Dr. Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, the person who popularized the concept of “psychological safety” at work, and has been ranked the #1 management thinker in the world. She explains why psychological safety was never about comfort, why “fail fast” is missing the point, and how stop, challenge, choose helps leaders stay regulated when things go sideways.
A household where only one failure was off limits
Amy Edmondson grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with enough freedom to walk to museums on her own. At home, the only kind of failure that was truly off limits was a failure of kindness. The lowest grade she brought home before college was a B plus, and she was devastated.
Everywhere else, the message was that failure is bad and shameful. That mindset runs against how discovery works. “If you’re a scientist and you’re not failing, you’re a lousy scientist,” Amy says, because a scientist’s job is to push knowledge forward by testing what we don’t yet know.
Fail small, and do your homework
To “fail forward” and “fail fast,” Amy adds two principles. The first is to fail small: you may be wrong, but be wrong at the smallest possible scale that still brings in the information you need. The second is to do your homework. If a move was knowable in advance as non-viable, failing at it quickly is neither productive nor valuable.
The principle holds even for executives facing big decisions with no time to wait. The bet may be large, but it should still be the smallest one possible.
Good bets come from high quality conversations
Any decision made under uncertainty is a bet. The failure Amy most wants to prevent is a bet made without information the organization already had, because people didn’t feel able or willing to share what they knew. “We never have complete information, but we ought to aspire to have all the information that we have,” she says.
Success in an uncertain world requires high quality bets, and those come from high quality conversations, where people share what they know and what they don’t know, listen to each other’s evidence, and argue it through. They are rare. In Amy’s experience, many executive team conversations are performative, with people sharing happy news from their different corners. Senior teams also bring diverse interests, since a leader who represents one group is also a steward of the whole firm. The more openly a team acknowledges those conflicting interests, the better its conversations will be.
Failure is on the path to winning
Amy didn’t set out to study failure. Her interest is organizational learning, and nearly everything that keeps an organization learning, from better decisions to innovation, involves failures along the way. She points to a commencement speech in which Roger Federer said he won 54 percent of the points he played in major match play but 80 percent of the games. “If you cannot recover from those mini failures, you can’t be a winner,” Amy says.
The Alan Mulally moment
When Alan Mulally arrived at Ford, his team brought him nothing but good news, with every status reported as green. He reframed it by pointing out that the company was on track to lose $17 billion that year and asking what wasn’t going well. “If you’re a bunch of people with only good news and your company is losing $17 billion, something’s wrong,” Amy says.
She describes three moves for leaders who want to change that pattern. The first is to call attention to context early and often, so that ideas from left field feel welcome. The second is to proactively invite voice through genuine questions, such as what people are seeing out there. The third is to become aware of how they respond when someone brings bad news, including what their face is doing, so the moment becomes a positive experience.
Stop, challenge, choose
People are exquisitely tuned to hierarchy, so a leader’s reactions have an outsized effect on everyone else. For the moment bad news arrives, Amy recommends a routine from her book Right Kind of Wrong. Stop means taking a breath, which creates enough of a pause to short circuit a spontaneous reaction. Challenge means questioning what that automatic reaction would have been. Choose means picking a more helpful response with an eye on the future, such as telling the person it was the right thing to call and asking for a few minutes to process.
Resist the single cause
After a failure, people look for a single cause, preferably an external one, because concluding that the cause was them is too painful. Most failures today are complex, and that search short circuits the learning. “It’s human and emotionally desirable to do it. But it’s impractical and wasteful,” Amy says. To start a learning conversation rather than a blame conversation, she suggests opening with one question: what happened? It’s judgment-free, and it’s the first step toward an honest discussion.
Psychological safety was never about comfort
Many executives believe psychological safety is in tension with high standards. Amy sees them as two dimensions that both matter: permission for candor on one side, and commitment to excellence and clarity about what good looks like on the other. When leaders build both, teams find themselves in the learning zone, where experiments and stretch goals happen. The two are “complementary, not contradictory,” she says, because the more honest a team is, the better positioned it is to hold each other accountable.
“Psychological safety is about a learning climate, and a learning climate is as uncomfortable as hell,” Amy says. Learning means stretching and risking being wrong, and people will naturally choose comfort over learning.
What to do this week
– Focus on high quality conversations. Most executive teams trade happy news from their corners and call it a meeting. Ask “What are you seeing that I’m not?” and then invite and welcome disagreement. You still make your own decisions, but you make them better informed.
– Manage your reactions. When failure happens, everyone is looking at the person at the top of the hierarchy. If someone brings you bad news, use Amy’s three-step reset: stop, challenge, and choose.
– Make learning routine, not a response to a disaster. After every project, launch, or event, run a plus/delta, where the pluses are what worked and the deltas are what you would change. When deltas are normalized, people stop hiding them. And when something goes really sideways, start with two words: “What happened?”
– Share this episode with one person who would benefit from hearing it. Send it to them, tell them why, and talk it through together.
Related Episodes
– Episode 1 - Lead Like a Learner: Helen Tupper on “Squiggly Careers” and the Power of Vulnerability
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