Failure 1
We just sat there, staring at the screen. Seven seconds. That’s all that was left.
When you’re building credibility from zero, every workshop matters. Every client testimonial is gold. Every piece of content represents hours you can’t get back.
Two weeks ago, at the end of delivering a successful Insights Discovery workshop, participants were sharing their takeaways from the session; stories about breakthrough moments with their teams. It was humbling to listen to the impact the workshop had made. We captured all of this on video after taking their explicit consent. We even celebrated afterward with seafood by the beach, feeling like we’d nailed it.
Later that evening, we were excited to watch the recording. A little narcissistic? 🫣 That’s when we realised the phone had recorded only the first 7 seconds and the last 2 seconds. The rest was gone.
We just sat there, staring at the screen. All those genuine, heartfelt stories… vanished.
“No worries,” Jirina said, “we collected written feedback too.“
That’s when the world really came crashing down. The feedback forms were stored on an email we could no longer access. WPForms couldn’t help. The hosting company couldn’t help.
The authentic client testimonials we’d captured had simply disappeared.
We moved on, thinking there would be more workshops, and there was one the very next day.
Failure 2
We were delivering a full-day workshop to a high-potential client. We knew we had to deliver our best, so we spent hours designing, building, and customising the entire experience. We had even specially designed a framework for one of the workshop themes. We were confident we had everything covered.
During the workshop, when we were facilitating the framework implementation process, we could see it wasn’t landing well. We failed to get their buy-in. Standing there, watching our carefully crafted framework fall flat, was brutal. The participants weren’t to blame; we hadn’t foreseen the complications.
In that moment, we made a quick call to drop the framework and shift to something we knew works every time. It wasn’t elegant, but it got the room back on track.
It reminded us that even the most carefully designed content means nothing if you can't read the room and adapt in the moment.
Failure 3
While we were recovering from the above two setbacks, we decided to create more e-learning modules to provide ongoing support to our clients. To ensure the modules were engaging, interactive, and meaningful, we used multiple learning modalities: images, text, audio, and video.
The first set of 4 videos took us the longest time since we were trying something new. After 4 hours of recording, we finally felt like we’d gotten something right. Only after uploading them did we discover that the video quality wasn’t up to standard; excess brightness and distorted colouring made them unwatchable.
All four videos. Four hours of work. Back to square one.
Jirina just looked at me and started laughing. “Well, at least we know what NOT to do now.“
We re-recorded all the videos. Fortunately, this time we didn’t spend 4 hours getting it right. 😁
Silver Lining
Complete disclosure: in the past couple of weeks, we experienced impatience, frustration, deep disappointment... the whole gamut. There were so many occasions where we could have pointed fingers and blamed each other.
Thankfully, we’ve done enough work on ourselves and know how to regulate our emotions. In those moments, instead of spiralling into blame mode, we simply vented our frustrations, took a day off, and came back to have a problem-solving conversation.
One thing that helped us move along and not get stuck in our own shadows was normalising ‘failures‘. We see them as part of growth; another side of the coin. We genuinely believe every single failure has taught us something we couldn’t have learned any other way.
Our story has just begun, and we want to thank you for being part of this messy phase of our journey.
How do normally you handle failures?
