I was facilitating a strategy session several years ago with about twenty-five senior leaders from one of the best-known companies in our region. We were there to work on strategic priorities, but that wasn't the real challenge. The real challenge was that nobody in the room seemed especially eager to try anything new.
The ideas themselves weren't the problem. There were plenty of smart suggestions on the table, and a few of them were genuinely bold. What was missing was any real appetite for risk. Almost every promising idea was immediately followed by some version of retreat: a caveat, a hedge, a reason to slow down, a reason to stay with what was familiar. It was clear that this was an organization that had learned that the penalty for a failed experiment felt worse than the penalty for standing still.
Then the CEO said something that changed the conversation.
She said, "Let's stop calling it failure. I want to call it tuition. I'm happy for us to pay tuition to learn a lesson, but I'll be damned if I'm willing for us to pay to take the same class twice."
What struck me in that moment was not just that the room relaxed, though it did. You could see people recalibrating almost immediately. The comment created permission, but it also did something more important: it established a standard. Trying something and learning from it was not only acceptable but expected. At the same time, repeating the same avoidable mistake was not.
That distinction matters. "Failure" is usually heard as a verdict. Once that word enters the room, people tend to move into defensiveness, blame, or caution. They become more interested in self-protection than in learning. "Tuition" changes the meaning of the cost. It suggests that some missteps are part of the price of doing serious work, especially when you are attempting something new. It shifts the conversation away from fault and toward learning.
But that reframe only works if the learning moves in both directions. If you paid the tuition, you owe the organization the lesson. And before you sign up for something new, you should ask whether someone else already took that class.
That means the lesson has to actually travel. Not as a vague summary, and not as a post-mortem that disappears into a folder no one opens again. The useful part is the specific knowledge that came from the attempt: what was tried, what happened, what assumptions turned out to be wrong, and what others should know before trying something similar. Organizations that get better are not always the ones that avoid mistakes. More often, they are the ones that become disciplined about turning mistakes into shared knowledge.
That is why I keep coming back to what that CEO said. Her reframe made room for intelligent risk without making room for sloppiness. It treated learning as an asset and repetition as the real problem.
Most organizations are willing to absorb the cost of learning. What they are much worse at is making sure the lesson survives the moment.