Three Stages of an Error Friendly Culture

Psychological Safety

By now (2025), it's common knowledge that psychological safety is an important factor for successful teams. At least in technology/software engineering. Googles' Project Aristotle is probably the most often cited source for this finding.

For software engineering teams, psychological safety means that members of the team feel comfortable speaking up, even though they might be wrong, or naive or not fully thought through or otherwise far from perfect. Such teams have an error friendly culture.

The Three Stages

In my time in the industry, I have worked with and in many teams. The way I see it, there's three stages or levels of error friendly cultures.

Allowing mistakes
It's OK to be wrong. It'd be nicer to not be wrong because maybe it takes more time, but it's accepted and OK.
Accepting the inevitable
Things will go wrong. There's no way around it. We accept that and we expect you to be wrong at some times. It's fine.
Embrace for Learning
We not only accept you to be wrong. We _need_ you to be wrong because that's the most efficient way we can learn together.

Not all teams will be able to go all stages. An HR team responsible for paying out salaries will likely stay at stage 1. A software research team should probably aim for stage 3. But a team writing software that's powering critical systems where failure may even be life-threatening will likely not even go to stage 1.

You mileage will vary.