How to fail intelligently.

The Next Big Idea Daily newsletter?(SUBSCRIBE)?is written by me,?Michael Kovnat, and gathers insights from today’s leading non-fiction authors. It’s a companion to our?Next Big Idea Daily?podcast, available on?Apple?or?Spotify.

What have you failed at? As we learned from Daniel Pink , it doesn't do any good to ignore past errors (No regrets!). Nor, of course, is it helpful to simply wallow in remorse (I suck.). While we're often encouraged to take a third path and learn from our mistakes, exactly how to do that remains under-explained.

This dilemma resonated with me when I came across it in Dan's recent book The Power of Regret, and it came into even sharper focus after reading Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy Edmondson . Amy is something of failure expert, though I'm not sure she'd love being described that way. She's a professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, and was a pioneer in developing the idea of psychological safety as a key element in building productive and innovative teams.

But the flip side of that question has long fascinated her as well: what makes teams -- and individuals -- mess up? Rather than discard error as simply bad data, she's studied and categorized the different types of mistakes humans make, and developed systems for eliminating the dumb kind as much as possible while encouraging what she calls intelligent failure.

We're on a bit of an Amy Edmondson kick here at the Next Big Idea Club. I'll be interviewing her for an upcoming episode of the Next Big Idea podcast and we featured some of the key insights from her book this week on the Next Big Idea Daily.

Hear Amy Edmondson explain how to fail better:

Of course, we heard from other great thinkers as writers this week as well, such as:

• How random forces impact your healthcare, from physicians Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham, M.D., M.P.H.
• How rational people come to believe irrational things, from social scientist Dan Ariely
• How long-term thinking can help us solve our biggest problems, from futurist Ari Wallach
• How to break out of dysfunctional family dynamics, from clinical social worker Nedra Tawwab

If you'd like to share any of your dumb mistakes or intelligent failures, feel free to do so in the comments below.

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