Healthy failure conversations are a wellness intervention, not a performance one.
We talk about corporate wellness in terms of standing desks, mental health days, and EAPs. All essential if you are being a good leader and genuinely caring for those who work with you. Also integral to work-place wellness is how your organisation actually talks about failure. And responds to it. Do you have a failure strategy?
Most organisations and boards have a risk strategy and a crisis management strategy. Definitely not to be confused or replaced or 'in-place-of' a failure strategy.
Psychological safety is one of the most well-evidenced predictors of team performance we have. And psychological safety isn't an abstraction. It's built or broken in the specific moment someone has to decide whether to speak up, try something new, or admit something didn't work. If failure is a 'dirty word' in your culture, safety isn't real. It's token.
Silence around failure doesn't remove the risk. It just relocates it. Or buries it.
Here's what happens when failure is the 'thing that shall not be named'. Or discussed. Or pre-discussed. Your teams don't stop taking risks because risk disappeared. They stop taking risks because the personal cost of a visible misstep has become higher than the cost of doing nothing. That's a rational response to an irrational system. And it's exhausting to live inside. And it's not productive. And it will almost certainly doom the organisation to failure. Permanently.
Here's the part that gets missed. Inaction has a cost. It's just quieter. It doesn't show up as an incident report. It shows up as the market moving past you, becoming the follower instead of the leader, the idea that never got pitched, the person who quietly disengaged eighteen months before they resigned. Inaction is the more expensive failure. It's just the one nobody understands, recognises, or knows how to explain in a de-brief.
What looks like laziness can be self-protection.
If you're noticing staff who seem disengaged, slow to commit, or stuck in procrastination loops, it's worth asking a different question than “why aren't they motivated?” Try: what have they learned about what happens here when something goes wrong? What is the price they have seen paid?
Procrastination is frequently a psychological safety symptom, dressed up as productivity. Notice delays in decision making, over-polishing before sharing, waiting for someone else to go first? These are all forms of risk management in a system where the downside of trying feels bigger than the downside of stalling. You don't fix that with a productivity hack. You fix it by changing what happens when someone's attempt doesn't land. If you have read my previous articles, you will remember Blue Chilli and how well they had this covered.
Healthy failure conversations are a wellness intervention, not a performance one.
This is the reframe: a failure strategy isn't primarily about innovation velocity, though it helps with that too. It's about the spine of your organisation. Teams that can name a 'failure' out loud, examine it without shame, and move on, are teams that carry less chronic, low-grade dread into their workday. That dread has a cost. It costs focus, creativity, and retention. These are elements of the actual health outcomes a wellness budget is trying to protect.
Where to start?
You don't need a rebrand or an offsite. Mind you, I am a big fan of a solid offsite. And I love curating and facilitating them. Rather, you need smaller, more frequent permission-giving:
Name one thing that didn't work this week.
Ask “what did we try?” as often as you ask “what did we deliver?” Actually ask it more.
Notice when someone's slowness is actually caution, and get curious about what they're protecting against.
None of this is about celebrating failure for its own sake. This about strategy. It's about building the conditions where trying is safer than not trying. That's the trade every disengaged team has quietly made. The upside is, if you make the effort, it's reversible.
A wellness strategy that never considers or discusses how your people relate to failure isn't complete. It's just ordinary. And right now, no business can afford to be ordinary.
Celebrating Success One Failure at a Time is now available as a book, an audiobook, and an online course. You can bring this conversation to your organisation as a keynote, workshop, or leadership programme. Link in comments.
Healthy failure conversations are a wellness intervention, not a performance one.
Healthy failure conversations are a wellness intervention, not a performance one.
