The three types of failure - are you focusing on the wrong one?
One of the best books I've read this year was The Fearless Organisation by Amy Edmonson. In this article, I share my biggest takeaway from the book about psychological safety and failure.
If you've heard the term "psychological safety" but haven't dug into the details yet, the book you want is The Fearless Organisation by Amy Edmondson. She did the original research that Google built upon with Project Aristotle, where they found that psychological safety - the ability to be vulnerable and take risks with your team - was the one thing that linked all of their high-performing teams.
Edmondson talks in the book about the three types of failure you can experience in a team:
- Preventable failure: a failure caused by deviating from a known process. For example, someone forgot to run the test suite before shipping code and the app crashed.
- Complex failure: a failure caused by a system breakdown. For example, an engineer accidentally switched the dates to US format, nobody noticed in code review, the test suite didn't pick it up, and the app crashed.
- Intelligent failure: a failure caused by an unsuccessful trial. For example, a company tests a new version of their app and nobody uses it.
The wrong failure diagnosis
Teams with low psychological safety often treat complex failure like preventable failure - for example, they might focus on the engineer who accidentally changed the date format instead of the code review process and test suite that didn't pick up the mistake. Over time, this makes team members more and more risk adverse, as they know they'll be unfairly held to account for problems out of their control. And since everyone avoids risks, nobody feels safe enough to focus on intelligent failure, the kind that leads to innovation, learning and ultimate success.
Two questions to ask yourself
Based on these types of failure, try asking yourself two questions next time something goes wrong:
- What type of failure was this?
- What type of failure are we treating this like as a team?
Almost everyone naturally treats a complex failure like a preventable one, and these simple questions will help you - and your team - focus on the real problems to solve.
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