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Amy Edmonson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Early in her career, she worked as the Chief Engineer for architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, which started her on the road to re-imagining how we’re all impacted by the world around us. She then became the Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she designed change programs in large companies. Now she’s an academic, where she focuses on how teams function and evolve, along with the essential dynamics of collaboration required in environments that are informed by uncertainty and ambiguity. What sort of environments are those? Almost all work environments. A significant point of her research and focus is the necessity of psychological safety in teamwork and innovation—effectively, how do you create an environment where people feel like they can fail in the right direction, where they’re learning and taking risks toward evolution and growth even when they might not get it right the first few—or few hundred—times? This is the focus of her latest book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.
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(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: It's funny, thinking about my own book, your book to me was the perfect end cap, it’s an extension of the final chapter, which is about sadness and men, and what happens when men are severed from their feelings, disconnected, disallowed, and as you seem to find the only cure for sadness is grief, but it can be inaccessible, right. So take us back to, not the inciting event, but this idea that you're enduring panic attacks, which started, was it in your twenties?