Succeed at Failing

Harvard behavioral psychologist Amy Edmondson has become well known for her work on psychological safety in teams. Inspired by Edmondson’s groundbreaking research, leaders around the world have been working to build trust, respect, open communication, and supportive feedback so their people will feel free to experiment, make mistakes, and fail without fear. The rewards include innovation, resilience, better teamwork, and higher engagement.

Now Edmondson turns her attention to failure itself. Despite paying lip service to the Silicon Valley mantra of failing fast and often, failure continues to be a dirty word in many organizations. As a result, people work in fear, problems go unreported, and the potential for learning from errors, mistakes, and experiments goes unmet. Edmondson aims to free failure from its stigma and enable organizations to reap the rewards.

In Praise of Failure

Edmonson offers a three-pronged strategy to recast failure as a key to success. First, she aims to help people reconsider their natural emotional aversion to failure and dismantle their resistance to admitting their slip-ups so leaders and teams can more freely report, talk about, and learn from these experiences.

It’s impossible to calculate the wasted time and resources created by our failure to learn from failure.Amy Edmondson

Two human foibles underlie the emotional aversion to failure, Edmondson says. One is the natural bias toward negativity — the human inclination to notice and remember negative events, feedback, and feelings more viscerally than positive ones — probably due to the survival advantage that accompanies being able to avoid these negatives in the future. The other is loss aversion — the fact that people tend to overestimate the weight of a loss and underestimate the weight of an equivalent gain. Both of these mental heuristics sharpen the pain of an experience that’s likely already fraught with shame and fear.

Edmondson points out that while an antipathy to failure is normal, being failure-averse will, ironically, increase your likelihood of failure. Small problems become bigger problems when they go unaddressed. Within many organizational cultures, failure is unequivocally unacceptable, but this doesn’t mean people stop making mistakes: They simply hide their errors from their colleagues and leaders, pushing them underground.

Good Failures, Bad Failures

As the second prong in her strategy to reframe failure, Edmondson offers a taxonomy to help dispel the confusion about the various facets of failure. Failure can be good, she says — but there are different kinds of failure; some hold lessons and offer opportunities, but not all of them do. She provides a framework for distinguishing three forms of failure and responding appropriately to each.

“Basic” failures, she says, happen in the performance of routine tasks, when someone simply slips up. These are entirely avoidable mistakes that happen due to human error — failing to pay attention, making incorrect assumptions, exuding overconfidence, or neglecting to perform a duty with care, for example. Edmondson recommends reducing basic failures by adopting a friendly attitude to error and human fallibility. These mistakes hold lessons, she says, and they may point to a need to invest in preventative maintenance, codify procedures using checklists, adequately train workers, and take measures to mitigate known risk factors. Always prioritize safety, she says, and in high-risk environments, aim to catch small errors before they compound, creating bigger issues.

Good failures are those that bring us valuable new information that simply could not have been gained any other way.Amy Edmondson

“Complex” failures, the second kind of failure, result when many small issues culminate in a catastrophe, such as in the 2017 Equifax data breach. Here, Edmonson explains, human error and technology failures combined to grant hackers access to 150 million Americans’ Social Security numbers, credit card details, and addresses. Complex failures are often preceded by warning signs, Edmondson says, so leaders should welcome reports of these signals, even if it means occasional false alarms. When complex failures do occur, be careful in attempts to rectify them, Edmondson warns. The complexity of these problems means that attempted solutions often exacerbate them.

“Intelligent” failures, the third kind of failure, occur when you’re exploring uncharted territory, such as developing a new product. Edmondson calls intelligent failure the “right kind of wrong” — an inevitable, valuable part of a process of exploration, learning, and growth. Intelligent failures often occur in the context of an iterative process of experimentation, failure, the identification of insights gleaned from the failure, and then a new round of attempts, she says. Edmondson recommends learning as much as you can from an intelligent failure by analyzing it to discover the root causes.

Failing Greatly

Edmonson’s third prong in reframing failure examines its social dimension — the profound fear of being perceived as incompetent, thought less of, and consequently rejected or punished. This is the realm of psychological safety, which Edmonson has written extensively about elsewhere. Here, she points to three capacities that will support a mindset for “failing well”: First, self-awareness enables you to notice failures and your own part of them, so you can learn and reorient. Second, contextual awareness allows you to perceive risks that might otherwise go unnoticed and assess stakes accurately, aiding decision-making. Third, systems awareness means seeing the broad picture of a situation so you can identify potential risks of failure that arise from interactions among the parts of a system.

All of us are fallible. The question is whether, and how, we use this fact to craft a fulfilling life full of never-ending learning.Amy Edmondson

Ultimately, Edmondson advocates for a more humane, more realistic view of what it means to be human: imperfect and fallible, but capable of learning and growth. Failures can bring greater clarity and perspective, helping individuals and organizations progress toward their goals. Fallibility no longer needs to be a point of stress, she says: Consider it a gift.