amy edmondson

• The Fearless Organization: Building Psychological Safety
  Edmondson introduced the concept of psychological safety and remains its foremost authority. She shows leaders how to build environments where people speak up with ideas, questions, and concerns — the precondition for learning, innovation, and high performance in a knowledge economy.
• Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
  Drawing on her award-winning book, Edmondson distinguishes the failures organizations should engineer against from the "intelligent failures" they should be willing to commission — giving leaders a framework for taking smart risks and learning from them without shame or blame.
• Teaming: How Organizations Learn and Compete
  Edmondson reframes the team from a noun into a verb. She shows how "teaming" — dynamic, cross-boundary collaboration under uncertainty — allows organizations to learn and adapt faster than rigid, siloed structures ever could.
• Leadership in High-Stakes, Uncertain Environments
  Based on two decades studying hospitals, aviation, and manufacturing, Edmondson offers C-suite and board audiences a practical model for leading when the cost of silence is highest and the need for candor is greatest.

speaker Bio: 

Dr. Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and the world's foremost authority on psychological safety — a concept she introduced in a landmark 1999 study and has spent more than two decades developing. Twice ranked the #1 management thinker in the world by Thinkers50, she has shown how the most expensive errors inside organizations are rarely caused by people who don't know what to do, but by people who know and choose not to say — and has given leaders a vocabulary and a method for changing that.

The author of seven books, including the bestselling The Fearless Organization and the award-winning Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson earned her PhD, master's, and undergraduate degrees all at Harvard, and began her career in an unusual place — as chief engineer for the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. Her research underpins how organizations from Google to national health systems think about teamwork, and her frameworks are cited not just by academics but by the executives trying to change their own cultures.

Summary: Signature Framework — Psychological Safety

Edmondson's defining discovery was counterintuitive: studying hospital teams in the 1990s, she found that the better teams reported more errors — not because they made more, but because they felt safe enough to discuss them. That insight became psychological safety: the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, where people can admit mistakes, ask questions, and challenge the status quo without fear of humiliation. Her crucial clarification is that this is not about comfort or niceness — psychological safety paired with high accountability is what produces the "learning zone" where real performance happens. For any leader trying to build a culture that can innovate, adapt, and catch its own mistakes before they become catastrophes, Edmondson provides both the original concept and the practical steps to build it.

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