Why your team should celebrate failure and learn faster

With common Silicon Valley mantras like ‘fail fast’ and TED Talks on the value of mistakes, you might think the modern workplace had learned to embrace failure. 

However, most companies still reward only the wins and treat losses like an awkward family secret.

That’s a missed opportunity, as celebrating failure can encourage experimentation and innovation, and help teams learn faster and avoid repeat mistakes. 

If you want to build a culture where people take smart risks without fear, you need to celebrate failure effectively. 

Here’s how…

Celebrating failure is often just lip service

Many leaders know they should promote risk-taking, but when a project fails, their instinct is still to hide it or downplay it. 

Even worse is to attempt to spin failure into an upbeat announcement.

Employees then learn the lesson that companies are merely paying lip service to ideas about celebrating failure. 

When failure is handled this way:

• People stop taking bold risks. 
• Teams learn less, because mistakes aren’t openly dissected. 
• Trust erodes, as employees see a gap between words and actions. 

As Harvard Business Review notes, “Most leaders who say they want to encourage intelligent risk-taking fail to align their behaviour with that aim”. 

Without genuine recognition and transparent learning, celebrating failure becomes just another empty corporate slogan.

Prioritising effort and learning over outcomes

True celebration of failure isn’t about applauding bad outcomes, it’s about recognising the effort, creativity, and learning that went into the attempt.

When leaders frame setbacks as stepping stones, provided they were well-reasoned and thoughtfully executed, they:

• Reduce fear of judgement.
• Encourage employees to share insights early.
• Build resilience and adaptability.

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” - Thomas Edison

The shift you want is from a culture that punishes failure, to one that rewards smart, well-calculated attempts, even if they don’t always succeed. 

This is essentially the philosophy behind growth marketing, or growth hacking. In order to learn and move forward, it's important to experiment and learn from failures. 

Celebrate the process, not just the outcome.

How to celebrate failure without sounding fake

Here’s how to make it genuine. 

1. Make failure discussions public

Host regular learning reviews where teams share projects that didn’t pan out and the key takeaways. Keep the focus on facts, not blame.

For example, Etsy’s engineering team introduced public blameless post-mortems after outages. 

The goal was to uncover what happened and how to prevent it, not to find out who messed up. 

Over time, this reduced fear of reporting issues and improved incident response. 

2. Recognise effort in the same way you recognise wins

If you hand out awards for top sales, also recognise the team that tried a bold marketing idea that didn’t convert but generated valuable customer insights.

Intuit’s co-founder Scott Cook created a ‘Best Failure’ award and even threw failure-themed parties, reinforcing that experimentation backed by thought is valuable, even if it comes without a win.

3. Separate reckless from smart failure

Not all failure is worth celebrating. Make it clear you’re rewarding calculated risks backed by data or reasoning rather than poor planning or negligence.

Supercell, the gaming company behind Clash of Clans, empowers small autonomous teams to kill their own projects if they’re not working. 

The focus is on sharing the learnings internally, not pushing bad ideas forward out of pride.

4. Give symbolic permission to fail

Telling people to take risks is one thing, but showing them you mean it is another. Symbols and rituals can help.

One example of this comes from IKEA. CEO Jesper Brodin introduced ‘banana cards’, a symbolic gesture where he signs off in advance for employees to take risks and fail. 

He personally follows up on these projects, reinforcing that leadership stands behind them.

5. Share stories to normalise failure

The more openly you share, the less taboo failure becomes.

Mobile game company Scopely runs a weekly ‘Fail of the Week’ session where employees share their biggest misfires and what they learned. 

It’s public, informal, and focused on insight.  

Rituals, language, and leader behaviour must all align to make failure celebrations authentic.

The payoff: innovation without the fear

When you celebrate failure authentically, you create an environment where:

• Employees take more creative risks. 
• Problems surface faster.
• Innovation accelerates because teams aren’t paralysed by fear of mistakes.

In this situation, failure becomes a driver of learning and growth. 

Failure celebration done right isn’t about sugar-coating losses, it's about creating a culture where effort, learning, and courage are valued as much as wins. 

That doesn’t just make people feel safer, it makes your organisation smarter, faster, and more adaptable.

When your team feels safe enough to experiment, giving them a genuine stake in the company’s future can make that commitment even stronger.

Employee share schemes
align individual ambition with collective success, ensuring that the rewards of innovation are shared by everyone who took the risk to make it happen.