Making the Most of Your Mistakes

In 2009, British businessman Philip Davison Sebri was celebrating his wife’s 50th birthday in the Maldives when he got a phone call. A government clerk had made a typo, mistakenly reporting that Sebri’s 134-year-old company, Taylor and Sons, was being shut down. Within days, contracts dried up, orders were cancelled, and creditors demanded payment. The government corrected the error, but the debt spiral had already taken hold. Taylor and Sons actually did go out of business. Not all mistakes are so consequential, but as Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson explains in this episode of Hidden Brain, the way we think about failure—whether we try to stamp it out entirely or celebrate it blindly—is itself a fundamental mistake.

The Wrong Direction of Good Teams

Edmondson’s research on failure began with a puzzle. As a young scientist, she spent months tracking medication errors at two hospitals. She also measured team performance—things like the quality of relationships, leadership, and whether people felt everyone pulled their weight. Her intuition was obvious: better teams should make fewer mistakes. When she finally ran the data, the correlation was statistically significant—but the sign was in the wrong direction. Good teamwork was associated with more errors, not fewer.