Learning From Failure: How Psychological Safety Helps us Build Innovative Teams

On the Impactful Teamwork podcast, host Julia Felton interviews Rachel Franco, founder of Fail Smarter, about why teamwork and learning from failure are competitive advantages.

Franco shares how her Fortune 500 innovation enablement work and a Northwestern capstone on barriers to learning from failure led her to focus on helping leaders and teams overcome fear of failure so they can innovate.

The conversation emphasises psychological safety—making it safe to speak up with ideas, concerns, and mistakes—through leader role-modelling, thoughtful responses, and measurement using Amy Edmondson’s Fearless Organization Scan.

Franco cites data linking high psychological safety to lower turnover and higher engagement, productivity, learning agility, and skill application, and notes Google’s Project Aristotle finding it is the top factor in team effectiveness.

They discuss practical blockers like lack of time, incentives, cross-team communication, weak user-centered thinking, rushed postmortems, and poor follow-through on ideas, plus experiential learning via the “failure toy” workshop and Fail Smarter’s quiz.

00:45 Meet Rachel Franco

01:27 Why Fail Smarter

04:59 Fear of Failure Culture

06:43 Psychological Safety Basics

09:00 Measuring Safety and Incentives

12:31 Stats That Prove It

17:06 AI Era Needs Experimentation

18:58 Why Projects Fail

21:05 Everyone Can Innovate

23:39 Ideas Need Follow Through

26:20 Failure Toy Workshop

29:34 Accountability and Smart Risk