The Science of Failing Well

There’s such a thing as failing well? Yep, and Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson’s 2023 book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well provides the detailed formula for productive failure and the circumstances to turn failure into innovation.

You may recognize the author’s name, as Dr. Edmondson coined the term psychological safety from her research about the dynamics behind successful teams. Psychological safety is an environment that encourages candor and reframes mistakes as learning opportunities. From this work, Dr. Edmondson turns to the idea of good failures.

If you read the book with a lens toward social change, it is a prescription for continuous improvement, intentional iterative action, and rigorous problem-solving. As Dr. Edmondson says, “Intelligent failures provide valuable new knowledge. They bring discovery. They occur when experimentation is necessary simply because answers are not knowable in advance” (p.11). Social transformation requires new knowledge and discovery precisely because we are asking hard, complicated questions.

Particularly poignant is the second part of the book: practicing the science of failing well. The three chapters in part two focus on self-awareness, situation awareness, and system awareness and how each intersect with failure. Dr. Edmondson highlights how our biases, contexts, and system dynamics influence how we frame (and our tolerance of) failure.

The overarching argument in the book is that fear of failure stifles innovation, so we need to take the fear away and be open to the good failures. Page 63 even poses some questions that would help us design a smart pilot program/intervention (spoiler: the goal of the pilot should be to learn as much as possible, not to prove the success of the innovation to funders)! Chapter 7: Appreciating Systems (p.227) is particularly relevant for our collective impact efforts.

The last chapter of the book begins with a quote from tennis legend Billie Jean King: “For me, losing a tennis match isn’t failure. It’s research.” Food for thought!

Source: Edmondson, A. C. (2023). Right kind of wrong: The science of failing well. Simon and Schuster.