The Science of Failing Well | Amy Edmondson

**Dan Harris** (0:04)
This is the Ten Percent Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
Hey kids, failure really does get a bad rap. But if you're not failing regularly, you're probably not taking enough risks or running enough experiments in your life.
Today, we're gonna talk to a researcher who has dedicated much of her career to studying how to fail well, or how to get good at what she calls intelligent failure.
Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Her latest book is called The Right Kind of Wrong. We talked about the major problems of shame, perfectionism, and social media, how not to get caught up in analysis paralysis, the importance of self-compassion, and also of having a growth mindset, the benefits of worrying with somebody else instead of on your own, why redundancy is your friend, how to discuss failure with your team without blaming people, the crucial role of psychological safety, which is a key aspect of Professor Edmondson's work, and it's something that I work on pretty hard in my own life with varying degrees of success, and why accepting your smallness in the face of the infinite universe can be very freeing when it comes to failure. This is the second episode in our Sanely Ambitious series, a popular franchise here on the show. Monday, we talked to Daniel Goleman about the science of optimal performance. Next week, we're talking about how to boost your attention span and the science of when to quit, to quit a job or project or even a relationship. Anyway, today, it's Amy Edmondson and it's coming right up.
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Professor Amy Edmondson, welcome to the show.

**Amy Edmondson** (4:57)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Dan Harris** (4:59)
It's a pleasure.
We have all sorts of academics and researchers on this show and I love asking them how they got interested in their subject. I'm particularly interested with you because you study failure. So what went wrong or right in your life to lead you to this expertise?