Written by Aggie Warren

Intelligent failure: how smart mistakes drive innovation and success

3rd March, 2025   •  

Failure is often seen as something we should avoid at all costs. We put systems in place so that things don’t fail, so that things work well and go as planned. But what if, sometimes, this is the wrong approach. What if we should be thinking instead about the systems we could put in place to allow us to fail… intelligently?

Intelligent failure

Intelligent failure, a concept introduced by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, is a type of failure that results in learning, growth and improvement. It is a learning strategy that involves intentionally experimenting, entering ‘unknown terrain’, to gain new knowledge. Because this terrain is unknown, we have no way of knowing what will or won’t work, and therefore it is completely normal that we would fail while we try to learn this.

“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Thomas Edison, Inventor

When you google great examples of intelligent failure, the results vary from:

• The light bulb – finding out what didn’t work was crucial to finding out what did
• Bubble wrap – first designed to be a ‘textured’ wallpaper
• Penicillin – developed after Dr Alexander Fleming discovered mould was growing on a Petri dish of bacteria, but that the mould had killed some of the bacteria 

Had the teams behind these inventions and discoveries quit when things went wrong as opposed to persisting, the world would be a very different place.

In other words, intelligent failure is essential for innovation.

Not all failure is intelligent

Edmondson classified three types of failure; basic, complex and intelligent. The former two are ones we should and do try to avoid. 

Basic failures, for example, result from carelessness or ignorance. They are completely preventable. 

An example of a basic failure could be sending an email off without its attachment (we’ve all done it). We can put systems in place to avoid these failures happening – 

Gmail now have an automated message which signals if you’ve mentioned an attachment but haven’t attached anything. 

Complex failures happen as a result of multiple factors, where no single factor alone would have caused it, and therefore they are difficult to account for. 

These complex failures might happen during natural disasters for example, where the event has not happened before and therefore could not have been completely prepared for or predicted.

The problem

The problem arises when we lump all kinds of failures together. 

Failure can generate an emotional reaction – we really don’t want to get things wrong, and we really don’t want to be blamed for getting things wrong. 

An employee who experiments with the goal of innovation, but things don’t go as hoped, may fear being punished for this. They may fear feedback that reflects the outcome of their actions rather than their goal. 

Instead, their experimentation should be celebrated. Not only have they discovered a pathway that doesn’t work (avoiding time wasting in the future and moving them closer to the path that does), but they have also set an example to others to champion experimentation… pushing boundaries for the benefit of the business.

How can you create a culture of intelligent failure

Creating a culture of intelligent failure requires various essential steps:

1. Define its key characteristics. ‘Intelligent failure’:

• • Occurs in unknown territory, where the failure could not have been predicted or foreseen
  • Leads to learning and improvement
  • Happens as a result of a well thought out hypotheses/ plan
  • Minimises harm

This definition guides your team towards productive risk-taking as opposed to reckless mistakes.

For example, an organisation implements a 4-day working week trial because some employees are struggling with work-life balance. 

The failure – the trial results in increased stress and burnout because employees struggle to complete all their tasks within the shorter week

• Unknown territory – the organisation has never trialled something like this before
• Learning and improvement – they realise they could improve work-life balance via more flexible hours as opposed to the 4-day week, giving individuals more autonomy. They also find out they could be supporting their employees more during times of stress 
• Well thought out hypotheses/ plan – the trial came about as a result of feedback surveys from the employees and was thoroughly researched before being initiated
• Minimises harm – the initiative was ‘trialled’ as opposed to immediately rolled out, and the trial was only 3 months to minimise any possible harm it may do to employees or business

      2. Role model intelligent failure

Leaders and role models should openly acknowledge their mistakes and setbacks, and importantly, how they learnt from them in order to prompt this behaviour in the wider team.

This creates psychological safety, knowing that it is okay to fail and enables a culture of openness and innovation, as opposed to one where mistakes are kept under wraps for fear of being blamed, and therefore cannot be learnt from by others. 

Think about whether this is something that could be incorporated into team meetings, as an opportunity to normalise failures that you can and will learn from – ‘Failure forum’ or a ‘Mistakes moodboard’.

The questions you could ask:

1. What didn’t go so well this week? What went wrong?
2. Was this a basic, complex, or intelligent failure?
3. If basic or complex, what will we do to prevent this kind of failure again?
4. If intelligent, what can we learn from this?

Remember to make this a positive experience about growth and opportunity, not shame and blame.

     3. Make learning from failure a habit

Turn every failure into an opportunity for growth by embedding reflection and learning into your team’s processes.

For example, hold ‘retrospectives’ after every project: 

• Share what went really well
• What could be done better next time
• Create actionable steps for how the project/ team could improve
• Build this into your project plans
• Use these reflections to inform future projects
• Share them with your team so that others can learn from the failures too.

     4. Encouraging a growth mindset is also essential for making learning a habit, where failures and challenges are seen as opportunities for growth as opposed to a reason to give up. 

One simple tweak that can have a significant impact on our mindset is the word ‘yet’. 

“I’m not good at this,” versus “I’m not good at this yet.”

Adding ‘yet’ is a powerful tool to channel the growth mindset, and remind your team of this to help them channel the growth mindset too.

Intelligent failure isn’t about stupid mistakes. It is about clever risk-taking, learning, growth and improvement. More than anything, it is about being able to get up and carry on when things don’t go as you had planned, and being resilient in the face of challenges.

By empowering your team to intelligently fail, you are much more likely to succeed. 

If you would like to learn more about how you could develop systems and strategies to encourage intelligent failure then please get in touch with Higson; we would love to hear from you.