Take Risks & Embrace Failure
The Practice
It's okay to spin the racecar. Take risks and embrace failure means testing whether your risk appetite matches what growth requires, treating failure as information rather than shame, judging decisions by process rather than outcome, and debriefing to learn rather than to blame.
How It Works
The practice works by making failure survivable and instructive. You accept that being fast means being on the edge of out of control, and that if you're totally comfortable, you're not getting better. When failures happen, you run the three Rs (recognize, respect, return) and ask where the process went wrong before asking who to blame, because you control your preparation and your decisions, not everything that follows. Debriefs run with posted ground rules: critique the process, not the person; focus on thinking, not just actions. And the questions are cognitive: What were you seeing or hearing? What were you not seeing that you expected to?
Why It Matters
Organizations that punish failure get employees who hide mistakes, avoid risks, and never attempt anything ambitious enough to fail at. Organizations that treat failure as information get employees who experiment, learn rapidly, and compound their improvements over time. If nobody is ever failing, nobody is pushing the edges. Risk is the currency of a leader: the question is never whether to spend it, but how wisely to spend it. What It Looks Like Done Well In organizations that take risks and embrace failure, people whose reasonable risks failed are still there and still advancing. Mistakes surface early because hiding them is the greater sin. Teams audit wins for lucky bad process instead of just celebrating them. Debriefs produce documented changes, and the same mistakes don't repeat. The organization's breakthroughs exist precisely because failure was survivable.