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Two Primary Attributes
A healthy failure culture has two primary attributes. The first is shared awareness that failure is always possible. Failure is an ever-present risk in an uncertain world. So we’re alert to it. We’re able to catch and correct and prevent many failures, and to welcome and even pursue intelligent failures.
The second aspect of a healthy failure culture is the psychological safety to allow people to speak up quickly and candidly with concerns, with questions, and even with tentative concerns and with mistakes, and all of those things that help us really perform well in a fallible situation. One of my favorite examples of a healthy failure culture is IDEO, the product design and innovation consultancy, where they welcome and celebrate failure because they know it’s part of innovation. So they know that many of their fantastic ideas won’t pan out, will fail, and they know that’s part of the process.
But a healthy failure culture is also found in major tertiary care hospitals, where a healthy failure culture means something very different. It means no one would hesitate to speak up about an error or about even a tentative concern that they’re not quite sure is an error. They speak up quickly and easily because they know and understand the potential for real complex failures to happen, and they want to get out ahead of it.
So in both cases, a healthy failure culture is one where people recognize failures can happen and are willing to speak up quickly and honestly about them.
Softening the Blow of Failure
Team leaders build a healthy failure culture by reminding people of the complex interdependent nature of the work. In other words, reminding people that what we do has failure potential. We’re aware of that. It’s okay. It’s part of what we do.
Second, share your own failures. Model the behavior, displaying sort of humility and a sense of humor about things that go wrong. It’s okay to fail and just cheerfully, quickly pick it up and try something else and learn from it.
And the last thing thing is: respond in a thoughtful, empathetic way when things go wrong. “Oh, that must’ve been hard for you. Thank you so much for letting me know right away.” Just having that productive, caring response to help soften the blow of failure.