The Right Kind of Wrong

by Amy C. Edmondson

A revolutionary guide that will transform your relationship with failure, from the pioneering researcher of psychological safety and award-winning Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.

We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.

After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely. Outlining the three archetypes of failure—simple, complex, and intelligent—Amy showcases how to minimize unproductive failure while maximizing what we gain from flubs of all stripes. She illustrates how we and our organizations can embrace our human fallibility, learn exactly when failure is our friend, and prevent most of it when it is not. This is the key to pursuing smart risks and preventing avoidable harm.

With vivid, real-life stories from business, pop culture, history, and more, Edmondson gives us specifically tailored practices, skills, and mindsets to help us replace shame and blame with curiosity, vulnerability, and personal growth. You’ll never look at failure the same way again.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Psychology, Self Help, Leadership, Personal Development, Audiobook

Audiobook

First published September 5, 2023

About the author

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, where she teaches courses in leadership, organizational learning, and operations management in the MBA and Executive Education programs.

Reviews

[Frank Calberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Takeaways from reading the book:

How do we get better at communicating openly about mistakes?
- Page 28: When we do not admit mistakes or do not point out mistakes, we allow them to turn into larger ones. Also, we do not get the help we need.
- Page 62: Share everything about a failure with other people.
- Page 110: When someone, who works for Toyota, spots a problem, she or he pulls a cord above her or his workstation to prevent the problem from compounding. The cord conveys the message "We want to hear from you."
- Pages 113 and 114: Sharing bad news with people is the first step to making things better.
- Page 161: Actively seek dissenting voices.
- Page 161: Make sure that everyone is heard.
- Page 175: People learn less from being given information about what they get wrong than about what they get right. Success feedback is more effective than failure feedback.
- Page 251: Even in a successful project, people, who work for Toyota, ask each other: What did not go so well that we can make better?
- Page 269: People like others more, not less, when they disclose vulnerabilities. This is partly because we respect their courage.
- Page 281: Good teams report more errors.

What do we do to thank people more for communicating openly about mistakes?
- Page 15: When people work in psychologically safe contexts, they know that questions are appreciated, ideas are welcome, and mistakes as well as failures are discussable. They know that being wrong will not be a fatal blow to their reputation.
- Page 28: One of the most important strategies for avoiding complex failures is emphasizing a preference for speaking up openly and quickly. In other words, making it psychologically safe to be honest about a small thing before it snowballs into a larger failure.
- Page 91: Punishing people for making mistakes increases the likelihood of failure because people will not admit mistakes.
- Page 110: People, who work for Toyota, are thanked and recognized for their close observations.
- Pages 113 and 114: The most effective hospital teams can report errors without fear of being blamed. Also in aviation, anyone can report an error without the name of the person who made the error. Regulations guarantee that information is confidential, voluntary and non-punitive. Blameless reporting is part of a coordinated learning system.
- Page 159: Thanking people for taking the micro risk of speaking up without certainty periodically averts serious accidents.

What are reasons for mistakes people make?
- Pages 66 and 110: Analyze carefully why a mistake happened. What went wrong? What were the reasons?
- Page 69: Care more about new information, which a failure brought, than about being wrong.
- Pages 88 and 97: People make mistakes because of inattention. Example: Forgetting to charge smartphone. Fatigue plays a role in slips due to inattention. A third of adult Americans do not get enough sleep.
- Pages 88 and 102: People make mistakes when making wrong assumptions. Example: We have always used fossil fuels. So the evidence of negative effects on the environment must be false or exaggerated.
- Pages 88 and 100: People make mistakes because of overconfidence. Not thinking about the implications of a decision is a common underlying cause. Example: Not consulting weather reports when doing something outside.
- Page 88: People make mistakes because of neglect. Example: A damaged floor caused by leak from a sink, which persisted too long.
- Page 115: People neglect preventive maintenance because they give less weight to events that will happen in the future compared to events that happen now.
- Page 152: Get curious and take a closer look at signals of irregularity.

What can we do to test ideas in order to better understand things?
- Page 62: Test ideas by designing pilots under 1) challenging circumstances, 2) with the goal to learn as much as possible, and 3) with a compensation system that is not based on successful outcome.
- Page 75: World class cook René Redzepi created a time each week when junior cooks could experiment. The testing sessions fostered a culture in which failure was accepted as part of the innovation from which successful dishes emerge.
- Page 70: Elite failure practitioners test things. They want to understand the world and do that by interacting with it.
- Page 201: When you are working on a task where the purpose is learning, then avoid focusing on execution and feeling that you are supposed to know the answers to everything. Instead, experiment and learn.
- Page 206: When a situation is new for you, avoid treating that situation as routine. New situations bring more uncertainty and therefore require your full attention to try out ideas and continuously learn from what goes right and wrong.
- Page 221: Testing octopus recipes, the husband of Amy Edmondson improved the tastiness of octopus he makes. In the recipe testing process he tried out different ingredients and also experimented with cooking methods. This innovation work by Amy's husband is an example of an intelligent failure in a novel situation.
- Page 222: Testing an improvement idea in a production line and failing is an example of an intelligent failure in a consistent context.
- Page 248: 3M research scientist Arthur Fry distributed sticky note pads to friends. He said to them that they could come to him when they wanted more note pads. Fry wrote down how many note pads each person used. Later, he put pallets of pads in the halls of 3M. They quickly emptied. The rest is history.

Use checklists and technology to reduce mistakes
- Page 90: Checklists are used in medicine and in aviation. For example, pilots and their crews confirm a checklist of procedures before takeoff and thereby reduce preventable errors.
- Page 112: Record yourself using audio / video.
- Page 121: The undo function for documents helps to correct mistakes.
- Page 121: Twitter warns you when you reach the character limit.

What can we do to accept that we are not perfect?
- Page 18: We need to accept ourselves as fallible human beings.
- Page 27: People, who are higher up in the hierarchy, are more likely to blame factors other than themselves compared to those with less power.
- Page 27: We suffer from loss aversion. In other words, we overweigh losses compared to equivalent wins. We do not want to lose.
- Page 28: Feeling anger and blame does not help us avoid and learn from failure.
- Page 31: Some people are more resilient than others. Why? 1. They are less prone to perfectionism, less likely to hold themselves to unrealistic standards. 2. Resilient people make more positive attributions about events than those who become anxious or depressed. Their way of explaining failure to themselves is more balanced and realistic rather than exaggerated and colored by shame.
- Page 33: The amygdala, which is the small part of the brain responsible for activating a fight-or-flight response, detects a threat no matter the context. Our negative emotional reaction to failure can, regardless of the level of real danger, be surprisingly similar.
- Page 36: The fear induced by the risk of social rejection can be traced back to our evolutionary heritage when rejection could literally mean the difference between staying alive and dying of starvation or exposure.
- Page 181: When we hold a baby in our hands, our job is not to say, "Look at her, she / he is perfect. Our job is to keep her perfect. Our job is to look and say, "You're imperfect, and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging."
- Page 196: Choose learning over knowing.
- Page 196: Give yourself permission to be human.
- Page 263: Accept that you are fallible. Fallibility is a part of who we are.
- Page 263: Find out what you love to do.

How do we learn to realize that if we do not make mistakes, we do not grow?
- Page 3: As a PhD student Amy Edmondson learned to understand that if she was not failing, she was not journeying into new territory. She learned that her success as a researcher necessitated failure along the way.
- Page 5: Winston Churchill learned that success means to stumble from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Page 29: Wayne Gretzky said, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
- Page 49: Reframe the word "failure" - like Thomas Edison: I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that will not work.
- Page 121: Lee Kum Sheung accidentally left a pot of oysters to simmer too long. Tasting the result, he discovered that it was delicious. The experience led him to develop a popular oyster sauce.

What is a mistake? What is a failure?
- Page 17: A mistake is an unintended deviation from prespecified standards such as procedures, rules or policies.
- Page 16: A failure is an outcome that deviates from desired results. Failure is lack of success.
- Page 10: Intelligent failures involves 1) careful thinking, 2) that the failure does not cause unnecessary harm, and 3) that the failure generates useful learning which advances knowledge.
- Page 52: An intelligent failure has 4 attributes: 1. It takes place in new territory. 2. It is pursuing a meaningful opportunity to advance toward a desired goal. 3. It is informed by available knowledge. 4. It is as small as it can be to still provide valuable insights.
- Page 57: An example of an intelligent failure is experimenting with a new recipe that looks delicious and turns out to taste awful.

How do we create a system of innovation that enable failures to turn into brilliant products?
- Page 246: Create places that help connect people. Example: 3M created a golf course.
- Page 246: Encourage and celebrate boundary spanning.
- Page 246: Provide resources and slack time.
- Page 246: Normalize intelligent failure.
- Page 246: Celebrate changing the direction of a business when realizing that the current products or services are not meeting needs people have.
- Page 246: Declare that you want a significant portion of revenues to come from new and different products, courses or experiences.
- Page 246: 3M encourages people to spend 15% of their time doing things that might turn into failures. This initiative was later adopted by Google and Ideo.
- Page 255: Replace words, which you use, with other words that are more useful. An example: Instead of "blaming", use "learning."

Other research from the book:
- Page 172: Confirmation biases are fueled by our natural motivation to maintain self-esteem, which helps us tune out signals that we might be wrong.
- Page 244: Requiring managers to rank employees from best to worst is a cooperation killer.
- Page 254: Like a Swiss cheese, most accidents result rather from a series of small process failures lining up than from one person's error.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listened to the audiobook. I listened to this on nearly 2x speed by the end, because it was interesting, relevant, and practical, but also kind of repetitive. It's basically a book of a ton of case studies in failure. If you've read self-help or business books before, you've likely come across a lot of these cases. There were some helpful points about creating a culture - both in your personal and professional life - where it is okay to fail, because the greatest successes come from those who fail WELL. And there's good advice as to how to fail well. And then there are like 6 other hours of content. I do think the main points are important and helpful, I just wish they were made more concisely.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rant here ->

The bolded text "A revolutionary guide that will transform your relationship with failure, from the pioneering researcher of psychological safety and award-winning Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson." in the goodreads summary is one of the most egregious embellishments I've encountered.

I came into this book hoping to gain insight in detangling failure. Blameless culture and a desire to maximize psychological safety are both quite popular these days, but they come with challenges. They can make examining mistakes challenging as people fear (ironically?) coming across as impairing psychological safety.

Edmondson hints at addressing this when she categorizes mistakes into three categories: simple, complex, and intelligent. The implication is that intelligent ones are the good ones and the others not. She later goes on to advocate for all these mistakes being acceptable. The book does an abysmal job of making that case. How is pointing out the 100s of millions a bank lost because of a simple mistake supposed to encourage the acceptability of mistakes? I gained hope when she noted that companies often wonder how they can hold people accountable under such leinancy. However, Edmondson simply dismisses the concern by claiming it's a false dichotomy to believe it's a choice of blameless vs accountability. I'm open to that argument. In fact, it's exactly what I hoped to see explained in this book. But, this is never actually explored.

Reading the first part of this book (out of 2) kept reminding me of the 1984 book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Or at least a watered down, less thorough version of it. As if to remove my doubt, she explicitly references that book towards the end of the first part. She then starts summarizing it as if she hadn't already heavily borrowed from it. She goes on to suggest that we've since advanced the field by misrepresenting one of the author's arguments. That's when I moved from meh/disappointment into annoyance.

There's also so much uncontextualized simplification. Edmondson uses Toyota as an example time and again. Books about Toyota and their processes in mindset have been written for decades. Not only is this not "revolutionary" info, there are multitudes of stories of companies adopting these practice with terrible results.

Toyota is far from alone as a subject. Another example comes in a large oil spill disaster that's used as an example of complex failure. The author notes that even just one less mistake might have made all the difference. This is given to indicate that we can learn and do better. What is briefly mentioned is how much better we've gotten at dealing with oil spills. What isn't is how common it is to have accidents in ocean shipping and how common it is to have near misses (Normal accidents explains this with much more clarity). What is the learning the captain had to do there? In these cases the captains know they're taking a risk, they are pushed into crossing their fingers and hoping for luck due to the context.

This leads to one of the confusions of the book. Edmondson wants to treat all errors (failures) as mistakes. In reality a number of errors come from accepted risk that doesn't pan out. Edmondson seems to see the lesson in these as action should have been taken earlier as if it were possible to have perfect information in advance. That doesn't add up. If I have to choose between guessing a die will land on 1 or any of 2-6, I'll choose the latter. If I lose, the lesson isn't that I should have bet the other way. There's no lesson to be learned, I made a mistake only in the sense that for some reason, I didn't know the future. The handling of such situations did not need to be a part of this book and the author's handling did not work.

Some (though not much) of this book is actually from Edmondson's own work. Her first research story involves her failure to find that teamwork correlated with less mistakes. She goes on to reject her findings and assume she must have made a mistake. She determines that reported errors were not a measure of actual errors and goes on to find a follow up way that proves her original thesis. The story, like others she tells, seems at odds with her argument about the importance of psychological safety to allow for and learn from mistakes. In the story, she is dismissed by others but still succeeds. She determines her mistake is using self-reported data and tries another strategy. Did she really learn to not trust self-reported data in that story? It seems doubtful that a person with her educational prowess hadn't been taught one of the most common manipulations in stats (It's in the 1954 classic, "How to Lie with Statistics" for a reason) . The story is perhaps worthwhile in noting that often mistakes are recoverable but does nothing to show they are instructive.

This comes back when she describes another of her "failures." She ran an experiment that showed people learned more from success than failure (as Behaviorism emphatically showed decades earlier leading to a revolution in effectiveness in animal training). This seems to mean another mistake to her and she again digs further with some motivation reasoning. A follow up shows that people seem to learn more from the failure of others than from the success of others. She sees this as evidence that we can learn more from our own failures than successes as well and that it's simply a matter of adopting the right distanced attitude. The reasoning would work in either direction - one could equally argue that the success stories of others were simply not given in the right way. (On the topic of self-examination based learning read one of Annie Duke's books which come with practical methodical notes)

The anecdote didn't come across as showing learning from a mistake. It came across as showing the importance of unquestioning self-belief. It also once again emphasized that only a careless mistake could make our author not correct. Given that so many of the author's anecdotes center on a careless mistake on their part (ex: agreeing to their child's travel baseball team without consider how much effort it would be, failing a calculus exam due to underprep) it doesn't really seem like the author is learning from their mistakes. Then again she notes that mistakes are going to happen and they're inevitable, so what am I supposed to take away?

Back to that summary I started with, there's one thing that wasn't embellished. Edmondson is a Harvard professor - something she reminds the reader of time and again throughout the book.

There's so much more I could grumble about, but I'm out of steam. I'll leave off by strongly discouraging people from reading this book. If it feels like you've learned something, you've almost certainly fallen victim to the Dunning–Kruger effect.

[Kristīne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kā jau tas bieži notiek ar šāda tipa grāmatām, visu ideju var nokospektēt dažās lpp.
Grāmata vairāk noderēs ražošanā un inovācijās, medicīnā strādājošajiem. Savā grāmatu pārdevēja arodā/klientu apkalpošanā diezgan maz.
Bet šo to varēju paņemt sev praksē dzīvē
- nebaidīties no nepreizām darbībām un to pašu mācīt bērnam.
Autore min interesanti piemērus no dzīves ( un lieliem biznesa apmēriem), kad un kāpēc lietas nogājušas greizi. Bet ja šāda tipa literatūra jau ir lasīta, piemēri nebūs nekas jauns.

[Ajit Mathew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book categorizes failures into three types:
- Basic Failure: you were suppose to take a left but you took right. Can be avoided by using checklist.
- Complex failures: you were supposed to take left but you can't because of an accident. These failures are caused due to complicated interdependency in the system. It can be avoided/mitigated by smarter system design.
- Intelligent failure: you don't know of you have to take left or right. You chose one and learn from the mistake. These failures happen in unknown territories and are rich source of information.

In the second part of the book the author talks about techniques to avoid/cope/mitigate failure using behavioral science, psychology and system design.

[William Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected a lot more out of the FT’s 2023 Business Book of the year. I always look forward to reading their top picks, but this years #1 pick was quite disappointing.

The thoughts and concepts expressed were interested, but the book was unnecessarily lengthy. You can get everything that you need out of this book by reading the last page of every chapter. Figure 6.2 on page 223 also effectively summarizes the entire book into a 3x3 tile.

[Dan Connors · Rating 4 out of 5]

“As golf champion Yani Tseng puts it, “You always learn something from mistakes.” What can we take away from the practices of elite athletes? It seems to me that they learn how to confront their mistakes by focusing instead on possibility—on the achievements palpably within reach even if they eluded you today. They show us how to care more about tomorrow’s goal than today’s ego gratification.” Amy Edmondson

"A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." Albert Einstein

"To err is human, but to blame somebody else, that's even more human." Unknown

Why do we have such an aversion to failure? It's uncomfortable, of course, but it's the only way we learn anything. Before we walked, we fell down as toddlers. Everybody starts off in a state of ignorance, and our only way out of it is trial and error. Sure, we can try to learn from books, role models, Google, or by watching others succeed or fail, but the only way we each can reach our potential is to risk failure, which is often met with shame, scorn, and ridicule. It seems that as we age, our egos become even more fragile, as our identity becomes tied to perceived competence. But are we so fragile that we're afraid to fail or be vulnerable? Doesn't that make us weaker instead of stronger?

The elusive secret remains in how we frame our failures. We can frame them as embarrassments and ignore them. We can frame them as someone else's fault, which temporarily absolves our self-image. To do either of these things robs us of the opportunity to learn from failures and do better the next time. Somehow we need to re-frame failure as a normal and good thing, and an opportunity to grow and learn.

This is the basis of The Right Kind of Wrong, a new book by Amy Edmondson that looks at failures and how to deal with them. The author is a professor at Harvard's MBA program and has written 25 books on business management. This book is more for anybody who struggles with the fear of making a mistake.

Edmondson groups types of failures into three distinct groups.

Basic failures that are preventable are a product of neglect, distraction, or overconfidence. These include such things as forgetting your lunch, taking the wrong freeway exit, or giving the wrong drug to a patient. Mistakes like these can be major or minor ones, and can be minimized (but never eliminated) by planning and precautionary measures. Humans are always prone to making basic errors. Perfectionism is the enemy here. Expecting to never make mistakes like these is impossible in our fast-moving, complex world.

Complex failures are those that have more than one cause. Things like the weather, human error, faulty parts, and socioeconomic factors can combine to create large or lengthy mistakes, including destructive disasters. Things like plane crashes, recessions, or baseball teams ending up in last place are complex failures. One person can't necessarily control a complex failure, but they can be key in detecting problems before they snowball into bigger ones.

Intelligent failures are the main focus of the book. These are normal failures any time someone goes into new, unexplored territory. Trying an experiment, starting a new sport or hobby, or developing a new product are all drivers for intelligent failures (aka the right kind of wrong). The key is that these activities need to be towards some kind of goal, hypothesis driven with each step, and small enough that the failures don't hurt too much. The knowledge gained from these failures tell us what NOT to do, so that we can more clearly see what works in a world with many options.


(I would add a fourth type of wrong the author doesn't address. Ideological failures. This is when your ideology prevents you from seeing the world as it is. We all do this to some extent, but some of us base our entire identities on being right about religion, politics, and how things work that they ignore any conflicting information. This is how conspiracy theories are born, and they are drag us into territories where we learn very little and drift further and further away from reality.)

We live in a competitive world, where people often try to take advantage of other's mistakes. Or they try to blame mistakes on someone or something else. On social media people promote curated visions of themselves that ignore even the possibility of failure. So it's psychologically hard to face failures publicly, or even privately without feeling embarrassment or shame. The problem is, that by hiding our failures we rob ourselves of the chance to learn from them (while also robbing those around us of the chance to learn as well.)

Looking at recent history, it's depressing how little the USA has learned from its mistakes, mostly because politicians and voters refuse to entertain the painful truths. The corruption of Watergate keeps getting repeated The foolishness of Vietnam led us into wasteful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the failures of supply side economics keep getting repeated decade after decade. And acknowledging the damage that fossil fuels have done to our environment continues to be a challenge that few can wrap their heads around.

Edmondson's prescription for all of this boils down to two things- awareness and psychological safety. Awareness means that we don't look away from things that go wrong. We pay attention and re-frame them into something positive that we can learn from. A heart attack can be very bad, but it can also be a launching pad to a much healthier lifestyle. There's even a term for this- Post Traumatic Growth. We have to be self-aware, situationally aware, and systemically aware of the things that surround us that can and will go wrong sometimes. Ideally we won't be so surprised when things go wrong, and can be prepared to address and learn from them.

Psychological safety can only come from the top, but it is key to catching errors and learning from them. Toyota has the Andon Cord, that anyone on an assembly line can pull if they see something wrong, stopping everything. Pulling the cord is encouraged and rewarded, and it has led to Toyota being a leader in quality cars. In medicine, nurses are trying to install safety measures where they can correct doctors safely when necessary, which cuts down on medical errors. And there are a number of corporations that give employees a certain amount of time every week to work on projects and innovations of their own making, even celebrating the failures that didn't quite work out.

It's an uphill climb. Egos of those at the top can be fragile and threatened easily, so many are loathe to invite input from those below them. It makes them feel weak and vulnerable. But to expect those at the top to have all the answers is insanity. Information has to flow both ways for a society to function well. Admitting and correcting mistakes is the only way to get past them. And inviting intelligent mistakes more and more into our lives might make things harder at first, but it's the only path to growth.

[5H3MS]

When I started to read this book, I thought im an elite failure, and then I realised that im just a failure)

В общем неплохая книга для расширения горизонтов, особенно с точки зрения советско-постсоветского образования, где отношение к ошибкам было намного более критичным.

Но увы не обошлось без ложки дёгтя ближе к концу книги.

[Chris Boutté · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book. We all screw up, make mistakes, and fail. Fortunately, Amy Edmondson has been studying failure for years now, and she wrote a fantastic book about what she’s found from her research. Each time we make a mistake or fail, it’s a learning opportunity, and as Amy explains in this book, there are “intelligent failures”. In this book, you’ll learn how to make mistakes better while also learning what leads to much bigger mistakes. The book has a great combination of research as well as anecdotes, and I absolutely loved it.

[Omar Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good thesis on failure and it being a crucial part of success!

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned so much reading The Right Kind of Wrong. Edmondson explains how to prevent basic failures, how to create a space for intelligent failures and how to accept the inevitability of mistakes and failures of all kinds in the contexts of business, science, and -- unexpectedly -- family life. I was amazed at how well Edmondson illustrated a concept by alternating examples each of four different contexts: manufacturing, scientific innovation, medicine, and family.

Reading the book you will learn how to build resilience as well as perhaps correct some misconceptions you had about the value of failure. For example: we learn that a fail fast mindset makes sense only when you’ve put some thought into what you are trying (to just “try stuff” is the wrong kind of wrong”). Likewise the pulling the Andon cord in a factory (ala The Toyota Production System) isn’t stopping the line immediately but rather signaling that there may be an issue and starting the process of investigation.

Fear of failure and fear of rejection because you identified a failure (yours or one elsewhere in the system) is ingrained. It’s only by understanding that we won’t get it right all the time will we be able to improve and innovate. And this book is a guide to navigating that learning

Parents, managers, and individuals and individual contributors in all fields are likely to find something useful here. If want to know how to be better at accepting, and growing from, the inevitable uncertainties and failures in life and work, or want to learn how to create systems that better enable others do this this, The Right Kind of Wrong is worth a read!

[Magdalena Björkman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m probably not the target audience for this book. It’s basically “Fearless Organization” rephrased as a self-help book. If it’s the first book of this particular genre that you’re gonna read, you might find it interesting. I didn’t.

[Mark Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some valuable information. Generally well written but quite repetitive. The most important information could be shared in a long blog post. Worth an Audible credit.

[Sarah Cupitt]

WIP

Notes:
- There is a spectrum of reasons for failing which range from blameworthy to highly praiseworthy. By distinguishing between different types of failures, you can respond more effectively and foster a culture of learning and growth.
- praiseworthy failures, which occur when individuals or teams take calculated risks in the pursuit of innovation or improvement
- blameworthy failures, which result from negligence, recklessness, or intentional deviation from established protocols
- One of the most powerful tools in your failure-learning arsenal is the post-mortem review. Also known as an after-action review, this is a structured process for analyzing what went wrong, why it happened, and what can be done differently in the future.

Other:
- Another important strategy is to share lessons learned from failures across the organization. Too often, valuable insights get siloed within individual teams or departments, limiting their impact. So consider creating a centralized knowledge-sharing platform where teams can document their failures and the lessons they learned. Encourage cross-functional collaboration and dialogue, so that insights from one area can inform and improve work in another.

Obvious notes (TO ME) - tba bt content
- The key lies in fostering psychological safety, which empowers your team to take risks, experiment, and learn from their mistakes without fear of reprisal.
- When people feel that their ideas and contributions are valued, even if they don't always lead to immediate success, they are more likely to stay motivated and committed to their work.
- In order to foster an environment where learning from failure can thrive, people must feel safe sharing their failures, doubts, or imperfect works in progress. This is called psychological safety
- Creating psychological safety starts with leadership. As a leader, you set the tone for your team's interactions and communication style. By modeling curiosity, empathy, and openness to feedback, you signal to your team that it's safe to speak up and share their perspectives. This might involve admitting your own mistakes, asking questions rather than making assumptions, and actively seeking out dissenting opinions.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4 stars: Recommend

Why I would recommend:
- A great overview of several really important concepts around mistakes and failure. I appreciated how the author touched on several key concepts related to failure - the different types of mistakes that can be made, psychological safety, high reliability, the Swiss cheese model, checklists, systems thinking, etc. Pretty much everything touched upon in this book is exceptionally important for folks, especially those in positions of power, to understand.
- The writing was very approachable, and it was overall an easy read. I remember the author's previous book, The Fearless Organization, to be rather dry and challenging to read, so I appreciated how much more approachable this book seemed to me.
- While this was a little too beginner level for me, this is definitely a book I will recommend to my students. I've been reading and teaching about psychological safety and related concepts for over a decade at this point, so I personally would have liked more depth to many of the topics touched upon since much of it was familiar (I'll be diving into the bibliography for sure!). However, for someone who this isn't a key component of their work, this is a great book to introduce all the aforementioned topics and to get them thinking about their approach and thinking to failure, both at work and at home.
- I would have personally preferred fewer stories/anecdotes for all of the concepts. Absolutely a personal preference, I just felt that a lot of space was taken by stories and anecdotes. One or two would have worked instead of what seemed to be 3-5 stories for basically every topic touched upon.

[Damon · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it is now cliche to say that successful people learn from their mistakes,setbacks and failures, Edmonson avoids repeating established leadership cannon by establishing a framework for how to understand different kinds of failures, and how to be on the lookout for risks of those types of failures in your work and non-work life.

Her prose is accessible and engaging, and she brings many real-world examples to use as case studies for her failure types. Some of the cases and quotes that she uses are too familiar, however (i discovered thousands of ways not to make a lightbulb, etc.). I am not sure if you could approach a book about failure without pointing to the famous or obvious cases, but some of them are so common, that it feels like you are retreading familiar ground. The book has some good infographics, but could have used some more to emphasize her key points. As business/seaf-improvement/leadership writing goes, this is a good place to start if you are interested in how to train yourself (or your team) to learn from failures.

[Trent Horner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most organizations I’ve worked for, and people I know (including myself) have a high fear of failure. This book takes a practical approach to thinking differently about failure, and offers ways to learn from failure and to let spur us into growth (intelligent failure). Really helpful read, highly recommend.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everybody should read this book. Our default instinct is to hide our failures and mistakes, but it is in identifying and learning from our failures that allows us to improve. It refers to similar psychology books that I've read but with updated examples from a variety of fields and even parenting. I'll probably need to read it over and over to remind myself not to beat myself up over my mistakes.

[Todd Greer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like Amy Edmondson's work and have purchased probably every book she has written. This one, is probably the most scattered and repetitive of any of her prior works. In many ways this feels like a series of blogs cobbled together on the general topic of learning from failures, though it lacks any real breakthrough ideas.

[Christopher Rodgman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Act with audacity, play to win! Good advice. We (mostly) only regret the things we don’t do, the chances we don’t take. In order to succeed, people have to fail, and fail a lot. So when does failing help? In a lot of scenarios. Good book, very inspirational for the neurotic perfectionist in your life too paralyzed of not being perfect immediately that they never try new things.

[Erin M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t find a ton of revolutionary knowledge in here - some of the practical applications of utilizing failure for innovation or ensuring you “fail well” were interesting, but overall it was repetitive and called a lot upon Dweck’s research on grit.

[Amy]

I read about this book in the New York Times:

“It’s the third type of failure, which Edmondson labels ‘intelligent failure,’ that is most beneficial, leading to knowledge, discovery and growth. To qualify, Edmondson offers four criteria: You are operating in new territory, pursuing a goal, testing a hypothesis, and you have thoughtfully considered the risks.”

-Why Amanda Anisimova’s emotional post-match interview was a masterclass in handling failure https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6494...

[Joe Shadden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should read this book. It will free you from any tendency to be a perfectionist and give you tools and the freedom to learn and grow from your intelligent failures.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amy Edmondson focuses on the power of learning from your mistakes - recommended reading.

[Renee C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book.

[sislasus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like her talks much more than I like this book. Nothing much new in this book, we've all heard the examples from case studies before. And we've all already read Dweck, Brown and Duckworth.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

found this repetitive, DNF

[Matt Huber · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great ideas. Repetitive as hell.

[Steve Granger · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Right Kind of Wrong (not a saucy romance novel by the way), Edmondson beautifully summarizes in an accessible way her groundbreaking research on failures. Edmondson first describes the key ingredients that demarcate the types of failure, and then conveys a set of capabilities we can hone to help us navigate our inherent fallibility. This is a particularly important read for leaders, managers, and coaches.

[Lara · Rating 4 out of 5]

book about different types of failures, which to embrace and which to avoid, how to learn from failures