Amy Edmondson

speaker

344 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Amy Edmondson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Hidden Brain · Making the Most of Your Mistakes · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

In other units, even though they're only maybe across the hall or up a floor or two, he found people saying things like, well, in this unit, it's really easy to talk about mistakes because of what's at stake.

You know, patient's health is at stake.

So of course, you're never afraid to speak up and you're never afraid to tell the

the nurse manager, about what you see.

Well, to begin with, I realized you can't learn from mistakes that aren't reported.

When we think about organizations and teams and the goal of learning from mistakes and learning from failures, job one is to make sure we're actually talking about them honestly and openly.

And so that started me thinking that maybe there are differences in work environments in what I called then interpersonal climate.

And if the interpersonal climate differs, that would have real implications for people's ability to learn from mistakes and failures.

You said it at the outset, to err is human.

We are fallible human beings and we will always make mistakes.

I don't mean we'll make mistakes all the time, but there is always the possibility that a mistake will occur.

So a better approach is to

think about how can we be set up to catch incorrect mistakes before they cause harm.

It's one of these profound insights that I think way too few leaders or even just people in families recognize that when you insist that we must have error-free performance or error-free lives, the main thing that happens is not that error goes away, it's that you stop hearing about it.

I don't think it's possible to say one is better than the other.

They are better for different contexts.

So the fail fast, fail often is a fantastic approach for a laboratory or for an R&D group.

Let's adhere to the highest possible standards and try our very best to get everything right is how we want to run an operating theater.

Of course not.

Imagine being the head of a factory making Toyota automobiles who decides, let's fail fast today.

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