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It is helpful to realize that every failure is experienced as a small death. We try to value failure as a learning experience, but it is a difficult stretch in most institutions. This may be due to the realization that if we accept failure, we accept the fact that something is going to die. If our intent is to find failure interesting and fascinating and a source of learning and growth, then we have to come to terms both with our own death and with the reality of our institution’s mortality.

Institutional mortality means the organization will not go on forever. Not only is it likely that the organization will lose its vitality, but elements and projects within it also lie within a term limit. Any project we work on will reach a point where it is no longer supportable. We need to accept that our work unit is a temporary structure and it will at some point be merged into the very group that we wanted to take over. Plus most of us will leave this organization at some point, probably sooner rather than later. When we face the reality and presence of death, all of these smaller and symbolic versions of dying lose some of their paralyzing power. They have the potential to be taken as sings of life and a natural process rather than mistakes that should have been avoided.

To speak in these terms is usually frowned on. If we speak publicly of our organizational mortality, we are accused of disloyalty or inappropriate pessimism. We are all surrounded with the false bravado of “Failure is not an option.” The workplace becomes a place of manufactured optimism. We put posters on the wall with positive messages, we hold public meetings claiming a bright future and declaring success, and we then hold private meetings to deal with the reality of missed objectives or painful changes. This duality of public celebration and private realism is our defense against failure. This means we treat death as a mistake, as a sign that management has not done its job, that workers have not acted accountably, or that technology has not reached its potential.

This denial of death in the form of failure has significant organizational costs. We keep investing in projects long after we know they will not succeed. We position news of a failure in a way that people will feel good about it, and thus create cultures of unreality. We also deny our guilt and avoid taking responsibility for failures, thus triggering widespread and long-term defensive reactions to events that could have been put to rest quickly if we could see them for what they were…simply failures.

The alternative is to take failures as gift-like reminders of the difficulty and impermanence of life and let this deepen our determination to invest in work that holds meaning and create organizations that we want to inhabit. We could then publicly acknowledge that something did not work. We would not need positioning language that shields people from the truth about their experience.

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In no aspect of life do the insiders up there display even average ability or understanding, much less a higher level. If the excuse is that they are being divinely guided, then the claim is that they are at all times being guided to do dumb things, because that's what they always do.

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