Celebrate Failure! Really?

Celebrate failure! 🥳
Really? 🤔

Teams are more effective when they operate in environments that allow members to take interpersonal risks, such as admitting they don’t know something, offering feedback and support, asking for help, or sharing their mistakes and failures.

A commonly shared recommendation within our community is to celebrate mistakes as learning opportunities. By reframing mistakes as opportunities for learning and improvement, we should encourage a growth mindset within the team. Doing so creates a blame-free culture where failures are openly discussed, analyzed, and used as stepping stones for innovation and progress.

That makes sense, right? 🤷‍♂️

Interestingly, I’ve never been part of teams where we celebrated failures. 😲

In each team, we made mistakes. Instead of celebrating them, we discussed the mistake, explored the root cause, identified improvements, and moved on. We did show appreciation for sharing the mistake openly to encourage everyone to keep doing it.

But celebrating mistakes? I can’t remember that we’ve ever done it…

I have been involved in consultancy engagements in which we introduced practices like a “Failure Wall” or a “Wall of Mistakes ❌.” These were mainly focused on an organizational level. People were encouraged to add their failures to the wall to spark openness and conversation. Despite initial enthusiasm, people ignored the board soon afterward.

I’m still pondering my mind on what this means…

Maybe I’ve been part of teams with a solid trust and psychological safety foundation, and the need to celebrate failure wasn’t present. Maybe not, and I missed out on something. 😨

Or is celebrating failures something that sounds nice & important, and we keep repeating each other within our community? 🤷‍♀️

What are your thoughts and experiences❓