Strong leadership can build a learning culture-one in which failures large and small are consistently reported and deeply analyzed, and opportunities to experiment are proactively sought. But first leaders must understand how the blame game gets in the way and work to create an organizational culture in which employees feel safe admitting or reporting on failure.įailures fall into three categories: preventable ones in predictable operations, which usually involve deviations from spec unavoidable ones in complex systems, which may arise from unique combinations of needs, people, and problems and intelligent ones at the frontier, where “good” failures occur quickly and on a small scale, providing the most valuable information.

And successful learning from failure is not simple: It requires context-specific strategies. In organizational life, she says, some failures are inevitable and some are even good. The author, a professor at Harvard Business School, thinks both beliefs are misguided. Many executives believe that all failure is bad (although it usually provides lessons) and that learning from it is pretty straightforward.

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