Right Kind of Wrong

In this book, Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, investigates our complicated relationship with failure. She details the reasons that often make us react to it in counter-productive ways: emotional aversion, feelings of guilt, or even of shame, tendency to want to minimize our share of responsibility, etc. She particularly emphasizes that we tend to react uniformly—and always negatively—to failures, even though some are unavoidable in order to be able to innovate, learn to master a new skill, explore a still unknown context… To establish a more constructive relationship with failure, she invites us to distinguish three categories, each of which calls for a very distinct response: basic failures, avoidable and attributable to human fallibility; complex failures, often caused by the conjunction of systemic factors and a disruptive event; and “intelligent” failures, which occur in contexts of exploration and of calculated risk-taking. She provides advice, backed up by examples, to limit the first two types of failure and encourage “intelligent” failures, which are fundamental to any innovation and progress. More broadly, returning to her preferred field of study, psychological safety, she recommends the development of a context conducive to errors being reported as well as to risk-taking that yields value.