Professional Learning for Busy Educators

In the ‘90s, a young researcher named Amy Edmondson was tasked with assessing the rate of human-related drug errors in a particular group of hospitals. She wondered: Do better hospital patient care teams make fewer mistakes? When the data came in, the results astounded her—it appeared that better teams made more mistakes, not fewer.

Puzzled, she did some more research and realized that the better teams were not, in fact, making more mistakes—they were just more likely to talk about mistakes. These teams had an atmosphere of openness and good working relationships that empowered nurses to report errors.

The advantage? A nurse at one hospital, for example, was able to thwart a medication error by reporting a dosage that seemed too high to the on-call doctor who confirmed she was right.

Much later, Edmondson would coin this phenomenon as “psychological safety.” And as it turns out, it’s crucial to the performance of an organization. Psychological safety is what empowers Pixar to churn out blockbuster movies and Google to innovate on new ideas—because each team knows that the company views failure as a natural part of the process.