Culture shows its colours when things get hardest

SUCCESS HIDES CRACKS. Failure finds them. In the glow of achievement, an organisation's culture basks in false validation. Town halls echo with applause. Corporate values beam from posters. Everyone appears aligned. But it's in failure—when targets are missed, launches flop, or crises erupt—that the true character of a culture is laid bare.

- ROHIT OHRIFounder, Ohriginal

Failure strips away the theatre. It exposes whether your culture is built on trust or blame. Do people feel safe taking responsibility, or are they too scared to speak up? In blame-prone environments, setbacks trigger finger-pointing and cover-ups. Fear of repercussions makes people hide mistakes, which only deepens problems and corrodes trust. By contrast, resilient cultures treat failure as a collective learning opportunity, not a cause for shame. Leaders meet failure with humility and ask, "What have we learned? What will we do differently?"

At Ohriginal, I often say: "Failure is not just feedback. It's a flashlight."

In one organisation I worked with, a product launch fell short. Instead of blame, leadership hosted a "Failure Festival"—an open forum to share lessons. The result? Innovation, not insecurity. People felt heard, and ideas flowed again.

In another company, a high-profile campaign failed, and the response was deafening silence—no debrief, no acknowledgment, just hushed whispers and quiet exits. Trust haemorrhaged. Employees learned failure was something to hide, not discuss.