Who is Amy Edmondson
Amy C. Edmondson is an American researcher specialising in leadership, organisational learning and teamwork. She holds Harvard Business School’s Novartis chair in Leadership and Management. Her career combines field research, teaching and books on the conditions that allow people to share information and learn within organisations. [1]
Education and early work
She studied engineering and design at Harvard, later completing a psychology master’s degree and an organisational-behaviour doctorate there. This combined technical training with the study of human relationships in organisations. [4] Harvard records date her undergraduate degree to 1981 and doctorate to 1996. [8]
She worked with Buckminster Fuller for three years. In an interview she describes preparing engineering drawings, constructing models and calculating new geodesic configurations. The experience introduced her to the relationship between design and changes to the environment before her work turned towards collaboration and learning. [5]
Her first book, A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller, appeared in 1987 in the Design Science Collection. Explaining Fuller’s geometrical ideas, it represents a different strand from her later management publications. Communicating specialised knowledge was already part of her work before her organisational-research career. [6]
From consulting to research at Harvard
In her autobiographical account, writing about Fuller helped her discover an interest in teaching and explaining difficult ideas. Organisational consulting then drew her attention to the human factors shaping technical change. This experience encouraged her return to university for a deeper study of organisational behaviour. [7]
She joined Harvard Business School’s faculty in 1996, teaching leadership, organisational learning and operations management in MBA and executive-education programmes. [4]
Research on psychological safety
Her 1996 study of care groups in two hospitals examined medication errors, distinguishing their frequency from the likelihood of detection and learning. This mattered for interpreting the data: a higher recorded count could also reflect greater visibility of what had occurred. [9]
The 1999 article Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams studied 51 teams in a manufacturing company. It defined team psychological safety as a shared belief about taking interpersonal risks and found an association with learning behaviour, connecting group climate with willingness to ask questions, exchange information and examine problems. [10]
Learning and change in hospitals
With Richard Bohmer and Gary Pisano she investigated 16 hospitals introducing cardiac-surgery technology. Their 2001 study examined differences in team preparation, trials and reflection. Technology adoption also involved changing collective routines: comparable equipment and expert professionals did not fully explain the learning process. [11]
In 2003 she and Anita Tucker published Why Hospitals Don’t Learn from Failures, based on observations in nine hospitals. They examined nurses’ responses to everyday problems. An immediate workaround could keep patient care moving while concealing a recurring failure that required changes to the organisational process. [12]
Teaming: collaborating while learning
Teaming, published in 2012, examines dynamic collaboration: people temporarily brought together share knowledge, understand interdependencies and coordinate while performing a task, even without belonging to a stable team. [13]
Speaking up, collaborating, experimenting and reflecting are the four activities organising this practice. They connect what each participant knows with what the group needs to learn. [14]
Collaboration across organisations and sectors
Building the Future, written with Susan Salter Reynolds and published in 2016, followed Living PlanIT, a company aspiring to transform urban systems. It examines the demands of coordinating professions and industries in a complex innovation project, including difficulties, revisions and changing expectations as it developed. [16]
For 2017’s Extreme Teaming she collaborated with Jean-François Harvey. The book extends the analysis to teams crossing professional, organisational and sector boundaries. Its cases examine leadership when people bring different specialisms and languages and must build forms of collaboration that no single organisation can define alone. [15]
Books on psychological safety and failure
The Fearless Organization appeared in 2018, addressing psychological safety for learning, innovation and growth. It brought a research programme previously developed in articles and team studies into book form for organisational leaders and professionals across sectors. [17]
Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, published in 2023, distinguishes basic, complex and intelligent failures. Edmondson considers when unsuccessful outcomes can generate new knowledge and when foreseeable harm should be prevented, differentiating exploration in unfamiliar territory from avoidable errors in established activities. [18]
In 2023 she published Workplace Conditions with Jill Maben and Jane Ball. The review brings together evidence on staffing, psychological safety, teamwork, communication and healthcare workers’ health, relating these conditions to capacity for improving care quality and the time and resources needed to do so. [19]
October 2025 brought 90 Days to Level Up Your Teamwork. It arranges activities and reflective questions across twelve weeks, addressing barriers to collaboration, psychological safety and learning from failure. This provides another format for practical education through a structured sequence of topics and exercises. [20]
Teaching and recent recognition
At Harvard Business School Online she is faculty chair of CLIMB and teaches Dynamic Teaming, connecting collaboration research with education for professionals in varied settings. Online teaching extends a career that also encompasses MBA programmes, executive education and learning materials. [21]
Right Kind of Wrong won the 2023 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year award. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. Thinkers50 placed her first in its 2021 and 2023 rankings and second in 2025, dated recognition from the respective organisations. [22]
Connection with prevention
In prevention, her work helps frame ways to encourage communication of warning signs, questions and incidents. Psychological safety is one dimension of team functioning; psychosocial assessment must also examine working conditions and demands.
