We have built a culture fluent in the language of failure, yet completely intolerant of the experience of it.
Once upon a time, in a more naive phase of life, my keynotes often held the same two messages. Fail fast. We've got your back. Done. Dusted. Everyone would take it on board.
These messages can sound like permission. In reality, they can also function like a trap door.
Because the moment something actually breaks - a network, a decision, a sentence someone wishes they hadn't said - the same organisations and the same public that applauded the slogan go looking for a name to attach to the fault. Not a lesson. A name. Or should I say a head that can/will roll...
This is the gap I keep coming back to in Celebrating Success One Failure at a Time: we have built a culture fluent in the language of failure, yet completely intolerant of the experience of it. We reward the idea of falling short in a keynote. We punish the reality of it in a boardroom, a Senate hearing, a comments section, a corporation, in a CEO, or a national leader.
The loop we never close
Failure isn't dangerous because something went wrong. It's dangerous because most organisations never finish the loop. A real failure loop runs: something breaks → we understand why → we tell the truth about it → the system gets better → the story becomes shared knowledge. Skip any one of those steps and the failure just sits there, undigested, waiting to be re-lived.
What we do instead is stop at step one. Something breaks, we assign blame, and we call that closure. It isn't. Blame ends the conversation before the loop even opens. You can't extract data from a failure you're too busy prosecuting.
Telstra: a case study in half a loop
Telstra's mobile network went down nationwide in the early hours of a Wednesday morning, cutting off close to half of all calls and data sessions and leaving some customers unable to reach Triple Zero. Regional trains stopped. EFTPOS terminals used by roughly 80,000 small businesses went dark. It was, by any measure, a serious failure of critical infrastructure.
What happened next is the part worth studying. Telstra didn't hide. The company apologised directly and attributed the outage to a software defect, and its CEO later fronted a Senate inquiry to explain that the root cause was a neglected software update combined with an undocumented equipment change on ageing network hardware. She was specific about the mechanism, and she offered a genuinely useful piece of context: the average length of time a customer's phone was affected had dropped 91 per cent from the previous year, evidence, however imperfect, that the system had actually been learning from its past failures.
That's most of a loop. Break, explanation, public accountability, a stated intention to keep investigating why the update was skipped in the first place.
But notice what dominated the public conversation in the days after: share price movement, outrage, and a scramble to establish who was to blame, rather than a serious public conversation about the fact that a single missed software patch can now take down train networks, payment systems and emergency calls at once. The commentary that mattered got a fraction of the airtime: that the real lesson isn't to slow digitalisation but to make it more resilient. The “how did this happen, who's responsible” cycle got a whole lot of airtime. We had a rare, well-documented, technically honest account of a failure, and the culture still defaulted to fault-finding over learning. I expect some of the comments for the article will continue that theme; “yes but they could have....., should have...” insert your opinion here.
Albanese: when the failure is just being human
A smaller, more human example sat right alongside it. Asked on a comedy podcast to play “shag, marry, date” with three well-known Australian women, the Prime Minister answered, then walked into a genuine political storm. He apologised, saying he “unequivocally” regretted the comments. A colleague opposite tried to close the loop with proportion, noting that being a Kylie Minogue fan puts him in the company of millions of Australians. That should have been the end of it.
Instead, the apology itself became the next target. One senator called it “wholly inadequate.” The story ran for days. Really? Out of all the world issues and moral questions we are faced with at this current time in history, this is what got airplay?
Then there is the camp that claimed that the media were the protagonists and the story was clickbait. My response? STOP CLICKING ON THE BAIT then! If it is largely considered clickbait, don't click and demand that your media give you something with more substance to “click on”.
The Media, just like The Government and The Corporation, are all made up of humans like you and me. Trying to maintain relevancy. Trying to stay ahead of AI. Trying their best. If they aren't, call it out for what it is; political point scoring at best, sabotage at worst!
I'm not interested in relitigating the moment; that's not the point. The point is the pattern: an unscripted, low-stakes lapse gets an apology, and that apology is treated as insufficient because the culture isn't actually looking for repair. It's looking for someone to keep being wrong. A closed loop would have looked like: mistake, ownership, proportionate response, move on wiser. What we got instead was mistake, ownership, and a second wave of blame for not owning it hard enough. She ponders - what is hard enough?
That's not accountability. That's a loop with no exit.
Why “fail fast” and “we've got your back” can't survive this
Here's the uncomfortable bit for anyone who has ever put “psychological safety” on a slide, in a document or in a performance review. You cannot say “fail fast” in one breath and then spend the next news cycle hunting for a scapegoat. You cannot say “we've got your back” and then let the apology become the new offence. Rhetoric that isn't backed by a completed loop isn't culture, it's decoration. And people learn faster from what you do with failure than from what you say about it.
The organisations and leaders who actually get value from failure are the ones willing to sit in the uncomfortable middle of the loop thank you, Top Gun), the explaining, the owning, the changing, instead of rushing to the exits of either denial or blame. Telstra's Senate testimony got closer to that middle than most public failures do. The instinct to keep punishing an apology gets nowhere near it.
The real work
If you lead people, the question isn't whether you'll have a “fail fast” poster on the wall. It's whether, when something genuinely breaks, you can tolerate the eleven minutes of “why” before you reach for “who.” Blame is fast. It feels like action. It is, almost always, the reason the same failure happens again. Because nobody stayed in the room long enough to learn from it when failure should be the curriculum.
Fail fast means nothing without finishing the loop. Glad to say that I am less naive, but 100% the optimist and I remain always the idealist!
Please revisit the post with Top Gun, Chris Papaioannou, posted December 10, 2025, to discover how 'failures' do indeed turn to learning opportunities.
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.
Fail fast means nothing without finishing the loop.
Fail fast means nothing without finishing the loop.
