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Amy Edmonson: How judicial leaders can make organizations safer by treating failure as a source of learning
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Summary
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmonson on a Federal Judicial Center podcast defines psychological safety, explains three types of failure, and lays out practical steps — 'catch and correct' and 'stop, challenge, choose' — leaders can use to encourage speaking up and limit catastrophic errors.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmonson told a Federal Judicial Center podcast audience that judicial leaders who cultivate psychological safety — an environment where people can take interpersonal risks such as admitting mistakes or offering dissenting views — can turn failure into a source of organizational learning.
Edmonson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management and author of The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, said psychological safety is not about being "nice" or lowering standards but about creating conditions for candor that support continuous improvement. "It's truly about a learning environment where we value candor over coddling," she said.
The distinction between "mistakes" and "failures" matters, she said. Mistakes are deviations from known processes and are often preventable — for example, dialing the wrong setting on a medical infusion pump — while failures are undesired events that can result from experiments, bad luck, or multiple small errors lining up.
Edmonson described three failure types and focused on two organizational practices she says lower risk and increase learning. "Catch and correct" means noticing an error and fixing it before it causes harm; she stressed that people who catch errors must not be punished for speaking up. "Stop, challenge, choose" is a self-reflective practice to interrupt negative automatic thinking, re-evaluate assumptions and select a more productive response.
She also introduced the concept of "ambiguous threats," risks that are uncertain in probability and consequence. Drawing on research with coauthor Mike Roberto, Edmonson used the Columbia shuttle program (the transcript cites the 02/01/2003 accident) as an example of how expert teams sometimes underreact to ambiguous threats because of confirmation bias or production pressures.
Edmonson encouraged leaders to permit and reward small, deliberate experiments that may fail in order to gain new knowledge. "You reward intelligent failures," she said, explaining that leaders should share results broadly so teams do not repeat the same experiments and to build a bank of knowledge.
Asked what judiciary leaders should take away, she pointed to the final chapter of her book, "Thriving as a Fallible Human Being," and urged leaders to acknowledge their fallibility, show humility, and model the behaviors that invite others to speak up. "I need you to tell me when I've made a mistake," she said, recalling a pilot who greets new crews by saying he has never flown a perfect flight.
The episode was hosted by Lori Murphy, assistant division director for executive education at the Federal Judicial Center. For more information Edmonson pointed listeners to her website and her Harvard Business School faculty page. The podcast credited producer Shelley Easter and senior production director Craig Bowden, noting the episode was produced at U.S. taxpayer expense.
