Failure Isn’t an Event. It’s a Mirror

Failure isn’t an event. It’s not a single moment, milestone, or after-action ritual. It’s continuous, messy, and never black or white, it’s a 100 shades of grey. And it’s guaranteed to return if we don’t truly learn.

Too often, organizations treat failure as a tidy cycle: capture “lessons learned,” document actions, talk about them for a couple of months, and move on. That’s not learning. That’s performance.

In today’s fast-paced environment, where everything is wanted yesterday, conditions for success are rarely in place, landscapes grow more complex by the day, employee engagement sits at an all-time low, economic and geopolitical tensions loom large, and the right mindsets are often missing... failure in one of its hundred shades is more than likely to happen.

What Failure Really Looks Like

Failure is not black or white. It’s not simply “we achieved” or “we didn’t.” In reality, failure comes in many forms, often hidden beneath the surface of delivery.

It looks like:

• Achieving, but thr cost was too high, burnout, politics, relationships frayed beyond repair.

• Delivering by scaling complexity, creating structures so tangled they can’t sustain themselves.

• Getting it done, but leaving others to decipher it, outputs that look complete on paper but require endless sense-making downstream.

• Partial or patchwork delivery, enough to claim progress, but not enough to generate value.

• A trail of casualties, teams depleted, leaders disillusioned, credibility eroded along the way.

• Neglecting how what you delivered will live and thrive, no thought given to adoption, maintenance, or cultural fit.

• Short-term wins with long-term costs, quick optics at the expense of deeper impact.

• Avoidance dressed as action, moving fast, but around the real issue, not through it.

• Delivered but missed the window of opportunity

This is why failure isn’t just about lessons learned after a missed milestone. It’s about how we define success in the first place, and whether what we create can actually sustain itself without leaving wreckage behind.

The Weight We Give the Word

The very word failure is heavy. It carries stigma, judgment, and finality. People shy away from it because it feels like a verdict rather than an opportunity.

What if we reframed it?

• Heavy failure: blame, shame, defensive reviews, vague platitudes.

• Healthy failure: feedback, neutral, curious, shared ownership, specific behaviors, clear experiments.

This matters because when failure is treated as weight, people hide from the truth. When it’s reframed as feedback, leaders and teams lean in and move forward.

And no, am not just using a different word to make it feel good, this is a reframe and a mindset shift. Because failure is guaranteed to happen and the faster you can catch it before it spirals, the better. And most importantly use it to really learn from it (really learn from it).

The 90% Inside Job

Here’s the real double-click: 90% of learning from failure is not about fixing processes, creating more communications, or adding more resources. Those tweaks can help, but they’re surface. The deeper work is internal

It’s about what we change in ourselves:

• Owning our contribution, without hedging

• Noticing how we react under pressure

• Rewarding truth over optics

• Making one small behavioral change, and sustaining it

Learning is personal before it becomes organizational.

Leadership Responsibility in Hierarchies

Because organizations are hierarchical, responsibility scales upward. Leaders set the tone for whether failure is recycled or its a learning catalyst. This isn’t about fixing people, it’s about modeling what improvement looks like.

Leaders' part:

• Share their own failures and what they’re changing

• Protect the learning loop instead of rushing past it

• Reward truth-tellers even when it’s inconvenient

• Measure behavior shifts, not just “actions closed”

When leaders avoid this, organizations absorb the wrong lesson: survival, not growth

Why Now? The Current Business Reality

Look around:

• Many are just keeping their heads down, doing enough to get by.

• Others are barely staying afloat under relentless pressure.

• Some have stopped caring altogether, showing up for the paycheck but little else.

In this climate, the cost of pretend learning multiplies. When failure is rehearsed instead of resolved, organizations throw money at symptoms, avoid root causes, and stagnate. The result isn’t just inefficiency, it’s erosion.

Coping Patterns That Multiply Failure

As failure frequency rises, many leaders default to unhelpful strategies:

1. Passive-aggressive avoidance – polite agreement but no change.

2. My way or the highway – tightening control when things wobble.

3. Empire building – surrounding themselves with supporters or disengaged voices.

These don’t solve failure. They compound it.

Reframing Failure as Experiment

Failure will happen more often in the future. The goal isn’t to make it feel lighter, it’s to look at it differently. Reframe it as experiments: small, bounded, deliberate tests with explicit learning.

Experiment mindset:

• Start with a clear hypothesis.

• Run the smallest viable test.

• Timebox the review.

• Capture and anchor the behavior change into daily practice.

Why This Matters Now (Especially for Change & Transformation)

The landscape is shifting at a tectonic plate level ... technology, markets, expectations, and work models are all moving beneath us. Meanwhile, some teams are still debating if we need more “change communication” as if messaging alone could move mountains, or use Co-Pilot to increase productivity, or what new ERP platform should be use... these conversations are all valid but not deep enough to really shift the dial.

Without structural learning (+ unlearning) and behavioral change, all those "projects" are theatre. So we need to address these projects and initiatives a deeper level of mindset shifts, deeper ways of thinking and being, and the ability to dive much deeper than what we usually do.

If you lead change or transformation, prioritize:

• Learning velocity over plan perfection. Shorten the loop from incident → insight → behavior.

• Root-cause discipline. Make it safe, and required, to trace issues to design, incentives, and leadership habits.

• Capability over choreography. Train teams how to learn and adapt, not just how to follow steps.

• 1% better as a system metric. Normalize incremental, compounding improvement everywhere.

The 1% Better Protocol (Mini Playbook)

1. Observe: Name the failure in neutral, factual terms.

2. Own: State your personal contribution, no excuses.

3. Learn: Pull one root cause that sits inside your control.

4. Adjust: Design a single behavioral change and one experiment.

5. Anchor: Bake it into a ritual, template, or decision rule.

6. Revisit (30/60 days): Check if the behavior held. What shifted? What’s next 1%?

Closing Thought

Failure isn’t an event. It’s the mirror we face every day. The real question is whether we’ll keep performing “learning” or truly adapt. In an age where many are head down, barely afloat, or disengaged, the organizations and leaders who treat failure as a mirror, and act on what they see, will be the ones building a future worth leading. And this is equally true for individual leaders too

Till next time …

Warm Regards,

Jess Tayel

Founder of the Transformation Leadership Institute and People of Transformation membership & community.

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