Seriously, do celebrate your failures!

Celebrate your failures! is a ubiquitous Agile mantra. But what does that actually mean - and why on earth should you celebrate your failures? It is your successes that should be celebrated, right?!

It is true that team successes should indeed be celebrated. Celebrate these often. This is a positive feedback loop to the team that enhances good practices! But do make sure the entire team get to celebrate - we don’t want any heroes or favorites in the team, as that will damage the team spirit - ”hero personas” within the team will surely decrease collaboration. 

But what I want to talk about in this post is not how to celebrate successes. I want talk about failures. Of course, there are different types of failures. I am not talking about failing to come in to the office in time for the daily standup. An example of a failure that does fall within this post is:

"We decided to skip writing unit tests for one of the features we delivered last sprint. The team had committed to it in the sprint backlog and the Product Owner really wanted that feature to be deployed at the customer’s site by the end of the sprint. As a consequence, we have spent this entire sprint trying to fix the chaos that resulted from deploying the release."

In this case we can identify a few obvious learnings: Lower quality (no unit tests) does not mean higher speed or faster delivery - on the contrary it means lower speed and late delivery. Also, the team may be overcommitting, which might be the root cause of the incident. And on further analysis, maybe the old-style habit of committing to a sprint backlog is a local optimization in this case; perhaps it would have been easier to optimize the whole if the team had committed to a sprint goal instead? 

Ergo, a failure is actually a bunch of valuable learnings in disguise!

The Retrospective is the ceremony at which the team extracts learnings from their failures (and of course from their successes too). There should be no blame and no punishment. Instead, strive for an open and positive ceremony where everyone feels at ease. Focus on finding the root cause of failures and discuss how problems can be solved. Create (a limited number of) actions/experiments and commit to these. And then celebrate the failures! I suggest bringing Swedish "fika" such as cinnamon rolls to the retrospective.

For continuous improvement to work, the feedback loop from the retrospectives is essential. Now, imagine we are in an organization where failures are hidden and never talked of, due to a culture where they are unacceptable and therefore punished. In a such an organization, the improvement feedback loop will run dry. This means that the organization will cease to learn, stop improving and probably get behind its competitors, eventually going out of business.

Therefore, celebrating your failures is the antithesis to going out of business. And that is my point: Celebrate your failures, or you might eventually go out of business!