Psychological Safety (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)

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Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace

An interview with Amy C. Edmondson by Curt Nickisch

It was the late 1990s. Medical mistakes at hospitals were a big problem, and researcher Amy Edmondson had a moment of panic.

She had been studying different teams in the same hospital. She wanted to know: Do better teams make fewer mistakes? What she found was the opposite of what she expected.

Turns out, the most effective hospital teams, according to a validated team survey, reported making more mistakes, not fewer. She then wondered whether the better teams might not actually be making more mistakes—rather, perhaps they were more able and willing to talk about their mistakes.

This study was published in a 1996 paper called “Learning from Mistakes ...