HBR On Strategy How to Fail Right
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Mar 13, 2024 
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson discusses the importance of failing well in business. She distinguishes between good and bad failures, emphasizing the value of experimentation and psychological safety. The podcast explores the challenges of not experimenting enough due to fear of failure, and the need for feedback and learning from mistakes to drive innovation.
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Train Failures, Not Frontline Errors
- High-safety industries tolerate failures in training and simulation, not in front-line execution.
- Airlines succeed because they normalize discussion of error in safe settings like simulators.
The $800M Wiring Error
- Edmondson recounts a Citibank employee who accidentally wired $800 million to the wrong client.
- That human-error failure illustrates unproductive mistakes in known processes that shouldn't be celebrated.
Thorough Post‑Mortems Prevent Repeat Errors
- Do run thorough post-mortems after failures to understand what happened and why.
- Do use those analyses to prevent the same failure from recurring.