Recently I had the privilege of visiting Stanford University’s d.school, one of the world’s great centres of design thinking. On their wall: a striking installation of letter F’s in every font and form imaginable, clustered around two words — Fail Forward.
The plaque reads: “Early failures are an essential aspect of the innovation process and of one’s growth as a designer.”
I stood there and thought about schools.
We say all the right things, don’t we?
“We want our students to take risks.”
“We celebrate growth mindset.”
“Failure is just feedback.”
But do our systems tell the same story?
We rank students on merit lists, then wonder why so many are paralysed by the fear of being wrong.
We call certain kids our “top students” as if learning were a leaderboard. When a student attempts something ambitious and stumbles, do we lean in with curiosity, or quietly steer them toward something safer next time?
Our structures often whisper what our words won’t say: ‘don’t risk it.’
This isn’t an indictment. Most educators I know genuinely care. The tension isn’t about intention — it’s about the invisible architecture of our schools and the signals it sends every day.
The d.school didn’t put up a poster about failure. They built a wall, enormous, impossible to ignore, as a reminder that struggle isn’t a detour from learning. It is the learning.
What’s the equivalent in your school? Could we retire language like “top students” in favour of something that honours growth and courage, not just those who already arrived?
The young people we’re shaping will graduate into a world asking them to solve problems we can’t yet imagine. The ones who’ll thrive won’t be those best at performing certainty. They’ll be the ones who learned to fail forward.
Let’s give them that gift.
What’s one thing your school does, intentionally or not, that quietly discourages risk-taking?