Re:Development: Amy Edmondson on Psychological Safety and Intelligent Failure in Development
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Meet Dr. Amy Edmondson
- What Is Intelligent Failure, and How Can Aid Organizations Make Room for It?
- What Would a Psychologically Safe Aid System Look Like?
- Does Psychological Safety Work Across Cultures?
- How Do You Tell an Intelligent Failure from a Preventable One?
- Is the Private Sector Better at Learning From Failure?
- How Can Nonprofits Help Staff Facing Burnout?
- Are Foreign Aid Cuts the New Normal?
In our latest "Re:Development" episode, Harvard's Amy Edmondson applies her groundbreaking research on organizational behavior to the challenges of global aid.
International development has entered a new era. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been shut down, and many countries are cutting foreign aid budgets. And yet global poverty remains one of humanity’s most urgent challenges.
At this moment of crossroads, TechnoServe is exploring what the future of international development should look like—and how we get there.g
In TechnoServe’s series, “Re:Development | Conversations for Change,” we interview leading thinkers and doers with bold perspectives on how to build a world where everyone has an equal chance to succeed.
In this episode, TechnoServe CEO Will Warshauer speaks with Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson about intelligent failure, psychological safety, and what it takes for aid organizations to innovate when budgets are shrinking. She explains why honest talk about mistakes, power, and burnout is now essential to the future of international development.
Read previous episodes of the series.
Meet Dr. Amy Edmondson
Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, dedicated to studying human interactions that build successful enterprises and a better society.
Named #1 in the Thinkers50 ranking of global management thinkers, Edmondson is a leading expert on leadership, organizational learning, and transformational change. She is the author of several influential books, including the international bestseller The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year award for exploring the science of failing well.
In Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation, she examines the challenges of collaborating across industries to tackle large-scale, systemic issues. Her expertise in psychological safety, cross-sector collaboration, and transformational change is particularly relevant to international development at this time of transition.
What Is Intelligent Failure, and How Can Aid Organizations Make Room for It?
Will Warshauer: We’ve been really keen to interview you, Amy, because as we think about how international development is going to change going forward, we also, I think, need to pay attention to how the organizations will need to change to keep up with that and how individual behaviors will need to change. And I think your research speaks to a lot of that. So again, I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us. Welcome.
Amy Edmondson: It’s an absolute honor to be here.
Will Warshauer: One of the things that people say as we imagine a better foreign aid system is, it’s going to be more innovative than we’ve been in the past. And funding models have traditionally kind of reinforced predictability and compliance. It’s sort of one of the last bastions of five-year plans, I like to say, international development–at least it was. So how can organizations build in opportunities for experimentation and what I think you call intelligent failure, when the system is still sort of back in the five-year plan days?
Amy Edmondson: Well, the first thing I have to say is this can be done, but it must be done out loud. So the only way to build organizations that can innovate is to acknowledge the bind. To acknowledge the very challenge you just described, which is there are these expectations, expectations on the part of funders, expectations maybe even on the part of people in the field, that it’s all supposed to go well.
That’s not the world we live in. So we need to start talking about it, socializing it, letting people know that it’s okay to recognize the fact of uncertainty, complexity, interdependence, novelty–all features of reality today, features that literally preclude perfect plans that should work, on schedule, as we expect.
So the leadership task is really to be talking about these realities more often and then saying, “Don’t worry, it’s okay. There is a way to navigate this complexity. But it’s experimental and iterative. And it will involve intelligent failure.”
And so let me be very clear about what intelligent failure is. Intelligent failure is not just some bad outcome that resulted from negligence, and we’ll just accept it because, you know, “the world.”
Intelligent failures are small, smart, fast, informative. They’re not reputationally harmful, they’re not overly expensive, and they’re not dangerous. They are the undesired results of thoughtful forays into new territory–thoughtful experiments. So the trick really is to try things that seem smart, that could work, and to learn as fast as you possibly can, and then pivot or tweak accordingly and keep going.
Intelligent failures are the undesired results of thoughtful forays into new territory–thoughtful experiments. – Amy Edmondson
What Would a Psychologically Safe Aid System Look Like?
Will Warshauer: I want to try even to go a little deeper on this idea about failure because I think there are interesting power dynamics and cultural gaps as we think about international development. Your work has shown that high-performing teams often report more mistakes because they feel safe enough to do that. And as someone who has led nonprofit organizations like Techno Serve, there is this power dynamic. Different donors are more or less wonderful about it, but there is: “I’m asking you to give me money so I can do the work that I care about so much and want to do.” And so there’s that dynamic. And then also, as donors look to support more local organizations, there’s often a real power chasm between a smaller local organization and a big multinational donor.
And so, what would a psychologically safe aid system look like? One where implementing partners, local organizations, and donors can all sort of speak honestly with each other? I mean, this really is a tough question, but if anybody can answer it, I figured you could.
Amy Edmondson: There’s so much to unpack here. Let me start with I think perhaps the most important point: the goal is to speak honestly to each other so that we can make progress toward our most challenging and important aims. If we just keep coming back to the goal, the purpose and its importance, its challenge, I think that helps us be more forgiving about the bumps and roadblocks and disappointments along the way.
Now you started the question by pointing to some of my research where I’ve shown that higher-performing teams are not the teams that look perfect all the time. They’re actually the ones that are more willing and able to talk about mistakes. That doesn’t mean they have more mistakes. It means that they’re more honest about the ones that do occur.
But now I’m feeling the need to make a distinction, and I hope this will help–a distinction between mistake and failure. So a mistake is an unintended deviation from existing knowledge or process or protocol or even rules. And it’s unintended, that’s important. If it’s intended, that’s sabotage–I’m not a fan.
But [a mistake is] unintended–and we’re human beings, so we do and will continue to make mistakes. But our aim is not to make mistakes, right? We all aspire to make as few mistakes (when defined in that way) as possible. And the way we do that is through vigilance and teamwork and helping and training. In short, we want to help people to be as up to speed as possible on what we’re trying to do and on how we expect to do it.
Failures are undesired results, undesired outcomes. They can be big, they can be small, they can be preventable, they can be not preventable. But I think it’s important to make that distinction. Because even though intelligent failures are disappointing, there’s no way to prevent them.
If you want to be an innovator and you want to and are willing to go into new territory, you have to understand there will be, if you’re lucky, intelligent failures along the way. Because that means you were willing to boldly try smart things and weather the disappointment as it happens.
Higher-performing teams are not the teams that look perfect all the time. They’re actually the ones that are more willing and able to talk about mistakes. – Amy Edmondson
So the goal is honesty. High-performing teams tend to be more honest. They are working in an environment that I have greater psychological safety, meaning the belief that you can speak up without sort of individual harm or embarrassment or risk. And, failures will happen. We try to minimize mistakes as best we can.
And now let’s turn to the power imbalance. That’s another one of those things that I think needs to be made more discussable. The more we are willing to talk about power imbalances, the less harm they do. And by harm I mean harm that might involve someone holding back from speaking up with bad news, or avoiding a thoughtful experiment, because they’re afraid of that power imbalance.
So, let’s make it discussable; let’s call attention to the risk it creates to the real goals we all care about. And then let’s accept that we are now, like it or not, in the experimentation business. We’re all scientists in a new land, trying to make progress as best we can toward really important goals.
Does Psychological Safety Work Across Cultures?
Will Warshauer: I really, really like your answers, and they seem, in fact, quite implementable in terms of being very explicit about what you’re trying to address here, that this is all in service of the higher goal that we all agree on. But it is interesting, these power imbalances. I once worked for a very small foundation in West Africa and gave away very, very small amounts of money, and I found it to be incredibly insidious.
Everybody thought my jokes were so amusing and my insights were so smart. And I would travel around the region and somehow someone would meet me at the airport. I didn’t even recall telling them that I was coming or when I was coming and things like that. And I was so glad to be done with that job. I just felt like I never knew whether anybody was [genuine].
Let me just push you one last time on this around the cultural aspect because I lived for and worked for three years in Pakistan and Southeast Asia, part of the world where it’s intensely hierarchical. I was a young foreigner coming in to lead a large development project, and the amount of hierarchy and all was scary.
Do you have any data about how psychological safety translates across different global cultures and how international organizations might think about adapting their approach if that’s what you recommend, or otherwise?
Amy Edmondson: So let me first say, and this is completely unresponsive, but how much it says about you that you said, “I couldn’t wait to be done with that job.” I have to say, and this is just fact, that most people not only like that kind of treatment—you know–“You’re funny, you’re great,” you’re being picked up at the airport—most people enjoy that experience.
And unfortunately, they get so used to it—to the agreement, to being right—that then the truth doesn’t come out, and bad things happen.
But yes, I have done some research–and others, thankfully, are doing a great deal more–about psychological safety in and around the world and how culture matters. And probably the shortest way to describe this is that there is a very strong correlation, and this is not surprising, between average psychological safety levels and the power distance index of the country–which is exactly what you were referring to when you were saying people really take hierarchy seriously in certain cultures.
And so yes, on average–but you know, averages are not all that useful, or at least they’re not the full story, because what we do see also is enormous variance.
So within, say, a high-power distance country, let’s say Malaysia, there will be some places where the psychological safety levels are quite high. Why? Well, it turns out to have been the result of deliberate effort–let’s just say, in a global energy company where physical injuries are very possible and in some cases catastrophic. And so, because of that physical risk, if you’re a well-run company in that industry, you work really, really hard to teach safety practices, psychological safety, workplace safety, because you know that someone being afraid to tell a supervisor that something’s not working or that that’s not safe could prove catastrophic.
Thus, because the stakes are so high, they lean into the training to create a culture of speaking up. And if you lean into the training, it turns out you can make it psychologically safe for speaking up. Because people understand why it matters and they’re willing to do it.
Does this behavior make them pariahs when they go home or back to their community and they’re sort of not behaving the right way? No. Everybody knows the difference between, “Here we are at work, this is what’s at stake, this is what we’re trying to do. This really matters. I’m responsible for helping keep my colleagues safe, et cetera.” And I go home and host a dinner party. I mean, they know how to sort of code switch in these different environments, to revert to appropriate power dynamics for the social situation.
So the very real differences, [average] differences in psychological safety across cultures, can be seen as simply a challenge to overcome–not a reason to turn away and say, “We can’t be effective over there.”
Will Warshauer: Well, again, I love your answer. I love the distinction between “We’re here at work and a staff meeting,” or “I’m at home hosting a dinner party” and I’m behaving differently in those two settings. I will say I’m sure that some people who are watching this interview are watching it primarily because they’re grateful to you so much for this concept of psychological safety, which has been so powerful. It’s been very important for me at TechnoServe as I thought about the effectiveness of the senior team here.
The very real average differences in psychological safety across cultures can be seen as simply a challenge to overcome. – Amy Edmondson
How Do You Tell an Intelligent Failure from a Preventable One?
Will Warshauer: One of the many other challenges that development organizations like TechnoServe have is working in these difficult and volatile environments. And it’s easy to blame bad outcomes on external factors: political risks, climate shocks, you name it. There’s no shortage of them. You talked a little bit about this earlier; I just wanted to go back to it. How can we clearly distinguish between a truly intelligent failure and a preventable failure that was just pure poor execution or weak management in a challenging environment?
Amy Edmondson: Of course there are gray zones in here too, because I can define an intelligent failure as a failure that happens in new territory in pursuit of a goal, with a hypothesis. In other words: good reason to believe this is worth doing, might work, despite the uncertainty. And then finally, it’s as small as possible. It’s a judgment call, of course, that it’s neither overly expensive nor reputationally harmful or dangerous to try. It’s trying to make sure it’s just big enough to learn from.
But there also are, of course, what I call complex failures, where you’re experimenting, but then something truly out of the blue does happen. And it blindsides you, and in a way you could say it harms the experiment. It makes the experiment not as good a test of the idea because of an unexpected political event or climate shock or whatever happened. So I think it’s important to be honest and say, that did play a role.
But what great accountability looks like is to not stop there, to not say, “Oh well, we did our best, but that happened, therefore it failed, we’re off the hook.” Instead say, “Yep, we did our best, that happened. And here are some of the things, whether omission or commission, that I did or we did, that may have contributed, maybe in some small way, maybe in a larger way.” But honestly taking a look and being willing to name the things that were on our side.
Why would anyone want to do that when they’ve got this convenient excuse—this unexpected factor that you did not cause—right here? I think because that’s what strength looks like. That’s what confidence looks like. It’s being confident enough to say, “Yeah, this was a good try, and we fell short a little bit over here. And we’re eager to be a tiny bit better next time. That’s how ambitious we are–ambitious enough to want to name our own gaps and close them.”
Will Warshauer: And it’s rarely ever 100% one thing, isn’t it? It’s always a mix.
Amy Edmondson: Right, it’s always a little complex.
Is the Private Sector Better at Learning From Failure?
Will Warshauer: You know that TechnoServe is all about market-based approaches to fighting poverty. And I know that your work has been at the business school, primarily with the private sector, but has ranged across nonprofits as well. And I’m curious if you think that private companies are naturally better or worse at creating these environments where failure, intelligent failure is welcome and treated as a learning point rather than in the nonprofit sector or the public sector.
Amy Edmondson: I will first say I don’t have valid empirical data making this comparison in a rigorous way. But [from] my observations and experiences, and as someone trained in organizational behavior and social psychology–humans are humans. Most of the things that you and I are talking about right now are human dynamics in organizational systems. And I think they vary less than most people think.
I think we have an almost religious belief that ROI, magic market pressures, lead people to be super responsive and smart because the sort of risk-reward equation is clear. I just don’t think that’s the case at all.
And in part because return-on-investment thinking, if you assume it really works, then you assume that the timing works. What I mean is most returns on investments are at best a little delayed–but more frequently, they’re very delayed. If you’re in the pharmaceutical business, the return on your investment (your risky experiment) today is not coming for ten years.
I have met very few humans who can really discipline themselves to say, “I’m going to wait for that reward in ten years to feel good about what I’m doing right now.” You’ve got to create instead the sort of human and interpersonal conditions whereby we’re willing to work hard for other reasons: for each other, for our patients, for our constituents.
Will Warshauer: Well, you’re batting a thousand. That’s another answer I really love, particularly about the mystique of the private sector. Our workforce here at TechnoServe skews very heavily towards former management consultants. And it is true that their analytical abilities are really, really formidable. And a lot of TechnoServe’s best work has been built on the back of some of that really deep analysis that they’re capable of.
And yet they have many other weak areas–you know, when you’re a management consultant, you don’t get much experience managing people, for example. So interesting.
How Can Nonprofits Help Staff Facing Burnout?
Will Warshauer: Well, we are in an interesting moment thinking about the international development space. It’s been a difficult year for those of us in the business. But, you know, obviously the worst impact has been among communities around the world who have relied on foreign aid and had it suddenly yanked out from under them.
And I guess I’m thinking about organizations like mine now trying to do a little more with less and the extent to which some people are feeling burned out or risk getting burned out because of that.
Another tough question–what can you do as an organization there? Certainly everyone is passionate about the mission. They’re here for a reason, and so that helps motivate people. Certainly there’s some level of empathy that a CEO and others can provide to them. But beyond that, does your study and the framework in which you think about these things–do they offer us any other answers as far as what you can do to help people who may be suffering from burnout?
Amy Edmondson: It starts with making it discussable. Being open about how discouraging this is–but not stopping there, of course, because then that’s just a downer and leads to the burnout. I think burnout comes more often when we feel frustrated and alone. We can feel discouraged, but if we have each other, when we’re in it together, there’s a powerful sense of bonding that makes it tolerable. And bonding is a source of flourishing.
So I don’t wish hardship on anyone, but we can use the hardship we do face to reconnect and strengthen our bonds and strengthen how much we care and how much we are on the side of goodness, trying to make a difference together. We have to be scrappier now.
So long as people are encouraged to be open about the frustrations but also scrappy and innovative [about] the various things that maybe we wouldn’t have had to do before but might be sort of possibilities now. Use it to re-strengthen the bonds of the team members and get out there and do the best you can.
Will Warshauer: It’s funny, TechnoServe does a survey of our staff all over the world, every other year, to get a take on how happy they feel at TechnoServe, where we could be doing better, and how engaged they feel. And I didn’t know what sort of result to expect because 2025 was a difficult year for all of us.
And what we saw was an interesting result because historically on that survey, the number one thing that people cite that’s great about TechnoServe is our mission and our ability to deliver on it. We’re all united behind that.
Last year, it changed, and it changed to their colleagues. The number one thing they appreciated was their colleagues. Exactly what you were saying, I think, in this answer. They’re reaching out to their colleagues and getting the bonding you spoke about there.
Amy Edmondson: Actually that’s quite an interesting data point, because I think more than anything else as humans, we need to feel connected to each other. We need friends, we need colleagues. That’s now been shown in so many ways to be kind of the secret sauce to a healthy, happy life: good relationships in your life. Work, non-work, but we need each other. We are social creatures.
There is nothing like goodwill among people and countries around the world to reduce the likelihood of conflict. – Amy Edmondson
Are Foreign Aid Cuts the New Normal?
Will Warshauer: Amy, I’ve got one more question for you, which probably doesn’t draw at all on your expertise, so it’s a little silly, but it’s on my mind, so I wanted to get your take on it nonetheless. We’re in a strange environment now. I mean, the United States has done what it’s done with its international aid program. And we’ve seen I think virtually every European government and every Nordic government also cutting the budgets of their aid programs.
And I guess I’m just wondering the extent to which you see there’s a debate about, is this the new normal? Is this going to be the new environment that aid will exist in, or will there perhaps be some tacking back?
Amy Edmondson: Well, my answer is worth what you paid for it. But I will say in general in human history, there’s tacking upwind, too this way and then correcting it that way. There are cycles of, I won’t say fads, but zeitgeists of opinion. And I can’t imagine why this current trend, both in corporates and in governments around the world, won’t face a point where we think, “what are we doing?”
It used to be, people in the Defense Department would say, the best defense dollar we spend is on USAID. There is nothing like goodwill among people and countries around the world to reduce the likelihood of conflict and especially armed conflict. So even being hard-nosed and rational humans–this is foolish. It is foolish to stop investing in the safety and survivability of people around the world and of our habitat. It just doesn’t make sense. So I can’t imagine rational humans, as we sometimes are, won’t come back to that recognition.
Will Warshauer: I just want to thank you again for all the work you’ve done in the past and for sharing it with us today a bit in the context of the future of foreign aid.
Amy Edmondson: Well, back at you. Thank you so much for all the work that you and your organization do. It’s truly impressive, and I’m just grateful that you’re willing to do it.
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