How much energy does your organization put into avoiding (and punishing) failure?
Probably too much. Successful organizations -- the ones that figure out new things and grow when others are shrinking -- Celebrate Failure as described at the Leadership Freak blog:
Celebrating failure creates environments where people dare to try. If all you do is punish failure your organization will always choose the safe path. You'll stagnate and die.... Celebrating failure includes rejecting finger pointing. When a project that you authorized fizzles, accept responsibility and honor those who worked hard but failed.
Most new ventures don't work out. Even those that do usually don't do so perfectly. If you're trying to engineer failure out of your experience, you're inevitably preventing success.
Let the failure happen. Learn from it.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. 
