For effective lessons learned and continuous improvement we need to move towards a failure culture.

The major challenge to overcome is to talk about mistakes, failures, scrap rate and rework without finger pointing.
Without open communication and common understanding what went wrong, failures will be repeated.

Fingerpointing – making people responsible for reasons, not taking responsibility for your own mistakes will not support establishing a failure culture. Naming persons, departments, functions, responsibilities need to be excluded talking about failures, or root cause analysis and improvement will fail.

To talk about issues, conflicts, failures, mistakes is the initial step to improve.