We all know that it is important to have a culture of experimentation in order to be able to grow. and that we need to respect the courage it takes to attempt to do something new, even if that thing does not result in a successful outcome.
What I enjoyed about the Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson is that it creates a framework for classifying failures into basic failures, intelligent failures, and complex failures. Basic failures are those that result from inattention, neglect, overconfidence, and faulty assumption, and one should strive to reduce basic failures. Intelligent failures on the other hand are those that take place in a new territory, provide opportunities to advance towards a desired goal, are informed by available knowledge, and are small yet provide valuable insights. When these attributes are met, the failures can be just valuable as the successes in the experiments as they can provide critical known for one’s missions and objectives.
The book also explores complex failures that result from the operation of interconnected systems where failures in complex settings can be multicausal and have external factors. The book provides a framework for understanding such systems and provides recommendations on how to manage these failures by learning from previous complex failures, paying attention to early warnings, encouraging false alarms, and leveraging recovery windows.
The biggest takeaways for me were the ideas on how to create a culture that encourages reporting errors and failures without fear of repercussions, which is not easy to do in Omani culture.