Catmull is honest and human in acknowledging that failure hurts. Embracing failure is far easier to say than to actually put into practice! “To disentangle the good and bad parts of failure,” he says, “we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.” He points out that it's not enough to simply accept failure when it happens and move on, more or less hoping to avoid it going forward. We need to understand failure not as something to fear or try to avoid, but as a natural part of learning and exploration. Just as learning to ride a bike entails the physical discomfort of skinned knees or bruised elbows, creating a stunningly original movie requires the psychological pain of failure. Moreover, trying to avoid the pain of failure in learning will lead to far worse pain. Catmull: “for leaders especially, this strategy – trying to avoid failure by outthinking it – dooms you to fail.

... I couldn’t resist asking, “Tommy, why do you keep throwing yourself at this climb? You’ve experienced so much success as a climber, but all this climb seems to do is give you failure upon failure. Why would you go back?”

“I go back because the climb is making me better, it’s making me stronger,” he replied. “I’m not failing, I’m growing.” We got into a long conversation about how to think about failure, arriving at the idea that the opposite side of the coin of success isn’t failure but growth.

“What I find with a lot of people,” he continued, “is that they’re so focused on success that they don’t put themselves in situations where they’re likely to grow through the process of failure. But to truly find your ultimate limit, you have to go on a journey of cumulative failure and hopefully come out the other end someday. Even if I never succeed in free climbing the Dawn Wall, it will make me so much stronger, and so much better, that most other climbs will seem easy by comparison.

There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without it being compounded by the search for a scapegoat.

In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.

Said Ferriola: “We encourage our people not to fear failure. You cannot stretch the limits of your knowledge, your imagination, or your skills, if you’re afraid to fail. It’s very typical to hear a manager or a supervisor coach a new teammate by saying something like: ‘If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing the limits of your abilities.

For example, meeting with senior executives in a large financial services firm in April

2020, I listened as they explained that the current business environment made failure temporarily “off-limits.” Understandably concerned about an economic climate increasingly challenged by a global pandemic, these business leaders wanted everything to go as well as possible. Generally speaking, they were sincere in their desire to learn from failure. But enthusiasm about failing was acceptable when times were good, they told me; now that the future looked uncertain, pursuing unerring success was more imperative than ever. These smart, well-intentioned people needed to rethink failure. First, they needed to appreciate the context. The need for fast learning from failure is most critical in times of uncertainty and upheaval, in part because failures are more likely! Second, while encouraging people to minimize basic and complex failures may help them focus, welcoming intelligent failures remains essential to progress in any industry. Third, they needed to recognize that the most likely outcome of their prohibition on failure wasn’t perfection but rather not hearing about the failures that do occur. When people don’t speak up about small failures—say, an accounting error—these can spiral into larger failures, such as massive banking losses.