Turning Failure and Crisis into Fuel for Your Next Breakthrough

No matter how organized or talented, every team eventually faces a project that goes south. For BlackBerry, product flops, catastrophic network outages, and devastating legal rulings repeatedly threatened to end the company. The difference between fading quietly and fighting back depended on how leaders and teams responded to the mess. Some turned inward, learning hard truths, confronting painful facts, and designing new systems to catch errors earlier. They responded to public humiliation with honest autopsies—and then immediate adaptation, never hiding from reality or waiting for someone else to fix things.

Science calls this a 'growth mindset'—the belief that abilities and outcomes can be improved with effort and change, not set in stone. It’s not about loving failure, but trusting that setbacks point to what needs fixing most. In cultures and organizations that normalize this process, teams can recover, try bold new approaches, and eventually use their scars as springboards for giant leaps.

So whether you’re left holding the pieces on a bombed presentation, a lost deal, or even a public embarrassment, the lesson isn’t to avoid all risk. It’s learning to treat every misstep as a forced update—and build systems that remember those lessons for the future.

First, take a hard look at what broke, missed, or blew up, and put the details in writing—don’t sugarcoat anything. Then pick out one fixable thing you wish you’d done differently and commit to trying it next time, even in a small way, just to see if it chips away at old problems. Set aside a mini experiment, and ask a peer or team to weigh in if possible. Every time you cycle this process, you stack up real-world experience and resilience, and over time you’ll find that what once sank you now launches you forward. Give yourself permission to try—and to fail fast and small.