Do you cringe when things don’t go according to plan? Is your fear of failure holding you back from success?
Amy Edmondson’s book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well can help you turn your defeats into stepping stones for growth. Edmondson’s process involves learning from past failures to achieve better outcomes in the future, putting a positive spin on mistakes and setbacks.
Read more in our book overview of Right Kind of Wrong.
Overview of Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson
Many people view failure as shameful or painful, and try to avoid it at all costs. However, Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well offers a more balanced perspective: Failures are inevitable, and they can be essential stepping stones toward future successes. She argues that failures have been crucial to scientific discoveries, technological advancements, and individual achievements because the people who made them were willing to take risks and learn from their missteps. With the right mindset and tools, you too can transform defeats and shortcomings into innovations and personal growth.
Edmondson is a professor at Harvard Business School, where she earned her doctorate in organizational behavior. She specializes in teamwork and psychological safety, and has published numerous books on those topics. Right Kind of Wrong, published in 2023, is based on the expertise that Edmondson developed through decades of research, teaching, and consulting work. However, she’s best known for developing the concept of psychological safety within organizations, combining academic theory with strategies to help create more adaptable, innovative, and humane workplaces.
Recognizing That It’s Safe to Fail
To begin, Edmondson says that turning setbacks into opportunities for innovation and growth requires you to embrace the idea that failures—which she defines as results that differ from the desired outcome—are inevitable, and usually aren’t cause for shame or punishment. In short, she urges you to cultivate psychological safety regarding failure: the idea that failures should be freely shared and discussed for the common good, rather than hidden out of embarrassment or fear.
In this section, we’ll discuss how you can develop a mindset of embracing failure, and how you can help to create an organizational culture that welcomes failures as learning opportunities.
Personal: Developing a “Fail-Safe” Mindset
Edmondson begins by saying that a crucial part of personal growth and success is not just accepting, but embracing your fallibility. In other words, it’s not enough to rationally understand that you’ll sometimes make mistakes—you must also come to terms emotionally with the idea that you’re an imperfect human being, and that’s OK. To help you achieve this shift in mindset, the author suggests several skills you can develop to start building a healthier relationship with failure.
To develop a healthy relationship with failure, the first skill to cultivate is resilience, the ability to keep trying after you encounter a setback. Edmondson explains that many people fear failure because they view it as final: If an endeavor doesn’t go perfectly, they immediately give up and walk away from it. In contrast, developing the resilience to push through the embarrassment and frustration that failure often triggers makes it seem much less threatening. With resilience, you understand that you can keep working toward your goals even if something goes wrong.
The second skill Edmondson discusses is accountability—recognizing and admitting to your role in a failure. For example, perhaps you made a mistake, misunderstood an important piece of information, or simply overlooked something during your planning process. Accountability means acknowledging the mistake you made without shifting the blame to someone else. It also means apologizing and making amends when your actions harm others, even accidentally. While owning up to your personal failures is briefly uncomfortable, this practice will ease your feelings of guilt, making your mistakes and failures much less painful in the long run.
The third and final skill the author urges you to practice is reflection—examining your past failures so you can learn from them and do better in the future. Reflection empowers you to view failure as an opportunity worth embracing, rather than as something negative to be avoided.
Organizational: Building a “Fail-Safe” Culture
Developing a healthy personal mindset about failure is an important first step, but Edmondson’s primary goal is to help organizations develop work cultures that embrace failure and learn from it. The goal is to create a culture where conversations about mistakes and setbacks become a natural part of life in the workplace.
She argues that such work cultures are crucial in today’s rapidly evolving business environment, where adaptation and learning are essential for survival. Therefore, organizations that embrace experimentation and risk-taking have the potential for major breakthroughs and growth. Conversely, organizations that are too failure-averse to take risks will miss important opportunities and eventually fail.
Openly Discussing Failures
Edmondson says that organizations should strive to be places where workers can share setbacks, express doubts, and take calculated risks without fear of reprimand or punishment. This culture of safety promotes the sort of brainstorming and experimentation that drives innovation.
An organization’s leadership plays a crucial role in creating such an environment. The author says that the first step is for leaders to model the behavior they want to see, which means candidly discussing their own failures. For example, suppose a company’s CEO publicly shares a mistake they made and how it cost the company a lucrative contract. Sharing that story sends a clear message to employees that it’s acceptable to talk about their own mistakes (which were probably much less impactful).
Edmondson also urges those in leadership roles to encourage workers to tell their own stories about mistakes they’ve made and setbacks they’ve faced. She suggests creating spaces where employees can openly share such stories, such as a forum on the company intranet. This will have two major benefits: First, it will allow workers to offer each other advice about the problems they’re dealing with. Second, it will help them share valuable insights with the whole organization, rather than letting those ideas stay isolated within specific departments or teams.
Rewarding Good Failures
Creating a workplace where it’s safe to fail is a good start. However, as with your personal mindset, Edmondson urges you to work toward an organizational culture that embraces failure rather than merely accepting it.
Edmondson says that organizational leaders should review and analyze past failures with the people involved whenever possible. For instance, a store manager could do this during team meetings and individual performance reviews. The purpose of these analyses is to determine the root causes of each failure, then come up with actionable ideas to avoid similar problems in the future. Edmondson emphasizes that such reviews aren’t about blaming or punishing anyone, but rather about finding ways to improve individual, team, or company performance.
The other strategy Edmondson proposes is to publicly recognize and reward “good” failures—those in which the value of the lessons learned outweighs the costs of the mistake. This will reinforce the importance of learning from failure and encourage workers to take reasonable risks that could lead to further useful discoveries.
The Importance of Context
Edmondson’s discussion of creating an environment where it’s safe to fail comes with one crucial caveat: Sometimes it’s not safe to fail. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate the context you’re working in. This will help you determine the appropriate level of caution for your situation so that you can avoid genuinely harmful mistakes and encourage productive, educational failures. The author urges you to consider two factors relevant to your situation—the level of unpredictability and the level of risk—and find the appropriate balance between caution and experimentation based on your analysis.
Context Factor #1: The Level of Unpredictability
The first factor to consider is the level of unpredictability in what you’re doing. Edmondson presents a range of levels of uncertainty:
- Stable contexts are situations with well-established procedures and predictable outcomes, like following a recipe or completing simple, routine tasks.
- Volatile contexts are familiar situations, but they still require adaptation and flexibility. Examples include teaching a class and practicing medicine.
- New contexts are situations that don’t have established playbooks or best practices yet. Experimentation is absolutely needed in such contexts, so failure should be an expected part of learning and making progress.
Naturally, the likelihood of failure increases with the level of unpredictability. You’re very unlikely to encounter failure in stable situations, and if you do, it’s almost always the result of human error or negligence. At the opposite extreme, failure is to be expected in brand-new situations, because trial and error is the only way to navigate them.
Context Factor #2: The Level of Risk
The second context factor to consider is the level of risk involved in what you’re doing. In other words, what might failure cost in terms of money, reputation, or people’s well-being?
In low-risk contexts—situations where failure might only result in inconvenience or mild embarrassment—Edmondson encourages you to take an experimental approach. Trying new things when there’s not much at stake is an effective way to make new discoveries, learn from mistakes, and practice skills you don’t normally get to use. For instance, this is what many training programs do—let people practice skills and test solutions in a low-stakes environment. Someone learning CPR starts by practicing on a dummy so there’s no risk of injuring someone if they do the technique incorrectly. The trainee is free to experiment with various angles and levels of force until they find the method that works for them.
Conversely, Edmondson says that you should always approach high-risk contexts with vigilance and caution, no matter how unlikely failure is. In a situation where people’s reputations, livelihoods, or lives might be on the line, the consequences of failure are too severe to risk. For example, commercial airliners have numerous, redundant safety features and advanced autopilot systems that can nearly fly themselves. Even so, regulations require there to be at least two pilots in the cockpit at all times. This might seem overly cautious and inefficient, but if anything does go wrong, hundreds of passengers’ lives could be in danger. Therefore, the risk level is too high to leave anything to chance.
Study Your Failures to Learn From Them
Now that you’ve created an environment—personal, organizational, or both—where it’s safe to fail, you’re ready to start turning those setbacks into the building blocks of future successes.
Edmondson’s process for learning from failure involves much more than just asking what went wrong and what you can do better next time. She says you must carefully study your failures, gather specific details about them, and develop a deep understanding of what went wrong. Only then will you be ready to decide how to respond to the situation and learn how to avoid similar problems in the future.
In this section we’ll go over the types of failures Edmondson identifies: intelligent failures, simple failures, and complex failures. Next, we’ll share Edmondson’s principle that all failures exist on a spectrum ranging from deserving blame to deserving praise. Finally, we’ll discuss common psychological barriers that prevent people from learning from their mistakes.
Types of Failure
Edmondson divides failures into three categories, each with its own qualities and corrective methods:
Type #1: Intelligent Failures
The first category is what the author calls intelligent failures—those that provide meaningful insights without major losses. They’re common in settings where the entire point is to experiment and learn, such as scientific laboratories and R&D departments. As such, this type of “failure” is more or less expected and usually doesn’t require any special corrective action—the people involved were already prepared to fail, learn from the experience, and try again.
For example, if a scientific experiment doesn’t produce the expected results, it means that the researchers got something wrong, such as a flaw in either their hypothesis or their methodology. Finding and correcting that mistake will either improve their understanding of the research topic (if it was a problem with the hypothesis) or their skills at designing and conducting experiments (if it was a problem with the methodology).
Type #2: Simple Failures
The second category is what Edmondson calls simple failures—those with a single point of failure, usually (though not always) due to a preventable mistake or oversight. As such, this type of failure is the most likely to require some sort of punishment or corrective action.
Simple failures are common in predictable contexts with well-established procedures, such as factories and other repetitive jobs, because people are likely to get bored and overconfident in such settings. For example, if a factory worker gets injured because they weren’t following proper safety procedures, it’s clear that the point of failure was the employee’s own negligence. It will then be up to the supervisor or manager to determine whether any further punishment is warranted, such as giving the employee a formal reprimand or firing them.
Type #3: Complex Failures
The third category is complex failures—situations where multiple factors interact to create a problem. Edmondson says that complex failures are almost never worthy of blame because they’re nearly impossible to predict. In a complex failure, even very skilled and knowledgeable people can’t foresee the specific factors that cause it interacting in the specific way that triggered the underlying problem. Furthermore, there’s usually at least one uncontrollable factor involved in complex failures, such as the weather. However, due to that very complexity and unpredictability, such failures can serve as valuable learning opportunities.
The financial crisis of 2007-2008 is a notable example of a complex failure. A combination of many factors, including deregulation in the US financial sector, reduced interest rates for mortgages and other loans, and overconfidence on the part of bank executives and government officials, came together to create a “housing bubble” in which home prices increased well beyond their actual value. When the bubble “popped,” the demand for homes declined, and market prices corrected themselves accordingly—banks, lenders, and hedge funds lost hundreds of billions of dollars as their loans and assets suddenly became worthless. Furthermore, the shock to the US economy cost millions of people their jobs and homes.
Attempts to learn from these mistakes and prevent another financial crisis led to the US government passing measures like the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which tightened banking regulations and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Consider the Whole Range of Failures
We’ve discussed different types of failures, but it’s likely that you still think of success and failure as a simple binary: You either succeeded or you failed. Edmondson urges you to try thinking of failure as a spectrum instead.
At one end of this range are failures that deserve blame. These tend to be problems resulting from negligence or protocol violations, so they require immediate corrective action—such as punishment or additional training—to ensure they don’t happen again. However, the author argues that very few failures (perhaps one out of a hundred) exist at this end of the spectrum.
At the opposite end are failures that deserve praise. These are situations where people planned as well as they could have, took every reasonable precaution, and still encountered a setback. Edmondson says that failures of this sort are worthy of praise because they teach valuable lessons—there was an issue that you didn’t foresee and couldn’t have prepared for, and now you know about it.
Note that the vast majority of problems and setbacks will fall somewhere between those two extremes. Most of the time, any given failure is due to a combination of human error and unforeseen circumstances. Therefore, that failure is neither completely blameworthy nor completely praiseworthy, and it will be up to you to decide how best to proceed. The author adds that this principle is crucial because, far too often, people respond to failure by looking for someone to blame and punish. However, since most failures aren’t truly worthy of blame, this approach is generally both unfair and unproductive. Far from correcting problems and preventing future ones, our eagerness to blame creates a culture of fear wherein people hide their failures to avoid punishment. In doing so, those people deprive themselves and others of valuable learning opportunities.
