Fail Club: Finding Joy in Failure as a Nurse

“People who wade into discomfort & vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real badasses in this world.” – Brené Brown

I failed...

Like many good stories, this one starts with an epic failure. I was new to my role and was brought onto the team to lead the expansion of a large organizational program. So, six months after implementation, when one of the units decided to leave the program, the failure felt big and overwhelming. I initially felt that I had not only failed, but the system and my team had failed me. I felt hurt, ashamed, sad and inadequate. This experience with failure and my journey with healing has led me to champion the normalization and celebration of failure. Through this journey, I discovered “Fail Clubs” and took back the power of this experience as an example of my strengths rather than failure.

Learning From Failures

One of the best ways to learn is by doing and failing. As a leader, I have learned many lessons through mistakes and failures. I sometimes use the words mistake and failure interchangeably, but I recognize the difference between the two. A mistake has felt smaller … a missed step, a miscommunication, a shortcut, a misjudgment. And a failure has felt bigger … I tried something I thought would be successful, but it did not work out at all! Mistakes have felt easier to recover from than failures. It has been easier to say, “Oops, I made a mistake, and I will do it differently next time,” than to own the concept that I failed at something. That’s how I thought about mistakes and failures, but what is the actual difference between them? I felt that to explore the differences, it would help to have an accurate working definition of failure and how that differs from mistake. So, to the dictionary …

According to Merriam-Webster:

• Mistake: A wrong judgment; a wrong action or statement proceeding from faulty judgment, inadequate knowledge or inattention
• Failure: Lack of success

I disagree with this dictionary’s definition of failure. It places failure on the opposite side of success, which I do not believe to be true, so I sought additional clarification and found Seth Godin’s definition:

• “A failure is when an action does not move you closer to your intended goal but simultaneously teaches you something.”

Based on Godin’s definition and some other definitions, here is how I have come to think about the difference between mistakes and failures:

A mistake is the result of a wrong action or judgment. It can result from external pressure, carelessness, lack of knowledge or human factors (exhaustion, hunger, distraction). The lesson is in better understanding the situation and circumstances internally and externally that contributed to the action or judgment. Failure occurs when the expected and actual outcomes are not in alignment. While you may not achieve the intended outcome, it does not mean there is an absence of success. I have often experienced an unintended positive outcome — and when you have the skills to extract rich learning from failure, there is an unintended positive outcome — and that is where the joy in failure lies!

A failure allows us to learn about the process, the contributing factors and ourselves. Here are some reflective questions I like to consider:

• Where in the process did it start to break down? What contributed? What can I do differently next time?
• What went well? What should I continue to do next time?
• What did I learn about my strengths in this situation?
• The power of diverse perspectives — What were others’ experiences? What did others see in my leadership?

Failures are inevitable in work and life. Yet, failure as a leader is not normalized as part of the leadership development process. For failure to contribute to leadership growth, leaders must develop the skill set to process, recover from and learn from those situations.

Leaders are not good at sharing their failures with others, which creates an added stigma and puts pressure on newer leaders to have unrealistic expectations. There are so many benefits to sharing failures! For some, it highlights other perspectives and opens us up to receiving support and compassion, so we feel less alone. For others, it normalizes failure and role models processing it, and when we share what didn’t work, it helps others avoid those same situations.

There is power in the lessons we learn from failure, but recovering from it and harvesting the learnings requires a specific skill set and the support of colleagues and the overall organization. When we have the structures to share and process failure in a healthy manner, our brains start to perceive failure differently. The outcomes include improved resilience, decision making and overall performance of individuals, teams and organizations.

Fail Clubs

I initially came upon the concept of Fail Clubs while reading “Beyond Sticky Notes,” by K.A. McKercher, with my team, as we were learning more about co-design. Co-design is centered on elevating the lived experience and learning by doing, which inherently comes with the risk of failure. Fail Club is a concept that invites members to share their failures, receive compassion and harvest the learnings to inform the work ahead. The concept resonated with me as I was still healing from and processing my (perceived) epic failure. The lightness of the name “Fail Club” and the normalization of failure as part of the work made my experience feel less big and gave me the space and framework to start sharing and processing my experience with the support of others.

In researching Fail Clubs, I found that some resources exist, although mostly from outside healthcare. Some nursing literature discusses the importance of learning from and rebounding from failure; however, these articles do not offer specific frameworks or structures to support the leader in actualizing this concept. They also discuss the risks of not normalizing failure as part of leadership development and the impact on problem solving, decision making and resilience.

The resources I found to be most helpful include two online blogs, one by Rose Sherman from Emerging RN Leader and the other by Brené Brown. I was also inspired by the ATX Fail Club, a community-based group of women whose mission is to support women in reframing how they look at and celebrate failure.

Fail Clubs in Healthcare

In my learning about Fail Clubs, I thought a lot about how I talk to clinical nurses about their obligations to identify system barriers and report near misses. I emphasize the power of sharing mistakes so that we may learn from each other. I also recognized how my experience as a leader felt very different. What is my obligation as a leader? Leaders should have the same support for mistakes and failures as clinical nurses in a Just Culture. I started to frame Fail Clubs as “Just Cultures for Leaders.” Leaders need a space to surface mistakes or failures, near misses and system barriers, and a platform to share, learn and grow in a supportive learning community.

Healthcare is a complex adaptive system (CAS), which requires leaders to have skills in resilience, adaptability and innovation. Front-line nurse leaders need to be skilled in quick decision making by leveraging small tests of change. Fear of failure can limit a nurse leader’s ability to make decisions and take risks. When leaders do not have the structures to support and normalize failures, they may struggle to process and learn from these events, which leads to burnout and shame. When shame is associated with failure, leaders hesitate to share their stories and lessons, and those failures are at risk of being repeated. To learn more about processing failure as a nurse leader, I recommend the article “Failure: Is it personal?” by A. Prestia.

Implementing a Fail Club

Assessing Readiness

I leveraged my team’s weekly huddle, “Learning Community,” as a space to try out what I was learning about Fail Clubs and started sharing and processing my experiences with failure. Since we were all reading the same book, the team was familiar with McKercher’s principles. While not a formal Fail Club, the space already existed to bring forward and celebrate our leadership lessons. When something felt challenging, it was the space to learn about diverse perspectives and to find celebrations and lessons.

For teams that want to implement a Fail Club, following are some readiness indicators to assess at the team and individual levels. Fail Clubs can be implemented in a team with healthy team dynamics or through mentoring/coaching relationships.

• Assessing Team Readiness
  • Willingness of all members to share failures
  • Trust among team members
  • Supportive and safe work environment
  • A learning mindset

• Assessing Individual Readiness
  • Self-compassion
  • Intrinsic motivation for self-development
  • Willingness to accept accountability over blame

Fail Club Principles

Once you have established the readiness of the individuals and the team, every team member should be comfortable, willing to share and agree to the following principles:

• Invite all members to share
• Avoid giving advice
• Offer listening, empathy and compassion
• Ask questions to prompt deeper reflection
• Share tools, reflections and resources

Identifying Outcomes

The outcomes of a supportive environment to process failure are clear in the literature. Some of the outcomes include:

• Improved problem solving and decision making
• Strengthened resilience
• Increased ability to give and receive compassion
• Improved performance at individual, team and organizational levels

To learn more about the importance of building resilient healthcare and factors that contribute to resilience and learning from failure, the article “Resilient Health Care: A Systematic Review of Conceptualisations, Study Methods and Factors That Develop Resilience” offers a lot of evidence-based learnings.

Failing Forward

As most healthcare organizations focus on nurse burnout and retention, well-being initiatives are emerging as strategic priorities. Implementing structures that support leaders’ processing, sharing and learning from failure is instrumental to support leaders’ well-being, productivity and resilience. Consider your own experiences with failure: What structures exist to support you, and how are those learnings shared and celebrated?

Over the last couple of years, I have thought a lot about failure and my experiences as a nurse leader. I thought about how leaders share stories of their successes and hold close their stories of failure and how that frames leadership through an expert model. I decided to flip the script and thought it would be “fun” to submit an abstract to share a story of failure instead of success. I submitted the abstract to the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL) for their 2024 conference. I was accepted as a poster presenter and was privileged to speak with leaders nationwide about their lessons and experiences with failure.

In preparing for the conference, I was inspired by a video of Fiona Deehan posted in the Leadership Lab celebrating lessons from failure. I decided to engage others in a dialogue about their failures and lessons. To gather stories, I shared the video with my team and invited them to share their lessons in failure to be included on my poster. At the conference, I invited attendees to share their lessons either virtually or on sticky notes that were added to the poster.

Here is what I learned from my failure:

• Failure is a gift — The pain meant I cared and took a risk. Now, I get to learn and grow and try something new next time.
• Listen to my gut. If I question why I am doing something, then I probably shouldn’t be doing it.
• Make sure I am having fun.
• Find the alignment and build from there. If I focus on the differences, the conflict remains high, and moving forward together is challenging.

Here are some inspiring lessons I learned along the way from my peers and leaders across the nation:

• Fail forward!
• I wouldn’t want to work for a leader who never failed.
• Failure is a teacher, motivator and friend — Embrace it!
• Don’t ever get so big that you think you can’t fail. You’ll fail harder.
• Most mistakes are repeated five or six times if no one shares.
• Growth comes from application of the learning. It’s not the storytelling itself; it’s the reflection and then the application. That’s where the hard work is done.

What are your lessons learned from failure?