The key ideas

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

Amy Edmondson, 2018

Why do smart, experienced people stay silent precisely when their words could prevent disaster? Harvard professor Amy Edmondson spent more than twenty years studying how teams work, from hospital wards to NASA, and concluded that the problem isn't people's character but an environment where speaking up is more dangerous than keeping quiet. The book explains how fear hides mistakes and shows what any leader can do so that people start speaking up in time.

Who it is for

For anyone who leads people or works in a team and notices that meetings go quiet while problems surface too late. And for anyone who has more than once kept a question to themselves.

Psychological safety isn't about being nice. It's about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other.

The nurse who kept quiet

A neonatal intensive care unit. The nurse Christina Price looks at twins born too early and thinks they need a particular drug. It has to be prescribed by a doctor. But Christina has seen this doctor tear into another nurse, and she doesn't want to be next. She weighs whether to call. And she decides to keep quiet.

This is the scene Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, opens the book with. For more than twenty years she studied why smart, experienced people stay silent precisely when their words could prevent disaster. The Fearless Organization came out in 2018 and brings together stories from hospitals, banks, carmakers and a space agency.

Her main idea is simple and uncomfortable. Christina's silence isn't a character trait. It's a reasonable calculation in a setting where a question can get you humiliated. Edmondson calls whatever helps people speak up in time psychological safety, and it can be built.

Ahead are stories of how fear silenced NASA engineers, bank employees and Nokia managers. And of leaders who removed that fear. And at the end you'll see what you can do in your own team, even if you're not the boss.

The best units made the most mistakes?

The early nineties. Edmondson is a Harvard doctoral student, and she joins a study of medication errors in two Boston hospitals. The task seems clear: show that good teams make fewer mistakes. Nurses in eight units fill in her questionnaires about leadership and relationships at work, while medical researchers collect the error data.

The result stunned her. The units with the best leaders and the most close-knit teams showed not fewer errors but more. Could a good team really work worse than a bad one?

Edmondson brought in another researcher who knew nothing about her data. He simply watched the units at work and talked to people. And the answer emerged: in the best teams there weren't more mistakes, people just talked about them. There you could admit a slip, and it was examined rather than punished. In the other units, mistakes were hidden.

That's how the idea at the heart of the book was born. The error reports measured not only the quality of the work but also the willingness to admit mistakes. Silence in the reports may mean everything is fine. Or it may mean people are afraid. Later Edmondson described a team's psychological safety as a feeling shared by all its members and proposed a way to measure it.

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About the author

Amy Edmondson is a professor at Harvard Business School who researches teamwork and learning in organizations. She brought the concept of psychological safety in teams into wide use.

All books by this author: Amy Edmondson

Terms from the book

  • Wells Fargo
  • Aristotle
  • Carroll
  • Alphabet
  • Fukushima
  • psychological safety
  • NASA
  • Price: Christina Price, a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, the central figure in the scene Edmondson opens the book with.
  • anxiety zone: One of the four zones in the author's model: standards are high, but speaking about problems feels risky. Mistakes there are more often hidden than fixed.
  • learning zone: The zone in the author's model where both standards and safety are high. People take on hard things and talk openly about what isn't working.
  • Deming: W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993), an American quality management theorist. Among his fourteen points for managers is a call to drive out fear.
  • cross-selling: Selling a customer who already uses one product other products too: a second account, a card, a loan.
  • Volkswagen: A German carmaker. In 2015 it emerged that its diesel cars had software that cheated emissions tests.
  • Winterkorn: Martin Winterkorn, head of Volkswagen from 2007 to 2015, who resigned after the diesel scandal.
  • Nokia: A Finnish company, in the early 2000s the world's largest maker of mobile phones. In 2013 it sold its phone business to Microsoft.
  • Columbia: An American space shuttle. It broke apart on 1 February 2003 on its return to Earth, and all seven astronauts were killed.
  • Rocha: Rodney Rocha, a NASA engineer who, after Columbia's launch, was worried about a foam strike on the wing and asked for images of the damage.
  • Ham: Linda Ham, head of Columbia's mission management team. Her refusal to take the engineers' concerns seriously was later described as part of the problem with NASA's culture.
  • Anglo American: One of the world's largest mining companies, headquartered in London with large mines in South Africa.
  • lekgotla: A traditional gathering in South Africa and Botswana: participants sit in a circle, anyone may speak, and the conversation goes on until a shared decision is found.
  • Masuda: Naohiro Masuda, head of the Fukushima Daini plant in 2011. Under his leadership all four of the plant's reactors were safely shut down.
  • situational humility: The author's phrase: an honest admission that the situation is new and nobody knows the answer alone. It isn't low self-esteem.
  • Morath: Julie Morath, chief operating officer of a children's hospital in Minneapolis. She made talking about mistakes the foundation of her work on patient safety.
  • Minneapolis: A large city in the state of Minnesota, US.
  • Bridgewater: Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's largest investment firms, known for its rule of openly telling each other everything you think.
  • Dalio: Ray Dalio, an American investor, founder of Bridgewater Associates and author of the book Principles.

All terms

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