PERSON
Amy Edmondson
The Harvard organizational scientist whose discovery that the best-performing teams report more errors, not fewer, gave us the concept of psychological safety—and whose life's work now names the invisible architecture that determines whether AI becomes a tool for human flourishing or a source of institutional paralysis.
Edmondson's most counterintuitive finding has become one of the most consequential in the history of organizational science: the teams that perform best are not the ones that make the fewest errors but the ones that feel safe enough to
report them. The worse-performing teams were not more competent; they were more afraid. This observation, first documented in a study of hospital nursing teams that she expected to show the opposite pattern, launched three decades of research across factories, software teams, hospitals, and multinational boardrooms that converged on a single construct—
psychological safety—and a single claim: that the shared belief among team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking predicts learning, innovation, and performance more reliably than technical skill, resources, or leadership quality in any conventional sense. The AI transition has made this finding urgent in a new way. Adopting AI tools demands precisely the interpersonal risks her