Raise a toast to your business fails today

Business Transformation leaders, Purposeful Change, support people to navigate complexity and deliver results with soul. That means doing the deep work as individuals, as teams, and across whole systems. From one-to-one transformational coaching, to team journeys and cultural interventions, the focus is always on uncovering what’s hidden, surfacing what matters, and shifting how people show up and lead.

Founder Simon Lamb believes failure is a clue not a curse. He states:

“In a world that rewards success, we’ve forgotten how to learn from the messier parts of the journey. But the truth is, failure is often the very thing that cracks open growth, creativity and change.

Instead of brushing past it or pretending it never happened, we need to learn to celebrate failure — not for its pain, but for the wisdom it carries.

Celebrating failure doesn’t mean glamorising mistakes. It means getting curious: What did I learn about myself? What did this reveal about our system, our habits, our blind spots? And most importantly — what will I do differently now?”

Simon continue “At Purposeful Change, we work with leaders and teams to build cultures where failure isn’t feared but shared. We encourage rituals like “failure debriefs” or “learning stories” — short, honest reflections where people name a risk they took, what went wrong, and what they now see more clearly.

One of the best examples I’ve seen was a senior leader who opened a team meeting by sharing a failed project and what he had missed. It shifted the culture overnight — from blame to bravery.

In a culture like that, failure stops being something to hide, and starts becoming a path to trust, innovation and meaningful progress.”

Here are Simon’s failure insights:

1. Failure creates clarity

A tech startup launched a new feature that flopped with users. Instead of hiding it, they ran open ‘post-mortems’ across departments. The result? Not just better UX — but a deeper understanding of what their customers actually valued. The failure cut through assumptions.

2. Failure builds trust when owned well

A healthcare leader admitted in front of their team that a policy they pushed had unintended consequences. Rather than lose credibility, they gained it — because people saw integrity and humility in action. That vulnerability gave others permission to speak up too.

3. Failure busts ego and invites growth

One executive told me, “That moment I fell flat on my face in front of the board? It was brutal — but it was the first time I really started leading, not just performing.” Failure humbles the ego — and that humility often unlocks a more authentic, relational kind of leadership.

4. Failure makes teams more adaptive

In high-performing teams, it’s often the shared failures — not the wins — that deepen cohesion. Teams that debrief failures together build psychological safety faster than teams that avoid tough conversations. It’s the furnace of failure that forges real collaboration.

5. Failure can be a return to soul

“Take LEGO — they were close to collapse in the early 2000s after chasing growth in too many directions. The failure was humbling. But instead of doubling down, they paused. They listened. And they returned to what they were uniquely great at — imaginative, open-ended play. That return to essence is what made them iconic again. Sometimes failure doesn’t just push us forward — it calls us back to what we almost forgot.”

For more great insights, connect with https://purposefulchange.com/