Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

by Adam M. Grant

She was surprised to find that the more psychological safety a team felt, the higher its error rates. It appeared that psychological safety could breed complacency. When trust runs deep in a team, people might not feel the need to question their colleagues or double-check their own work. But Edmondson soon recognized a major limitation of the data: the errors were all self-reported. To get an unbiased measure of mistakes, she sent a covert observer into the units. When she analyzed those data, the results flipped: psychologically safe teams reported more errors, but they actually made fewer errors. By freely admitting their mistakes, they were then able to learn what had caused them and eliminate them moving forward. In psychologically unsafe teams, people hid their mishaps to avoid penalties, which made it difficult for anyone to diagnose the root causes and prevent future problems. They kept repeating the same mistakes.