“The team that experiments the most, wins. The team that experiments the most will also fail the most — and that’s the point.” — Steven Bartlett
Most organisational cultures treat failure as something to be minimised, hidden, and apologised for. Performance reviews penalise failed projects. Post-mortems focus on blame. Leaders are rewarded for delivering certainty and punished for experiments that didn’t work.
This failure-averse culture is one of the most expensive mistakes a company can make. It doesn’t eliminate failure — it makes failure invisible until it’s catastrophic. It doesn’t create certainty — it destroys the learning that would reveal where certainty is actually achievable.
Steven Bartlett’s counterintuitive argument: the goal is not to fail less. It is to fail more — faster, smarter, and more publicly.
If your probability of success on any given experiment is 10%, you need to run 10 experiments to expect one success. If a competitor runs experiments at twice your rate, they will reach that success at half your cost and timeline. The team that experiments more wins — not because they are smarter or luckier, but because they process more attempts. Failure rate is irrelevant. Attempt rate is everything.
Bartlett describes a practical heuristic for deciding when to launch an experiment: the 51% threshold. You don’t need certainty. You don’t need a majority of evidence. You need to reach the point where the probability of success exceeds the probability of failure — even slightly.
At 51%, you launch. You gather real-world data. You iterate. The remaining 49% of uncertainty doesn’t disappear by waiting — it only disappears through doing.
Most organisations wait for 80% or 90% certainty before acting. By the time they reach that threshold (if ever), competitors who operated at 51% have already moved through five iterations.
Out-fail your competition. Run more experiments, accept more failures, and share what you learn from both. The rate of learning — not the rate of success — is the primary competitive advantage in fast-moving environments.
Building an organisation that genuinely embraces failure is harder than it sounds, because it requires actively rewiring deeply held assumptions about what failure means.
Practices for failure-positive culture:
For your current business, project, or personal goals:
Bartlett also makes the case for sharing failures publicly — counterintuitive for most leaders who fear that admitting failure will undermine credibility.
In practice, the opposite is often true. Leaders who share their failures authentically build deeper trust than those who present only successes. Audiences can relate to failure in a way they cannot relate to curated success. The willingness to be vulnerable about what didn’t work signals the confidence and integrity that real credibility requires.