Failure Tolerance
The capacity to accept and learn from failures without excessive negative response.
Also known as: Tolerance for failure, Failure acceptance capacity, Risk tolerance
Category: Concepts
Tags: failures, resilience, cultures, psychology, innovations
Explanation
Failure tolerance is the capacity - individual or organizational - to accept and learn from failures without excessive negative emotional, behavioral, or systemic responses. High failure tolerance enables: experimentation, risk-taking, honest feedback, and continuous learning. Low failure tolerance creates: fear-based conservatism, blame cultures, hidden problems, and stagnation. Individual failure tolerance involves: emotional resilience, identity separation from performance, and learning orientation. Organizational failure tolerance involves: psychological safety, blameless cultures, and appropriate failure response policies. Building failure tolerance requires: exposure to manageable failures, developing recovery practices, and separating failure types (tolerating intelligent failures while preventing preventable ones). Context matters - some domains require low failure tolerance (surgery, aviation) while others benefit from high tolerance (innovation, learning). For knowledge workers, building failure tolerance means: gradually expanding comfort with risk, developing reliable recovery practices, and cultivating environments where appropriate failures are accepted as learning opportunities.
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