Imagine a world where a scientist is punished every time an experiment fails.

In that world, we would have no penicillin. We would have no lightbulbs. We would have no internet. We would still be sitting in caves, terrified to rub two sticks together because it might not work the first time.

Yet, this is exactly how most businesses are run.

We operate on a binary reward system. If you hit the goal, you get the bonus. If you miss the goal, you get the silence. Or worse, the reprimand.

This system works beautifully if you are running a factory where the task is to stamp the same widget a thousand times a day. Variance is the enemy of manufacturing.

But you are not running a factory. You are running a business in a volatile, complex, and ambiguous world. You need your team to invent. You need them to solve problems that have never been solved before.

And invention is messy.

If you only reward the touchdown, your team will stop throwing the ball. They will only take the shots they know they can make. They will sandbag their goals. They will hide their ambitious ideas because the risk of failure outweighs the reward of success.

We need to flip the incentive structure.

We need to learn how to celebrate the Attempt. We need to build a culture where the quality of the effort and the intelligence of the risk are valued just as much as the outcome.

The Logic of the Poker Table

To understand this, we have to look at professional poker.

A great poker player knows that you can play a hand perfectly and still lose. You can calculate the odds, make the right bet, and then the other guy gets a lucky card on the river.

If you judge your decision based solely on the outcome, you will learn the wrong lesson. You will think, “I shouldn’t have bet.” But the math says you should have bet.

This is called Resulting. It is the tendency to judge a decision by its outcome rather than its quality.

In business, we are guilty of Resulting every day. We praise the sales rep who closed a deal because they got lucky with a lead, and we ignore the rep who did incredible discovery work but lost the deal because of a budget freeze.

Over time, this teaches your team that process doesn’t matter. Only luck matters.

You have to start rewarding the quality of the bet.

Did they do the research? Did they have a hypothesis? Did they execute with rigor? If the answer is yes, then the failure is just bad luck. And you should never punish bad luck, just as you should never blindly reward good luck.

The ‘Intelligent Failure’ Award

How do you operationalize this? You make it a ritual.

Create an award. Call it the “Dare Greatly Award” or the “Best Bad Idea.” Give it out once a quarter.

Ask your team to nominate a project that failed but was executed brilliantly.

Maybe it was a marketing campaign that didn’t convert but tested a bold new messaging angle. Maybe it was a product feature that users didn’t adopt but was built with elegant code.

Bring the person to the front of the room. Give them a gift card. Give them applause.

Say this:

“We are celebrating Sarah today not because this project made money, but because she saw a gap in the market and she went for it. The data said no, but the attempt was yes. We need more of this.”

Watch the room when you do this.

You will see a physical release of tension. You are signaling that the safety net is real. You are proving that you value their courage.

Suddenly, the quiet employee in the back raises their hand. “I have an idea I’ve been sitting on because I wasn’t sure it would work.”

That idea might be your next million-dollar product.

Separating Sloth from Strategy

Now, a warning.

This does not mean you celebrate incompetence. There is a difference between a noble failure and a sloppy failure.

A noble failure happens when you do the work, follow the process, and the world just doesn’t cooperate.

A sloppy failure happens when you didn’t prepare, you ignored the data, or you were lazy.

You must be ruthless in distinguishing between the two.

If you celebrate sloppy failure, you breed mediocrity. If you punish noble failure, you breed fear.

The criteria for the celebration must be:

1. Preparation: Did they do their homework?
2. Execution: Did they work hard?
3. Insight: Did we learn something valuable from the loss?

If those three boxes are checked, pop the champagne.

The Psychological Safety Net

Amy Edmondson at Harvard coined the term “Psychological Safety.” It is the belief that you will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

Celebrating the attempt is the fastest way to build this safety.

When a team member sees that their worth is not tied to a coin flip, they become more honest. They share their half-baked ideas. They admit when they are stuck.

Innovation is a volume game. You need a hundred bad ideas to find one good one. If your team is afraid to look stupid, they will filter out the ninety-nine bad ideas, but they will also filter out the one weird idea that could have changed everything.

You want a high volume of attempts. You want a high velocity of experimentation.

The Long Game of Talent Retention

High performers get bored easily. They want to be challenged. They want to test their limits.

If you put them in a box where they are only allowed to do things that are guaranteed to succeed, they will leave. They will go to a startup that lets them break things.

By celebrating the attempt, you are telling your high performers: “This is a playground. This is a lab. I trust you to push the envelope.”

This creates a sticky culture. It creates a sense of adventure.

It turns work from a series of obligations into a series of quests.

Redefining Success

Ultimately, you have to redefine what success looks like for your team.

Success is not just hitting the number. Success is the rate of learning.

If you hit the number but learned nothing, you are stagnant. You are vulnerable to disruption.

If you missed the number but learned exactly why, and you have a plan to fix it, you are growing.

Look at your team today. Who tried something hard this week? Who took a risk?

Go over to their desk. Send them a Slack message.

“Hey, I saw what you tried with that client. It didn’t work out, but I loved the approach. Keep swinging.”

That two-second message is worth more than a thousand dollars in bonuses.

It tells them that you see them. It tells them that you value their spirit.

And tomorrow, they will swing harder.