Amy Edmondson - Leading Thoughts

speaking topics

Decision Making
Error and Failure
Innovation, Integration & Creativity
Leadership
Learning & Performance Management
Learning Culture
Organizational Behavior
Organizational learning
Psychological Safety
Social Capital, Trust & Culture
Talent Management
Teaming

Watch Amy’s recent TED Talk

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announcing

Amy Edmondson won the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea award and makes #3 on the 2019 Thinkers50 List.

Amy Edmondson took the coveted place of HR Magazine’s most influential thinkers for 2019.

Read Amy Edmondson’s HBR article, Don’t Hide Bad News in Times of Crisis, March 6, 2020.

Read Amy Edmondson’s interview in the HBR article, How a New Leader Broke Through a Culture of Accuse, Blame and Criticism, September 17, 2019

Read Amy Edmondson’s newest book: The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth – released November 2018.

Ready Amy Edmondson’s interview, How to Build a Fearless Organization – November, 26 2018.

View Amy’s snippet video on psychological safety at work.

Listen to Amy’s latest TED Talk: How to turn a group of strangers into a team

Cursed by Knowledge — Building a Culture of Psychological Safety – The New England Journal of Medicine.

In a recent Forbes review, Amy Edmondson’s book Building The Future was described as “a promising framework to guide leaders” aspiring to take on the complex challenges of the 21st century.

Released new book: Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation – April 2016

Awarded an Honorary doctorate from Maastricht University on the occasion of its 38th Dies Natalis for her “immense contribution to the field of organisational learning.”

Named to Thinkers50 for 2015, the foremost global ranking of management thinkers, also known as the “Oscars of Management Thinking.” This is Dr. Edmondson’s third consecutive appearance on the list.

praise for Amy Edmondson

“Edmondson’s insights that teams are verbs rather than nouns, and that leaders who focus on ‘teaming’ animate a more adaptive work environment, are a major advance in our grasp of leading, organizing, and learning. This is the work of a gifted, hands-on scholar at her best!”

– Karl E. Weick, Professor, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

“After our speakers present, we ask clients to rank their performance on a 1-5 scale. Amy has never received a score lower than “5.” In fact, clients frequently ask if they can assign her a rating of 5000 or five million! They also repeatedly invite her back to deliver keynotes or workshops for new audiences.”

– Joan Powell, President, Leading Thoughts

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been ranked by the biannual Thinkers50 global list of top management thinkers since 2011 (most recently #3) and selected in 2019 as the #1 most influential thinker in Human Resources by HR Magazine. She teaches and writes on leadership, teams and organizational learning. Her books, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy and Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2012, 2103) explore teamwork in dynamic, unpredictable work environments. Her book, Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), reveals the challenges and opportunities of innovation that involves teaming across industry sectors. Her most recent book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Wiley 2019) is the winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award and offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy.

Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on the design and implementation of transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller’s mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design, all from Harvard University.

Leadership
What Is a Learning Organization?
Innovation in Teams and Organizations
Collaborative Work Environments and Innovation

Content possibilities:

Using the dramatic situation of the 2010 rescue of 33 miners trapped 2000 feet underground in the high desert of Chile, I explore the role of leadership in creating an organization that accomplishes remarkable feats against difficult odds. Explaining how the Chilean rescue unfolded serves to highlight a particular kind of leadership that directs and empowers at the same time. The session also emphasize the power of teaming coordinating and collaborating across boundaries of many kinds (knowledge, distance, status). The discussion will emphasize that a top-down, command-and-control approach would have failed utterly, as would pure bottom up (simply encouraging everyone to try anything, which would have produced chaos and harm). Instead, what was required, facing the unprecedented situation and ambiguous context, was coordinated teaming multiple fluid groups of people working separately on different types of problems, and coordinating across groups, as needed. Success, as in today’s pharmaceutical marketplace, also required progressive experimentation. This is a process that requires leadership.

Using video vignettes of various leaders and organizations (e.g., Ed Catmull at Pixar, David Kelley at IDEO, Ferran Adria at El Bulli, or Steve Jobs at Apple, I will introduce and engage executives in a discussion of building a culture of innovation, and the role played by a company’s leadership in accomplishing this. The core emphasis is the paradoxical culture of innovation which is both playful and rigorous, failure tolerant and ambitious, and the role of leadership in building such a culture.

Books

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

Conquer the most essential adaptation to the knowledge economy

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent—but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of “fitting in” and “going along” spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process. People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud; it creates a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing.

Shed the “yes-men” approach and step into real performance. Fertilize creativity, clarify goals, achieve accountability, redefine leadership, and much more. Psychological Safety at Work: How to Ensure Learning and Innovation in the Knowledge Economy helps you bring about this most critical transformation.

Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation