Right Kind of Wrong The Science of Failing Well

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I haven't met anyone who feels really good about failure, myself included. You have to force yourself to feel good about failure.

I think it's our upbringing, right? By the time you're in elementary school, there's such a strong emphasis on getting the right answer or succeeding, not failing.

I think of them as emotional, cognitive, and social. So emotionally, we're just spontaneously averse to failure, right? I don't like it. I don't want to have it. I don't want to look at it, right? It's immediate.

Cognitively, because we don't do a good job or don't have access to a simple framework to distinguish among kinds of failures, we then sort of decide to not like any of them.

And the fear part has to do with our concerns, very deep and deeply founded concerns of what other people think of us. So we don't want to be seen as having shortcomings. We don't want to be seen as associated with a failure.

Amy Edmondson studies the science of mistakes. She's the author of Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well.

Amy Edmondson teaches at the Harvard Business School. She's the author of Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well.

And she has a new book out entitled, The Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well.

Part of feeling psychologically safe is feeling okay making mistakes and admitting them. This idea of failure is the focus of your new book, Right Kind of Wrong. Can you talk to us about unproductive failure versus productive failure? And can you share your three archetypes of failure for us.

You know, one of the chapters in the new book is about the importance of context, the importance of situational awareness.

And I wish you best of luck with your new book, right kind of wrong, The Science of Failing Well.