Failing Well: A Short Guide for Organisations and Individuals

People and organisations can either fail well or fail badly. If an incident is managed well, people and the organisation they are in will fail well. They will learn and adapt as a result of the failure, understand the fault lines in their processes and increase their resilience. Ultimately, they will grow more successful.

However, people and organisations too often fail badly. The impact of an incident or failure instead results in blame, failure to take responsibility and ultimately, a failure to really understand why something has happened and learn from it in a way that allows both organisation and individual to learn and grow.

Both organisations and individuals therefore need to develop a strategy to fail well. This short booklet uses examples from business, entrepreneurs, parenting, education, healthcare and science to demonstrate the breadth of the issues involved with failure and will enable readers to understand how broad these issues are and how many situations the same principles can be applied to.