Pretending it didn’t go wrong might protect the vibes or save someone a bollocking but it will kill you in the long run
Disproof
Frequent blame-free postmortems with actioned findings
Consequences
Compound ostriching where the teams launch dud after dud, run out of money and kill the company
Leadership being told that everything is fine, not verifying, and planning even more disastrous expansions
Causes
Nearly 100% due to environmental toxicity:
Failure is highly punished, leading to an unwillingness to report it for fear of blame; or
Company is toxically positive and any discussion of failure gets gaslit into silence; or
Failure response is highly performative and results in a lot of public consultations, cross functional inquiries and all-hand meetings that may even dissect the failure in detail without any action
When it is a skill issue, is when you’re so focused on working out what went wrong to realise you’re supposed to do something about it
Approaches
If failures are not explicitly framed as a valid and necessary means of improvement you will have very little success
Work to get everyone past blame, which involves creating psychological safety if done from the top. Remember your equity depends on this.
If safety is being created from the middle, takes courage from the ones creating it as they’ll be convincing their superiors and peers to try it out and taking the blame if it fails