What price failure?

Last month, J K Rowling made the commencement speech at Harvard. Her theme was The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination (you can read the whole thing by following the link).

The companies I have worked for and with have had different attitudes to failure. In one, some time ago I may add, a swift kick was not an unknown consequence at least in the production department. More recently, I more often hear of 'blame cultures' or their converse 'if you don't make any mistakes you haven't tried'.

But how true are either of these. In 'blame cultures' no one ever actually takes the blame. It just circles round until it runs out of energy and everyone moves on. In companies that claim to be learning from their mistakes ,when you ask how they do this learning you get met with a lot of blank faces.

But the personal and business learnings available from our mistakes are immense. Not least in demonstrating the emotional maturity to understand that you can succeed despite (or because) of your failures. Did I ever tell you about the time I forgot to get approval for the covers of a print run of several hundred thousand books? Never did that again

Who in your organisation has failure and wisdom to share?