What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
It’s the question I posed to a room full of high school students earlier this year—and the kind of question we don’t ask ourselves often enough as adults. Especially as leaders, we tend to avoid the “F-word” altogether: failure.
But what if we viewed failure not as a weakness to avoid, but as a tool to sharpen our edge?
During my talk I shared a simple story that’s stuck with me—the story of the carrot, the egg, and the coffee bean. You’ve likely heard it: three ingredients placed in boiling water, each reacting differently. The carrot goes in strong and comes out soft. The egg goes in fragile and comes out hardened. But the coffee bean? It transforms the water around it.
That’s the kind of leadership I aspire to. Not to be broken down by adversity or hardened by it, but to rise in the face of it—and create change because of it.
It’s easy to forget, in boardrooms and budgets, that the most meaningful breakthroughs often rise from the ashes of our biggest flops. Think of Milton Hershey, Oprah Winfrey, Thomas Edison—people who redefined their industries because they refused to let failure have the final word.
As executives, we are often expected to be foolproof. But the truth is, failure is inevitable. The question is: Will we fail forward?
In the high school auditorium that day, I asked students to name their recent failures and reflect on how they handled them. Then I invited them to label those experiences as either productive or unproductive.
- Productive failure moves us forward. It comes from intentional risks, thoughtful decisions, and actions grounded in purpose—even when the result isn’t what we hoped.
- Unproductive failure happens when we’re passive, distracted, or driven by fear.
Here’s the point: If we lead in a way that embraces failure as fuel—if we decide, act, and evaluate with clarity—we don’t just get better results. We build more resilient teams. We foster innovation. We make it safe for others to take meaningful risks.
So here’s my call to action, for myself and maybe for you too: Let’s plan to fail. Not in a self-sabotaging way, but in a way that assumes setbacks are part of the process. Let’s encourage our teams to reflect on what went wrong, recalibrate, and move forward. Let’s champion the coffee beans in our organizations—the ones who, when the heat rises, transform their environments for the better.
Because in the end, success isn’t about getting it right every time. It’s about being willing to get it wrong, learn from it, and still move forward with courage.
What would your organization look like if you let failure fuel you?