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.

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.

Practices for Learning from Failure

To Avoid

Don’t Say

Try

Skipping the analysis

I'll try harder next time.

Thinking carefully about what went wrong and what factors might have caused it.

Superficial analysis

It didn’t work. I'll just try something else

Analyzing what the different causes of the failure suggest about what to try next.

Self-serving analysis

I was right, but someone or something else messed it up.

Digging in to understand—

and accept—your own

contribution (small or large)

to the failure.

Owning our errors becomes easier when we accept human fallibility as a fact and put that acceptance to use in learning and improving. In the most successful teams in my research, people, especially team leaders, talk about the ever-present chance that things will go wrong. They are honest and good-humored about mistakes, which nurtures the psychological safety you need for people to speak up quickly about them. This is a best practice—in families, too, not just work teams—if you want to reduce basic failures.

“Use Systems Thinking to Change How We Think about Error …

Rely on inquiry

So Morath faced a challenge: How to help people to see and accept their hospital’s failures? Rather than doubling down on her logic—You work in a complex error-prone system, don’t you see? Things will go wrong!—she instead invited clinicians to reflect on their experiences that week with their patients, then prompted, “Was everything as safe as you would have liked it to have been?” Her aspirational question opened the floodgates. Most people had been in what Morath called “a health-care situation where something did not go well,” and

once they reflected on the many problems they had noticed, they became eager to talk about what had happened and how they might improve…

New language

Another element of the patient safety system was what Morath called Words to Work By—a roster of suggested terms designed to help shift mindsets from blaming to learning. Morath substituted neutral-sounding words such as study for the more threatening word investigation, which put people on the defensive…

Synergy…

As with the system at 3M that supported people’s intelligent failures in ways that encouraged product innovation, and the system at Toyota that made quality improvement second nature, Children’s Minnesota built a robust learning system that turned everyone into an active participant in patient safety. Morath’s approach reminds us that system design is more than simply coming into an organization and flipping a single switch. It’s flipping multiple switches understanding how they work as a system.