An introduction to Intelligent Failure
See failure anew, understand our fear and instinctive responses to failure, and tap into the wisdom of seeing hardship and challenges as moments that hold the potential for change

One to three hours of interactive content
Delivered in person or remotely by Fail Forward CEO, Ashley Good

Takeaway 'homework'
A daily action or behaviour designed to put the workshop’s learning into practice when participants return to their day-to-day tasks

DETECT FAILURE

Feedback and Difficult Conversations

Feedback is key to getting the information you need to detect failure early. Want to know how to avoid, or at least reduce, the consequences of failures? This is the workshop for you! Learn how to receive bad news, and even invite those difficult conversations - where differing views collide - in order to uncover blind spots and catch failures while they're small.

ANALYZE

Pre- and Post-Mortems

There never seems to be enough time to reflect and learn from past work. Also, digging into uncomfortable experiences can be, well, uncomfortable. Learn to debrief failures to uncover rich insights quickly, understand repeated mistakes, and build the skill of what Chris Argyris called double loop learning to maximize learning while avoiding blame.

APPLY LEARNING

Communicating Failures for Learning

Changing our mindsets, behaviours and processes based on what we learn seems obvious but it's not! Just look at all the lessons learned reports collecting dust on our office shelves.
Lessons only get applied and remembered when we decide as teams, departments, and organizations to change the way we do our work. This starts with the skill of communicating our failures in a way that promotes learning and change. Learn to make speaking openly about failure easier, expected, and focused on what's important: how we apply what we have learned to walk away stronger and wiser from the experience.

INNOVATE

Transforming Risk and Fear

What is stopping you? We often assess risk to manage and avoid loss. Obviously, that's important, but what if we also asked ourselves What is the risk of staying the same?
Fear of loss and failure is healthy. It can push us to practice and strive be better, but just as often it stops us from ever trying. Learn to articulate how much risk we need to accept to see innovation thrive, practice identifying where we hold ourselves back, and tap into our more courageous natures to speak up and shake up business as usual with new ideas and approaches.

INTELLIGENT FAILURE FOR PEOPLE MANAGERS AND LEADERS

Creating Psychological Safety

We often assume we will get worse performance if we allow failure. But failure is inevitable. Whether we allow it or not, it happens. What's more, learning, improvement and innovation only happen at the edge of our capacities, where we are most likely to make mistakes. Therefore, it is vital for leaders to foster a healthy relationship with risk taking and failure if we wish to lead ambitious, high performing teams. Learn what you can do as a leader to create the conditions for openness, candour, respect, trust, and psychological safety on your team.

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After the Fail Forward workshop things changed. There was a big failure that week and when it came up the discussion focused on what was learned instead of gripes and complaints.

—  Coonoor Behal, Deloitte GovLab