The Real “F-Word” at Work: Why Embracing Failure is the Key to High Performance

Failure. It’s the “F-word” that makes corporate boardrooms flinch and executives squirm. It’s treated like a four-letter word, avoided at all costs, and, too often, buried under a mountain of euphemisms. But here’s the thing: failure isn’t the enemy of success—it’s its closest ally.

In her transformative book, The Right Kind of Wrong, Dr. Amy C. Edmondson, reminds us that not all failures are created equal. There are preventable failures—those caused by negligence or lack of preparation. Complex failure—the kind that arises in unpredictable, high-pressure systems where multiple factors collide, revealing hidden flaws. And then there are intelligent failures—the kind that emerge when we test boundaries, explore uncharted territory, and push the limits of what’s possible.

If your organization is unwilling to risk the latter, you’re playing the smallest possible game in a world that demands big moves.

The Cost of Making Failure a Dirty Word

In too many organizations, failure is a taboo topic, spoken about in only one of 2 ways: hushed tones or “failure is not an option”. This mindset is deeply rooted in a culture of fear—fear of blame, fear of lost credibility, fear of rocking the boat. And while this fear-driven culture might help leaders sleep at night by minimizing visible mistakes, it’s also killing the very things that keep companies alive: innovation, learning, and adaptability.

Failure is an option - it’s always on the table. 

Innovation requires experimentation, and experimentation comes with uncertainty. Uncertainty often leads to mistakes. If your culture punishes every misstep, your people will stop taking chances. They’ll stay in their lanes, opt for the status quo, and protect themselves at the expense of the organization.

Dr. Edmondson’s research highlights the power of psychological safety—the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In cultures where failure is treated as an opportunity to learn, teams outperform their fear-driven counterparts every time. Why? Because they know they can take risks, speak up, and iterate without fear of retribution.

Reframing Failure as a Competitive Advantage

Failure is an option - it’s always on the table. So the question that you should be asking at this point is “what are the failures I should be looking for?”

Instead of shunning failure, you need to rethink it as a teacher—a source of critical insights that illuminate what works, what doesn’t, and what’s worth trying next. But not all failures are valuable. Leaders need to distinguish between good failures—the kind that are bound to happen in the pursuit of innovation—and bad failures that result from carelessness or lack of accountability.

From a practical point of view you can think about it this way:

1. You are trying to avoid an ultimate failure in outcome 

2. To avoid that you need to look for failures along the way that could be early warning signs.

   1. What are the failures in your process, communication, training or system that could cause a bigger failure down the road?

3. When it happens you need to avoid blaming and look at all possible factors: 

   1. Attribution is hard but critical to make the most of when something doesn’t go to plan. Human error, training, systemic, process breakdown, or entropy are just the start and DON’T hide behind simple explanations.

4. Design experimentation that focuses on pushing an idea to failure. You want to know when something fails, not just that you can get something to work. Spend time discussing a reasonable timeline for review. When would you have the data that things are working or not?

When leaders shift from a blame-first mindset to a learn-first mindset, failure becomes fuel. Learning your way through problems requires perspective so you need eyes, ears and voice for those perspectives to be shared. Design for the right kind of contribution and then incorporate it. 

All teams have some fear or failure. The teams that use failure to help them navigate change and uncertainty. The best teams aren’t afraid to fail because they will see it coming or make the most of it when they do happen. These are the teams who uncover breakthroughs, challenge industry norms, and find creative solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

Creating a Culture That Embraces the F-Word

The cost of avoiding conversations about what can go wrong is significant. Without innovation they best you can hope for is a high average. 

If you’re ready to take failure out of the shadows, here are some practical steps:

1. Talk About Failure Openly: Start with your own stories. Share your missteps and what you’ve learned from them. When leaders normalize failure, they give everyone else permission to do the same. Don’t make it hard - just admit when you made a mistake and what learning you applied.

2. Encourage Intelligent Risk-Taking: Reward the courage to experiment, even when it doesn’t pan out. Acknowledge the effort and insights gained from trying something new. Don’t just go about it carelessly - help people think through how they will capture learning, when they think they will be able to know more and how the team can be supportive

3. Learn Relentlessly: Build reflection into your processes. After every project—successful or not—ask: What worked? What didn’t? What will we do differently next time? This can’t be emphasized enough. The teams that fail to learn do so because they didn’t plan to, they didn’t hold themselves accountable to their process or they did a bad job, usually by looking for an easy reason that felt comfortable instead of more meaningful reflection.

4. Make Psychological Safety a Priority: Foster an environment where people feel safe speaking up, challenging ideas, and admitting when something goes wrong. This doesn’t mean comfort - this means that people are rewarded for when they contribute and feel an obligation to speak up even when it does feel a bit uncomfortable. Psychological safety allows for accountability to feel more easy to establish and maintain as a leader. For team members it makes asking for help and seeking support feel more available. When teams depend on each other to get things done psychological safety is a collective responsibility.

   
   

You can read more about how embracing discomfort helps build high performance. HERE

Failure Is the Price of Admission

Innovation is messy. Learning is uncomfortable. Growth doesn’t come with a guarantee of success. But the most successful organizations understand that the price of admission for greatness is embracing the possibility of failure—and the lessons that come with it. A friend of mine (and now myself as well) has been known to say:

 “The difference between innovation and efficiency is your ability to predict the outcome. One is certain while the other isn’t. If you want to innovate, failure needs to be ok.”

So, the next time you hear the F-word, don’t flinch. Lean in. Ask: What can we learn from this? Because failure isn’t the end; it’s the beginning.

Neil Pretty CEO