We suggest instead a three-part response:

1. Ask what learning came from the project.

1. Don’t make a big deal about it.

1. Ask her to “sunshine” the failure.

Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed - Amy Edmondson

Introduction:

“Intelligent failures provide valuable new knowledge. They bring discovery. They occur when experimentation is necessary simply because answers are not knowable in advance.

Note that healthy attributions about failure not only stay balanced and rational, they also take account of the ways—small or large—that you may have contributed to what happened. Maybe you didn’t prepare sufficiently for the interview. This is not to beat yourself up or wallow in shame. Quite the contrary; it’s about developing the self-awareness and confidence to keep learning, making whatever changes you need so as to do better next time. Each of us is a fallible human being, living and working with other fallible human beings. Even if we work to overcome our emotional aversion to failure, failing effectively isn’t automatic. We also need help to reduce the confusion created by the glib talk about failure that is especially rampant in conversations on entrepreneurship.

Embracing the Possibility of Failure to Reduce the Occurrence of Failure

My decades-long fascination with error, harm, and failure has left me humble about the complexity of these topics. The mix of factors—technology, psychology, management, systems—means none of us can master every aspect of the relevant knowledge to feel “we’ve got this.” But a few simple practices have emerged from my work that can help prevent complex failures. With these, we all have the power to make that kind of difference—in our own lives and in the organizations we care about.

Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach conducted five studies to test the hypothesis that failure, rather than promoting learning, actually undermines it. In one study they asked participants a series of questions starting with identifying which of two symbols from a fictional ancient script represented an animal. Afterward, one group of study participants was told, “You are correct” (success feedback). The other group was told, “You are incorrect” (failure feedback). To see how well they learned from each type of feedback, participants were given a follow-up test. This time they were asked to look at the exact same symbols and asked to identify which one represented a nonliving entity. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Yet those who had been told they were correct in the first round scored higher in their second test than those told their answers were incorrect. Over and over, people learned less from being given information about what they got wrong than about what they got right.