Amy Edmondson

Why organisations work with Amy Edmondson

• She is the original source of the psychological safety research now cited by Google, the NHS, and most leading management programmes, not a downstream interpreter of it.
• Her frameworks come from two decades of field research inside hospitals, manufacturing plants, and Fortune 500 teams, not from theory or anecdote.
• She translates an idea that leaders often misread as softness into operational language about error rates, learning speed, and innovation throughput.
• Her Right Kind of Wrong work gives executives a practical taxonomy of failure types, separating the failures organisations should prevent from the failures they should encourage.
• Thinkers50 ranked her the world’s number one management thinker in both 2021 and 2023, which signals her standing among the practitioners and academics buyers most respect.

Biography highlights

• Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School.
• Ranked #1 on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers in 2021 and 2023.
• Winner of the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2023 for Right Kind of Wrong.
• Author of seven books, including The Fearless Organization, Teaming, and Right Kind of Wrong.
• Recipient of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award (2019) and Talent Award (2017).
• PhD in Organizational Behavior, AM in Psychology, AB in Engineering Sciences, Harvard University.

Biography

The most expensive errors inside large organisations are rarely caused by people who do not know what to do. They are caused by people who know, and choose not to say. Decades of research at Harvard Business School have made that pattern visible, and have given senior leaders a vocabulary for it: psychological safety.

Amy Edmondson built that vocabulary. As Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, she has spent more than twenty years studying teams in hospitals, manufacturing operations, technology firms, and government. Her 1999 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly is the academic anchor for an idea now used inside Google’s people analytics, NHS quality improvement work, and most credible executive education curricula.

The work has expanded from a single concept into a coherent body. Teaming examined how cross-functional groups learn fast enough to keep up with the work in front of them. The Fearless Organization gave leaders a step-by-step model for making honest contribution the norm, not the exception. Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year in 2023, separates the failures organisations should engineer against from the failures they should be willing to commission.

Thinkers50 has ranked her since 2011 and named her the world’s number one management thinker in 2021 and again in 2023. That recognition matters because it tracks how often working executives, not academics, cite her frameworks when they describe what they are trying to change inside their own organisations.

Key speaking topics

• Psychological safety and team performance
• Learning from intelligent failure
• Teaming in cross-functional and high-stakes work
• Leadership in high-reliability environments
• Organisational learning
• Innovation cultures and candour
• Leading through error and recovery

Ideal for

• C-suite and board audiences in healthcare, aviation, financial services, and other high-stakes industries
• CHROs and chief learning officers redesigning culture and capability programmes
• Heads of innovation and R&D leaders building teams that need to fail intelligently
• Executive education and leadership development cohorts inside large organisations

Audience outcomes

• A working definition of psychological safety that separates it from comfort, niceness, or lowered standards
• A taxonomy of failure types that leaders can apply to their own portfolio of decisions
• Specific leader behaviours that increase the rate at which problems surface early
• A clearer language for talking about error, candour, and accountability inside the organisation
• Evidence-based responses to the common executive objection that psychological safety reduces performance pressure