Failing Forward: What Our Mistakes Teach Us

"Fall down seven times, get up eight" - Japanese proverb

We hear about failure all the time and how it’s necessary to ‘fail forward’ in order to achieve success. Social media is full of stories about exceptional scholars, athletes, and artists who recount the many trials and setbacks they faced before achieving greatness.

And although we seem to be glorifying failure as a society, deeming it integral to success, it seems the mere thought of messing up still triggers fear, shame, and self-doubt.

Amy Edmondson takes a deep dive into the science of failure in her new book The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science Failing Well, breaking down failure into three categories:

1) Basic Failure: Preventable mistakes in well-understood contexts (e.g., sending a confidential email to the wrong person).

2) Complex Failure: Arising from unpredictable interactions in dynamic systems (e.g., a patient experiencing complications due to overlapping factors like staff handovers and drug interactions).

3) Intelligent Failure: Thoughtful experimentation in uncertain situations where outcomes can’t be known in advance (e.g., a city testing a new traffic design that fails but yields valuable insights).

While basic and complex failures offer learning opportunities, intelligent failures are what drive innovation, progress, and growth.

In Stephen Dubner's latest Freakonomics podcast series, How to Succeed at Failing, he draws upon numerous cases, from medical failures to rocket launch disasters. Through interviews with subject matter experts, including Edmondson, Dubner offers a comprehensive picture of how and why we fail. What underscores the conversation is whether our society should disassociate shame from failure or if it’s indeed important for failures to be painful and “to burn” as one of his guests described.

I’m sharing this to highlight the critical role that organizational culture plays in shaping how we experience and respond to failure, and ultimately, how we build successful teams and businesses. Each of us brings different strengths and perspectives, but the real magic is in how we foster environments that uphold psychological safety to allow for them to be expressed , whether it’s how we delegate tasks, provide feedback to our peers, or show up for each other in times of challenge. Let's create workplaces where people feel comfortable and excited about taking chances, making mistakes, and getting messy!