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 Franco01:27 Why Fail Smarter04:59 Fear of Failure Culture06:43 Psychological Safety Basics09:00 Measuring Safety and Incentives12:31 Stats That Prove It17:06 AI Era Needs Experimentation18:58 Why Projects Fail21:05 Everyone Can Innovate23:39 Ideas Need Follow Through26:20 Failure Toy Workshop29:34 Accountability and Smart Risk31:03 Where to Find RachelYou can connect with Rachel at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelfranco/https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelfranco/Connect with Julia:WebsiteLinkedInFacebookInstagramTake the IMPACTFUL Teamwork Quiz to assess your team's communication, creativity culture, goal clarity, and conflict resolution skills!Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on Spotify