Embracing Fallibility

Bridging the gap between academia and industry has always been the goal of Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Amy C. Edmondson. “My field—management research and teaching—has long focused on finding practical levers and skills that managers can use to build viable organizations that thrive over time,” she says.

Edmondson’s work revolves around teams, interpersonal dynamics, learning in action, and collaboration. While most organizations depend on the latter to meet their goals, it’s “startlingly challenging to operationalize consistently over time,” she notes.

That is because typical human nature seeks short-term results and quick fixes, and organizational dynamics and incentives can impede cooperation. To overcome short-termism, it’s important that individuals learn systems thinking, including how to have productive conversations, solve problems together, and learn from each other.

Some recent studies argue that higher education does not properly prepare graduates for the world of work. For example, Hult International Business School reports that less than a quarter of graduates felt they were prepared for their role. Edmondson disagrees.

“I think higher education is intended to teach an ability to think analytically, an ability to learn how to learn, a tendency to understand the need to wrestle with tensions and produce effective solutions, and to understand and relate to others,” she states. “These are skills and capabilities that are vitally important in the workforce.”

To reconcile corporate training and academic theory, “identify the theories that point toward solutions to help individuals and organizations overcome our counterproductive tendencies, which are both hardwired and socialized into us,” Edmondson continues.

Indeed, academics must often pause, step back, and examine context “so as to find new, often subtle, opportunities for reframing the situation,” she emphasizes. The process enables them to identify multiple options for solving a problem—a practice from which the corporate sector could learn.

On the flip side, academia could welcome the achievements and progress that result from teamwork found in the corporate sector. Edmondson explains that “Today’s companies face a never-ending flow of novel problems, where progress must be made through trial and (small) failures; it is simply not possible to develop a perfect plan and then execute it in truly novel contexts or highly uncertain environments. Learning and progress happen through experimenting.”

Edmondson, whose most recent book is Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, will serve as keynote speaker at the Association for Talent Development’s International Conference & EXPO on Tuesday, May 20. She learned early in her career that “people and organizations flourish when their culture encourages and supports speaking up, asking questions, seeking help, and sharing mistakes—or what I call psychological safety. Doing so is critical to personal growth and organizational effectiveness.”

Read more about ATD25 at conferencedaily.td.org.