To help assess if an organization suffers from destructive competition and conflict—and to figure out how to fix it—we ask, “Who are the superstars here?” Followed by “Do people get ahead by doing great work and helping others succeed? Or doing great work while ignoring and even undermining colleagues?” When people are rewarded for helping others, many of the ugly dynamics that infected Microsoft—and so many other places—disappear.

Another of Carl Jung’s admonitions reverberates: ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ We look at our organizations and logically conclude that they are fated to be dysfunctional messes. That we, because of our lack of skill, are fated to fail as leaders. To never feel safe enough, warm enough, or happy enough.

I felt embarrassed and afraid that my colleagues wouldn’t keep me on the research team. My thoughts spiraled out to what I would do next, after dropping out of graduate school. This unhelpful reaction points to why each of us must learn how to take a deep breath, think again, and hypothesize anew. That simple self-management task is part of the science of failing well.

The instinct to exhort people to do their best work in challenging times is understandable. It’s tempting to believe that if we just hunker down, we can avoid failure altogether. It’s also wrong. The relationship between effort and success is imperfect. The world around us changes constantly and keeps presenting us with new situations. The best-laid plans encounter problems in an uncertain context. Even when people work hard and are committed to doing the right thing, failure is always possible in a new situation. Sure, sometimes failures are caused by people who are careless or don’t work hard, but even hard work can end in failure when a situation is new and different or some unexpected event happens. Finally, and most perversely, sometimes sheer luck allows you to mail it in and succeed anyway.

When presented with the choice between admitting our mistakes or protecting our self-image, the decision is easy. We want to believe we are not at fault, so we find every reason to justify what we did as correct. That makes it hard to learn! A psychological bias known as the fundamental attribution error exacerbates the problem. Stanford psychologist Lee Ross identified this fascinating asymmetry: when we see others fail, we spontaneously view their character or ability as the cause. It’s almost amusing to realize that we do exactly the opposite in explaining our own failures—spontaneously seeing external factors as the cause. For example, if we show up late for a meeting, we blame traffic. If a colleague is late for a meeting, we may conclude he is uncommitted or lazy.