Amy Edmondson

The researchers were genuinely stumped for a while.

The data was a mess until they started looking at academic psychology, specifically a nineteen ninety-nine paper by a Harvard professor named Amy Edmondson.

Okay, Amy Edmondson.

She introduced a concept called psychological safety, and when Google mapped their data against this concept, they realized this was it.

This was the ultimate predictor of success.

Direction, focus, and safety.

And Amy Edmondson at Harvard talks a lot about psychological safety.

Mm-hmm.

And that's one of the key attributes, because our brains, in every microsecond, our brains are asking three questions: Do I trust you? Am I safe with you? Do I matter to you?

That there are more intelligent failures and there's less intelligent failures.

And there's a great book by Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor, that is, I believe, called The Right Side of Wrong.

And failures are failures that don't wipe you out.

You lose all your money, and you're completely destitute.

Instead, they create an environment where the right leadership can emerge from the right person at the right moment.

that also requires psychological safety if the engineer closest to the problem sees something senior management has missed but doesn't feel able to say it the centralized leadership has failed regardless of what the organization chart says Amy Edmondson's research found that psychological safety was associated with learning behaviour in teams.

An important reminder that learning requires people to be able to challenge assumptions, admit uncertainty and to face problems.

A useful example comes from Ericsson's large-scale agile transformation.

I'm not going to tell you the full version of the truth.

You know, there's this great study by Amy Edmondson that she looked at nurses in hospitals around the East.

And she was studying like, look at the performance of the hospital, the nursing departments in the hospital, and looking at the number of errors they make every single day, every week, every month.

And she found this really sort of unusual result, which is the best performing nurse stations in the East actually had more mistakes than those that were less well-performing.

by asking people, what do you think? What are we missing? What would you recommend? What decision would you make if I weren't here? It also requires allowing someone to struggle productively instead of grabbing the work back the moment things become uncomfortable.

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety shows why this matters.

Teams learn more effectively when people feel able to raise concerns, admit mistakes, ask questions, and challenge assumptions without fear of humiliation or punishment.

Now, psychological safety doesn't mean freedom from accountability.