Rethinking Failure in Social Impact

Failure isn’t just a possibility in social impact work — it’s inevitable. But are we failing constructively? In this episode, Eric and Jonathan break down the difference between constructive failure and harmful failure, and why embracing the right kind of failure is essential for innovation, leadership, and long-term impact.

From team dynamics and funding challenges to moonshot thinking and psychological safety, this conversation will shift your perspective on what it truly means to fail — and how to fail forward without losing trust, credibility, or momentum for your organization.

Episode Highlights:

• [00:00] Introduction – Why failure is a complex, layered topic in social impact.
• [02:20] Why Failure Is Good (But Hard to Embrace) – The role of failure in learning, growth, and innovation—and why so many organizations resist it.
• [07:39] When Failure Has Real Consequences – Understanding the stakes of failure in the nonprofit sector and why some organizations can’t afford to take big risks.
• [12:59] Good vs. Bad Failure – Breaking down the difference between constructive failure that drives progress and failure that erodes trust and credibility.
• [16:08] Learning from Failure: The 4-Day Workweek Experiment – How Cosmic tested, failed, and adapted their approach to a 4-day workweek—without backtracking on their vision.
• [23:40] How Leaders Can Create a Culture That Supports Failure – Practical steps for building psychological safety and making failure a tool for growth instead of a risk to avoid.
• [29:34] Why Failure Should Be an Experiment, Not a Guess – Taking a scientific approach to failure, how funders can support responsible risk-taking, and why experimentation leads to real innovation.

Notable Quotes:

• "Failure is really just built into evolution, our humanity, the way physics and the world and science work at large. To not embrace it constructively, I think is just a big mistake." – Eric [02:20]
• "Being able, more importantly, to look failure in the eye—not just acknowledge it and move past it, but stand in the mirror and look at this failure and really let it sink in." – Jonathan [04:10]
• "It's really easy to talk about failure when you're not the one who's failing." – Eric [07:39]
• "Failure isn’t good carte blanche. We’re not out here preaching ‘go fail at everything.’ There are versions of failure that I don’t accept." – Jonathan [20:09]
• "If you never fail, you're not reaching far enough." – Eric [14:06]

Resources:

• Article - The Benefits of a 4 Day Work Week For Social Impact Organizations
• Article - In Defense of Moonshots: True Social Innovation Requires Taking Risks

Transcript:
 

Jonathan Hicken [00:00]:

They're kind of levels of failure, right? There's personal failure, there's team failure, organizational failure,

Eric Ressler [00:05]:

Maybe it's a mission failure. Failure is really just built into evolution. Our humanity, the way physics and the world and science works at large. To not embrace it constructively, I think is just a big mistake.

Jonathan Hicken [00:20]:

And being able, more importantly, to look failure in the eye, not just acknowledge failure and move past it, but stand in the mirror and look at this failure and really let it sink in.

Eric Ressler [00:32]:

Sometimes the space is criticized for not being very innovative. I think there's a good reason for that. And what I've heard and I think is very valid pushback, is that it's really easy to talk about failure when you're not the one who's failing. 

Jonathan Hicken [00:53]:

Eric, it's no surprise I fail a lot, but I've learned to embrace that failure, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.

Eric Ressler [01:01]:

Ooh, this is literally one of my favorite topics to discuss as it relates to social impact. So I'm all in.

Jonathan Hicken [01:08]:

Let's first start by defining the different kinds of failure, and this is just like in broad strokes, I think they're kind of levels of failure, right? There's personal failure, there's team failure, organizational failure, maybe it's a coalition failure, maybe it's a mission failure. So there are levels of failure and you don't always have control over what is going to succeed and what is going to fail depending at the scale. I think for the purpose of this conversation, we're going to mostly talk about personal and team failure, but is there any other flavors of failure that's coming to mind for you right now?

Eric Ressler [01:52]:

Existential

Jonathan Hicken [01:52]:

Failure that feels relevant right now, but look, I mean, I think, look, you embrace failure. I know you do. We talk about it at dinner all the time, and we both happen to agree that failure is good, but I think that by and large failure is very hard. But there are some techniques to getting through that. Now, why is failure good?

Eric Ressler [02:20]:

I mean, my opinion is that I've always learned best through failing and the pain of failure and the motivation that creates to not fail again. So just speaking personally, I think that's one reason why personally failure is good, but I also think that that can trickle up or bubble up to program failure or organizational failure, or even if we think about the scientific method around how do we learn how the world even works largely through trying stuff and failing until we don't fail. And so I think that failure is really just built evolution, our humanity, the way physics and the world and science works at large. So to not embrace it constructively I think is just a big mistake.

Jonathan Hicken [03:09]:

We both have young kids and they're failing all the time. I mean, I actually heard Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about how a kid jumping in a puddle is really just a physics experiment. And I love that, and that has stuck with me for years now and seeing my kid fail in all these ways and knowing and being able to recognize in that moment that he's experimenting and he's learning through doing it. So you're right, you used the word evolutionary, and I think you're absolutely right.

Eric Ressler [03:38]:

Yeah. And it makes you just think about failure as a parent being especially relevant right now, and just I think every parent experiences failure as a parent or their idea of what it means to be a parent. And it is also really hard. It's really hard to know as a parent how you should act or the choice that you should have made and making a different choice or showing up in a way that's not your best or not how you meant to. And I think it happens all the time for all parents. So

Jonathan Hicken [04:10]:

I think when you fail and when you've learned to do so in a healthy way, I think some of the outcomes of that, you've hinted at things like personal growth and learning, and I think personal resilience, kind of that grit factor, like that thick skin factor where I'm focused on the learning and what to do next and not dwelling in the past. I also think at a team level, there's a lot of innovation that can come from failure and being able, more importantly to look failure in the eye, not just acknowledge failure and move past it, but stand in the mirror and look at this failure and really let it sink in.

Eric Ressler [04:52]:

This is something I'm probably too good at to the point where it can make my team uncomfortable. So as a story or an example, we do retrospectives on all of our client projects and internal projects. And what I've found sometimes, and I think out of, I've been trying to work with the team on this and I think making some good progress here, but there's a natural inclination on my team, and I think in general to sugarcoat failure and to not bring up failure because it can be perceived as, or might even literally be a form of criticism. So when we look at our projects and our relationships with clients and we look at what went well and what didn't go well, and we look at where we failed and how we can improve, I've noticed sometimes that the biggest failures in my mind on a project don't get brought up in the retrospective, and I have to be the one that's like, in my opinion, this is the thing we did absolutely worst on this. And I've learned that that can also not be constructive unless it's approached in a way that is both transparent but also empathetic and also graceful and also constructive in a way that is like, well, here's my idea around how we might do better. And in a way also that doesn't put blame on anyone unfairly or just make it feel unnecessarily rude or nasty or impolite. And I think that is a hard balance to strike sometimes, frankly.

Jonathan Hicken [06:23]:

Yeah, I think it's pretty natural to look at failure, acknowledge it, and look, just like anything in life, there are a million variables that can go into something being successful or be a failure, and I certainly have the instinct to lean on the things that are out of my control when looking at a failure. And that can be sort of a crutch, like, oh, couldn't control that. That's why that went awry. And the harder part is looking at the thing that you do have control of and acknowledging the failure in that sphere. I think that's what's happening a lot of the times where we're sugarcoating is we're pointing the stuff that's kind of out of our control. Anyway, that's something I noticed, but I think let's take a pause and also just acknowledge that when it comes to failure at the team level, at the personal level, we are dealing with some really heavy, very important intractable problems in the society. Failure is not always good or an option or an option. So what we are talking about right now is the kind of failure where the stakes are manageable, the stakes are of the kind where you can learn and grow. So I just want to acknowledge that before we get too much deeper.

Eric Ressler [07:39]:

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because if you didn't, I was going to do the same. And I think when you think about a lot of the issues that we are working on in this sector, failure means lives on the line or people's lives really deeply negatively impacted in certain situations. So I think sometimes the space is criticized for not being very innovative, being allergic to failure, and I think there's a good reason for that actually. As much as I've actually been one of the voices out there criticizing this lack of embracing failure, and what I've heard and I think is very valid pushback is that it's really easy to talk about failure when you're not the one who's failing, right? It's easy for me to say, oh, social impact sector needs to be more innovative, be more open to failure. But when you're the one actually failing and failure means you don't get that grant again, or failure means those donors don't think you're an impactful organization anymore. Those are high stakes. And I do have some examples of where I think failure or how failure more specifically should fit into the space, but I don't want to totally wreck your outline here.

Jonathan Hicken [08:50]:

Yeah, we'll get there. So failure is hard. I mean, we've talked about now the implications of failure in our sector and how the stakes are really high, but there's also just this deeply rooted aversion to failure, and I think that's just a part of our society and a part of even how our education system is built and how we look and how we define success and how we define failure. And I think they're just decades of habit that's built into self-worth and self-perception based on being successful in a very rigid set of terms. So in school, you get a failing grade, you failed the class, the downstream impacts of that failure are pretty tremendous. Whereas in work, there may be versions of failure where, yeah, you made a mistake, now you can learn from it and we can get better. But I do think that there's just, there's this deeply embedded culture of success and failure and specific markers of worth.

Eric Ressler [09:58]:

And I think to pile onto that a little bit in the business world, and I would say by extension in the social impact space, we love to tell stories of success. And what we don't do as much storytelling around is all of the failures that led to that success. Now, in the movies, in the entertainment industry, we love a good failure story or a good challenge, a good obstacle to overcome that is one of the pillars or the pinnacles of a good story is that transformation, that overcoming of a challenge or a failure. But when it comes to our resumes and our impact storytelling and the celebration of leaders thinking about Forbes like 30 under 30 for example, or who's going to be on the cover of Time Magazine next, we're celebrating these people who have achieved tremendous success either personally or in business or through their organizations, and more of this is happening. But for a long time we just talked about the successful parts and what has been achieved, and I think it's easy to forget that for every success story, there's 10 people who failed trying to do that same thing. And for every success story, that very same person or organization also failed many, many, many times. To get to that point of success,

Jonathan Hicken [11:20]:

You should all go read Eric's post on LinkedIn about some of the successes and failures of cosmic and how you've gotten to where you've gotten today and the place of success, but that you had bumps along the way and you had failures, many bumps all the time, still to this day.

Eric Ressler [11:35]:

Always working through stuff.

Jonathan Hicken [11:44]:

So you alluded to it a second ago, but I think there are sort of good failure and bad failure, and as a leader, I think that there are reasons to accept failure and there are reasons to reject failure. So let's start with what are reasons for you as a leader that you are going to accept a failure from yourself or someone on your team? I think the kind of failure that enhances team problem solving, one, a type of failure that leads to smarter risk taking or innovative decision making failure that can build a collaboration and trust failure, that can support growth for those who fear the failure and even some failures that can strengthen team bonding. These are the flavors of failure that as a leader I'm willing to accept. What are in your position, either as a creative director or as principal on your client work, what are some of the failures that you encourage or you like to see happening?

Eric Ressler [12:59]:

It's an interesting question. I actually, in reflection to that question, I don't really think about failure being positive when it comes to the work that we do for our clients. And maybe that's a mistake actually, as I say that out loud, I think a lot about it more when it comes to our own growth at Cosmic and our own goals around our vision. One way I think about it is that failing is a sign that you are reaching far enough. If you never fail, you're not reaching far enough in my opinion. I guess that could be true for activation and marketing work as well. If you are just doing the motions and it's all just kind of gravy and generally humming, but you're not growing, then that might be a sign that you're not being ambitious enough. So I think ambition and failure are really close friends, in my opinion and in my experience where if every time I've been ambitious and grown, there's been failure that's either inspired that ambition or that's complimented it in one way and pushed me to reach through to that next level.

[14:06]:

So I think in my work, I think a lot about new ideas and approaches that we've taken to how we run things. As an example, we've talked about this in other episodes. We do a four day work week. One way that we tried that experiment, and I'm going to continue to use the word experiment, I think it's really relevant to this conversation. At one point, we thought we needed to still hit 40 hours a week for that four day work week to be successful because that was our assumption. And what we learned is that that was a failure for us. It works for other people and some people might still prefer that to a standard five day, eight hour day work week. For us, that experiment failed because although we had three days every week, which was great, we were working long hours, especially in the winter, that was really tough.

[14:57]:

We weren't getting that daily recharge, and we did it for a bit. And then after a while we realized like, Hey, this is actually not better. We don't have time for socializing after work. We don't have time to get dinner by the time we're out of work. It's been dark for four hours in the winter. It was brutal, man. And so I can look at that in hindsight and say, well, that was a failure. However, it was also a necessary step to realize a really important insight, which is that 40 hours a week is not actually required for us to be effective as an organization. And as I dug into the research on that, and the research on this is fascinating. There is a sweet spot, and in my opinion, it's about 36 hours a week, 32 to 36 hours a week of work and about six hours of work a day. And as soon as you go past that, you actually stop being more effective. The return on that time becomes less meaningful. And certainly there are times where you can push, and I do it and the team does it sometimes where you do work longer hours, you do work more days a week, and you can sustain that for a certain amount of time. Probably about six weeks is about the shelf life on that.

Jonathan Hicken [16:08]:

But you had an opportunity to correct it, right? I mean, and I think that that's an important ingredient to good failure or acceptable failure is if you know that there's going to be an opportunity to correct it,

Eric Ressler [16:21]:

And our correction was not a reversion, and sometimes an aversion might be the right choice. Hey, this is an experiment. We're going to try it and if it fails, we're going to go back to the status quo. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that. We chose to continue experimenting and say, well, the 10 hours a day didn't work. What if we did eight and we just didn't work as much? Can we still produce as much creative work and can we still be a viable sustainable business working less hours across the board? I don't want to belabor this too much. We also, in early parts of this experiment, had a split schedule because we had another assumption that someone must be there Friday to answer emails on the phone, like culture could not possibly support us not being available Friday. And so we had a split schedule where some of us worked Monday through Thursday and some of us worked Tuesday through Friday. That also failed. And we learned about why that wasn't enough overlap between our team. So we had multiple failures in this experiment, in this mission to figure out how to support a four day workweek culture because we believed strongly that it was a worthwhile experiment, and there were many failures along the way to get to the point where now we do have a sustainable way of doing that.

Jonathan Hicken [17:29]:

I'm guessing that when you were making that transition that this was something you were talking to the team about, they understood what was coming, they understood what success looked like, they understood that there was going to be an opportunity to correct if it didn't work. And I also think that that's an important ingredient to good failure where there's sort of a shared expectation of what happens when we fail.

Eric Ressler [17:52]:

Yes,

Jonathan Hicken [17:53]:

Because I think that that's part of the fear, right? Is if it's a black box beyond the point of failure or there's just like, I don't know what's going to happen. Am I going to get fired? Am I going to get demoted? Am I going to stop getting the good projects? That can be that fear is a strong motivator, and so better not to go out on a limb and take a risk if I don't really know what the consequences are for success or failure on the other side.

Eric Ressler [18:19]:

Agree. And I think there's even part of this that is planning for failure or planning for what failure might look like and how we might approach that failure. So to continue to use this example, we set it up as an experiment. We timeboxed it. I don't remember exactly how long it was. I think it was about six weeks that we were going to try this in all of these different phases, and we set the expectation that, hey, we want to try this. If we can do this in this six week period and prove that we're still as productive and we are hitting our deadlines and our goals and everything, then we will continue the experiment. But if we fail, if we can't do that, no harm, no foul, but we're going to be going back to how things were before or we're going to reassess. So we did plant the seed around what might happen if the experiment failed.

Jonathan Hicken [19:10]:

And I think you can apply the same sort of thinking to a personal mindset too. You've just described how you approached it as the leader of a team. I think we can do the same thing for ourselves at a personal level. I'm going to try this thing. What's going to happen if this thing succeeds or fails? And am I going to have a chance to correct it? And also, I think an important step in all of this is if this is in a professional setting, obviously you're going to want to communicate that to your supervisor or your team, just so everybody understands the implications of success or failure for any experiment. Yeah, there are reasons though, Eric, that I think that we as leaders or even as individuals, should reject failure. Failure isn't good carte blanche. We're not out here preaching like go fail at everything.

[20:09]:

There are versions of this that I as a leader, that I don't accept. So for example, here's a few kinds of failures that I do not accept for myself or my team. Repeated mistakes, especially in sort of high stake situations. It's one thing to make a mistake and to learn from it. It's another thing to continue making that mistake. Second failure due to negligence or lack of effort, that to me is not an acceptable form of a mistake. Third, mistakes that have legal or ethical implications, and that's something that's on me to make sure my team understands when we're making these risky choices and to set those boundaries, but we can't be making big mistakes or major failures if there are legal or ethical implications there failures that demoralize the team. I think that's a softer one, but really that comes back to the expectation setting and is this something that we can correct?

[21:20]:

It's related to the stakes as well. We don't want to have this major experiment that if it fails, it's going to tank the business. And then the other one is a failure. That negatively in fact impacts the core mission in a meaningful way, right? In the course of years or whatever, that it's going to get us so far off track that we're really doing a disservice to the mission. That one's a little harder to tease out, and that one's a little less common, but it is one that I'm paying attention to. A, how does this sound to you? And B, what are some other kinds of failures that you don't

Eric Ressler [21:59]:

Accept? I really like this list. I really like the framing of good versus bad failure because I don't think that nuance or that distinction is something that we usually think about. I've never actually thought about it that way before. The only other one that I might add would be, and yeah, I don't know how to reconcile this with the concept of failure, but if someone tries to place the blame around failure unfairly and won't own it, especially after repeat attempts or discussions, and I've had this happen before where it's one thing to fail, it's another thing to not own up to that failure. And look, this is hard. This is hard, and I think we've all done this before where we'll pretend or we'll offset the failure or push the failure away, but if you don't own the failure, you're never going to, first of all, it's not real, and second of all, you're never going to grow. And I think it's really hard sometimes to even know that you're doing that. It might be subconscious, but if something that I will not accept, and certainly there's some grace here, but over time, someone on my team or that I'm working with and whatever, or even friends are failing to come through on a commitment or an expectation or an agreement over and over and over again and they won't own it and they won't accept it and they won't try to make an improvement, that's at some point a deal breaker.

Jonathan Hicken [23:29]:

Yeah, that's probably the single most important component to embracing failure is as an individual or as a team is owning that failure.

Eric Ressler [23:40]:

You got to own it. You got to accept it.

Jonathan Hicken [23:42]:

Now this all sounds good, and it's like, yeah, failure, let's embrace failure, but what can you do as a team? What can you do as a leader to begin to build a team culture where this is actually doable and this is actually livable. It's not something that you can just snap your fingers. This is going to change overnight. You can't just walk into your next all staff meeting and be like, all right folks, we're embracing failure. Go. This in some cases can take years to shift organizational cultures, especially if you're in a larger organization. But I have some ideas about how you can do that. First is to do exactly what we just did, which is to define for your team what are the flavors of acceptable and unacceptable failures?

Eric Ressler [24:27]:

Yes.

Jonathan Hicken [24:29]:

Second is as a leader, especially when it comes to setting cultures, you have to lead by example. So you have to name your own failures and how you are correcting them or name your own failures, express to your team when you're going to experiment and what is going to happen in the case of success and failure, kind of getting ahead of the failure, I think that you need to establish psychological safety as a leader to where someone, we're all programmed to fear failure. You need to establish that psychological safety. And one way to do that is to reward transparency over perfection and celebrate someone who took a risk and celebrate their learning and invite them if they're so willing to share what they did, what worked and what didn't, and as a team help them think through it and help them think how we're going to make this better. But I do think that you need to begin to celebrate the process of experimentation as much as you do the results.

Eric Ressler [25:38]:

And I like this. The way I think about this is permission to fail. And I think having those guardrails is so important. You mentioned some of them earlier, we don't want failure to lead to ethical or legal issues. We don't want failure to have irreparable disarray for our missions. We don't want anything to happen. That's going to be such a big deal that the failure is going to creep into that bad failure category, permission to fail leading by example. As a leader, I actually really like this reframe away from even potentially even using the word failure and leaning into experiments. I think the framing and even the cultural background around experiments is the exact right way to think about this. And I think even the scientific method or a watered down version of that even is perfectly appropriate for this. And that's the way I think about a lot of the work that we do even with our clients, but especially in our own growth at cosmic, is that we're going to try something, we're going to experiment with this, and we're going to put some boundaries around that experiment.

[26:43]:

We're going to plan for what happens if the experiment doesn't go the way we hoped it would, but even the idea of a hypothesis, we think that if we do this action, it might help result in this result. And we're going to test that because going back to the first episode in season three, the MVS framework, that is really an experimentation framework at the end of the day, and it is a framework that is highly likely to create failures, and that is part of the idea. We worked with an organization that was really innovative in the ocean sciences space and partly because they were attached to moonshot thinking. And I would love to talk briefly about moonshot thinking in the social impact space if we have some time. The thing I loved about their approach is that they had a very clear and intentional experimentation framework that had de-risking that was responsible with the funding.

[27:41]:

They had enough funding that they could do this. And this is something I hope that any funders in the space listening to our pod, hopefully are out there. Embracing failure I think has to come from the funding side at some level. You have to be willing to let social impact organizations experiment and fail and to give them that permission. So the same where we're talking about leaders doing this with their organizations, we need funders and probably frankly donors at some level to be open to that too. Now, that gets a little nuanced because funders have a lot more money than even major donors sometimes. But this idea of running experiments, and this organization did this in such a great way. They had smaller initiatives, smaller funding, I don't remember the exact dollar amounts, but it was the hundreds of thousands of dollars for new experiments and new organizations that were going to give some seed funding and to prove out some of their ideas.

[28:36]:

And then once those experiments were run, successful experiments had additional funding unlocked to scale those ideas. And now there are some counter arguments to make about this process. Certain things cannot be scaled down to pilots to test out, for example. But a lot of things can. And I think the real thing is if we're dealing with these extremely complex, systemic, intractable problems, we have to be willing to experiment. The word moonshot even comes, I believe, I might be wrong here, but it seems to come from the actual task of taking humans to the moon. What a wild idea. How high were the chances of failure? How many failures had to happen for that to be true in the first place? And there's a huge argument in the space about moonshot placing big bets and doing moonshots and putting a time and attention to that. And critics of that will say, that's all for show and it doesn't really work.

[29:34]:

And there's all these proven things that we know work that aren't funded fully, and so we should be putting our dollars. I think that's a solid argument to make, but my counter argument is, yes, and there is enough wealth and money in this world. We can do both. We need to encourage and hold funders accountable to fund both of those things. And I think we need a healthy balance of the two. How did those things become proven through experiments? They were probably moonshots at one point too. So I think all of this to me ties into this idea of being responsibly experimental, and that will breed innovation and true social change over time.

Jonathan Hicken [30:12]:

Experiment is one of my favorite words, especially being in a science center. I mean, we talk about experiments all the time, but experiment is literally one of our core values. I remember that. Yeah. So we talk about experiment and we set KPIs around experimentation. We hold ourselves accountable to doing the experimenting. And the cool thing is that experimentation, look, I celebrate the funder. That is encouraging big experimentation. Experimentation can happen at the smallest task too. Anybody in any job can be experimenting with whatever's in front of 'em. So as far as creating an organizational culture that celebrates and embraces failure, maybe start using the word experiment. Maybe don't use failure so much. That's a really good tip. You talked about using debriefs at cosmic. I actually think that's a really important component of all of this. Otherwise it's just willy-nilly, like wild, wild west. What does that look like?

Eric Ressler [31:13]:

Yeah, so I mean, I can talk about our framework, but I think another helpful example is that I believe it is the Navy Seals. They call it after action reviews, and it's really deeply ingrained in their culture, and they're doing super high stakes work. So talk about high stakes work. They're doing the highest of high stakes work often, and it is very deeply ingrained in their culture that after any action, they do an after action review and they have a really transparent, open conversation around what went wrong, why did it go wrong? What might we do next time? And so that's some of the inspiration for us. But really the way that we do it, not to bore you with the details too much, but we have a process for it. We have a framework. We send out surveys to everyone on the team with a set of predetermined questions around things you enjoyed shout outs to other people on the team, what were some friction points in the process?

[32:11]:

Where do you think there might've been some friction points for the client? Like these types of questions. So everyone fills those out, and then our project manager puts together a report. We have a short conversation around it. And the most important thing is either in that conversation or often after that conversation, we develop new working theories or experiments around how we might solve some of these problems. So if all you do is talk about everything that went wrong and then go back to your day to day, that's not an effect, would be bad failing. And so it has to be constructive, which means you have to actually change behavior.

Jonathan Hicken [32:45]:

I am thinking about all of the debriefs that you have done at Cosmic, and you probably have this extensive history of failures and wins that have helped you become the team that you are today. It just gave me this idea. I was like, what if I did a team building activity with my team and we always built out our failure cvs or a failure resume, and we all just spent an hour just writing down all the things that we did wrong and the things that we messed up and the things that we failed at, and then learned, did a little learning together. But anyway, this is just another tool that someone might consider using to again, build that safety and build that expectation that experimentation and failure and success is all part of what we're doing here.

Eric Ressler [33:30]:

I love it. And maybe we should eat our own dog food and do an episode on all the things we've messed up over the years.

Jonathan Hicken [33:35]:

Let's do it. I'm super down. All right. Well, hey, look, embracing failure is a very powerful tool. It's a one that's so powerful. You have to wield it carefully, but when you do, it can transform your organization and really help you have the impact you seek. Thanks for breaking it down with me today.

Eric Ressler [33:56]:

Yeah, thanks Jonathan. This was great.