When Failure Is Useful - And When It Isn't.

In the first blog of this series, I argued that failure does not need to be treated as the enemy of progress. But there is an important qualification: not all failure deserves the same response.

Some failure is useful. Some is not. It is important to understand the difference.

At one end, failure is treated as shameful, so people hide mistakes, protect themselves and avoid risk. At the other, failure is casually celebrated, as though every mistake is evidence of bravery or innovation. Neither position is particularly helpful.

A more mature relationship with failure starts by asking: what kind of failure are we looking at?

Some failures are preventable. They happen when known processes are ignored, responsibilities are unclear, standards slip, or lessons from the past are not applied. These failures should not be dressed up as learning opportunities too quickly. They need honesty, accountability and correction.

Other failures are complex. They arise because organisations are human systems. Different pressures, assumptions, decisions, relationships and constraints interact in ways that are difficult to predict. In these cases, blame is rarely useful because no single action explains the whole outcome. The better question is not “who caused this?” but “how did this happen?”

Then there are intelligent failures. These happen when people try something genuinely new, test an assumption, experiment in uncertain territory or pursue a worthwhile goal without knowing in advance whether it will work. These failures can be valuable because they generate information the organisation could not have gained through analysis alone.

Amy Edmondson’s work on learning from failure makes this distinction clear: preventable failures require different treatment from complex failures or intelligent failures (Edmondson, 2011). Sitkin’s earlier work on “small losses” also reminds us that learning is easier when experiments are thoughtful, contained and designed to produce insight rather than damage (Sitkin, 1992).

This is why the phrase “fail fast” can be misleading. The goal is not to fail more often. The goal is to learn sooner, at lower cost, with greater honesty.

For leaders and teams, the practical question is simple: what response would make us wiser?

If the failure was preventable, tighten the system. If it was complex, study the conditions. If it was intelligent, capture the learning and move forward.

Failure is useful when it tells us something true. It becomes wasteful when we ignore it, hide it, repeat it, or celebrate it without understanding it. The point is not to make failure fashionable but to make it informative.

References

Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Strategies for learning from failure. Harvard Business Review, 89(4), 48–55.

Sitkin, S. B. (1992). Learning through failure: The strategy of small losses. Research in Organizational Behavior, 14, 231–266.