Episode Summary
A young PhD student ran the numbers and found that the best-performing hospital teams had the highest error rates. That result made no sense — until she realized better teams don't make more mistakes. They report more of them..
Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and the researcher who coined "psychological safety," joins Mousa to trace that discovery back to its origin — and to break down why most people still misunderstand what psychological safety actually requires
Amy Edmondson didn't set out to study psychological safety — she stumbled into it as a second-year PhD student trying to answer a simple question about hospital teams and medication errors. In this conversation she walks through that discovery from the inside, explains why the concept is so often misapplied as "being nice" rather than holding high standards alongside real candor, and lays out the three kinds of failure from her book Right Kind of Wrong — only one of which organizations should actually be trying to increase. It's a rare chance to hear the origin story of one of the most influential ideas in modern leadership, told by the person who found it.
In This Episode
00:19 — Introduction
00:25 — The role of compassion, trust, and heart in her work
04:02 — Defining psychological safety: the belief that speaking up is safe
05:45 — Hearing Buckminster Fuller speak at MIT — and writing him a letter
07:12 — Becoming Fuller's "chief engineer" at 1980
09:35 — Working alongside Peter Senge, Chris Argyris, and Edgar Schein
12:52 — The hospital study that started it all: do better teams make fewer errors?
14:34 — The counterintuitive finding: better teams reported more errors, not fewer
22:10 — Two broken failure cultures: "failure is not an option" vs. "fail fast, fail often"
22:59 — The three kinds of failure: basic, complex, and intelligent
27:52 — How leaders should respond differently to each kind of failure
31:06 — Todd Conklin's insight on blame: "it isolates the learning"
34:36 — What people get wrong about psychological safety — it's not about being nice
38:52 — The three faulty mental models that undermine safety: perfectionism, invulnerability, and individualism
44:53 — Her closing advice: pause, breathe, and choose curiosity
🗣️ KEY TOPICS DISCUSSED
→ The origin of the term "psychological safety"
→ Why better-performing teams report more errors, not fewer
→ Basic, complex, and intelligent failure — and how to respond to each
→ What people get wrong about psychological safety
→ The mental models that undermine safety: perfectionism, invulnerability, individualism
→ Choosing curiosity over certainty as a leadership practice