Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Her research examines psychological safety, organisational learning and collaboration within and across teams. She studies how leaders create the conditions in which people contribute their knowledge, discuss uncertainty and learn together while remaining accountable for demanding work.
Her academic work developed a widely used way of understanding psychological safety as a shared belief about the interpersonal risks of speaking up. The distinction matters: a workplace can contain talented, conscientious people and still make it difficult for them to raise a concern. Edmondson’s research connects that problem with team learning rather than treating it simply as an issue of individual confidence or personality.
Her books develop complementary parts of this argument. The Fearless Organization examines how leaders make candour possible. Teaming explores collaboration when people must work across disciplines and organisational boundaries without the stability of a conventional team. Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, winner of the 2023 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year award, distinguishes basic, complex and intelligent failures, challenging both indiscriminate blame and indiscriminate celebration of failure.
Edmondson holds an undergraduate degree in engineering and design, a master’s in psychology and a doctorate in organisational behaviour from Harvard University. Before her academic career, she worked with architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller and later in research on organisational change. This background connects questions about how systems are designed with questions about how people behave inside them.
For executive audiences, her perspective provides a disciplined language for examining silence, coordination and learning. A useful brief connects those ideas with a real organisational challenge: an innovation process that avoids difficult questions, a transformation crossing established boundaries, or a leadership culture in which bad news arrives too late.
