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

No, no, no, no.

Intelligent failures are the undesired results of forays into new territory that are driven by a hypothesis and are as small as possible.

And so in a sense, an intelligent failure is an experiment that didn't produce the result you had truly wanted it to produce.

Yes.

So there's two kinds of frontiers.

One is the frontier of knowledge or discovery in that we're talking about a place where no one has been before.

And the other is the frontier that's just new for you.

Let's say you pick up a new hobby.

You decide to take a ceramics class.

That's new territory for you.

And you can expect some intelligent failures along the way, even if it's not new to the world.

Well, the shuttle had completely combusted on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere on February 1st, 2003.

And it was later determined that the reason for that is something called a foam strike.

Now, what happens is to get the shuttle out beyond the Earth's atmosphere, it takes off with the help of a solid rocket booster.

And that sort of has the energy to bring it out into space.

and that is surrounded by insulating foam.

And occasionally little bits of that insulating foam would break off just because of the pressure of the launch.

sometimes those little bits strike the shuttle and make little dents you know just little nuisance problems that would lead to maintenance later on to fix them up but in in this case there was a rather large piece of foam that dislodged and hit the shuttle on a delicate spot the leading edge of the wing

And so it unfortunately made a larger hole, a hole the size of a human head.

Now a hole that size in the shuttle as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere allowed all the hot gases of the atmosphere in and led to instant combustion.

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