Continuous improvement, business transformation and change management have an underworld. Yes, an actual black market of knowledge. People hoard shortcuts, hacks and “lessons learned” like contraband. They only trade them when it makes them look brilliant. What’s the currency nobody spends? Failures.
- Projects that tanked.
- Pilots crushed by resistance.
- Kaizens that died on the shop floor.
- Automation “saviors” that became expensive paperweights. These get buried deeper than grandma’s secret cookie recipe.
Why? Because in corporate culture, failure = shame.
Knowledge about failures is worth far more than success stories.
Success tells you what might work. Failure tells you what definitely won’t. One hands out hope, the other saves time, money and morale.
Explaining the black market
People hoard failed experiments and initiatives as social capital: “I know something others don’t.”
- Teams repeat the same mistakes because the lessons never leave the basement.
- Leaders reward wins and punish visible failure, so burying “negative knowledge” is rational behavior.
As a result, continuous improvement and change initiatives become PowerPoint theater. Lots of confetti slides. Very little actual continuous improvement or transformation.
My proposal: The continuous improvement “don’t do it” playbook
It’s not another glossy binder. It’s not another “how-to” full of polished wins. Imagine a living, searchable, proudly ugly repository of what not to do.
What it contains:
- Failure logs: Short, anonymized accounts of what we tried, why it failed and concrete indicators.
- Resistance maps: Who slowed the change, how they behaved and what was missed.
False-savior exhibits: Automations and tools that created more work than value. - Leadership diaries: How decisions, or the lack of them, derailed projects.
- Quick “don’t repeat this” checklist: Three- to five-line warnings teams can read in 60 seconds.
- Fix attempts and outcomes: What recovery options were tried and whether they worked.
Format rules:
- Brutally short entries (200 to 500 words).
- Anonymized where needed.
- Tags for quick search (e.g. automation, resistance, scope-creep).
- A one-line TL;DR for busy managers: “Don’t do this if X, Y, Z.”
Why would this actually work?
- Knowledge compounds: If one failure stops 10 teams from wasting months, ROI is exponential.
- Saves morale: Fewer repeated failures mean fewer people demotivated by déjà vu disasters.
- Builds humility: Publicly owning failure flattens the “hero leader” myth and promotes genuine learning.
- Turns continuous improvement into practice, not performance.
If you think it’s uncomfortable, good, discomfort is where real learning hides.
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How to start: Three practical moves you can run next week
- Pilot the playbook in one function: Start with operations, IT or HR functions which feel the pain of repeated mistakes. Create five entries from recent failed projects. Publish them internally with leader sign-off.
- Incentivize generosity: Create a small recognition (and non-punitive) reward for teams that contribute failures with clear lessons learned. Reward sharing, not just wins.
- Make it part of onboarding: Require new managers to read three “Don’t Do” entries before they can start sponsoring a continuous improvement project or a change initiative.
Leadership’s role (non-negotiable)
- Sponsor the playbook publicly. Read entries aloud in town halls.
- Say this out loud: “If you hide a failure, you’ll lose the right to teach.”
- Reward transparent sharing. Firewalls of shame must come down.
Shareable pull-quotes
- “Your next breakthrough might not come from a shiny success story, it may come from a failure someone was too scared to admit.”
- “Don’t hide your mistakes. Gift them.”
- “Knowledge about failures is 10-times more valuable than success slides.”
A small, controversial ask
If you’re serious about continuous improvement or any change initiative, stop polishing only the trophies. Build the playbook of things not to do. Publish it. Pride in a perfect record is the enemy of progress. If you’re brave: share one short failure in the comments. Anonymize it. Tag it.