Having a culture where failure is okay is different from having a culture where failure is valued. Like the parent commenter said, if failure means you look back at what happened, learn some lessons, do better next time, then that's fine, you've gotten value out of failure. If you say "Hey, I got a failure out of the way," you're playing slots and falling victim to the gambler's fallacy.
> Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.
> Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).
David Anderson (kanban) once observed that if your estimates are accurate then they should be wrong about half the time (and half of those overestimated).
The pressure to make them into promises instead of estimates is, I think, a form of failure aversion, one that Almost everyone deals with and one that causes a lot of unnecessary drama.
I don't remember whose quote this is, but the old line about how if you aren't failing from time to time it means you aren't trying hard enough. Your reach can't exceed your grasp if you don't reach at all.
However its easy to fail from sheer stupidity as well. Failure is a trapping of success, not an indicator.
> Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.
> Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).
So, was this mistake glorious, amazing, or new?