This book came to my attention because it won the FT Best Business Books of 2023 (I also bought the short-listed book "How Big Things Get Done" and will review that soon).
Edmondson's book talks about four key concepts - that of psychological safety (I remember Google suggesting this is one of the greatest determinants of team success some years ago), second was how culturaly respond to errors and learning from them, third was how important feedback & coaching is and lastly, how leaders create psychological safety.
But to step back a minute and why this work has so much credibility: Edmondson is an American organisational theorist, author, and professor at the Harvard Business School where she is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management .
But to go through each chapter to try and look at the lessons through the lens of SEO:
Chapter 1: The Failure-Friendly Mindset
In the opening chapter, Edmondson introduces the concept of a "failure-friendly mindset," which is characterised by openness to learning from mistakes and a willingness to challenge the status quo. She argues that this mindset is essential for innovation and growth in today's complex business environment.
SEOs can benefit from adopting a failure-friendly mindset by being open to experimenting with new techniques and learning from their mistakes. This may be using tooling such as Search Pilot, or setting up your own robust inhouse testing capability or just starting off with the most rudimentary of capability but acknowledging the various types of bias. Challenge conventional wisdom and explore new approaches.
Chapter 2: The Anatomy of Psychological Safety
This chapter explores the concept of psychological safety, which is the shared belief that it is safe to take risks and make mistakes. Edmondson argues that psychological safety is essential for fostering a culture of innovation and ultimately delivering better oucomes for your customers and organisation.
SEO teams can create a more psychologically safe environment by encouraging open communication, validating ideas, and providing support for experimentation. They can also create opportunities for team members to share their ideas and provide feedback - all of these are essential for the framework I use to offer any value.
Chapter 3: Embracing Errors and Learning from Failure
This chapter focuses on the importance of embracing errors and learning from failure. Edmondson argues that mistakes are inevitable and can be valuable opportunities for learning. She provides examples of organisations that have successfully used their mistakes to improve their products and services.
SEO professionals can learn from their mistakes by tracking their keyword rankings, analysing GSC data, using research from your UX teams and identifying areas where their content may not be performing as well as it could. They can then use this information to make improvements to their SEO strategies. This definitely ties into the framework elements of "act on lead measures" by using the learnings to define what the lead measures should be and then understand the sensitivity of the lag measures to them. It also ties into the "keep an actionable scoreboard" element as you need to clearly surface the impact of the failures as much as the successes.
Chapter 4: Fostering a Blame-Free Culture
This chapter explores the importance of fostering a blame-free culture in organisations. Edmondson argues that blaming individuals for mistakes can create a climate of fear and discourage innovation. She provides examples of companies that have successfully implemented blame-free cultures.
SEO teams can create a more blame-free culture by focusing on the process, rather than the person, when mistakes occur. They should also avoid assigning blame and instead focus on identifying root causes and implementing corrective actions. Of course I've made a few mistakes in my SEO career and I'm proud of how the leadership at the time responded to those issues and were supportive. It may have been because I always delivered a solution at the same time of the failure which softened the blow. I also built up credibility over time which certainly helped.
Chapter 5: Embracing Experimentation and Innovation
This chapter discusses the importance of embracing experimentation and innovation in organisations. Edmondson argues that experimentation is essential for developing new products and services, improving existing ones, and adapting to changing market conditions.
This is vital for SEO. We can certainly benefit from embracing experimentation by testing new technologies such as AI, defining new methods of surfacing untapped search term opportunities and creating new capabilities within platforms.
Chapter 6: Failure as a Catalyst for Growth
This chapter concludes the book by exploring the role of failure as a catalyst for growth. Edmondson argues that failure can be a valuable learning experience, and that it can help organisations to develop their resilience and improve their ability to adapt to change.
SEO should view failure as an opportunity to learn and grow by determining what went wrong, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing corrective actions. They should also be mindful of the lessons learned from past failures and avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. If you work within an enterprise agility setting, the concept of a retro is absolutely key here. And even if you don't, its essential that you have regular retrospectives with your team or at least fulfill that function within a regular cadence of strategy reviews.
There's so much that rings true with this book. And if you need help with rationalising and leveraging what you may see as failure, this book (aff) will be indespensible.