Failure & risk
失敗とリスクFAIL
How mistakes, incidents and risk are handled: whether errors are spoken about, how postmortems work, and how cautious organisations are with new technology and data.
41 claimsWell attested 14Attested 21Thin 6
Related scales
These scales describe national averages that bear on this theme. They place countries relative to one another; they say nothing about any one engineer.
- HofstedeUncertainty avoidanceTolerant of ambiguity ↔ Avoids ambiguityHow threatened people feel by ambiguous or unknown situations. Not the same as risk avoidance.
Japan日本JP3 claims
South Korea韓国KR3 claims
Introducing its 2021 developer conference SLASH21, Toss presented a culture that values fast execution over fear of failure.
Well attested1 source2021kr-failure-1
After a fire at the Pangyo data center caused a major outage in October 2022, Kakao presented its root cause analysis and prevention measures at if(kakao) dev 2022 that December. The measures include data center redundancy and triple redundancy for operations tooling.
Well attested2 sources2022kr-failure-2
Woowa Brothers, the company behind Baemin, lists "don't blame people" among its principles for KPT retrospectives. An SK Devocean presentation says the hardest step in a postmortem is not holding the person responsible to account.
Well attested2 sources2021kr-failure-3
China中国CN2 claims
Fupan, a review method named after replaying a game of Go move by move, is used in Chinese companies. A former Lenovo executive calls it a pillar of the company's culture and cites founder Liu Chuanzhi's instruction to think things through without sparing yourself.
Thin2 sourcescn-failure-1
Meyer gives the example of Chinese managers learning not to criticize colleagues in public.
Attested1 sourcecn-failure-2
IndiaインドIN3 claims
According to Meyer's 2017 HBR article, in top-down decision-making cultures, India among them, decisions are made quickly but can change as new input or arguments arise. A decision is treated as a placeholder that can be adjusted later, not a firm commitment.
Attested1 source2017in-failure-1
On Meyer's Scheduling scale, India is on the flexible-time side, described as running several things in parallel, accepting interruptions and prioritizing adaptation.
Attested1 sourcein-failure-2
The claim that offshore teams do not escalate bad news rests on anecdotes on Hacker News. Other HN commenters counter that US-side managers often have not built a structure that invites pushback.
Thin2 sources2024in-failure-3
United StatesアメリカUS2 claims
The Google SRE Book (2016) codifies the blameless postmortem. It identifies contributing causes without blaming individuals or teams and assumes that everyone involved acted with good intentions.
Well attested1 source2016us-failure-1
At F8 in 2014, Zuckerberg changed Facebook's motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infra." His reason was that at Facebook's scale, the time spent fixing breakage outweighed the gain in speed.
Attested1 source2014Datedus-failure-2
United KingdomイギリスUK4 claims
The GDS Way incident management standard requires incident reviews to follow a blameless post mortem culture.
Well attested1 sourcegb-failure-1
GOV.UK publishes incident reports, such as one on increased error rates on 5 January 2022. A former GDS staff member wrote in 2018 that publishing them builds trust and an atmosphere where people can learn safely.
Well attested2 sources2022gb-failure-2
In a 2019 blog post, the London fintech Monzo explained that it runs on-call with two people and records every incident. The Pragmatic Engineer warns against "blameless buck-passing," where blame is shifted while claiming to be blameless.
Well attested2 sources2019gb-failure-3
In the Post Office Horizon scandal, testimony that Horizon was "robust" was used despite bugs in the Fujitsu system, and more than 900 people were wrongly convicted. The Court of Appeal found that the Post Office had in effect reversed the burden of proof.
Attested2 sourcesgb-failure-4
GermanyドイツDE5 claims
In the Randstad-ifo HR survey (Q3 2026, 469 companies), 28% of firms with 500 or more employees said mistakes are discussed openly, against 62% of firms with 49 or fewer. 34% of large firms see their error culture as a barrier to innovation, while 56% of all firms report no effect.
Well attested1 source2026de-failure-1
In a YouGov survey commissioned by AXA (May 2024, 2,132 people), 25% said they cannot admit mistakes at work, rising to 44% among those under 25. 23% expect negative consequences if they disclose a mistake.
Well attested1 source2024de-failure-2
According to an article on an EY survey (around 2023, about 1,000 people in machinery, automotive, finance, and other sectors), 64% of managers did not admit, or only partly admitted, their own mistakes from the past two years.
Attested1 source2023de-failure-3
In a survey by the industry association Bitkom (October 2024), 70% of companies said data protection hinders digitalization. At 63%, innovation projects failed or never started because of data protection rules. A follow-up survey put that share at 77%.
Attested2 sources2024de-failure-4
A study comparing GDPR coverage in Germany, France, the UK, and the US (Sanford & Yasseri, 2021) found that German and French media tend to frame privacy as a fundamental right, while British and American media focus on compliance and commerce.
Attested1 source2021de-failure-5
FranceフランスFR3 claims
France scores 86 on Hofstede's uncertainty avoidance (UAI), higher than Germany's 65. The Culture Factor explains a high score as a tendency to reduce ambiguity through rules and procedures.
Attested1 source2026fr-failure-1
In GEM 2024, 42.7% of French adults who see business opportunities cited fear of failure as a barrier to starting a business. GEM puts the German figure at about two in five for 2025, so the gap is small.
Well attested2 sources2025fr-failure-2
The CNIL imposed 87 sanctions in 2024, with fines totaling about €55.21 million, up from 21 sanctions in 2022 and 42 in 2023. Of the 69 sanctions under the simplified procedure, 11 were for breaches of data security obligations.
Well attested1 source2025fr-failure-3
The Nordics北欧NORD3 claims
In Kniberg's 2014 video, Spotify called itself fail-friendly and valued fast recovery over failure avoidance. Postmortems dealt with what happened and what to change rather than who was to blame, and systems were designed to keep the blast radius small.
Attested1 source2014Datednordics-failure-1
Supercell celebrates the lessons from killed games with champagne. Paananen described the practice in his 2016 BAFTA lecture and said at Slush 2024 that it continues.
Attested2 sources2024nordics-failure-2
Vuori and Huy (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2016) attribute part of Nokia's loss in the smartphone race to fear inside the organization. Middle managers, afraid of top management and peers, held back bad news, and top managers overestimated the company's technical capabilities.
Attested1 source2016nordics-failure-3
NetherlandsオランダNL2 claims
ING moved to a Spotify-style structure of squads and tribes in 2015. In a McKinsey interview (2017), it described each tribe writing down its results and biggest learnings every quarter and celebrating both successes and failures.
Attested1 source2017nl-failure-1
According to Thomke (HBR, 2020), only about 10% of Booking.com's experiments produce positive results; the other 90% or so do not support the hypothesis. The company runs its experiments on that assumption.
Attested1 source2020nl-failure-2
IsraelイスラエルIL4 claims
Arieli argues that Israel is a society that does not shy away from risk and that children are raised to accept failure as part of learning. The Publishers Weekly review criticized the book for being unsure whether it is a parenting guide or a cultural analysis.
Thin1 source2019il-failure-1
After October 7, 2023, an estimated 15% to 20% of tech employees were mobilized for reserve duty, and in the war's third week about 70% of tech firms reported disruptions. Even so, the sector raised $3.1 billion in 220 rounds by spring 2024.
Attested2 sources2024il-failure-2
According to Calcalist, reserve duty delayed Wix's AI design product by one quarter, and Intel moved some work to teams in India.
Attested1 sourceil-failure-3
2025 brought a series of large acquisitions: Wiz ($32 billion, Google), CyberArk ($25 billion, Palo Alto Networks) and Armis ($7.75 billion, ServiceNow). Calcalist estimates the total value of acquisitions of Israeli-founded companies at about $80 billion.
Attested1 source2025il-failure-4
BrazilブラジルBR1 claim
Nubank acquired Plataformatec (the company behind Elixir) in January 2020 and Cognitect (Clojure/Datomic) in July 2020, bringing in the firms behind its own technology stack. According to Cognitect, Nubank then had 600 Clojure developers running 500 microservices.
Attested2 sources2020br-failure-1
PolandポーランドPL2 claims
In GEM data, 52% of people who saw a business opportunity held back from starting a business for fear of failure (2023), above the European average of 45%. Only 2.6% of non-entrepreneurs intend to start a business within three years, far below the European average of 12%.
Well attested2 sources2024pl-failure-1
In the same 2023 GEM survey, 3.4% of adults aged 18-64 had discontinued a business in the previous 12 months, close to the European average of 3.3%. The pandemic was the most common reason (36%), followed by lack of profitability (18%).
Well attested1 source2024pl-failure-2
UkraineウクライナUA4 claims
In a July-August 2024 Deloitte and AmCham survey of 139 executives at member companies, 76% said prolonged blackouts affect their operations. At the same time, 88% said they were prepared for outages and 94% had or were developing a business continuity plan.
Attested1 source2024ua-failure-1
IT companies are reported to have handled blackouts by setting up coworking spaces with generators and Starlink and by subsidizing employees' backup power.
Thin1 sourceua-failure-2
Central bank figures reported by AIN.UA show IT service exports peaking at $7.3 billion in 2022 and falling to about $6.4 billion in 2024 (down 4.2% year on year). According to dev.ua, exports recovered slightly to about $6.66 billion in 2025.
Attested2 sources2026ua-failure-3
An article by the outsourcing firm Alcor, citing DOU surveys, says 38% of IT workers feel burned out at work. Thirty percent of IT specialists serving in the army receive payments from their IT employer.
Thin1 source2026ua-failure-4