“In a novel context, a context like science or R&D or innovation or entrepreneurship, mediocrity would be no failures.”
Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Her research made psychological safety a core idea in modern management, and she is the author of Teaming, The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year in 2023.
We cover the failed hypothesis that launched her career, why bad is stronger than good, the three types of failure, Toyota’s Andon cord, near misses, whether failure is a privilege, and what leaders can do to build psychological safety.
What we covered:
- The 1990s hospital study where the better teams seemed to make more medication errors
- The realization that those teams were reporting more of their errors
- Awfulizing, then a looking-out-the-window moment in a 15th-floor PhD office
- Interpersonal risk and why psychological safety matters most in knowledge work
- Why we notice negatives faster than positives
- Going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
- Basic, complex and intelligent failures, and the five criteria for an intelligent one
- Astro Teller at X: if you’re not failing, you’re not taking the right risks
- Rewarding teams for shutting down failing projects
- The fundamental attribution error, at work and at home
- James Reason’s Swiss cheese model in aviation and healthcare
- Toyota’s Andon cord, from loom machines to a San Francisco trolley car, and why most pulls never stop the line
- Near misses as good catches, and the case for a near miss day
- Why failure is a privilege, and how leaders can level the failure playing field
- Whether encouraging failure means celebrating mediocrity
- Three moves to build psychological safety: frame the work, ask questions, respond productively
People:
- Arie Kruglanski, psychologist and previous guest on this show
- Roy Baumeister, social psychologist
- Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor
- Astro Teller, head of X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory
- James Reason, British error psychologist
Books:
- Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson
- The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson
- Teaming, Amy Edmondson
- The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
- The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Articles:
Organizations:
- Harvard Business School, X, Google, Toyota, Microsoft
Find Amy:
Harvard Business School: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6451
Website: https://amycedmondson.com
Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.
