The Change Signal with Amy Edmondson
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Here are three questions that arise from this Change Signal conversation with Amy Edmondson:
- Are we learning — or just performing success?
- When should a change project be allowed to fail?
- And what are we afraid to say when the stakes get high?
Amy Edmondson is best known for her work on psychological safety, and here she connects it directly to change leadership, experimentation, and the realities of transformation inside large organizations.
We talk about why psychological safety isn’t about making people comfortable — it’s about making learning possible when the work is uncertain, awkward, and risky. We explore her distinction between mistakes and intelligent failure, and why trying to eliminate failure can make meaningful change harder.
Amy also challenges the way organizations run pilots. A pilot designed to succeed may teach you almost nothing; a useful experiment should expose the edges before you scale.
Along the way, we cover hierarchy, false agreement, courage, cross-functional collaboration, and a useful idea for anyone leading change without a reliable playbook: treat change less like implementation and more like research.
ABOUT AMY:
Amy Edmondson is a Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and a leading researcher on psychological safety, teaming, organizational learning, and failure. She is the author of books including The Right Kind of Wrong, Teaming, and Building a Fearless Organization: A Field Book for Creating Psychological Safety at Work.
Music Credits: Rest in the Garden – SackJo22 ft Duckett & The Stubble Field Break (Mana Mixed) – Mana Junkie ft Apoxode
