8 - Miracle at Fukushima Daini - Amy Edmondson on Psychological Safety and Leadership

Amy speaks about the way she thinks about Psychological Safety – an environment where people feel free to take interpersonal risks. She goes on to speak about some of the pieces that people get wrong or miss. For instance, she speaks about the fact that this is not about being nice. She also teases out the nuance between developing trust with a leader and creating a climate of safety, something that people might mix.

Amy speaks about the implication of psychological safety on how team members learn. She makes the distinction between “Learn what” behaviours and “Learn how” behaviours and goes on to say that Psychological safety has a significant implication on the latter.

Amy speaks about how psychological safety becomes even more critical in the context of a leadership transition. She speaks about the criticality of the incoming leader to portray humility and curiosity as he/she settles into a new context. She talks about the case of Alan Mulally, who transitioned from Boeing to Ford Motor Company when it was bleeding about USD 17 Billion dollars a year. She speaks about how he embodied situational humility to transition effectively to win the trust and respect and drive the turnaround.

Amy speaks about the asymmetry between silence and speaking up in the way people size up the trade offs. The upsides of speaking up are often felt (if at all) way down the line while the downsides of speaking up are felt right then and there. Given this pay-off structure, people often end up preferring silence to speaking up. Amy also speaks about Ray Dalio and Bridgewater Associates where he frames silence as an unethical choice.

Amy speaks about what traits we should look for in leaders if we are solving for psychological safety in an organization. She shines the light on three traits – Curiosity, Humility and Empathy. She also speaks to the limitations of the interview process and how we could consider getting the candidates to interact with the team to suss out the manner in which they engage with the people around them.

Amy speaks about the nuances involved in giving and receiving feedback so that it is productive. She speaks about the practices at Pixar where they strive hard to create a climate that’s conducive for healthy feedback on a project. She also shares a small but powerful nuance in the way she interacts with her PhD students when they submit their drafts.

Amy speaks about how companies have to work hard to create a climate of risk taking. She alludes to failure parties at Eli Lilly and the Museum of Failure at Google X to talk about how companies have to work hard to take the stigma of failure away to encourage risk taking. Some of the insights, I guess, are as applicable to families specifically in the context of parenting.

Amy speaks about the case at Fukushima Daini, where under the leadership of Naohira Masuda, 400 employees worked non stop for 48 hours, when their lives were under threat, to achieve the cold shut down of the nuclear reactor thereby saving 1000s of lives in that process. She speaks about the brand of leadership that Naohira demonstrated through this phase.

Amy teases out some of the nuances involved in the way Psychological safety applies in different contexts. One end being the relatively predictable, repetitive work in the shop floor of an organization like Walmart, the other end being Google X that works on moonshots. She also speaks about the similarity of human beings across some of these very different situations.

Amy speaks about the term, Naïve Realism, that was coined by Lee Ross of Stanford. This is a phenomenon where we believe that we all see a certain version of reality but believe that that’s the reality. She speaks about the implication of this trap.

Amy speaks about the notion of Team Potential and the power of psychological safety coupled with good process and rituals and techniques and unlock the potential of a group of people.