Embrace This Type of Failure, Science Says

EXPERT OPINION BY ANDREA WOJNICKI, EXECUTIVE COMMUNICATION COACH AT TALK ABOUT TALK.

“Embracing failure” has become a staple of modern business advice. Business leaders are surrounded by catchphrases like fail forward, failing better, and fail fast, fail hard. All in the name of learning and progress.

Founder of shapewear company Spanx Sara Blakely credits her success to her upbringing, where her father would ask “What did you fail at today?” then celebrate her failures. Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, has said, “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and by falling over.” Failure is literally a step toward success.

Despite our best efforts to celebrate failure, it still triggers a gut-wrenching reaction. We’re wired to avoid it—and let’s be honest—so are our shareholders.

The truth is, not all failures are created equal. Some should be avoided at all costs, while others are essential for progress. The key, as Harvard Business School Professor of Leadership and Management Amy Edmondson explains, lies in distinguishing between them.

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Edmondson for my podcast. Edmondson, a pioneer in the concept of psychological safety, has been recognized as one of the world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers50, holding the top spot in 2021 and 2023. She’s also an expert on the science of failure and the author of Right Kind of Wrong (Simon Element / Simon Acumen, 2023), which was nominated for the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year award.

The language of failure

Edmondson emphasizes that our language around mistakes and failures matters. She makes a key distinction:

• A mistake is an unintended deviation from a known practice or process. For example, when you text while driving and get into an accident, that’s a mistake with a clear, preventable cause. In a business setting, an equivalent might be sending out a major client report without proofing it, only to find embarrassing errors later.
• A failure, on the other hand, is an undesired outcome, often unavoidable or arising from a more complex situation.

Edmondson outlines three types of failures: basic, complex, and intelligent. Here’s what they mean—and why one is worth embracing. I bet you can guess which one!

1. Basic failures

Basic failures have simple, identifiable causes. They happen when we deviate from a proven process, often due to human error. These are the kinds of failures that organizations work hard to eliminate through training and quality control. These errors, preventable with forethought and discipline, can and should be minimized.

Examples of basic failures could include things like an employee failing to double-check important financial data, leading to incorrect numbers in an investor presentation. Or launching an existing product in a new market without doing adequate market reserach, finding out later that there’s no demand because of cultural differences.

2. Complex failures

Complex failures are messier. They involve multiple factors and often emerge from unpredictable, high-stakes situations. Think of NASA’s Apollo 13 mission, where a series of mechanical failures nearly led to disaster.

In a corporate context, an example of a complex failure could be a data breach at a tech company that results from a confluence of oversights and sophisticated cyberattacks.

3. Intelligent failures

These occur when you test an informed prediction, but the outcome doesn’t go as planned. Whether or not you call it an experiment, that’s really what this is. You have a clear hypothesis, and you run a well-designed experiment. Call it a pilot test.

Intelligent failures are valuable because they generate data, inform new hypotheses, and pave the way for future breakthroughs. Think of a scientist whose experiment disproves their original theory, only to open the door to a game-changing discovery.

On his journey to inventing the lightbulb, Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Embracing intelligent failure

Edmondson underscores that we all fail and make mistakes. (Yes, even her.) But the secret is to embrace intelligent risks—those where we stand to learn something crucial, even if we don’t succeed right away. In this way, failure is more than just a learning opportunity; it’s essential feedback that drives innovation.

By reframing failure as an experiment rather than a defeat, leaders and entrepreneurs can foster a culture where intelligent risk-taking is celebrated, and learning is prioritized. And that, ultimately, is the path to meaningful progress.