“Failing fast,” “failing forward” and “Learning from failure” are all the rage in the tech industry right now. The tech company “unicorns” seem to talk endlessly about how they reframe failure into success. And yet, many of us are still required to design and implement backup system capabilities, redundancies, and controls into our software and operations processes. And when those fail, we cringe at the conversation with management that will ensue. So is all this talk of reframing “failure” as “success” within our organizations just that: talk? And what does that look like, anyway? We'll explore mindset, the history it's rooted in, as well as effective methods to move your organization toward it and some land mines to avoid along the way.

J. Paul Reed has over fifteen years experience in the trenches as a build/release engineer, working with such companies as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, Symantec, and Salesforce.

In 2012, he founded