What is Psychological Safety? The Right Kind of Wrong with Amy Edmondson

Power Hour

Adrienne Herbert

Society & Culture

4.8 • 713 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Adrienne is digging into the Power Hour archives and today's episode comes from 2023. d

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Renowned for her world-leading research into the concept of psychological safety, Edmondson has been named by Thinkers50 as the most influential management thinker in the world.

In her new book, Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson - the world's most influential organisational psychologist - reveals how we get failure wrong, and how to get it right. She draws on a lifetime's research into the science of 'psychological safety' to show that the most successful cultures are those in which you can fail openly, without your mistakes being held against you.

She introduces the three archetypes of failure - simple, complex and intelligent - and explains how to harness the revolutionary potential of the good ones (and eliminate the bad). And she tells vivid stories ranging from the history of open heart surgery to the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, all to ask a simple, provocative question: What if it is only by learning to fail that we can hope to truly succeed?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Power Hour. I'm Adrienne Herbert, wellness coach, international speaker and author.
0:11.6	Each week I speak to a variety of guests from business founders to Olympic athletes, leading coaches,
0:17.9	change makers and innovators to find out their daily habits, their rules to live
0:22.5	by and what motivates them to get up out of bed each day. Personally, I am on a mission to encourage,
0:29.5	motivate and inspire, so I hope that the Power Hour will help you to achieve your personal
0:34.4	and professional goals.
0:39.7	Welcome back to the Power Hour podcast.
0:45.9	Today, I am joined by the world's most influential organizational psychologist Amy Edmondson.
0:51.6	We're going to be talking about the science of psychological safety and also about failure.
0:57.3	Now, recently, you might have been told to embrace failure, that you should be prepared to fail fast, to that failure isn't final. We hear all of these things and whilst it might
1:02.7	sound good, it doesn't always feel good to fail. Now Amy says in her new book that learning for
1:09.8	mistakes is easier said than done.
1:11.8	So I have many thoughts, many questions on this topic, and I'm really excited to get into it.
1:17.5	Welcome to the show, Amy.
1:18.7	Thank you so much for having me.
1:20.6	As I said, well, so many things that come up, I think, when we think about the topic of failure.
1:25.9	But first, I think I wanted to start with psychological safety, because for anyone who's not
1:30.6	familiar with that term, maybe if they work in the corporate world, maybe if they work in
1:36.2	HR, they might have heard of this before, they might have seen a LinkedIn post about it,
1:40.6	but I'd love for you to tell us what psychological safety actually is in practice
1:45.0	for anyone who's not familiar with that.
1:47.0	Thank you. Yes, it's important to clarify because people have all sorts of misconceptions.
	...

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