Right Kind of Wrong

Winner of the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award 2023.

'Amy Edmondson shows us how we can make room for failure, recognising that our emotions and personal needs are part of the solution. Right Kind of Wrong will inspire you to do your boldest work.' Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and author of Creativity, Inc.

We all fail sometimes. Now, a world-leading Harvard professor reveals how these failures can lead us to happier, more successful lives - provided we know how to learn from them.

We used to think of failure as a problem, to be avoided at all costs. Now, we're often told that failure is desirable - that we must 'fail fast, fail often'. The trouble is, neither approach distinguishes the good failures from the bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.

Here, Amy Edmondson - the world's most influential organisational psychologist - reveals how we get failure wrong, and how to get it right. She draws on a lifetime's research into the science of 'psychological safety' to show that the most successful cultures are those in which you can fail openly, without your mistakes being held against you. She introduces the three archetypes of failure - simple, complex and intelligent - and explains how to harness the revolutionary potential of the good ones (and eliminate the bad). And she tells vivid stories ranging from the history of open heart surgery to the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, all to ask a simple, provocative question: What if it is only by learning to fail that we can hope to truly succeed?