Reframing the stigma of failure with playfulness

Within the field of software development, notions of agile development, failing fast, and learning from your mistakes are ingrained in the culture. However, this is seldom the case for legacy cultural institutions, such as museums. This is detrimental to their innovative potential. The importance of acknowledging failure as a part of innovation was one of the key insights coming out of an action research process involving ten museums from the EU and the USA. Here we will account for the ideas on the value of failure resulting from this process and how one museum partner tried to leverage the learning potential residing in past failures. However, the social stigma surrounding failure proved too strong. Adopting a playful approach to rapid prototyping of ideas, instead, as a way of reframing this stigma, seems more promising. We argue that museums should learn from other sectors that have a less risk-averse approach to innovation and adopt a bolder culture of active experimentation even if it will inevitably involve failure and therefore require a better failure resilience of the organization.