Failure In Project Management = Good?
If you’ve worked on projects for any length of time, you’ll know that they don’t always go the way you expect. There’s always failure in project management. From the supplier who goes bankrupt, to the natural disaster that delays your essential components arising, to the new hire who doesn’t turn up for work, there’s a catalog of reasons why the path to project success isn’t straightforward. (All those are real examples of challenges faced by just one of our team members, from a three-minute brainstorm).
Why do people avoid failure?
Despite knowing all that in principle, businesses, and society more widely, have a bit of a fear of failure. Project managers generally view it negatively too. There are three misconceptions it is worth us debunking before we go any further.
1. “Failure indicates incompetence.”
A lot of project management involves doing innovative work in unique situations, and not everything goes right all of the time. Problems are often a result of trying new things and can signal active problem-solving.
2. “Failures always have negative consequences.”
This isn’t true – read on below for some examples of how failures have led to positive changes.
3. “Good project managers always avoid failure.”
Good project managers balance risk and reward to get the desire outcome. Completely avoiding failure usually means staying in comfort zones and limiting innovation, and we’ll talk more about that later too.
What is failing forward?
Failing forward is the idea of viewing failure not as an endpoint or negative outcome, but instead as an essential step toward growth and innovation on the way to success. In project management, this means actively learning from setbacks, mistakes, or unsuccessful initiatives, and intentionally using these insights to improve future processes, decisions, and outcomes. Does that sound like lessons learned to you? Yes, it does!
To be more specific, when project managers ‘fail forward,’ we’re talking about them:
- Embracing setbacks as valuable opportunities for learning and reflection.
- Analyzing what went wrong objectively, without assigning blame.
- Adapting their approach based on insights gained from failures.
- Encouraging a team culture that openly acknowledges mistakes, fostering greater creativity, resilience, and innovation.
In short, it’s a way of transforming failures into stepping stones toward continuous improvement and long-term success.
Avoiding failure limits creativity
If you set up your project to avoid failure, you probably aren’t stretching the team enough. If failing feels too scary, you’re going to end up stuck with tried-and-tested ways of working and solutions that just don’t move you forward. Innovation means taking risks, trying new things. And sometimes those things won’t work out.
Teams that want to be creative need to take (calculated) risks with solutions and delivery mechanisms. If an activity fails, the team will have learned something and developed their resilience skills as the same time. As Thomas Edison said: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
There are plenty of examples of projects that failed in one sense but stumbled upon something else along the way, while the individuals involved were exploring options or checking out how things could be done.
Our favorite example is sticky notes: a glue that wasn’t sticky enough became an iconic office product that we certainly couldn’t live without.
Dyson vacuums took James Dyson 5,126 prototypes before he created a successful vacuum cleaner, embodying failing forward through perseverance and iterative innovation.
Amazon’s spectacular failure with the Fire phone pivoted into Alexa – which we now use at home for setting timers, checking the weather and keeping the children occupied with jokes!
Without failures along the way, many products we have come to know and love wouldn’t exist. On a much smaller scale, avoiding failure could mean that you don’t improve a process or update a document template. Fear-based failure avoidance is a sure-fire way to screen out opportunities, so knowing how to take measured risks is really important.
Creating a culture that embraces failure
As a project manager, there’s only so much you can do to shape company culture, but you can influence the culture of your project delivery team and create a safe space for people to be innovative… and make the mistakes that come from that.
Talk to the team about their own feelings around solutions that don’t work or their risk appetite for new approaches. Try to actively shape team perceptions around failure so that it doesn’t seem so big and scary.
Build more time into the schedule when the working practices are new and untested, so that any setbacks don’t negatively affect the overall project timeline.
Here are some other quick tips for cultivating an environment that views mistakes as constructive learning opportunities:
- Encourage transparency and openness around setbacks.
- Celebrate intelligent risk-taking, even when it doesn’t result in immediate success.
- Implement structured lessons learned conversations, post-project reviews or retrospectives to discuss lessons openly without assigning blame.
How to get started
You probably already have a lessons learned or agile retro process in your organization, and that’s where we would start. Book your next session and ensure you’re ready to facilitate in a way that focuses on improvements rather getting sucked into a ‘who did what when and why’ conversation that goes round in circles as people try to avoid blaming others without being overt about it.
Those conversations are good, but lessons learned capture should be something that happens in-between structured retros. Encourage the team to reflect on what worked and what didn’t in other conversations or even start a channel on your collaboration tool for people to jot down their thoughts in the moment.
One thing we’ve seen work well is swapping lessons learned with other teams. Visit another team (or project) and share the outcomes of your retro with them. Invite them back to share their learnings with you. This cross-pollination of lessons can help normalise the idea that everyone suffers setbacks and it isn’t only your project that has been caught out with a failure or two.
Embracing and learning from failure in project management is not only valuable but essential for innovation and sustained project success. What are you going to do to address failure in project management? Are you going to help your team build their resilience and get closer to their goals when something goes wrong?