Despite best intentions and efforts, delivered outcomes may fail to meet expectations or even turn out to be adverse. There can be varied reasons for this, including making incorrect assumptions, a change in circumstances leading to assumptions being invalidated, human errors, and unanticipated circumstances.

Knowledge work, that is, work which is creative and not mechanical or repetitive, particularly work done with the objective of being innovative, is experimental in nature, and by definition is liable for failure. People and teams are consciously cognizant of this fact, and hence treat failure as an experience to be learned from rather than treating it as an event that is to be forgotten after blaming someone as the cause of it. The individual will retrospect to identify the actual underlying problem which caused the failure, crystalize the learnings and actively factor those learnings into decisions when similar situations arise in the future, thereby doing their best to avoid a repeat of the failure.

Corollary to learning from failure is also the willingness to try new things and therefore have the appetite to fail and recover from it. Continuous improvement and innovation can happen only if there is a willingness to challenge the status quo and also experiment to try something different. People and teams are not only courageous enough to own their failures, but also willing to share them with the wider organization so that others also can learn from them.