You are welcome and thank you for that most gracious and generous introduction. I'm just delighted to be here and appreciate all that you just said.

You're a very good student Hitendra. You're a very good digester of many books, many articles. Let me try to use that as a useful platform? I will say that your first and third pillar to me blur a little bit. To me, a psychologically safe environment is almost the same as a learning culture. I just don't see how you can learn collectively, especially, not as much individually unless you've got psychological safety. I want to talk more about that and maybe add on. Tightly related to those to the notion of teaming.

Like it or not, most of us face work that is deeply interdependent with others. We can no longer just stay in our lane, do our jobs, work hard, and get the rewards of having worked hard and all will be well. No, most of what we do, whether you're in B2B sales or drug development or even developing and teaching a course, you're doing it with others. You're doing it in such a way that their ideas, their expertise are essential to making progress. You did mention with the third one psychological safety. That's all about finding ways to harness collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is, by its nature, diverse intelligence, that people have different backgrounds, different expertise, different training, different ideas. Unless that's brought together, the output is going to be suboptimal.

I will say I love that you highlight failure as one of the three pillars. I would agree with that. In fact, I think it's the one area other than the Harvard Business Review article, which is, I think, a useful and simple framework for people. Other than that, one article, I haven't done enough with this. I talk a lot about it. I speak a lot about it, but I'm not sure I've written enough about it. That's on the to do list.

Let me just bounce off a minute on that dumb failure versus smart failure. You're right. I think there has been a period in popular management articles and discussion that celebrates failure. Well, yes and no. Not all failure is good. It's obvious. But unless we talk about it, then the reality is people still won't feel comfortable with and revealing the good kind of failure. If we don't make clear distinctions between what you called smart failure and dumb failure, we really won't be harnessing the power of smart failure.

There are two kinds of dumb failure. One is the kind that individuals make. When I put the milk back in the cupboard, and the cereal in the fridge, that's a dumb failure that I made all by myself, with no help. The kind of dumb failure that I'm passionate about and study often is, the kind where organizations make really stupid decisions. They launch a product that has real flaws. They acquire a company even when the acquisition doesn't make sense. Now, you could say, "Hey, there was uncertainty. We didn't know that." But it turns out when you do the anatomy of many of these failures, there were people in the team, in the organization who had grave concerns, but their voices weren't heard. Then this becomes a situation of dumb failure at the collective level. At the organizational or team level.

Yeah. That is one of the most important aspects of that whole domain. We don't celebrate failure just to celebrate failure. We celebrate failure for its learning value. But we can't get its learning value unless we do the hard work of failure analysis. Too often that work is done superficially or not done at all. When I say superficially, I mean, we come away with conclusions that are self-serving, like the customers just weren't ready for our fantastic thing. It wasn't us. It was them. Or we look one level down, but we don't do the deeper work of where we made our own mistakes or missteps and contributed to the failure.

If we could find that scene, that could be a good classroom piece.

If you reframe it that way, there's no failure. It is just discovery. It is just learning. I like to talk about execution as learning as a frame. I think we think of execution meaning, got to get things done. There are whole books written in our space about execution, the key to success. But often that brings up a mindset of just do it versus do it. Mindful that your hypothesis for what's needed might be wrong. Let's say act, and you act in good faith. You do the work in good faith. You deliver the product; you conduct the interview. Then it turns out you're wrong, like you were missing something. That has got to be OK, because we live in this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. We are going to be wrong often. If we are not profoundly open to what our experience must teach us, we're not really doing our job.

I think it is a very uncomfortable place for humans. Turns out, there is research on this. It's not mine, but we are hardwired to prefer certainty. We kind of expect certainty, rationality, fairness. That's our default, cognitive expectation. But then, reality just keeps knocking at them. Sometimes, we miss those knocks, and we see what we expect rather than what's there. But other times, we're tuned in, and we see what's happening and then we're probably erroneously upset by it. If we're upset by it, we waste valuable energy being upset rather than saying, "Oh, that's what? So, what does that mean? What do I do with that new information? With that new awareness?"

I think we get so much messaging in our upbringing and culturally that says you're supposed to be right; you're supposed to know, you're supposed to have plans and follow through on those plans versus being open to what life is bringing and being open to what others are saying. Am I truly open? The notion of are you listening to learn or are you listening to wait until it's your turn to speak? There is of course, a profound difference and it's a palpable difference if you're listening to learn. It's a gift.

Probably a good idea. Thank you for that question. Otherwise, it's just an abstract notion. Let me give you the one that comes to mind. I don't think it matters what company or where, because it's true, but I want to say it in such a way that is sufficiently generic. A business services firm is aware that there's starting to be more competition in its domain. A lot of other providers can do quite similar things. The top team starts to think about what other services might they provide? And they come up with an idea that's quite different compared to their usual offerings. It's new, but they believe that it would be valuable and help clients. They decide to let clients know they are up for this. They get a request to deliver this kind of service and a couple of months go into this project, it fails. It doesn't make any difference for the client. Nothing changes. The team does some wonderful work, but it doesn't land where it needs to land for the client to actually take action.

So, they go back and try to figure out what went wrong. I call this a smart failure because they were trying to innovate. They had this sense that there's an opportunity here. More is needed from us. Clients need things we aren't doing. This might be something they need. And yet the project is a flop. They go back and try to figure out. They are able to figure out why it didn't work. A lot of their old biases, they come from traditional services they offer, were absolutely wrong and got in the way of doing this new service well. Having figured that out, then they tried it again. At this point today, it is about 40% of their business. It is a smart failure because there was opportunity there. They had a good hypothesis, but they were blinded by some of their assumptions about certain things that they would have to change in their own behavior to make it work. Having figured that out, then they were able to move forward. It is a smart failure.

Dumb failure would be a company launches a new service. Senior team debates. There are people on the senior team who absolutely know that technically and from a staffing point of view, we are not capable of pulling this off. Nonetheless, business development loves it, the marketing loves it, they announce it to the world. They decided to go ahead anyway, despite those concerns expressed by operations and human resources. It leads to thousands of complaints and all sorts of problems. That's a dumb failure. Because, they could have known better, had they listened to their own internal experts. An intelligent failure is new territory. Like literally we haven't been here before, there is no playbook I can pull off the shelf to tell me how to do it well. A dumb failure is the information was there, but you didn't access it for whatever reasons.

This is why I think design of experiments is a team sport. If you have failed to harness the collective intelligence, then you've put yourself and your colleagues at greater risk than was necessary. There is always going to be risks. There is always uncertainty, and especially in new terrain. In new terrain, there's a lot of uncertainty. But make sure you come armed with the knowledge you do have and are clear eyed about the knowledge you don't yet have.

The short answer is that in my experience, there is even greater appreciation of the need for psychological safety in high-risk environments like healthcare delivery, pharma, passenger airline and military. I don't want to imply that it's going to be consistent across organizations in those industries, but it is far more likely than in the average corporate setting that they have really thought about and are aware of the critical need for everyone's voice, given what's at stake. That, in fact, has been the theme that runs through the cockpit resource management training that over the past 30 years has transformed passenger air travel into an astonishingly, ambitiously, magnificently safe activity. Because, they have resolved to ensure that voice is heard, to ensure that all small and large mishaps are learned from and then incorporated. That's because it's far more direct and obvious to them what the consequences are. Therefore, they've often built leadership structures to enable that.

But here is the challenging and true observation. Airlines are rather consistent nowadays. But when you talk about healthcare delivery or the military, unfortunately, we have still a lot of variability. We'll have pockets of just fantastically well-run patient care units or military groups, and then we'll have pockets where people are terrified. The results are clear, too, of that.

You rightly tie this discussion to some of my early research in graduate school, which was research that epitomized as a smart failure in that I had a hypothesis that was drawn from the research in the aviation industry that better teams in hospitals would make fewer errors, that makes sense, right? Teams that had good leaders, good quality relationships, clarity about the goal, all the other things that you would want your team to have. I could measure that with a previously validated survey instrument. Meanwhile, in this study, trained medical investigators were out going to the patient care unit. From a research point of view, very nice design, because there's independent collection of the dependent variable. I'm not doing it. I'm just waiting for those data to come to me. They collected those data for six months. I did my survey in month one. When I finally have the data on both sides of the equation, I have what at first looks like a lovely significant correlation between teamwork and error rates. So, this is good.

Then I noticed, it's in the wrong direction. The data seemed to suggest that according to the team diagnostic survey, better teams didn't have lower error rates. They had higher error rates. I then was struck not immediately, but after a couple of hours of pulling my hair out by a blinding flash of the obvious, which was maybe better teams don't make more mistakes. Maybe they're more able and willing to talk about them. But, how do you know? We don't. We don't know.

What we learned from that study was in fact, it is desperately hard to get the actual error rate. What you get often is the detected error rate. Because it's easy to hide errors, especially those errors that didn't spiral out and cause harm. Those are easily hidden. We know that from wherever we work. That's true in healthcare also. It doesn't take much thinking to realize that the ones who are talking about it are likely to be safer places to be admitted. You don't want people hiding. You want people coming clean and being open.

That was the stumble. My hypothesis was wrong. I was ultimately not able to weigh in one way or the other about that hypothesis. But I was able to show from those data, one interesting thing, which was that even in two very strong organizational cultures, the groups or the teams within those organizational cultures had vastly different interpersonal climates. At that time, I didn't have the term psychological safety for that, but I just knew, "Wow, it's really different to work over here versus one floor up." even though they have the same CEO, the same basic resources and training programs and so on. That taught me that the leaders in the middle may be the most important leaders you have. Leaders at the top are, of course, important to creating a culture, but it's the leaders in the middle who are shaping the climate for voice.

Absolutely. My examples earlier were about the risks of not hearing from people about concerns. Psychological safety is just as pertinent for not hearing from people about ideas and not having people be willing and able to kind of push back and make their case. Let's say if an executive shoots down a perfectly good idea. In a psychologically safe environment, the personnel will push back and say, "Hey, let me try that again." In a sense, they're taking responsibility for not being compelling enough yet. Here's how I'm thinking about it. Then they might say they might open it up. What do others think? what experiences do you have that might take this perfectly good, but still incomplete idea and take it to the next step? Psychologically safe teams are better able, even with hierarchy, to capture and integrate the collective wisdom.

I sometimes think about this. I wish I could be more precise about this. All of us have some threshold, above which we'll speak and below which we won't. Of confidence about what we're going to say. I think all of us intuitively know that some people set that threshold too low, and some people set it too high. It sounds to me like you were setting it too high. Unless you felt you could do that, the rock-solid mathematical proof of your idea, you weren't going to let it out of there. It was going to stay inside. That's too high.

Sometimes what you have to say is incomplete. But guess what? There's someone else on the team who could add to it and make it better and you deprive them of that opportunity by not letting it out. But meanwhile, all of us also know that we've been on teams where people set it too low, where they're just saying everything that comes into their head. It's not helpful and it slows us down.

My way of thinking about this is that there are more people in hierarchical workplaces that set it too high than too low. The people who set it too low, in well-run organizations do get feedback. All of us do need and deserve feedback. That's part of our job. We must give people feedback because nobody comes to work and says, "Gee, I really hope to be ineffective today and my colleagues think I talk too much and don't add value." Nobody wants that. When they're doing it, we owe them an opportunity to learn and grow. It's harder to develop the people who've set it too high, because we don't get the data. We don't know what's going on in their head. Often, they're holding back treasures. Which is why I say, by and large, I'm not talking about creating psychologically safe environments. I'm talking about lowering the average threshold, not to zero. On average, it's going to usually be set too high.

There's this wonderful study by Anna Simpson, at University of Minnesota. It's in a manufacturing setting. It is about interaction effect between confidence and psychological safety. It shows that at the same level of confidence about their expertise, with more psychological safety, people will be more willing and able to contribute. It doesn't mean they'll always be right, but it means that they're in a far better position to harness the collective intelligence because it's coming out and they are able to play with it.

By bottom up, I'm assuming the leaders who aren't at the very top.

I would start with the phenomenal power of genuine questions. My argument is that anyone can influence the psychological safety of their own team or their own colleague by asking a genuine question. Because genuine questions focus on something that matters. They are phrased in such a way that invites careful thought. It hands the space over to you to respond. Of course, it's important that I now listen. I've given you a platform for voice and if I walk away or start interrupting you, that's not going to work as well. Now I listen and I react. In that moment, we have created a little bubble of mutual attention to something relevant. That's something that literally anyone can do.

The reason we don't do it well and don't do it often enough goes back to our cognitive frames. We have this erroneous sense of seeing and knowing. We don't have enough of an appreciation for, "Wow, I don't know. What am I missing?" If we woke up every morning with that enthusiasm about learning, we'd be more curious. If we were more curious, we'd spontaneously ask more questions. If we asked more questions, our colleagues would know we cared about their voice.

I value them both, but I would make a distinction between curious questions and Socratic questions. The Socratic questions are those that are not necessary that there's a right answer, but that there's at least a framework or a domain that I want to lead the client to, or I want to lead the class to. I ask questions that head us in that direction but help them take ownership of it. You can go awry in asking those kinds of questions when you make the mistake of asking certain kinds of questions where you inadvertently are trying to make them guess what's in your head. It just doesn't work. It has got to be a blend of letting them draw from their experience and their thinking to take us where we need to go. That's Socratic. We do have a destination in mind, but there's various ways we can get there. I need your help.

But the genuine question where I say, "Hey Hitendra, where did you grow up?" I don't have an answer in my head already. I don't know. I want to hear about it and I'm all ears. I think there is a place for both kinds of questions.

One of my great mentors and advisors was a professor called Chris Argyris, who spent his entire life devoted to understanding why learning breaks down in conversational worlds at work and what to do about it. One of his big insights was, we spend an awful lot of time telling and very little time genuinely asking. Even if you analyze questions, many of them are of the rhetorical or leading kind. You expect me to believe that? That's not a genuine question.

I couldn't agree more. I think these ultimately does boil down to the journey. Our own willingness as adults. It's not easy. That sounds like fun until you realize that also means a willingness to be wrong and to be limited. As you get to be a working adult who has been working for decades, it can feel psychologically like the stakes are very great indeed, you can't be wrong. Experts suffer from this challenge. If I'm the expert I'm supposed to know the answers. Experts are generally in rather narrow domains and reality is complicated and complex and it crosses domains. Unless we are willing to be, fundamentally humble in a strong way to acknowledge that, 'Yes, you have an awful lot of knowledge and expertise to give but also a lot we don't know always.' We'll have to keep learning because the world will keep changing. So humble, curious, willing to learn, willing to ask and empathic, to have a very serious and deep appreciation for the reality of others, that others are human beings as well, who have their own feelings and needs, and each of us is not just the center of the universe.

It all stems from these fears. It's all about these deep fears. The fear of being left alone, kicked out of the tribe. That breeds this need to be to be right. We long for connection. We can and must keep helping ourselves and long for growth and development. But we protect ourselves against growth and development in ways that aren't always very helpful.

I don't have a good answer. I need a better answer. But I suppose, given our conversation, a part of that dream is to have the courage and fortitude to keep doing my own work. It's a lot easier to talk about these issues than to live them in a in a real way. We all love to be right. We don't like to be disagreed with. The aspiration is to keep learning and growing and occasionally coming up with something that resonates that other people find useful. You started this session by saying, "You've done this research and long ago you found that it connected to practice." I live for people like you who are able to take some of the little things I've found and then take them further. I appreciate that.

That's a very good way to put it. We need new ideas about how do we reduce that particular gap. I think that's a very powerful insight.

The short answer is, do it practice? You don't get good at the learning routines without doing them or practicing them. But oftentimes when we say practice, that immediately brings up a notion of offline, later, when we're not busy working. No, practice in the process of doing the real work, making the decisions, interacting with the clients, with whatever the work you do. It may be caring for patients, make that the arena of practice.

Donald Schon used to call reflection in action. Because the more we practice while doing the work we need to do, I think the better we get at that inner side of it. But that has to be done consciously and attentively.

You're exactly right. It's a good metaphor because I grew up in New York. We had one of those doors, too. If you don't close it, it slams. That's just the way it was, it was a heavy door. It is heard by others as anger. They slammed the door. In fact, no, you didn't. But I like the idea that you could learn and that your wife was willing to give you the feedback rather than just roll her eyes.

Thank you for that advancing part. It certainly traces back to my parents, my family, a great emphasis on service, a great emphasis in my family, extended and nuclear on. What is it you can do for others? Your job here is to make the world a better place in the smaller ways. It's not about just satisfying your own needs and desires. That might sound like an overly unselfish perspective, but it actually isn't, because life is far more meaningful when lived in a sense of connectedness to others. I think all of us, or at least my upbringing led me to long to be of service in some small way, even to be able to make someone's life or day better just a little bit, I think is a rewarding thing for people.

Practice good questions. The art of good questions that's in your hands. Every day, there are countless opportunities to do that.

It was a pleasure, and the time flew by. Thank you for having me.