How Celebrating Imperfection Creates Cultures of Learning

What’s your relationship to failures and imperfections?

What about your organization’s?

When we strive for perfection, we tend to have a negative relationship to failures and imperfections. For an individual, it shows up as negative self-talk or beating yourself up when you fail or have setbacks. Within an organization, it creates a fear-based culture, where mistakes aren’t allowed, impeding innovation and trust.

When we strive for excellence, we cultivate a positive relationship to failures and imperfections. For an individual, it shows up as responding with kindness and reflecting on what you can learn from your failures to grow. Within an organization, it creates a learning culture built on both psychological safety and high standards. A learning culture embraces a growth mindset, encouraging everyone to move out of their comfort zone and into their learning and growth zones on a regular basis.

How could we embrace our failures and recognize they are our access point for growth?

The Beauty in Imperfections

There is an ancient Japanese philosophy called Wabi Sabi, a concept that asks us to “search for the beauty in imperfection.”

Kintsugi is an the ancient artform that comes from Wabi Sabi, where someone fixes broken objects by putting them back together with liquid gold, giving them “golden scars.”

The practice is done to actually celebrate the cracks. Why? Because cracks build resilience and that’s what makes us beautiful. Instead of gluing something back together and hiding the imperfections, they are celebrated!

This mindset praises our imperfections. We celebrate our humanity because human beings connect, not in perfection, but in our humanity. Think of a time when someone told you about their flawless success and another time when someone told you a story when they overcame a setback, learned from it and then succeeded. Which one resonated more deeply with you?

How to Adopt a Wabi Sabi Practice in the Workplace

The Wabi Sabi practice gives you and others around you permission to let go of the counterproductive (and impossible) goal of perfectionism. Instead, the practice focuses on taking the time to pause and reflect on learnings from failures in order to strive for excellence.

The steps provide guidance on how to operationalize the Wabi Sabi practice to use as a standard approach to executing projects. 

Steps of Wabi Sabi Practice:

1. Create the Space to Pause

It is so easy to be in the busyness of the business. In order to learn from failures, it’s essential to first take time to pause.

Integrating learning from doing and learning from pausing and reflecting provides so many benefits: it improves self-efficacy, increases our self-awareness, develops our creative thinking skills, and boosts performance.

As leaders, we can facilitate creating the space for reflecting on both successes and especially failures.

Pausing provides an opportunity to get clear on what happened in the situation versus who did it. Without pausing, we often make up stories—as humans we are story making machines—and don’t think through the facts. By distinguishing the facts from the stories, we’ll better understand what occurred and move away from blaming one another.

Reflection: Think about a recent time when things did not go as planned or you perceive you failed. Write down as many details/facts around that you can remember.

2. Go Beyond the Surface

As you review facts, highlight both the strengths and what could have been better. It’s so important to focus on what went well in the situation in addition to the learnings. Consider what was imperfect about the situation with kindness and compassion.

When we look at successes and failures, we often think of them as binary: either it was a success or failure.

A more holistic way to view failure is on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum are blameworthy failures, relating to individuals violating processes intentionally or with inattention. On the other end of the spectrum are praiseworthy failures, which includes exploratory testing and piloting to see what does and doesn’t work before expanding from there.

Most of the time, when a situation or project breaks down or fails, it falls within the middle of the spectrum. It could be because of processes issues or complexity, task challenges, or uncertainty.

Recognizing there’s a range within a failure can help as you process the situation.

Reflection: Continuing with the example from above, what are the strengths you and others brought to the situation? What felt flawed, incomplete or imperfect in the situation?

3. Discover the Wisdom

How you repair what’s imperfect with gold is to discover the wisdom in what’s flawed. What can you learn from the projects or situations that didn’t go the way you planned them?

As you reflect, incorporate where your failure or setback falls on the failure spectrum:

• For situations that fall on the blameworthy side of the spectrum: it could be a place to privately ask for coaching or, for someone on your team, to coach and develop them.

• For situations that fall in the middle of the spectrum: explore what broke down in the process or situation and how it could be improved.

• For situations that fall on the praiseworthy side of the spectrum: discover what you learned from the undesired result and how you could use that to expand your knowledge.

Reflection: What is the wisdom, resilience and growth you have gained from these imperfect areas?

4. Strive for Excellence, not perfection

“Success depends on high standards, not being flawless. The target is not perfection—it’s excellence.” –Adam Grant

Studies have shown when people strive for excellence instead of perfection, they achieve greater results. Teams that celebrate successes and learn from failures are 25 times as likely to be successful over the long-term (Sixseconds, Team Vitality Report 2022).

Reflection: What does striving for excellence, not perfection, look like moving forward from this? What is one take away or action you could focus on? 

As you complete this practice, remember, it can be difficult to reflect on what didn’t go well. What do you need to accept or let go of to move forward?

By reflecting on what’s imperfect and finding the wisdom within our failures, we repair what’s been broken with gold and become more resilient.