Shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award.

Forget ‘fail fast, fail often’. This revolutionary book reveals how we get failure wrong – and how to get it right.

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?

About the Author

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Renowned for her world-leading research into the concept of psychological safety, Edmondson has been named by Thinkers50 as the most influential management thinker in the world. Her work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Psychology Today and Harvard Business Review, and been drawn upon by companies including Google and Microsoft. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.