{
  "id": 12371892,
  "title": "How to build a ‘safe-to-fail’ culture for IT teams — and why you should",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/06/how-to-build-a-safe-to-fail-culture-for-it-teams-and-why-you-should",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-06T11:37:59.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Computerworld",
    "slug": "computerworld",
    "url": "https://www.computerworld.com/article/4223580/how-to-build-a-safe-to-fail-culture-for-it-teams-and-why-you-should.html"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "To foster a \"safe-to-fail\" culture within IT teams, organizations must remove barriers that discourage experimentation and innovation. Employees may be hesitant to use new technologies due to concerns about negative performance reviews or potential security risks, which can hinder the adoption of valuable AI and automation tools. By establishing a culture that permits controlled experimentation, businesses can mitigate these risks while still encouraging the exploration of innovative solutions.\n\nA safe-to-fail culture allows IT workers to try new ideas without fearing that their failures will impact their careers. Michael Morris, global head of platform and talent at Randstad Digital, emphasizes that this type of culture is about designing experiments that are manageable, reversible, and valuable, even if a failure occurs. Daniel Burrus, founder and CEO at Burrus Research, stresses the importance of separating experimentation from day-to-day performance evaluations, ensuring that employees are not penalized for attempting new technologies during their regular work hours.\n\nCompanies like Typeform demonstrate how to implement this approach by providing dedicated time and financial resources for employees to engage with new technologies during work hours. Additionally, Typeform offers a personal budget for training, certifications, and specialized tools, enabling workers to explore a variety of resources tailored to their roles. This flexibility helps employees address specific business problems and sets clear goals for their experiments.\n\nTo prevent experimentation from becoming an unfocused activity, IT leaders should focus on disciplined pilots with specific objectives. Each experiment should have a defined problem to solve, a clear hypothesis, measurable outcomes, and a predetermined timeframe. By emphasizing these elements, leaders can ensure that experiments remain productive and provide actionable insights into the effectiveness of new technologies.\n\nTransparency and clear boundaries are also critical in building a safe-to-fail culture. Dom Profico, CTO at Bridgenext, highlights the need to educate employees about the company's rules and risk tolerance regarding new tools. Providing a detailed understanding of acceptable practices and safeguards can alleviate concerns about potential security issues and empower employees to experiment more confidently. Organizations should communicate these boundaries clearly and implement systems to prevent mistakes from affecting customers or users.\n\nWhile a safe-to-fail culture cannot eliminate all risks, it does require a willingness to accept a certain level of risk in exchange for fostering innovation. Ravi Soin, CIO and CISO at Smartsheet, describes this balance as creating a culture of \"yes, but safely.\" By providing employees with access to approved systems, clear guidelines on data usage, and designated channels for involving IT or security when necessary, businesses can encourage experimentation while maintaining necessary controls. This approach helps IT teams adopt new technologies more effectively and turn failures into valuable learning experiences.",
  "summary": "Companies continue to invest in AI, automation, developer tools, and other new technologies. But they may not get the results they expect if IT workers don’t have the time, resources, or freedom to learn how to use them. IT workers may be afraid to try new tools if they think a failed experiment could hurt their performance reviews. They may also be unsure which tools and data they can use or how…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}