In my facilitated workshop on respecting success, I have an exercise that looks to see how members of the workshop can build a tower using balloons and tape. There are few guidelines other than to see how a structure could be made that goes high and stays stable.
Practicing the construction of the tower takes a good bit of failure to determine what might be the best way to get as high as possible. There are festivals in which towers created involved hundreds of people supporting 10+ 'stories' of humans. In order to test their limits, they must try new things which will fail.
Within these failures comes learning and innovation. Failure provides us inspiration to grow and to drive towards the possibilities.
I see so many organizations who are afraid to push to failure. They are much more confortable pushing to succeed. This process sets goals that can somewhat easily be achieved, even blown out of the water. I was leading a group at a former company where our finance support refused to accept the revenue number I recommended for plan because he thought it was too high to be attainable. If we didn't hit the number, other groups would have to pick up the slack. By the way, we killed the number they set.
People celebrate these "success" goals but they won't have the self-satisfaction in the knowledge they did the best they could with the resources they had. To use a sporting reference. They beat a poor team by 10 points when they should have beat them by 20 or more.
Look at your leadership. Look at the culture of the team and organization you are part of. Are you all pushing to failure? Are you striving to see how high the tower can be built before it falls?
How can you lead to failure? How can you get others to push to failure? It's an intersting question to ponder.