The Science of Fearless Organizations

Harvard’s Amy Edmondson reveals how psychological safety transforms fear into learning—and why the best teams talk about their mistakes.

A single person writing on a glass wall surrounded by teammates watching and nodding

A few years ago, a nurse at a busy hospital noticed an error in a medication dosage. The prescription had been written by a senior physician — someone she deeply respected and didn’t want to embarrass. For a moment, she hesitated. She told herself she must have misread it. Then she remembered something her supervisor once said: “Silence is the enemy of safety.”

So she spoke up.

That single moment — the decision to raise a hand instead of staying quiet — is the essence of what Harvard professor

Amy Edmondson

calls psychological safety. It’s the invisible force that separates teams that thrive from those that quietly fall apart.

Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, has spent decades studying what happens when people feel safe enough to tell the truth. “In high-performing teams,” she told me, “people don’t fear being wrong — they fear not learning.”

That’s a subtle but revolutionary shift.

We often think of great teams as the ones that avoid mistakes. Edmondson’s research shows the opposite: the best teams make more mistakes — or rather, they report more of them. They openly discuss errors, dissect them, and learn faster than everyone else.

Why fear kills learning

When Google ran its massive “Project Aristotle” study to uncover what makes teams effective, psychological safety came out as the top factor. Not intelligence. Not work ethic. Safety.

It makes sense. When we feel threatened, the brain’s amygdala floods us with cortisol and adrenaline — useful if you’re escaping a bear, disastrous if you’re in a brainstorming session. Under threat, curiosity collapses. We default to protection, not exploration.

🧭 If insights like this resonate with you — the hidden science behind how we think, connect, and lead — subscribe to The Ignited Life. Each week, John R. Miles explores the forces that shape us, with guests like Amy Edmondson, Charles Duhigg, and Angela Duckworth.

And so, innovation dies quietly — not because people lack ideas, but because they lack permission to share them.

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