Make Intelligent Failure part of what you're already doing

We work with your people, leaders, and processes to foster Intelligent Failure using your organization’s existing structures. We also strive to uncover norms, processes and messaging that conflict or otherwise make a healthy relationship with failure difficult.

Aligning how you share stories, evaluate, reward, recruit, train, learn, etc. makes dealing with failure well simply part of "how things get done around here".

Some examples

  • Leverage existing performance evaluation and reward systems to incent experimentation and learning

  • Include learning and innovating as part of job descriptions when hiring

  • Build and/or strengthen mechanisms for receiving feedback

  • Work with leaders and internal communications to capture and share stories that celebrate smart risk taking and learning from failure

  • Use your existing internal communications platform to ask employees what they've learned, failed at, or are worried about

  • Have a section titled "what if I mess up?" in the employee on-boarding manual that outlines the expectations for analyzing, learning and sharing

  • Host an annual Fail Fest, or launch a Failure Award to share stories

  • Build Intelligent Failure into new manager training


Learning from failures is now part of our competency framework and more importantly, our HR director publicly shared a failure on our internal blog… We’ve made progress, at least it is no longer taboo to talk about failures, which in itself is a huge achievement.

— Roxanna Samii, UN International Fund for Agricultural Development