Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

But the results were the exact opposite. Better teams were making more mistakes, not less. What could explain this counterintuitive outcome? Edmondson decided to dig deeper, sending a research assistant into the wild to observe the teams on the hospital floor. The assistant discovered that better teams weren’t making more mistakes. Instead, they were simply reporting more mistakes. The teams that had a climate of openness—where the staff felt safe to discuss mistakes—performed better because employees were more willing to share failures and actively work to reduce them. Edmondson refers to this climate as “psychological safety.”