that's not fair, but so it's, it's, it's almost the difference between being kind and being nice. You know, being nice is easy. Just say what I think you would. You know, it's comfortable, right? But being kind is being willing to, you know, respecting others enough to be willing to you know you might be wrong, but at least to be willing to convey your observations about the possible impact that their behaviour might be having on the team.
Jean Gomes:I mean, I'm fascinated in your thoughts on the counterpoint to talking in teams, and whether silence also can be, like, really helpful for creativity and reflection so on what your thoughts are on that,
Amy Edmondson:yeah, I mean, I that's, in a way, what I'm trying to say when you're listening. I mean, hopefully you're silent, you're not somewhere else. You know you're silent, you're listening. And that couldn't be more important, and and and it's so important that everybody ought to be spending some time doing it. So because silence, you may be just, you know not, maybe you are. You should be processing, and in the processing of that silence, you will you may notice patterns that those who are speaking will miss, because you know when you're speaking, it's taking your your effort and your thought, and you're trying to be clear, Might be missed, or suddenly a leap, a leap of logic, has just been made, and you realise we may not have evidence for that leap, like we may be about to launch this thing based on an assumption that's faulty, and it's much more likely that the silent person will notice that than the person speaking, because they're already they're busy speaking.
Jean Gomes:And I'm wondering whether, you know, like not just listening in silence, but also like, collectively silence so we all get a moment.
Amy Edmondson:Oh yes, okay, interesting, awkward, but potentially very powerful. And you see that, I mean, sometimes some people have practice. Remember, we talked about practices and rituals, but like, okay, we're all going to come together and, you know, read the brief and then talk about it. Or we're going to come together. You could say, just jot down your top concerns, issues, what have you. I mean, I think that might be a very good practice. Or just be quiet. Listen, that could feel a little, you know, new age, but it's the the point of making sure to put in some pauses between all the activity, I think is critical nowadays, because there's just so much sort of thing to thing to thing that without deliberately inserting Some pauses to think we could be at great risk. So you
Scott Allender:just had an article published in Harvard Business Review about AI's impact on psychological safety. So can we pivot to that as we sure more automated world?
Amy Edmondson:Well, that's with Jayshree Seth at 3M who's a sort of R and D, leader there and and, and these, you know, these. The most of the examples and so forth in the article come from from her. But the observation we make, or the argument we make, is that when, when AI becomes a team member, part of the team, part of part of the sort of, one of the roles here that that's participating with us, there are certain when things go wrong, when that when when they produce errors, or when, you know when they produce output that wasn't what we expected or didn't data, the the output is, is being presented as here it is. It's right, it's accurate. But if we don't trust it, we it can impact not only how we're interacting with the AI, but how we're interacting with our other team members as well.
Jean Gomes:Where do you see that going in the future? When you when you have tea, when when AI is kind of like a colleague sitting around the table with us?
Amy Edmondson:You know, I, I, I think I don't have a crystal ball, but I do think what, what the future is calling for is what, exactly what your podcast is dedicated to, which is a sort of learning orientation, a my, a mindset that says I don't know. Evangelist, they'll just tell you, ah, it's all going to be great, or something like that. And if you ask that of a person with worries and concerns, they'll say, like, I don't know, it could be awful, right? So, or they might not say, I don't know. They might just say, it's going to be awful. I may be overstating the case.
Jean Gomes:That's a really interesting, you know, kind of like tension to hold in in all of this, and it's it leads really nicely to a question about your other book that we love, right kind of wrong, which illustrates the whole opens up the whole idea of understanding failure from lots of different perspectives and helping us to think about it, to move past the limitations of the word itself, which is problematic. So how do we, how can we think about failure in a really productive way that that brings us into the space of psychological safety?
Amy Edmondson:Yeah, so there's like, I like to, you know, wrote an article in The Guardian a couple years ago, it said they essentially said, you know, show me a successful person in any field, athlete, scientist, you know, entrepreneur. And I will show you someone who has failed more often, not less, than the average person in their field. And that's, of course, just more more times at bat, right? They've been more willing to take risks, to stretch beyond their initial, you know, comfort zone, and so they have succeeded through the the learning. But, and those kinds of failures are intelligent failures. It's a it's it's a failure. It's an undesired result of a thoughtful foray into new territory. You try something you don't yet know how to do. Well, you might, you know you're likely to have a failure, but it's okay. It's new territory. It's in pursuit of a goal with a hypothesis and no bigger than necessary, to get the new information or skill that you previously lacked. So those kinds of failures, and they are failures. I mean, people can. People often say, Well, don't call them failures, you know, call them learning moments, or call them whatever, discoveries. And that's fine, except I think we actually need to detoxify the word. Which brings me to the second point, which is that failure is a part of life, right? If you want to have a failure free life, you can't do it, right? It's just, it's just not a thing. So then we have to say, Okay, since it was, since it seems to have been included as part of the life journey, let's make friends with it. But that doesn't mean we have to make friends with stupid failures, or what I call basic failures, which are the undesired results of unintended deviations from, you know, existing knowledge, right? So basic failures are the failures that occur you you know, you accidentally check the wrong box in a form, and, you know, fail to pay your taxes in the right way, or whatever. You know the things that if you're alert, awake, vigilant, you wouldn't have had those right? And we want, we want people to aspire to be Alert, alert, awake and vigilant when the stakes are high, right? It's fine to, you know, play around for for low stakes things. In fact, I approve. I, you know, I, I advocated, like, Have fun experimenting when the stakes are low. But I am not at all a fan of preventable, expensive or dangerous failures, right in any way, shape or form. So those are basic failures, single cause, usually by inattention or mistake, and then complex failures, which, of course, are on the rise. They're the kind of inevitable result of interactive complexity in our systems. They're the failures that happen when a handful of factors come together in just the wrong way and produce an undesired outcome. The good news on those, if there is any, is that often all you need to do is catch and correct one of the contributing factors to prevent the failure, right? You don't have to get them all, but if you take one of the pieces out of the puzzle, you don't end up with the worst case scenario.
Scott Allender:I love the idea of detoxifying the word failure. And as you talk through that, I was thinking, you know, in many organisational sort of cultures, it seems that people are getting bonus and reward simply on successes. And so there's a real fear of taking any even calculated risks and experimenting, which then minimises innovation and creativity and solving new challenges, because you stay safe and just keep producing the status quo. So talking about mindset, how do we get more mindset shifts there, right?
Amy Edmondson:I mean, you just described something that's so pervasive and so important, which is that the sort of incentives, formal and informal in many organisations are set up to reward only success and not intelligent failure, not, you know, not thoughtful risk taking. Working. And so what they inadvertently are doing is setting themselves up the company that is for a different kind of failure, which is the failure to innovate, the failure to adapt as needed in a rapidly changing world. So you're you will, you'll do great today, but you'll be out of business tomorrow in the metaphorical sense, right? So, so it's, it's like it all looks good until it doesn't, and so, or you need to put in place the incentives for learning that really are, that really do, say those of you who are, you know, not stretching, not taking smart risks, or just not adding all that value. You have to find ways, and those ways will be different in different kinds of industries and different kinds of organisations, but you have to find ways to
Jean Gomes:Can you talk to us about this idea of a failure landscape, and how it helps, you know, to have these kind of more concrete and rational conversations about failure?
Amy Edmondson:Yes. So I the landscape that I have in mind has two dimensions, like all landscapes, and let's call the horizontal dimension will be the type of context that we're working in, and it's roughly going to be go from highly certain or consistent, like an automotive assembly line to well understood but variable like a patient care delivery experience in a hospital, say, supply chains, whatever much work falls into that variable category, all the way over to novel, to R and D, to innovation and invention. So we get more we have higher uncertainty as we go to the right, which kind of means failure is more likely. But we'll come back to that, and then the vertical dimension is the consequences, the what's at stake, financially, human safety, reputationally, right? That can be very low. You know, I stub my toe on the on the way home. You know, big deal. To very high, I blow up a space shuttle and and so now we have a landscape that sort of says, you know, uncertainty, high stakes, and it becomes, first of all, becomes clear that as with more uncertainty, we are more in need of intelligent failures. We have to have more experimentation, more risk taking, to reduce the uncertainty, to learn as much as we can about the landscape. But it also becomes clear that we have to be thoughtful about the size of the experiments we're willing to take. You know if this, if the stakes economically or from a safety perspective, are very high, we're going to be extremely cautious in the in the size and degree of risk of experiments we take. So we can kind of fill out that landscape with sort of appropriate strategies for mitigating risk, but experimenting thoughtfully.
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Jean Gomes:in these conversations that we've been having around helping people to ask better questions in meetings. The thing that kind of time and time unravels is people's ability to call out the underlying assumptions that people are making in the statements that they have and asking questions sometimes can feel like an attack on somebody or, you know, like or implied in whatever. What have you learned about trying to help people challenge assumptions, bust and challenge assumptions effectively.
Amy Edmondson:Well, the thing about assumptions is the person making them is, is the swimming around in water, and they're a fish, right? They they will be the least able to notice their own assumptions. So we have to sort of set norms in which we all are aware that we're all making assumptions, so we all are given permission to raise their possibility and yeah, some assumptions we're making are totally valid, so it's okay. I think you're assuming, yeah, well, I've got good data to assume that, right. So, but I but, but you're right. There's a and I do believe, you know, in intention matters, and if you're asking a question genuinely, to learn, I want to understand better your thinking and and maybe even uncover some assumptions that will be helpful for us to be aware of versus I want to do a gotcha. And, you know, I want to, I want to catch you being wrong about something right. So, you know, like in a courtroom, that is a different sport than the sport of earnestly trying to learn from each other. So you know, intention does matter. And the problem is, I know my intentions, oh, by the way, they're good, but I can't see yours, and I often will fill in the vacuum and and if you say something that sort of puts me off, I'll assume your intentions aren't good, right? And so then suddenly we're in a place where that's undiscussable, because I can't just tell you, Look, Jean you're being really, you know, mean or bad or trying to do the wrong thing here. I mean, that's I couldn't so we have to sort of set the norms of of genuine inquiry, saying, you know, when I ask a question, please forgive me if it sounds off putting, but because I'm, I am, I truly want to learn from you and and I believe we need to, we need to all be in the business of truly learning from each other.
Scott Allender:I love that, and I don't, I don't see it enough, right? I don't think, no, it's rare a natural mindset of going to work in how can I learn from my colleagues today?
Amy Edmondson:Exactly. But that is the, you know, that is sort of the the growth mindset, or the learning mindset idea. But the reason why I think what you're doing is so important is because that's not natural. It's, it's it's just not the default, like our default, our default mindset is a mindset of knowing like I'm looking around and I'm pretty sure I see reality I don't I see reality filtered through my biases, background, expertise and so forth.
Scott Allender:So you've been focusing recently on a Quick Start plan to help teams implement psychological safety. What's, uh, what's the most surprising or important discovery, Discovery you've made in your research?
Amy Edmondson:I'm not sure I've ever discovered anything in my research that's surprising I saw, I honestly, I saw this absolutely wonderful sort of column yesterday in the British Journal the psychologist, and it's a column that, I guess they ask people to write on a paper. This is, this will sound very self serving, because it is a paper that changed your life, right? And, and so this, this man wrote about my 1999 paper in administrative Science Quarterly. You know, not exactly, you know, bedtime reading, but anyway. And went on to say that when a paper points something out that is utterly intuitive, but you hadn't really thought about it before, that that's a kind of that's a great experience to have. Or, you know, for him, that was a that was a a preferred experience to have, that have have something, show him, something he already understood at a deep level, but didn't have the words for the framework for, I only bring that up because I agree with him, like I there's nothing surprising. Or, you know, it's all so intuitive that maybe the only way we can say something is surprising here in what I've discovered or studied is how rare it is like it's sort of surprising, but then again, we know enough about human nature and our wiring and our socialisation to know that it's not surprising, but it's sort of Surprising when we think of ourselves as rational creatures, and we like to think of ourselves that way, then it's surprising that we behave so irrationally. You know, we hold back important thoughts we you know, don't experiment when, clearly, that's how you discover the future. And you know all of that, so not a very good answer.
Jean Gomes:Well, for somebody who's accomplished so much, but it's interesting for us, you know, because we talked to a lot of you know, people that have achieved an awful lot. And you mean you if I just look at a couple of the things that you know that were on your CV, ranked number one, latest thinkers, 50 ranking of the world's most influential management thinkers, winner of the 2019 Distinguished Scholar Award from the organisational development most influential international thinker in Human Resources HR magazine, you know. And the list goes on and on and on. How do you think about yourself in terms of your work, and how other people you know see it? I mean, how? What's your sense of self?
Amy Edmondson:Well, my sense of self is someone who accidentally got into the right places at the right time, and that's very sincere, and I am, I am well aware, and I'm sure you are too of the unearned privilege and credit you get simply by being at Harvard, or, you know, other other institutions where they sort of, the institution has clout and status. So, you know, I can I, you know, I think there's like a little, you know, bonus points you get that are not strictly speaking fair, right? Or fairly earned. But I try to say so I'm, you know, I'm like, for sure, the accidental scholar, right? I just never, you know, as a child, growing up or even a you know, college student, never even occurred to me to become, you know, an organisational researcher and scholar. I wanted to be far more useful than that. But anyway, here I am. But it's sort of one, you know, one accidental thing led to another. I was paying attention and following my nose, and here I am. So it is a sort of a stunning accident that that list you just read is, you know is factually accurate.
Scott Allender:How do you how do you feel? Your mindset has been developing and changing over the past several years.
Amy Edmondson:I try so hard to embrace the learning mindset, the growth mindset, but I catch myself all the time, you know, in the fixed or knowing mindset, and I you know it's, it's, it's hard, right? It's hard to choose learning, is it scary and it's hard to choose curiosity. Choose learning over knowing it because it means you're, you're admitting to yourself in that moment. I don't know, and then that feels scary. So I, you know, I guess I'm over, I'm maybe better at noticing the absurdity of my, you know, deviations from, from a learning mindset, but it happens all the time. I can hear myself being strident, for example, and especially at home, you know, in in ways that are clearly not the right mindset.
Jean Gomes:And just to kind of open that for a moment, what? Where? Where are you? Where's the learning edges for you right now?
Amy Edmondson:Well, I guess it's, this is too broad, but it's the future of work, right? Because there's so much uncertainty. And you opened with this lovely, giant question, which? What are humans for? And that is, it's so funny, because when I, when I first graduated from from university Long, long ago, my first job was working as a as an engineer for and with Buckminster Fuller, and his big driving question. This is, you know, for decades, but he died in 8082 he his big question was, we should be asking ourselves, why are humans included in universe, right? Like it's where, you know, there's some, you know, remarkable thing here. And his answer was, well, we're included because we've got these big brains and we're, we're here to solve problems to help take care of each other, for more future, you know, more future health and life and it, and I'm not quoting exactly, but it was sort of, we're here to solve problems that help take care of people, right? Like, I loved that idea. So it's like, Okay, put me to work. And now again, oddly, you know, 50 years later, we're coming back to this sort of the fundamental nature of that question, like, what are humans for? And now I think we're coming to a realisation that we again, we are here to take to take care of each other, to relate in meaningful ways to each other. You know, dare I say it, to truly care about each other, to love each other. Our relationships, research is now incontrovertible, with each other, are what make a full and healthy life, and we're at risk of those attributes of human existence are very much under threat. We've never been lonelier, more isolated, less social. So I'm sort of consumed by now. How do we reconnect?
Jean Gomes:And how do you see because it's so much noise around Gen Z and younger generations and their capacity to learn and both socially, but just more generally with technology. What's your thoughts emerging in that front?
Amy Edmondson:You know, I hate to get too far out ahead of my skis. You know, things that I'm just this is just Amy thinking, not, you know, not thinking as an expert in anything here. But I'll start with the premise that young, old, everybody's everybody's human, and the human has certain needs and capacities to learn. So if we, if we point to empirical evidence that suggests. Uh, that young people, for instance, aren't spending as much time together and with each other and learn, even kids like learning how to play and resolve conflicts and and read emotions and all of that, then we've got to put them back in harm's way, meaning we've got to put them we've got to make sure that we are, in fact, creating, even engineering the Learning Programme and context for them to do, and Not because we want it, but because they need it. Yeah. So interpersonal skills, you know, need to, need to be learned. They don't just kind of come right right away with the programme from birth, so they need to be learned. And that it's frustrating to deal with human beings, but it's also incredibly rewarding. The best days work are the days where you've, you know, you've been with other people, working on something hard. Maybe there's an aha moment. Maybe there's a, you know, finally we we solved a problem where we got, we got through an agenda that seemed ambitious. I mean, it just feels good. It feels good to have done that with others, you know together.
Scott Allender:Is there anything else that we should be asking you that we haven't covered in the few minutes we have left?
Amy Edmondson:Yeah, I think you've asked. You've asked me so many things that you know, again, I probably have no business answering. But so I I'm not sure, although, you know, I may not have fully answered the question you know, in talking about failure, which is a part of life and comes in better and worse, forms the connection, just to tighten that connection to psychological safety. Psychological safety describes an environment where people can engage in smart experiments and therefore experience intelligent failures. It describes an environment also on the other side, where people are willing to speak up when they see something wrong, so that we don't have a preventable failure, right? So it's a very tight connection, right? Creating an environment for learning matters, both for preventing the bad kind of failure and for encouraging the experimentation that will sometimes create the good kind.
Jean Gomes:What's next for you in terms of your research?
Amy Edmondson:Well, it's looking at the employee experience at work and the employee value proposition and how organisations can do a better job setting that up so that people feel engaged and psychologically safe and able to perform. So I know that's quite holistic, and it's deliberately holistic, and so it's, it's what I'm working on and thinking about with Mark Mortenson at INSEAD, and hopefully we'll have something useful to say.
Scott Allender:Well, thank you, Amy, for the work that you do in the world. I've hugely benefited from it all these years, and I've hugely benefited from this conversation as well, and we deeply appreciate you being here. Thank you.
Amy Edmondson:No thank you for having me.
Jean Gomes:It's been a it's been a wonderful conversation, and as you know, Echo Scott's comments, we love your work, and it's been incredibly helpful, not just to us, but to many millions of people. So thank you for your for everything that you've contributed,
Scott Allender:Jean, there's a line from this conversation that I keep returning to. Amy said that psychological safety and courage are two sides of the same coin, not opposites. There's no sequence in which you build safety first, and then people become brave. They exist together or not at all. You have to feel the discomfort, and you speak anyway, because the environment tells you that you can survive it. The practical test she gave us is worth taking seriously. Record your next consequential meeting, not the inconsequential one about where to hold the office party, but the one where the real decision is at stake. Then ask three questions. Was everyone either contributing something meaningful or listening with genuine intent? Was there a real mix of statements and questions where the questions were not rhetorical but honest attempts to deepen understanding. And did the people in the room leave feeling like they had collectively gotten smarter? If the answer to any of these is no, you have found the constraint, not a talent problem, not a strategy problem, a conversation problem.
Jean Gomes:What struck me was the button muster fuller thread. Amy's first job out of university was working as an engineer for fuller and his driving question was, why are humans included in the Yes, his answer was that we are here to solve problems that help take care of one another. 50 years later, with AI rewriting the terms of what human contribution means, Amy finds herself circling back to that same question and arriving at a similar answer, though with sharper edges, we are here to relate to each other, to care, to learn together, and the research now makes it incontrovertible that our relationships are what produce a full and healthy life. But here's the tension she leaves us with. We've never been lonelier, more isolated or less social. The very capacities that make us irreplaceable are the ones that we're allowing to atrophy. That's not a problem AI has created. It's one AI is making harder to ignore. Amy calls herself the accidental scholar, someone who followed her nose through a series of fortunate turns, but there's nothing accidental about the challenge she sets before us, stop worrying about whether your workplace is psychologically safe, and start worrying about whether you're having conversations worth having. The safety will follow. Thanks for being with us. We'll see you next time on The Mindset Economy.
