When things go wrong
Learning from Failure.
A day on facing failure honestly: why good people go wrong, how cultures fail, and how organisations learn rather than hide.
- Level
- Immerse
- Learning time
- 8 hours 30 minutes
- Where
- Serving the public
- Price
- £249
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Senior teams and boards after a failure or near miss
Overview
When something goes wrong, the way an organisation responds says more about its culture than the failure itself. When things go wrong brings together the theory of learning from failure, Syed's black box thinking, Edmondson's kinds of failure, Reason's Swiss cheese model and Dekker's just culture, with candour, apology and accountability after Hillsborough. It explores why good people do wrong things through moral disengagement and groupthink, how cultures fail at Volkswagen, Wells Fargo and Theranos, and how reputational risk gathers. Complaints are treated as data for a learning system, and capstone cases including Trivallis, the WASPI findings and the Post Office mediation scheme show what honest learning asks of leaders.
Aims
This programme aims to help senior teams and boards face failure honestly and turn it into lasting learning rather than defensiveness. It develops the judgement to look past individual blame to the systems and cultures beneath, the courage to act with candour, and the practices that let an organisation hear bad news while there is still time.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Explain why capable people and organisations go wrong, using systems thinking, just culture, moral disengagement and the patterns of cultural failure.
- Use complaints, reviews and near misses as evidence to build a learning system that changes practice rather than closing cases.
- Lead a candid, accountable organisational response to failure that protects trust, rebuilds reputation and keeps dissent and difficult news flowing.
What you'll develop
By the end of this Immerse, you will be able to:
- Distinguish Edmondson's basic, complex and intelligent failures and choose a proportionate leadership response to each.
- Explain how delayed truth becomes a second injury, using the Hillsborough case and the Bishop James Jones report.
- Apply the five lenses to the Trivallis case to identify how repeat reports, records, vulnerability, complaint handling and governance contributed to harm.
- Apply the utilitarian, deontological and virtue lenses to the same decision and identify the tensions they reveal.
- Explain why agile is a culture bet rather than a project method, using the cultural assumptions behind the Agile Manifesto.
- Explain how the consequence of failure, accountability and purpose of risk taking differ between public and private organisations.
- Explain why reputational risk is a consequence rather than a category, and describe its three distinguishing features.
- Identify the signs that a situation needs problem structuring before any option is chosen.
Built from 6 parts.
8 hours 30 minutes of learning.
- 01Failing well, learning fastLearning from failure and service improvementBitesize · Complaints, Ombudsmen and Learning from Failure2 modules
- 02Saying sorry and meaning itDuty of candour, apology and accountabilityBitesize · Complaints, Ombudsmen and Learning from Failure2 modules
- 03Why good people go wrongEthical decision making for leadersBitesize · Ethics, Integrity and Standards3 modules
- 04When culture goes wrongCulture in agile, remote and hybrid workingBitesize · Culture in Organisations2 modules
- 05When reputations are on the linePublic sector risk and reputational riskBitesize · Strategic Risk2 modules
- 06The value of a dissenting voiceGroupthink and problem structuring methodsBitesize · Solving Complex Problems and Decision Making2 modules