You’ve heard it in every high-stakes boardroom and locker room pep talk. Someone slams their fist on the table and declares that failure is not an option. It sounds heroic. It sounds like the kind of grit that gets people to the moon. In fact, that's exactly where we think it came from—the tension-filled rooms of Mission Control during the Apollo 13 crisis.
But here’s the thing. Gene Kranz, the legendary NASA Flight Director, never actually said it during the mission.
It’s a movie line. Scriptwriters for the 1995 film Apollo 13 invented the phrase to capture Kranz’s vibe, but in reality, the mindset at NASA was far more nuanced. If failure truly wasn't an option, they never would have launched a single rocket. Space flight is essentially a series of controlled failures and course corrections. By turning a Hollywood script into a management mantra, we’ve accidentally created a culture where people are too terrified to admit when things are going sideways.
The Apollo 13 Reality Check
Let’s look at what actually happened in 1970. When the oxygen tank blew, the team didn't just ignore the possibility of death. They obsessed over it.
Jerry Bostick, who was the Flight Controller on duty, later explained that the movie line was a distillation of the "can-do" attitude, but the actual process was deeply analytical. The engineers were constantly calculating "failure modes." They were looking for ways things could break so they could build redundancies. In the real world, "failure is not an option" usually leads to "failure is something we hide until it’s too late to fix."
Think about the difference.
If you tell a team of software developers that failure is not an option, they stop taking risks. They stop innovating. They build the safest, most boring version of a product because they’re scared of the fallout if a bold idea flops.
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NASA didn't succeed because they banned failure; they succeeded because they mastered it. They simulated every possible disaster months before the launch. They made failure an intimate acquaintance so that when the real crisis hit, it didn't feel like an ending—it felt like a problem to be solved.
Why Psychology Says We’re Wrong About This
Modern psychological research, particularly the work of Dr. Amy Edmondson at Harvard, suggests that the "no failure" mindset kills psychological safety.
When a leader shouts that failure isn't an option, the "amygdala hijack" kicks in for everyone else in the room. Your brain enters survival mode. You stop thinking creatively and start thinking about self-preservation. In complex industries like healthcare or aviation, this is where people die. If a nurse is afraid to point out a doctor's mistake because "failure is not an option" in that hospital’s culture, the mistake happens anyway. It just stays quiet.
Edmondson talks about the "Intelligent Failure." This is the kind of failure we should actually be hunting for. It happens when you’re exploring new territory, the risk is calculated, and the potential lesson is worth the cost.
Compare that to "Basic Failure," which is just someone being lazy or skipping a checklist. When we lump them all together under a "failure is not an option" banner, we lose the ability to distinguish between a stupid mistake and a necessary experiment.
The Business Cost of Perfectionism
Silicon Valley loves to say "move fast and break things," which is basically the polar opposite of the NASA myth. But even that has its limits.
The middle ground is where the real money is made.
Take Pixar, for example. Ed Catmull, one of the founders, famously said that all their movies "suck" early on. They embrace the fact that the first draft is a failure. They have a "Braintrust" where people tear the work apart. If they operated under the belief that failure wasn't an option, they’d never get past the first storyboard because everyone would be too paralyzed to show "bad" work.
Honestly? Most businesses that claim failure isn't an option are just hiding behind a lack of transparency.
I've seen it in dozens of consulting gigs. A CEO sets an impossible target. The VPs know it’s impossible. But because "failure is not an option," they massage the data. They "green-shift" the reports—turning red status updates into yellow, and yellow into green—until the whole thing collapses in the fourth quarter. It’s a slow-motion train wreck fueled by a catchy slogan.
The Engineering Perspective: Margin of Safety
Engineers don't build bridges by wishing away gravity. They use a Factor of Safety.
If a bridge needs to hold 10,000 pounds, they build it to hold 30,000. They plan for the failure of a single cable or a rusted bolt. This is the antithesis of the "no failure" mantra. It’s an active acknowledgement that the world is messy and things break.
- Design for "Graceful Degradation."
- Build in "Kill Switches."
- Create "Pre-mortems."
The pre-mortem is one of the coolest tools in management. Before you launch a project, gather the team and say: "It’s one year from now. This project was a total disaster. Why did it fail?" This gives people permission to speak the truth without feeling like they’re being "negative" or "not team players." It turns the fear of failure into an analytical asset.
How to Pivot the Mantra
If you’re a leader, you need a better phrase. "Failure is not an option" is great for a movie poster, but it’s terrible for a Monday morning meeting.
Try: "Fear is not an option, but failure is a data point."
Or maybe: "We don't fail, we learn. But we try not to learn the same thing twice."
That second one is key. Real failure isn't missing a target; it's missing the target and then refusing to look at why you missed it. It’s the repetition of errors that sinks companies, not the errors themselves.
Look at SpaceX. Their early days were a masterclass in failing forward. Their first three rocket launches failed. They were down to their last bit of funding. If Elon Musk had truly believed failure wasn't an option, he probably would have quit after launch two. Instead, they treated each explosion as a laboratory. They looked at the telemetry, found the leaked valve or the vibration issue, fixed it, and went again.
Now, they’re the dominant force in the industry. They succeeded because they made failure an option—specifically, a frequent and informative one.
Redefining Success in a High-Stakes World
We need to stop using 1950s military-style rhetoric for 21st-century creative and technical work. The world is too complex for "black and white" success metrics.
When we say failure is not an option, we are essentially asking people to lie to us. We are incentivizing the concealment of risks. Instead, we should be building systems that are antifragile—a term coined by Nassim Taleb. An antifragile system doesn't just withstand stress; it actually gets better because of it.
Think of your muscles. You go to the gym and you literally tear the fibers. You "fail" under the weight. But the body responds by building back stronger. If you never pushed to the point of failure, you’d never grow. Organizations are the same.
Actionable Steps to Move Past the Myth
Instead of relying on a hollow slogan, implement these three structural changes to handle risk more effectively:
- Institute "Flash Reports." Every Friday, have team leads submit the "Red Flag of the Week." It doesn't have to be a disaster, just one thing that didn't go as planned. This normalizes the act of reporting problems early.
- Reward the "Smart Miss." When someone takes a calculated risk that doesn't pan out, publicly praise the process they used. Show the rest of the company that you value the courage to experiment more than the safety of the status quo.
- Kill the "Blame Game." Conduct blameless post-mortems. Focus on the process that allowed the error to happen rather than the person who made it. If a human can break the system by pushing one wrong button, the problem is the system design, not the human.
The Apollo 13 crew didn't survive because of a slogan. They survived because of duct tape, carbon dioxide scrubbers, and a room full of people who were allowed to admit that they were in deep trouble. They embraced the reality of their failure and worked their way out of it.
The next time you feel the urge to say failure is not an option, take a breath. Ask yourself if you’d rather have a team that’s "perfect" on paper or a team that knows exactly how to fix a leaking oxygen tank in the dark.
Choose the second one every time.