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Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#12

Post by mikece »

I've heard it said that in Japan management seeks to fix the problem when there's a failure rather than fixing the blame. I have no idea if that's true of the Japanese but I know it's true in America. And once the blame is fixed then the person blamed is ejected from the organization and that's considered a fix to the problem. So why would anyone volunteer to talk about failure when that is the status quo?

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#13

Post by eugenekolo »

polonbike wrote: post #10

In my experience, you can own your mistakes by buying breakfast for the team the next day. I agree that this is different from a failure. But deleting your own account, or the production database, sending a useless email to the whole company, etc ... can all be redeemed with a breakfast, as long as it means that you own your mistake in good faith, and that you will do your best not to repeat it. (Disclosure: I'm fren…

Culture in a lab I worked at was to bring donuts in when you messed up. I don't think this is "celebrating" failure, so much as a fun way to say sorry for messing up.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#14

Post by pm90 »

I'll say there are ways to embrace it, but celebrating it, just that phrase, I suspect will turn off the suits who might misinterpret it.

Anyway, the way I've seen it be embraced:

* healthy incident management culture with postmortems

* teams giving internal talks/writing blogs on biggest goof ups

* coworkers buying you shit if they break something. Mind: this wasn't required, just something people did it because they felt bad. I've received many beers/whiskeys this way

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#15

Post by karaterobot »

johnea wrote: post #2

This is trolling, right? Or maybe, you haven't ever worked in a real job?

Many companies try to signal that it's okay to try new things by celebrating them even when they aren't successful. I've been on teams like that. Nobody is happy about the failure itself, but the idea, effort, and commitment that was shown, even if it was not successful, is worth rewarding. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, a ship in harbor is safe, etc. I think this is pretty much an inarguably healthy thing to do for a company that wants to keep morale up and encourage experimentation.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#16

Post by bradleyy »

We don't exactly celebrate failure, but:

  1) We have a culture that accepts "failures happen". People screw up, sometimes badly.
  2) Imperative to this is a culture of ownership. You hide failures, your job is at risk. You own it, go public, get help, and all is well. Well, not exactly well, since there was a failure, but you get the picture.
  3) Blameless post-mortems (hate that term, nobody died)
  4) We do have a tongue-in-cheek slack channel for those folks who have caused a "p0", i.e. most-severe-breakage
I'd not want to work somewhere that didn't have the above; it's just part of being a mature organization.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#19

Post by bradleyy »

bradleyy wrote: post #16

We don't exactly celebrate failure, but: 1) We have a culture that accepts "failures happen". People screw up, sometimes badly. 2) Imperative to this is a culture of ownership. You hide failures, your job is at risk. You own it, go public, get help, and all is well. Well, not exactly well, since there was a failure, but you get the picture. 3) Blameless post-mortems (hate that term, nobody died) 4) We do have a tongu…

I'd also add that high-performing teams require psychological safety (e.g. mistakes don't get punished), the research is pretty clear. So punishment is explicit blocking of high-performance.
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