It can be discouraging to fail at work. If you’re human, it usually feels like something to hide, tuck away, or minimize—certainly not something to speak into a megaphone. But new research from Gies College of Business finds that failure, when shared openly, can be a powerful force in creative work.
In their new paper “The Power of Sharing Failures,” published in The Accounting Review, Gies accountancy faculty Clara Chen and Laura Wang (right) analyzed how encouraging employees to disclose their failures can change how those employees think about problem-solving and performance. Their idea capitalizes on a trend in industry. From companies hosting “failure days” to tech firms hosting “failure celebration parties,” some businesses treat failed attempts less as a liability and more as a learning experience.
As Chen tells it, that shift was the start of an idea.
“We were motivated by a tension we see in innovative organizations: firms want employees to explore and experiment, but employees often avoid exploration because it’s risky and likely to fail,” Chen said. “At the same time, we realized from reading the business press that many companies are increasingly encouraging employees to share failures as learning opportunities.”
Chen, Wang, and their coauthor Xian Huang (University of Science and Technology of China) wanted to explore how simply asking people to share failures openly could shift their mindset and behaviors.
“Most prior research has focused on incentives, like pay structures, to encourage exploration,” Chen said. “We wanted to study something different: can simply encouraging people to disclose their failures change how they behave even before any failure happens? That was the core spark: understanding whether failure disclosure is not just about helping others learn, but also about improving one’s own behavior and performance.”
Putting failure disclosure to the test
To test their idea, the researchers designed an experiment in which participants completed a task that could be approached in two ways: one straightforward and reliable, and one that was riskier but could significantly enhance productivity if successful. Some participants were told they would later be asked to share their failed attempts at the riskier approach, and some weren’t. The researchers also varied whether participants believed that their performance would be evaluated.
When participants expected to be evaluated, those encouraged to disclose their failures were significantly more likely to be successful at the riskier approach than those who were not. Knowing that they’d be sharing their failures made the participants more willing to take risks and more likely to succeed.
It might be logical to assume that our tendency toward risk aversion might make us more cautious, or less likely to disclose failed attempts. But Chen explains that disclosure can change how we feel about being assessed.
“That intuition is what makes the study interesting,” Chen explained. “Evaluation does often make people risk-averse, but failure disclosure changes how evaluation is experienced.”
The benefits of failure disclosure
Disclosing failures doesn’t just help out a team that can learn from past attempts, or improve a group’s outlook on risk. The person doing the disclosing benefits just as much.
“We wanted to understand whether failure disclosure is not just about helping others learn, but also about improving the discloser’s own behavior and performance,” said Chen (right).
Chen explained that three key mechanisms make that happen.
- Sharing failures can give employees a way to “show their work.” “Failure disclosure shifts our attention toward exploration,” Chen clarified. “It motivates effort in exploration because employees know they can later demonstrate those efforts even if those efforts are unsuccessful. And it changes how failure is interpreted: from something to avoid to something that is valuable.”
- Sharing failures can reframe failure. “When organizations ask for failure disclosure, it signals that trying and learning, not just succeeding, is valued,” Chen said.
- Sharing failures can reduce anxiety. “Evaluation makes failure feel threatening to our self-esteem,” Chen explained. “Sharing failures reframes failure as learning, which reduces that anxiety and makes people more willing to explore.”
The mental reframing mechanism of failure disclosure might be especially important in work environments that are driven by performance. Chen noted the implications the researchers’ study had for industries that require creativity for discovery.
“We think this is especially relevant in job types that depend heavily on exploration, such as R&D, tech, and product innovation,” Chen said. “It’s also highly relevant in creativity-dependent industries, such as pharmaceutical, high-tech, and creative industries because these are environments where the ‘right answer’ isn’t known up front, and trial-and-error is critical, and failures contain valuable information.”
At the same time, she notes that failure disclosure isn’t a perfect solution for everything. What works in the creative process might not work in the surgical theater.
“It might be less beneficial or require caution in settings that require high reliability and error minimization, like surgery, aviation, or assembly lines,” Chen said. “In those settings, failure disclosure may still be useful for learning, but organizations do not want to encourage more failure, only better learning from unavoidable errors.”
Building failure sharing into the culture
In their new paper, the researchers challenge our common assumption that “success” means minimizing our failures. Instead, their results suggest that in the right contexts, failure shared openly and thoughtfully can be a catalyst for creativity, performance, and smarter risk-taking.
For leaders, the takeaway is that work can be designed to make exploration feel safe and encouraged.
“Managers can design their evaluation systems to make exploration visible and safe,” Chen said. “Practically, that means encouraging structured failure sharing. Ask employees to document what they tried, what failed, and what was learned. Evaluate effort and learning, not just outcomes, especially for exploratory tasks. And make failure disclosure explicit and legitimate to signal that sharing failures is expected and valued.”
In a world that that prizes innovation, the best path to success might be being willing to talk about what didn’t work.