Early on in Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson describes a scene that seems almost too candid for a business book. As a doctoral student researching medical errors in hospitals, her data appears to be inaccurate. The top-performing teams are making more errors than the underperforming ones. She thinks about giving up. She then stops, sits through the discomfort, and considers the possible significance of the discovery.
Eventually, it was determined that superior teams weren’t making more mistakes. Simply put, they were more open to admitting them. It’s a minor distinction that ends up being very significant, and Edmondson’s career at Harvard Business School has been centered around this kind of observation. She has been studying psychological safety—the circumstances in which people feel comfortable enough to speak up, ask questions, and admit when something has gone wrong—for years as the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management.
A logical continuation of that work, Right Kind of Wrong became the first management book to win the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year award in its 19-year history. That’s a noteworthy difference, but the reason it seems to have connected so widely is more intriguing. It’s possible that readers realized something they had been overlooked in the current discussion about failure, which had become boisterous and a little careless over time.
This article carefully examines the “fail fast, fail often” maxim, which is popular in Silicon Valley and frequently repeated in conference rooms that probably shouldn’t be repeating it. Edmondson doesn’t completely rule it out. She sees genuine value in acknowledging that failure is a necessary part of the journey ahead for scientists, entrepreneurs, and those working in truly novel fields. However, she makes a point regarding context. She points out that telling a surgeon or an air traffic controller to fail quickly and frequently is not only ineffective. It’s ridiculous. In a hospital operating room, where established protocols exist for non-arbitrary reasons, the same reasoning that applies to a startup experimenting with a product roadmap is inapplicable.
Instead, she suggests a framework that makes a distinction between different kinds of failure, such as simple mistakes made on familiar ground, intricate system failures involving numerous minor contributing factors, and what she refers to as intelligent failures, which occur when someone takes a calculated risk in unfamiliar territory and gains something truly valuable from the outcome. That third category includes Thomas Edison’s thousands of failures in his quest for a functional lightbulb filament. It doesn’t work if you forget to shut the garage door. When presented that way, the distinction seems clear, but organizations frequently blur the lines, either celebrating failure indiscriminately or punishing it equally, both of which are harmful.
Reading Edmondson’s work gives me the impression that the true issue she’s trying to solve is one of honesty rather than failure at all. The cultures she examines that are adept at handling errors are not those that have just grown accustomed to failing. In these cultures, people feel genuinely comfortable speaking the truth about their surroundings. To do this, leaders must set an example of curiosity rather than defensiveness, ask “what isn’t going well” as frequently as they ask what is, and recognize that an employee who conceals a mistake is more dangerous than one who reports it right away.
How many companies will adopt these concepts beyond the level of an offsite management discussion is still unknown. However, the book has earned a spot on the shelf because Edmondson takes the topic seriously enough to make it helpful, not because failure has become fashionable.
