Have you heard the story of the “Apple Lisa”? Launched in 1983, the “Apple Lisa” was one of the first personal computers to offer a graphical user interface (GUI). However, due to its high cost (approximately $10,000 adjusted for inflation) and performance issues, it failed to capture the market. Despite being a major failure, Apple learned from this experience about the importance of affordability and reliable performance. This influenced the development of the Macintosh, which had a lower price and became a significant success, helping establish Apple as a major player in the personal computer market. Do you realize that success often doesn’t come without failure, or rather: that failure is often necessary for success? And that all of this is even more important in today’s world? Let’s talk about today’s article protagonist, Amy Edmondson: she is a renowned American academic and author, known for her work in the areas of leadership, organizational learning, and team effectiveness. She is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, where she has been teaching and conducting research since 1996. One of Edmondson’s main research focuses is the concept of “psychological safety,” a term she coined to describe an environment where people feel comfortable expressing their ideas, sharing concerns, and admitting mistakes without fear of retaliation. Her most famous book is “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth,” which I highly recommend. However, her latest book, “Right Kind of Wrong,” is very interesting because she elaborated on a theory about errors that she details in her interviews. Watch the video below and don’t forget to turn on YouTube subtitles.
“Let me tell you a story: a few years ago, in the early days of the pandemic, I was meeting with some executives at a financial services firm, and they knew who I was, they knew my work, and they said “you know all of that failure’s stuff, that stuff is great in good times, but now with a challenging business environment, we have to say failure is off limits. Now we must execute perfectly”. I empathized with them, but there’s two major logical problems with that statement, namely that in turbulent times, failure is more likely than ever, right? and number 2, in turbulent times, innovation is more important than ever, and its corresponding need for experimentation and failure”.
In 1991, a first-year doctoral student named Amy Edmondson began visiting hospital wards, with the intention to show that good teamwork and good medicine went hand in hand. But the data kept telling her she was wrong. Edmondson was studying organizational behavior at Harvard. A professor asked her to help with a study on medical errors, and so Edmondson, searching for a dissertation topic, began visiting recovery rooms, talking to nurses and analyzing error reports from two hospitals in Boston. In a cardiac ward, she found that a nurse had accidentally administered a patient an intravenous dose of lidocaine, an anesthetic, instead of heparin, an anticoagulant. In an orthopedic ward, a patient received amphetamines instead of aspirin. She was shocked by the number of medical errors that existed, but not so much out of incompetence, but because hospitals are really complicated places and there are often large teams – up to two dozen nurses, technicians, and doctors – who may be involved in caring for each patient. This represents many opportunities for something to go unnoticed… that is, they are complex environments. Some parts of the hospitals Edmondson visited seemed more accident-prone than others. The orthopedic ward, for example, reported an average of one error every three weeks; the cardiac ward, on the other hand, reported an error almost every other day. Edmondson also found that the various departments had very different cultures. In the cardiac ward, the nurses were chatty and informal; they gossiped in the corridors and had pictures of their children on the walls. In orthopedics, people were more serious. Nursing managers wore suits instead of scrubs and asked everyone to keep public areas free of personal items and clutter. Perhaps, thought Edmondson, she could study the cultures of the various teams and see if they correlated with error rates. She and a colleague created a survey to measure team cohesion in various wards. She asked nurses to describe how often their team leader set clear goals and whether team members discussed conflicts openly or avoided tense conversations. She measured satisfaction, happiness and self-motivation in different groups and hired a research assistant to observe the wards for two months. She thought the correlation would be straightforward: units with the strongest sense of teamwork would have the lowest error rates. Except that, when she tabulated her data, Edmondson found exactly the opposite. Wards with the strongest team cohesion had many more errors. She checked the data again. It made no sense at all. Why would strong teams make more mistakes? Confused, Edmondson decided to look at these nurses’ responses, question by question, alongside error rates to see if any explanation emerged. Edmondson had included a question in the survey that specifically inquired about the personal risks associated with making errors. She asked people to agree or disagree with the statement: “If you make a mistake on this unit, it will be used against you.” Once she compared the data from this question with error incidence, she realized what was happening. It wasn’t that wards with strong teams were making more mistakes. In fact, it was that nurses who belonged to strong teams felt more comfortable reporting their mistakes. It was this result that inspired Amy Edmondson to develop her famous theory of psychological safety, which we described above. But we want to understand something even more important, which is: why do these challenging environments demand more tolerance for error? Well, first because as Amy said above, these environments bring more uncertainty, but let’s focus on the second point, namely, that the need to innovate is greater. Let’s move from the medical field to the business field and we’ll have the same result: a low apparent error rate doesn’t necessarily mean things are going well, but rather it may well mean that there is no psychological safety for them to be shared. As a result, the organization will neither learn nor innovate with them. One important caveat: these errors cannot be too big as to disrupt the company, just as in hospitals they cannot be too big as to harm the patient. This wouldn’t make them valuable, even though we can learn from them.
I would like to make clear the difference between errors and failures: failure is the outcome that deviates from the expected result, this can mean deviating from the desire to be promoted, from the plan to win a gold medal… and it’s a fact that athletes, for example, fail much more than they succeed! Error, on the other hand, are unintentional deviations from established standards, such as procedures, rules, and so on. Both are important in companies, and it’s important to be clear about the difference between one and the other. In turbulent and challenging times, such as the pandemic or post-pandemic where geopolitical tensions and slow growth are proving to be a challenging scenario for businesses, we must tolerate errors more to learn to deviate from what has worked in the past. The problem is that the rhetoric above will not lead to perfection, but it will certainly make leaders unaware of the things that go wrong… which hinders learning. Therefore, after this reflection, I want to list the reasons why error tolerance in challenging business times like this is important:
- Increased uncertainty and complexity: In turbulent times, organizations face unprecedented challenges and complex situations. A culture of error helps teams navigate these uncertainties, as it encourages open communication, information sharing, and reflection on what went wrong to improve future processes.
- Innovation and experimentation: Turbulent times require innovative solutions. A culture of error promotes experimentation and taking calculated risks, which are essential for innovation. When team members know they can experiment and that errors are seen as learning opportunities, they feel more comfortable bringing new and innovative ideas.
- Organizational resilience: Organizations that cultivate a culture of error are more resilient. They are able to quickly recover from setbacks and adapt to changes because they have established practices for learning from mistakes and continuously improving.
- Team engagement and morale: A culture that does not punish errors but rather learns from them contributes to a positive work environment. This increases employee engagement, improves team morale, and contributes to talent retention.
- Continuous improvement: Accepting error as part of the learning process leads to a mindset of continuous improvement. Organizations become more agile and capable of constantly refining themselves, which is crucial for maintaining competitiveness in times of rapid change.
- Psychological safety: Edmondson is an advocate of the concept of psychological safety, which refers to the belief that it is safe to take risks and express opinions without fear of punishment or humiliation. A culture of error promotes psychological safety by allowing people to openly discuss errors and learn from them, which is essential for performance and innovation.
