CAMILLE MEYER AND IRENE INGARDI: How leaders publicly tell tales of failure

Failure stories are pervasive in the media landscape. Stories about hurricanes and earthquakes are recurrent, but it is those about human error that are most common — think of the ongoing world conflicts, the latest corporate food safety scandals or the periodic crises in the tech industry.

Most organisations rarely voluntarily communicate about their failures and connected errors in the public sphere. They rather do it as a reaction to public scrutiny in a crisis or post-crisis phase, when they have no other choice than to communicate their views and claims on a given behaviour under the pitiless gaze of (social) media.

This has started to change, starting in the tech industry and Silicon Valley, where tolerance for failure is a valued quality. Failure stories are now becoming more popular in a variety of industries, including the non-profit and government sectors. After all, errors are fundamental to human development and organisations. Without making errors and reflecting on them, there is no room for improvement and advancement.

New research from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and University of Cape Town has explored the different narratives developed by leaders to communicate failures in a public setting. By analysing video data from F**kUp Nights Brussels — a global community platform sharing professional failure experiences — researchers found six distinct narrative genres: Fable, Documentary, Greek Tragedy, Modern Tragedy, Tragicomedy and Absurdist Fiction.

These narrative styles serve not only as mere descriptions of past events but provide a means for the cognitive and emotional processing of failure. By presenting the situation in the form of a story, the audience is more likely to relate and learn from the experience. As author Nick Morgan says in the Harvard Business Review, “In our information-saturated age, business leaders won’t be heard unless they’re telling stories... stories create 'sticky' memories by attaching emotions to things that happen. That means leaders who can create and share good stories have a powerful advantage over others.”

Knowing the different narrative styles — and when to apply each one — can give leaders a powerful playbook to draw on when telling failure stories. The Fable style, for instance, is told to redeem oneself from past personal mistakes and make a moral point; while the Greek Tragedy is the typical tragic hero’s tale — despite every effort to do good, the “hero” ends up with disaster on their hands. Here former SA Post Office (Sapo) CEO Mark Barnes comes to mind.

Appointed in 2015 to lead the cash-strapped postal service, he was ultimately unable to realise his vision for the organisation, resigning in 2019. In January 2021 he tweeted: “My contract as chief executive of Sapo should’ve only ended today. If the government had let management get on with our (board-approved, portfolio committee-supported) strategy we would’ve completed the turnaround of Sapo by now. Imagine that.”

The Documentary genre could be more frequently used to unveil stories of failed projects with relatively minor consequences, fostering organisational learning from “small” or “intelligent” failures. This is the case of most stories disclosed in the nine editions of Engineers Without Borders’ (EWB’s) Canada Failure Reports.

To enhance transparency and a culture of innovation and learning in the aid sector, EWB collects stories of failed ventures and projects, asking for contributions from staff, fellows and the executive team. EWB’s project to strengthen local farmers’ organisations in Burkina Faso that neglected to respect the organisations’ decision-making structures is an example of the Documentary narrative genre.

A particularly powerful communication style is the Tragicomedy, which tends to show how foolish people can be and makes use of jokes and humour. Tragicomedy narratives can attempt to normalise hardship by easing and alleviating the harsh consequences of failure, and in so doing make it an integral part of one’s career and organisational life. It is a technique employed in many of the most successful Ted talks, in which influential speakers speak on wide-ranging topics.

One of the top Ted speakers in the world is leadership and personal development expert Prof Brené Brown. Her hugely popular “The Power of Vulnerability” talk makes use of the narrative style of Tragicomedy to describe her failings. By inviting the audience to be complicit with a kind of “shamelessness” of the comic character, the Tragicomedy normalises failure and makes it an integral, okay-to-laugh-about part of organisational life.

While most of the genres recast failure for “sharing learning” — communicating the knowledge or skills acquired through the failure experience — some also function as “emotional cleansing” for the storytellers or as a way of “managing the impressions” the story should have on the audience. The Greek tragedy protagonist’s noble fight against an unfortunate destiny leads to a cathartic end of the story, one in which the storyteller can symbolically be cleansed from guilt and shame and release the negative emotions associated with the experience.

For business leaders wanting to communicate powerfully and create “teachable moments” from the errors in their organisations, making use of effective narrative styles can enhance the impact of their story greatly — and ensure the message hits home to cultivate a culture of error management, learning and transparency in their organisation.

• Dr Meyer is a senior lecturer at the UCT Graduate School of Business, and Ingardi a PhD candidate at Solvay Brussels School of Economics & Management, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.