“slip through the cracks” In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Edmondson wrote: “It’s not MY insight that mistakes occur because of system complexity (and its challenging combination with patient heterogeneity)….I am merely the messenger bringing that perspective to certain audiences. But yes, the opportunities for slipping through are ever-present, so the challenge is building awareness and teamwork that catch and correct and prevent the slips.”
teammates behaved In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Edmondson wrote: “My goal was to figure out whether the interpersonal climate that I’d found to differ in this setting would differ in other organizations, especially in terms of differing between groups within the same organization. Later I called this psychological safety (or team psychological safety). I also wanted to discover whether, if it did differ, whether that difference would be associated with differences in learning behavior (and in performance).” For more on Edmondson’s work, please see Amy C. Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–83; Ingrid M. Nembhard and Amy C. Edmondson, “Making It Safe: The Effects of Leader Inclusiveness and Professional Status on Psychological Safety and Improvement Efforts in Health Care Teams,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 27, no. 7 (2006): 941–66; Amy C. Edmondson, Roderick M. Kramer, and Karen S. Cook, “Psychological Safety, Trust, and Learning in Organizations: A Group-Level Lens,” Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Dilemmas and Approaches 10 (2004): 239–72; Amy C. Edmondson, Managing the Risk of Learning: Psychological Safety in Work Teams (Boston: Division of Research, Harvard Business School, 2002); Amy C. Edmondson, Richard M. Bohmer, and Gary P. Pisano, “Disrupted Routines: Team Learning and New Technology Implementation in Hospitals,” Administrative Science Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2001): 685–716; Anita L. Tucker and Amy C. Edmondson, “Why Hospitals Don’t Learn from Failures,” California Management Review 45, no. 2 (2003): 55–72; Amy C. Edmondson, “The Competitive Imperative of Learning,” Harvard Business Review 86, nos. 7–8 (2008): 60; Amy C. Edmondson, “A Safe Harbor: Social Psychological Conditions Enabling Boundary Spanning in Work Teams,” Research on Managing Groups and Teams 2 (1999): 179–99; Amy C. Edmondson and Kathryn S. Roloff, “Overcoming Barriers to Collaboration: Psychological Safety and Learning in Diverse Teams,” Team Effectiveness in Complex Organizations: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives and Approaches 34 (2009): 183–208.
1999 paper Amy C. Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–83.
her Google colleagues In an email responding to fact-checking questions, a Google spokeswoman wrote: “We found Edmondson’s papers on psych safety very useful when trying to figure out how to cluster norms that we saw popping up as important into meta-themes. When we reviewed the papers about psych safety, we noticed that norms like allowing others to fail without repercussions, respecting divergent opinions, feeling as if others aren’t trying to undermine you are all part of psychological safety. This became one of our five key themes, along with dependability, structure/clarity, job meaning, and impact.”
would never stop For my understanding of the early days of Saturday Night Live, I am indebted to those writers and cast members who were willing to speak with me, as well as Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, Live from New York: An Uncensored History of “Saturday Night Live” (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2008); Ellin Stein, That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream (New York: Norton, 2013); Marianne Partridge, ed., “Rolling Stone” Visits “Saturday Night Live” (Garden City, N.Y.: Dolphin Books, 1979); Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of “Saturday Night Live” (San Francisco: Untreed Reads, 2011).
“never be heard from again” In an email sent in response to a fact-checking question, Schiller wrote: “It was an intense experience for me since I had never lived in New York or worked on a comedy-variety show. A lot of us were new to Manhattan and as such, hung out a lot together not only because New York at that time was sort of dangerous and scary, but also we didn’t know that many people and we were formulating the show. We were in our midtwenties and early thirties. Yes, we’d eat at restaurants and go to bars together even when out of the studio. We moved en masse, trying to make each other laugh.”
“among the show’s cast” Malcolm Gladwell, “Group Think: What Does Saturday Night Live Have in Common with German Philosophy?” The New Yorker, December 2, 2002.
team intensely bonds Donelson Forsyth, Group Dynamics (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2009).
“It was a stalag” Alison Castle, “Saturday Night Live”: The Book (Reprint, Cologne: Taschen, America, 2015).
“someone else was failing” In an email sent in response to a fact-checking question, Beatts wrote: “My Holocaust joke, which was certainly said in jest because there is no other way to say a joke, had nothing whatsoever to do with the show’s writers. The exact wording was ‘Imagine if Hitler hadn’t killed six million Jews, how hard it would be to find an apartment in New York.’ It was a joke about the difficulty of finding apartments in New York, riffing off New York’s large Jewish population and general ethnic feeling, a la ‘You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread. But it wouldn’t hurt.’ Zero to do with the writers. Marilyn Miller took offense at the mere mention of Hitler and the Holocaust, which to her could not be a subject for comedy….[Regarding] competition among the writers, not that it didn’t exist, because it did, but…everyone always had a chance to come back swinging the following week. Also the other writers and everyone in general, despite the competition for airtime, Lorne’s approval, audience appreciation, etc., were always very supportive of other people’s efforts and sympathetic to each other’s failures. No one went around rubbing their hands in glee and going haha, your sketch was cut and mine wasn’t, so there! It was more an attitude of ‘Better luck next time.’ I think everyone felt part of a family, maybe a dysfunctional family, but a close-knit family all the same. I would say that there is more backstabbing and jealousy and rivalry and competition and cliqueishness on the average middle school playground than there ever was at SNL during the time I was there.”
“stuff for other people” In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Alan Zweibel wrote: “I wasn’t angry because of anything to do with that character or the process in which it was written. She and I weren’t speaking for reasons that I really can’t recall. But after about three shows where I didn’t write with her (and for her) we both realized that our work was suffering—that we were better as a team than we were individually—so we buried the hatchet and began collaborating again.”