Amy Edmondson, now a Harvard Business School professor, studied medical teams at hospitals nationwide. She sought to discover what made the most successful teams so adept. To her surprise, she learned that top teams actually reported more mistakes than low-performing teams. She coined the term “psychological safety,” which refers to “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking,” to explain this finding. It wasn’t that the best teams made the most errors, she realized, but that the best teams were willing to admit and discuss their mistakes more often than other teams.
