Resources

Worth your time on this question

Everything worth your time on the question: What actually happened, and what did I contribute?

Three things on this subject: one TAIU exercise and two things to read. It opens with Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson. Separates preventable failure, complex failure and genuinely exploratory failure, and shows why each warrants a different response.

This page is for going further on your own. If you would rather work the question out with somebody asking, that is the conversation.

Failure, examined: talk it through

TRY · 12 MIN

Failure Post-Mortem

TAIU

What happened, what was decided and what was only visible afterwards.

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READ · BOOK

Right Kind of Wrong

Amy Edmondson

Separates preventable failure, complex failure and genuinely exploratory failure, and shows why each warrants a different response. The categories are cleaner in hindsight than in the moment, which is worth remembering while reading.

Learning Through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses

Sim Sitkin

Argues that small, survivable failures teach far more than large ones. Written about organisations, but the point about scale and recoverability holds for anybody deciding what to try next.

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