A summary of Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson
We hear a lot about failing fast and learning from mistakes. Yet many organizations unintentionally discourage people from taking risks. In Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmonson (perhaps best known for her work on psychological safety), helps us understand how creating opportunities for failure can reap rewards. But not just any kind of failure – intelligent failure. Sim Sitkin of Duke University suggested ‘intelligent failure’ to describe failures that generate valuable understanding without causing significant harm. Intelligent failures could not have been predicted because there was no ‘right’ way to do it in the first place. This contrasts them with errors, where the right way was either not understood or ignored.
So why is intelligent failure so hard? Edmonson gives two psychological reasons and an analytical one. First, the psychological: Aversion is the natural human desire to avoid loss. The late Daniel Kahneman made his name studying “loss aversion” in which we give far more psychological weight to losses than potential wins. Loss aversion results in all kinds of irrational behavior today but has rational ties back to our survival instincts – after all, a surplus of food is fine, but a shortage of food is a crisis. Aversion leads us to avoid taking risks, even when the potential for gaining valuable new understanding is high. This relates to the other psychological factor – fear – in particular, fear of the social cost of failure. This is where Edmonson brings in her research on psychological safety, pointing out the importance of psychologically safe environments where people can experiment, ask questions and admit mistakes without the expectation of being blamed.
The analytical factor that makes intelligent failure difficult is differentiating between kinds of failure: basic, complex or intelligent. Basic and complex failure are worth analyzing (but not celebrating) because they don’t lead to valuable understanding. Basic failure occurs when the situation is predictable with a high level of existing knowledge. Complex failure results when the situation is less predictable and more challenging, and many things can go wrong. But intelligent failure requires the state of knowledge to be limited (there is no ‘right’ way) and high uncertainty, leading to novel experience and learning.
Overcoming these obstacles to intelligent failure takes strong leadership. Jake Breeden of Takeda Pharmaceuticals describes how he reframed “celebrating failure” to “celebrating pivots”. Failures led to a pivot, and that pivot was focused on the next chapter of the story. By celebrating pivots, he found people were more willing to talk about failure and the positive outcomes it eventually led to. Sharing failures is an act of vulnerability that – especially in leaders – increases trust, deepens relationships and promotes innovation.
The next time you see a failure, consider whether it was an error or an intelligent failure, and what the organization can learn from it.