Building Trust Through Vulnerability
The Festival of Failure Explained
Teams can only truly flourish when they embrace learning and discovery. This requires an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing ideas, questions, and vulnerabilities.
Psychological Safety: A Key Ingredient
Pioneered by researcher Amy Edmondson in the 1990s, "psychological safety" describes a team's ability to learn from mistakes without fear of blame. In this safe space, open discussions about mistakes, challenges, and questions are encouraged. Team members readily offer help, and everyone's unique contributions are valued.
The Festival of Failure: A Fun Ritual for Building Trust
One of the ways you can foster psychological safety and a spirit of experimentation is through "The Festival of Failure." It’s worth noting that this activity assumes a baseline level of trust within the team, as it involves being vulnerable in front of colleagues. However, if that foundation exists, the Festival can be a powerful tool for boosting team closeness and trust.
How To Host:
Monthly Meetings: Teams gather for a dedicated hour each month.
Setting the Stage: Two key props help create the festival atmosphere:
Failure Symbol: A physical object passed around to signify who has the floor. A playful item related to failure, like a bent spoon, works well. For virtual meetings, team members can display their own "failure objects" when it's their turn.
Themed Banner: A banner projected on a wall or used as a Zoom background sets the tone for the gathering. Zoom background image.
Sharing Experiences: Each team member comes prepared with a past experience where things didn't go as planned. Ideally, these will be a mix of negative and positive outcomes, highlighting the learning potential in both.
Taking Turns: The team creates a sharing sequence. In person, this might be a simple circle. Virtually, assign numbers to participant names or utilize features in newer Zoom versions to order participants and create a consistent view for everyone.
Sharing Your Failure Story: Each person gets 4 minutes to share their experience, detailing:
The context
What happened
The result
Key learnings (for themselves and others)
Appreciation & Moving On: After sharing, the team member stands, takes a bow, and receives applause. They then pass the failure object or name the next person in the sequence.
More Tips:
Inviting new hires sends a clear message: mistakes are learning opportunities, not sources of shame.
Holding these meetings monthly reinforces the normalization of failure and provides a fun team-building activity.
Building a Stronger Team
Teams that acknowledge failure in this way (and with the implied changes in language and framing) will tend to see boosts in the essential qualities of resilience, courage, humility and empathy.
If you’d like support with creating psychological safety in your organization, check out this psychological safety workshop.