Does your team host “effed up” Fridays?
I’ve seen it happen in every industry—from pharma to finance to energy:
The surest way to kill innovation is to make people afraid to fail.
When mistakes are punished, creativity flatlines.
When perfection is rewarded, risk-taking disappears.
And when everyone’s watching their back, no one’s watching for breakthroughs.
If you want an innovative culture, your team needs to know that failure is part of the process—not a career killer.
Relatable Problem: Your team isn’t bringing bold ideas forward because they’re afraid of making mistakes.
Pro Tip: Use the Permission to Fail Strategy to create an innovation-safe environment:
- Share past failures. Leaders should openly talk about their mistakes and what they learned. If leadership hides failure, the team will too.
- Create a “What Did We Learn?” ritual. Every failed experiment should end with a team debrief: What worked? What didn’t? What will we change next time?
- Celebrate bold attempts. Recognize employees not just for success, but for trying something new.
I worked with a tech company PM launched an internal competition where the best failed experiment got an award at the quarterly all-hands meeting.
One engineer pitched a voice-controlled email feature that completely flopped in testing. But during the debrief, someone realized the underlying code could power a speech-to-text transcription tool. That “failure” became their next flagship product.
That’s the power of giving your team permission to fail—they start finding the gold hidden in the rubble.
If failure is punished, innovation dies.
If it’s celebrated, innovation soars.
Give your team permission to fail—and watch what happens next.
PS: Ask your leadership team to come to your “effed up” Fridays. Maybe ask them to share one of theirs. Seeing all the hard work and the learning from the failures will bring a welcome wiff of transparency as you proceed to success.