<aside> 🤓 This term is borrowed from Netflix and describes the process of sharing failures company-wide. This allows people to take full ownership of their failures by sharing them and gives everyone else the chance to learn from these mistakes and prevent them (in the same or similar way).

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Why Sunshining Failures

• so others can learn from our mistakes (and not repeat them)
• we can’t have a culture of innovation without it (if we don’t encourage others to take calculated risks, how can we really innovate?)
• gain trust in people to be honest, and to take ownership of your actions/decisions
• show we embrace failure and won’t punish it

The other option would be to brush mistakes under the rug and keep repeating them, but who wants to replicate their own mistakes?

Our definition of “Failure” in this context

To not be sunshining failures every day (which could easily happen with 100+ Togglers), we need to define what kind/magnitude of failure is ‘sunshine worthy’:

• hearing about this failure is attractive to the vast majority of our Togglers
• there are actual learnings/takeaways that many our Togglers  will value (vs. a failure that is so specific, it only applies to a single person or small group)
• the failure affected the team (team, or department, or even the whole company) and/or the performance, and we want/need to make sure it won’t happen again
• it’s a failure that was at least partially, if not entirely, in our control (we could have taken measures to prevent it if we had known better/been aware at that point)

What to do as a Lead when a Failure happens

• Use the three-part response:
  1. Ask what learning came from the failed project (or task)
  2. Don’t make a big deal about it but take it seriously (people will be afraid of taking risks in the future if they feel they’re being punished for being honest about failures)
  3. Ask them to sunshine the failure (see below👇🏼 how)

When to Sunshine Failures

Depending on the size of the failure, it can be shared quickly. The crucial steps to keep in mind are these: