Teaming to Innovate

by Amy C. Edmondson

from disparate areas to produce something new—

Effective teaming happens when everyone remains highly aware of others’ needs, roles, and perspectives. This entails learning to relate to people who are different and learning to integrate different perspectives into new, shared possibilities, plans, and actions.

When it’s done well, teaming for innovation leads to new processes, products, and services that make the organization more valuable and those it serves better off.1

The key is asking good questions—and not knowing the answer in advance!

High standards and high failure tolerance. Innovation happens when the organization’s

culture promotes high standards and high tolerance of failure at the same time.

Failures are seen as a necessary step in a larger process of developing successful, innovative products.

leadership exercises three basic levers that influence the actions of others.

The first is communicating an inspiring picture of a desirable future.

The second lever is modeling desired behaviors. Those in positions of power and status are watched closely.

The more knowledge we have about how to achieve a particular outcome—for instance, how to manufacture an automobile or mend a broken arm—the more mature the knowledge.

failure is not only impossible to avoid; it’s an essential part of the innovation process.11

requires accepting that it’s simply not possible to look good or be right all the time.

Teaming to innovate requires creativity, humility, empathy, and drive.

Thomas Edison said, “Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”

The purpose of reflecting is ultimately to come up

with the next experiment, which sometimes means being resigned to pursuing the next failure, followed by more reflection.

Talking about safety implies that we are doing things ‘wrong.’”16

Too many would-be leaders forget about the power of inquiry and instead rely on forceful advocacy to bring others along.

“Health care is a very complex system, and complex systems are, by their very nature, risk-prone.

Complex systems are failure-prone; individual clinicians involved in a system failure are victims of that complexity, just like their patients.

On the innovation journey, aiming high means stretching beyond what seems initially feasible. The aspiration must be truly challenging. At the same time, it’s important that it not be completely implausible.

The opportunity to make a difference turns out to be a key driver of innovation. When people share an ambitious goal—together with a vision of a better future—it gives them a shared identity. It builds camaraderie.

Three types of boundaries are particularly important in the context of teaming to innovate: physical distance (location, time zone, and so on), status (perceived social value, hierarchical level, profession, and so on), and knowledge (experience, education, and so on).25

Without face-to-face contact, taken-for-granted assumptions can be particularly tricky to recognize and address.

Innovation requires teaming across knowledge boundaries.

it is essential to find novelty and synergy from the unexpected combinations of ideas and techniques that can occur between fields of expertise.

The process involves talking about concrete experiences and feelings, and is fueled by thoughtful questions on the part of a leader acting as a facilitator.

Psychological safety describes an interpersonal climate where people feel able to express ideas, ask questions, quickly acknowledge mistakes, and raise concerns about the project early and often.

Leaders who act this way make it safer for everyone else to do it too.

A strategy for boundary management is essential. Guidelines are needed for specifying points at which separate teaming activities must come together to coordinate resources and decisions.

Even when psychological safety, curiosity, and process guidelines are in place, the very nature of teaming is such that conflict will occur. In fact, conflict is desirable.

Emotions can hijack reason,

making it hard to sift through the differences and find the important questions, ideas, and new possibilities that may be lurking.

It takes skill to cool one’s own and others’ emotions so as to put co...

Managing self. This practice involves recognizing one’s emotions for what they are: spontaneous personal reactions to a situation.

Managing self means learning how to quickly reflect—to turn our curiosity inward for a brief period and ask ourselves why we’re feeling anxious, or frustrated, or angry. It’s critical to remind oneself in these situations of two essential facts.

To facilitate good communication in the face of heated conflict, it’s necessary to slow the conversation down so as to combine thoughtful statements with thoughtful questions.

other as people and to understand the other’s goals and concerns are less likely to attribute selfish motives to each other and more likely to be curious about others’ concerns. Managing relationships is about building trust grounded in experience. Investing time in getting to know colleagues—new and old—helps lay the foundation for productive conflict, despite the emotions that will surely surface along the way.

Failing well, as we will explore next, is all about making sense of what we know and don’t know, and figuring out what to try next.

intelligent failures are in fact positive events. They’re part of an essential strategy for creating new knowledge, developing ideas, and producing innovation.

lack of competence. This describes a situation in which an individual doesn’t have or hasn’t been taught the necessary skills to do the job

Inadequate process describes a situation in which an individual, or a group, faces a faulty or incomplete set of guidelines. This often occurs when a process is new and the kinks haven’t been worked out yet. Task challenge describes situations in which the task at hand is simply too difficult to be successfully executed every time.

When a failure to execute an exceedingly challenging task occurs, it would be just plain wrong to call that

Even though good protocols were in place for hurricane response, complexity means that it was unlikely that everything would work perfectly—

uncertainty means we don’t have complete knowledge about future events. Given what they know at the time, people will take reasonable actions that nonetheless may produce undesirable results (failures).

If thoughtful managers understand that failures do happen, and that it’s rare when an individual can rightly be blamed, then they’ll also see that to engage in blaming is more than just illogical. It’s counterproductive.

With proper training and support, steps in a routine process can and should be followed consistently. Failure to do so is usually due to one of the first three of the nine reasons for failure in the spectrum (violation, inattention, or lack of ability).

The majority of failures experienced by hospitalized patients—

occur as a result of a series of small process failures that unfortunately line up in just the wrong way to allow a patient to be harmed.