Certain errors or mishaps may not seem serious at first. In fact, they may present as shortcuts, efficiencies or even alternative solutions. The ends justify the means in this respect even if it is wrong for a specific reason.
On their own, moments like these may not seem especially serious. The danger is what happens when they are repeated, tolerated and eventually absorbed into the culture.
Over time, errors can become normalised.
Diane Vaughan’s work on the Challenger spaceship disaster described this as the “normalisation of deviance”: the process by which departures from expected standards become accepted because nothing immediately catastrophic happens (Vaughan, 1996). A team bends the rule once and gets away with it. Then it bends it again. Gradually, the exceptional becomes routine.
This is how failure gets locked into a system. Not usually through one dramatic decision, but through hundreds of small accommodations. People learn what is really rewarded. They notice which problems are ignored. They discover which conversations are too difficult to have. They adapt.
Eventually, “that’s how we’ve always done it” stops being an explanation and becomes a defence.
James Reason’s work on organisational accidents is helpful here. He distinguished between active errors — the visible mistakes people make — and latent conditions: the deeper weaknesses built into systems, processes, leadership habits and organisational assumptions (Reason, 1990). By the time something visibly fails, the conditions for failure may have been present for a long time.
This matters for teams because culture is not only what is written in values statements. As Edgar Schein argued, culture is formed by the shared assumptions a group develops about how to survive and succeed (Schein, 2010). If people learn that it is safer to stay quiet, cut corners, protect the image of success or avoid uncomfortable truths, those behaviours become part of the culture.
Unchecked failure therefore changes more than performance. It changes what people come to see as normal.
A coaching lens invites a different kind of inquiry. Instead of asking only, “Who made the mistake?”, we might ask:
What have we stopped noticing?
What workarounds have become habits?
What are people afraid to say out loud?
Where have we confused coping with effectiveness?
What would a newcomer see here that we no longer see?
These questions matter because teams rarely drift intentionally. They drift when pressure, silence and habit combine.
The antidote is not blame. Blame often drives failure further underground. The antidote is attention: creating enough psychological safety for people to speak up early, challenge unhelpful norms and name the small failures before they become the way the system works (Edmondson, 1999).
Failure becomes dangerous when it becomes familiar.
That is why leaders must pay attention not only to what goes wrong, but to what keeps being tolerated. Because today’s workaround can become tomorrow’s culture.
References:
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Reason, J. (1990). Human error. Cambridge University Press.
Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Vaughan, D. (1996). The Challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA. University of Chicago Press.