I read Amy C. Edmondson's Right Kind of Wrong.
Psychological safety, three types of failure, the role of leaders. I understood what was written and agreed it was important. But honestly, as I read, a "yeah, that makes sense" kept arriving before anything could truly pierce me. Nothing quite hit home.
Wondering why, I found myself caught on a question that lay even before Edmondson's framework.
What is "failure," really?
From here, my thinking takes quite a leap, so this may turn into a rather disjointed piece. But I feel the detour itself held meaning, so I'll write it as it came.
"Failure" Always Has Premises
The word "failure" always presupposes three things: a goal, a standard, and someone to judge against them.
In other words, failure doesn't exist objectively — it's merely a judgment someone makes against some criterion.
It varies wildly across cultures too. In Silicon Valley, failure is spoken of like a badge of honor. In Japan, it tends to be treated as shame. The same event becomes a learning opportunity in one place and a fatal wound in another.
Edmondson's argument is structured as "let's leverage failure for learning toward organizational goals." But whether those goals themselves are right is never questioned. I think that's where my sense of something missing came from.
Thinking About Failure Itself Might Be Meaningless
Here's where I leap even further.
Whether humans are on this planet or not, Earth as a living system carries on. In 4.6 billion years of history, humanity has existed for barely a blink, and if we disappeared, the Earth would keep spinning as if nothing happened.
Thinking this way, pondering failure itself might be meaningless. Maybe we're just arguing about "success" and "failure" inside a game of evaluation criteria that humans arbitrarily created.
But I stopped here.
What exactly is this feeling of "it's meaningless"?
A Device for the Universe to Know Itself
I encountered an idea. More accurately, I arrived at it through dialogue.
"Humans are a device that the universe accidentally created to recognize itself."
The universe has existed since the Big Bang, but there was nothing to recognize it. Only when humans appeared did the universe come to "know that it exists."
From this perspective, something interesting emerges.
That feeling of "being unable to stop asking even when you know there's no answer" — that hunger — might be the very engine through which the universe achieves self-recognition.
The moment we stop asking, the universe returns to a state of not knowing itself.
"So What If We Realized This?"
Honestly, the feeling of "so what?" wells up here.
Even if we understand we're devices for the universe's self-recognition, will tomorrow morning be any easier to face? Probably not. The work in front of us, the messiness of organizations — none of it changes. For all the grand talk, it feels like nothing remains in hand.
But I think this very feeling of "so what?" is profoundly human. Animals don't question the meaning of the universe. Humans, though, can't help asking even when they know no answer will come. That relentless urge to keep questioning is probably what makes us human.
What Is Failure in Organizations, After All?
Coming this far, I return to the original question.
Here's the answer I arrived at:
Failure in organizations is "stopping the universe's movement toward self-recognition."
In more grounded terms, it's "ceasing to keep asking questions."
What Edmondson was truly trying to protect with the concept of psychological safety may not have been performance or efficiency, but the state in which humans within organizations can keep questioning. The true terror of silence isn't that accidents happen or performance drops — it's that humans stop asking altogether.
And paradoxically, the greatest failure in organizations might be "trying to define and manage failure" itself. The moment you manage failure, you create a cage that says "ask only within these bounds." Questions asked there are merely domesticated questions.
Perhaps Edmondson's thinking held this depth all along, or perhaps as a Harvard Business School professor choosing words to reach practitioners, she intentionally compressed it. Honestly, I don't know.
Even If It Doesn't Land, the Question Remains
Of course, if I told someone "failure in organizations is stopping the universe's movement toward self-recognition," it probably wouldn't land. They'd think, "What is this person talking about?"
But I think that reaction — "What is this person talking about?" — is the very moment a question is born in the other person.
It doesn't make sense, but somehow it snags. That snag can become the first step that sets thinking in motion.
I started out trying to write a book review, and before I knew it, I'd descended all the way to the meaning of human existence. But perhaps this detour itself was an act of practicing what it means to keep questioning.
In your organization, are you still able to keep asking?
The Book That Started This
This is Edmondson's book that sparked this article. It systematically covers organizational insights including psychological safety and three types of failure.
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