How embracing failure drives innovation and breakthrough success
There’s something profoundly counterintuitive about celebrating failure. Our educational systems, career paths, and social norms often train us to avoid mistakes at all costs. Yet some of the world’s most innovative organizations and individuals take a radically different approach—they view failure not as something to be feared, but as an essential component of breakthrough success.
The video above offers fascinating insights into Honda’s racing philosophy, where failure isn’t just tolerated—it’s actively encouraged as a pathway to innovation. This perspective challenges conventional thinking about mistakes and setbacks, offering valuable lessons that extend far beyond motorsports into business, personal development, and creative pursuits.
The Universal Nature of Failure
At the heart of Honda’s racing philosophy is a profound understanding of failure’s universality and inevitability. Rather than pretending perfection is possible, they embrace a more realistic paradigm:
- Everybody makes mistakes
- So much of racing is failure
- Failure is a byproduct of pushing the envelope
This perspective reframes failure not as a sign of incompetence or weakness, but as an inevitable consequence of ambition. If you’re not failing occasionally, you’re likely not pushing boundaries or taking the risks necessary for significant advancement.
When viewed through this lens, failure becomes normalized—not as something to be ashamed of, but as a natural part of any worthwhile endeavor. This psychological shift is crucial, as it removes the paralyzing fear that often prevents innovation and calculated risk-taking.
Soichiro Honda’s Vision: Trial and Error
The company’s approach to failure isn’t accidental—it traces directly back to founder Soichiro Honda’s fundamental philosophy about innovation and progress:
All the demands from Soichiro Honda were to take risks and fail. The idea is that you can fail 100 times as long as you succeed once. “Trial and Error” sums up Soichiro Honda’s ideas.
This philosophy created a corporate culture with several distinctive characteristics:
- When you fail, it isn’t necessarily looked at as a bad thing as long as you learn from it and make something positive out of it
- Engineers for better or worse want to change things and advance
- We can only make fantastic advances in technology through many failures
What’s particularly noteworthy about Honda’s approach is how it aligns with the natural inclinations of engineers and innovators. By creating an environment where calculated risk-taking is encouraged, the company unlocks the full creative potential of technical minds that are intrinsically driven to push boundaries and explore new possibilities.
Leadership That Embraces Failure
The Honda racing story offers valuable insights about leadership and creating organizational cultures that foster innovation through embracing failure:
If you have a boss that is telling you to take a chance and if you make a mistake or fail, just try not to do it again and try to learn from that. That is a good thing.
This approach represents a stark contrast to leadership styles that demand perfection and punish mistakes. By creating psychological safety around failure, leaders can:
- Encourage more ambitious thinking and creative problem-solving
- Build resilience throughout the organization
- Create stronger learning cycles where lessons from failures become institutional knowledge
- Foster innovation that might otherwise be suppressed by fear
The most innovative organizations don’t just tolerate failure—they systematically learn from it. This requires leadership that understands the difference between productive failure (which generates learning and moves the organization forward) and unproductive failure (which results from carelessness or repeating past mistakes).
Lessons from Great Innovators
Honda’s philosophy connects to a broader tradition of innovators throughout history who understood the value of persistent trial and error:
Edison trying to do the light-bulb, he said I didn’t fail, it just didn’t work 10,000 times, it worked the 10,001st time so if you look at those 10,000 times were those failures?
This famous Edison anecdote highlights a crucial reframing: what others might call failures, true innovators see as necessary steps on the path to discovery. This perspective shift transforms how we view the iterative process of development and experimentation.
Other historical innovators who embraced failure include:
- The Wright Brothers – Who crashed numerous flying machines before achieving successful flight
- James Dyson – Who created 5,126 failed prototypes before inventing his successful vacuum
- Marie Curie – Whose groundbreaking discoveries came after countless unsuccessful experiments
These examples demonstrate that Honda’s philosophy isn’t unique to automotive racing—it represents a universal truth about the innovation process that spans industries, disciplines, and eras.
Applying This Mindset
While Honda’s racing team and historical inventors provide inspiring examples, how might we apply these principles in our own work and lives? Here are some practical ways to embrace productive failure:
Document Failures
Keep a “failure log” that captures what went wrong, why, and what you learned. This transforms mistakes into valuable data points.
Celebrate Learning
Create rituals that acknowledge valuable lessons extracted from failures, shifting focus from the mistake to the growth it enabled.
Prototype and Test
Adopt a rapid iteration approach that expects and plans for multiple failures as part of the development process.
The key distinction is between a culture that simply tolerates failure and one that actively learns from it. The latter requires intentional processes for capturing insights, sharing lessons, and incorporating them into future efforts. Without this disciplined approach, failures remain just failures rather than stepping stones to success.
Embracing the Productive Power of Failure
Honda’s racing philosophy offers a powerful reframing of failure that has applications far beyond motorsports. By understanding that innovation requires experimentation—and experimentation inevitably includes failures—we can transform our relationship with mistakes and setbacks.
The most successful individuals and organizations aren’t those who avoid failure; they’re those who fail intelligently, learn systematically, and use those lessons to fuel their next attempt. This approach builds resilience, accelerates learning, and ultimately leads to breakthroughs that might otherwise remain undiscovered.
As we navigate our own professional and personal challenges, we might do well to adopt Soichiro Honda’s mindset: embrace trial and error, learn from each attempt, and recognize that our most significant failures often lay the groundwork for our greatest successes.
Join the Conversation
What’s a “failure” in your past that ultimately led to important learning or unexpected success? How has your perspective on mistakes evolved throughout your career? Share your experiences in the comments below!