The only place I ever worked at that "celebrated failure" (their own words) was an overgrown startup with no customers that was unable to ship a single product.
Now I find the expression almost repulsive. Failure is part of work, not punishing failure is ok, celebrating it by saying "we learned so much" is a serious company smell for me.
THIS. I have seen cultures that performatively celebrate failure:
* Where, when systems fail, they go through the motions and jump straight to celebrating. "Thank you for finding this, X!" "Thank you for fixing this, Y!"
* Where a post-incident report is little more than "We found defect X and then we fixed it"
* Where psychological safety means "let's avoid talking about this and the risk management systems that allowed this to happen because the people responsible for those areas might feel attacked. Trust that the managers have dealt with the situation"
We need to be more specific than just saying "celebrate failure" to non technical managers, or this is what we get.
Now I find the expression almost repulsive. Failure is part of work, not punishing failure is ok, celebrating it by saying "we learned so much" is a serious company smell for me.