Fear of Sharing Failure
When silence costs more than the defect
The Million-Euro Silence
Cold October morning. It was only a few months after I joined the bank. My team had just rolled out a new connectivity solution for an e-trading platform. Buried deep in one of the adapters was a flaw: in a rare corner case, for one specific trade type, prices were inverted.
It never appeared in testing. In production, we were hit three times before anyone realised. We shut down the connection and started tracing the bad trades. That’s when the real failure began. Instead of communicating straight away that our testing had been too thin, I looked for alternative explanations – any explanation that might soften the “how did you miss this?” conversation. I grasped for precious minutes, chasing theories that didn’t matter, while the market kept moving.
By the time I ran out of excuses, the inverted trades had become costly to unwind. The defect was small. The fear of admitting failure was expensive. I didn’t lose my job that day, but I learned a lesson I will never forget.
The Quiet Collapse
Agile talks about “failing fast,” but when something actually fails, the room goes quiet. A sprint derails, a release breaks production, an integration drags for weeks – yet the dashboards stay green and the slide decks still celebrate velocity. People slap on work-arounds, apologise in private messages, and smooth the numbers until they look clean. Silence feels safer than the truth.
Failing Quietly in Plain Sight
It’s no mystery why. Wins get paraded in public. Mistakes get handled like personal flaws. “Fail fast” morphs into “fail where no one can see.” Sprint reviews show the single feature that still works. Retrospectives lean on vague “could-have-dones.” Say “this crashed and burned” and you’ll trigger governance alarms, leadership summons, and uncomfortable questions. Teams learn the trade-off fast: honesty costs, spin is free.
Failure Is Political
In every bank I’ve worked with, bad news always brings process but not always help. Miss a delivery date and you spend time defending estimates to committees instead of fixing the issue. The bigger the programme, the heavier the theatre: RAG status packs, long status updates, risk registers that somehow exclude the one risk that matters – no one is speaking plainly.
Blame-Free Isn’t Optional Underwater
Some financial institutions treat failure like a personal defect. You slip, you get investigated. You escalate, you get scrutinised. That logic builds a system where people would rather say nothing than risk being held responsible for saying too much.
Other domains handle failure very differently. Not because they’re kinder - because they have to.
In high-reliability environments, the cost of silence is existential. Walk a nuclear submarine or an air-force flight line and you’ll see a different reflex. A strange vibration, a hiss from a valve, a rivet that’s out of spec – it gets flagged on the spot, rank be damned. Nobody waits for a meeting or hides behind “we’ll monitor it.” They don’t need retros to remind them to speak up. They speak up because if they don’t, people die.
Finance isn’t life or death. But money moves fast. And when truth gets delayed, small gaps become real losses. The cost curve may be different, but the need for reflex is the same: see it, say it, fix it.
An Operating Model That Survives Impact
At one bank I worked with, they started shifting the culture in a way that actually stuck. It wasn’t some branded initiative or off-site trust fall. They just changed what people talked about.
Failures became part of the conversation – not just inside teams, but across the whole organisation. They showed up in job interviews. New hires were asked not just what they’d built, but what had broken under their watch. Senior leaders shared their worst screw-ups openly, with context, but no sugarcoating. One told the story of a trading outage that cost many figures. Another shared how their entire roadmap had been thrown out by users after launch. No one was mocked. No one was fired. And the message was clear: the risk isn’t in failing – it’s in hiding it.
That shift changed how teams operated. Engineers didn’t wait to spin up governance forums before raising an issue. Product owners called out when priorities were wrong. They moved fast, with real risk appetite – not recklessness, not cowboy coding, but clear-eyed, transparent action.
It didn’t kill accountability. It killed fear.
Consequences, Not Posters
Psychological safety isn’t about tone. It’s about consequence.
You can plaster the walls with “speak up” slogans and run vulnerability workshops every quarter – it won’t matter. What matters is what happens the moment someone tells the truth that no one wants to hear.
Do they get dragged into escalation meetings? Do they get sidelined on the next project? Or do they get backed – with focus, not fanfare?
Teams notice fast, and they calibrate accordingly. Not to what leaders say, but to what happens after the first real failure shows up.
Lars