The Right Kind of Wrong

Amy Edmondson’s The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well explores types of failure and how psychological safety can encourage good failure and minimize avoidable failure.

Here, failure is defined as an outcome that deviates from a desired result. Errors/mistakes are unintended deviations from prespecified standards like meaning to throw a banana peel in the trash but mistakenly throwing your keys instead. Violations are intentional deviations from the rules. Their definition of errors is what Don Norman calls slips which frustrated me as they reference him later in the book meaning they deliberately chose to use different terminology.

The main focus of Edmondson’s work started when researching medical teams and found that teams that had a worse culture reported less mistakes while the opposite happened with teams with a good culture. Good culture refers to a team’s openness and encouragement of disclosure without fear of blame or punishment. Edmondson describes this environment as psychologically safe, or having psychological safety.

The types of failure are basic, complex, and intelligent and can depend on the environment failure occurs in. There are consistent, novel, and variable environments with variable being a traditionally consistent environment with an unexpected random variable. Intelligent failures should meet the following criteria:

• Takes place in a new territory

• Context can forward desired goal

• Informed by available knowledge

• Is small as it can be to provide valuable insights

While intelligent failures should be informed by available knowledge, if the outcome is already known, then it is not an intelligent failure. Basic failures happen in consistent environments and are the result of inattention, making assumptions, overconfidence, or neglect. Complex failures appear when multiple factors interact in unexpected ways. It’s like if a block of Swiss cheese had a series of holes that made it permeable. The path through was likely not expected but had been an unlikely possibility.

For preventing basic failure, Edmondson brings in an example from Toyota where they have Andon Cords which are cords along the assembly line that workers can pull to notify a supervisor of a potential problem. Another method mentioned is blameless reporting that encourages problems are immediately reported and are not to lead to penalties. Preventative maintenance also stops basic failure. The enemy of this is temporal discounting where maintenance might be put off until there is a problem. Additionally, there are codification, required training, and failure proofing.

Complex failures can be reduced by learning from past failures and acknowledging ambiguous threats.

Non-intelligent failures still happen and might happen repeatedly because people can have trouble learning from failure. A failure might seem intelligent until looking at in hindsight and additional details are more closely looked at. Confirmation bias can lead to the filtering out of information that doesn’t support our stance and causes us to focalize on what does. The amygdala can also nudge a person into making rash decisions out of fear. Ego can stop people from admitting that they are responsible for failure and thus learn from it.

To prevent avoidable failure, it is critical to have an awareness of one’s self, situation, and system. The consequences of actions are rarely cause and single effect. There is a reverberating impact that should be considered to a reasonable degree. One needs to be okay with failing to achieve success. An attitude of straight negativity towards all kind of failure is typical but unproductive. As long as the failure has a reasonable cost, it can be advantageous to take a risk. Losing your life saving in the stock market is likely not the result of an intelligent failure, however booking a room in a cheaper hotel might be.

Overall, I did get value from Edmondson’s book. It was not as much as I would have liked to have gained. In my head, I see this read ranked close to Buyology. The author here does a similar thing with descriptions of people. I don’t understand why they thought it was necessary to let us know that Dr. Heemstra, a research scientist at Emory University, has a, “warm, open smile [that] threatens to burst from the confines of the [Zoom] screen,” or that she wore a blue blazer that she could wear to address an auditorium full of students or slip off and go on a job.

Towards the end of the book, Edmondson claims that they feel guilty for not bringing the ideas of psychological safety to DEI and LGBTQIA initiatives earlier. I took this as virtue signaling as I don’t understand what there was to be guilty of. Do they also feel guilty about not bringing their findings to more companies whose failures negatively impacted the environment? They also made a point of acknowledging that they had failed people in their lives, including their children, one of whom possessed a “rare” growth mindset. One of their claims was that people who own up to failure are found to be more respected, which might be why they go out of their way to include these details.

The case studies and anecdotes had a varying impact on me. The story of sticky notes being the result of multiple failures at 3M was interesting while learning how Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin-Clicquot succeeded after repeated failure in the Champaign business after pausing to take a four-year mentorship and receiving a million-dollar loan was less impressive. During a portion where they recounted the failed introduction of Dasani in the UK, I recalled a Tom Scott video I had seen. It was not surprising that they then referred to the same YouTube video I remembered. For some parts, it felt like they were writing this book, heard a couple of stories that they thought they could include, and awkwardly inserted them. I believe there were stronger stories that could have better represented what they were trying to get across at some points.

Okay book. Won't go out of my way to look at their other work.