F#!K-UP FESTIVAL
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A festival about everything that went wrong

F#!K-UPFestival

Everybody fucks up.Not everybody learns from it.

A festival for everything that went gloriously, painfully or hilariously wrong — and what we can learn from it.

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Mistakes. Lessons. Progress.Well, that went well.

The premise

We talk a lot about success.

The launch. The transformation. The promotion. The targets we smashed. The project that somehow ended up on a PowerPoint as a best practice.

Less often about the meeting that exploded. The decision that made absolutely no sense. The brilliant idea nobody wanted. The project we kept alive six months after everybody knew it was dead.

Shame.

Because there is usually more to learn from those stories.

Welcome to F#!K-UP FESTIVAL.

The format

How does a F#!K-UP FESTIVAL work?

  1. Share your f#!k-up

    Participants split into small groups. Each person shares a real fuck-up using five questions.

    The fuck-up does not need to be career-ending. Recognizable mistakes often work best.

    1. What went wrong?
    2. What was the consequence?
    3. How did you fix it?
    4. What did you learn?
    5. What should the rest of us take away from it?

  2. 3 — 2 — 1 — Point

    Each group chooses its favourite story. No committee. No scoring matrix. No long discussion.

    Hands up.

    Everyone points at the person with the strongest, funniest or most useful story. The person receiving the most fingers represents the group.

    3. 2. 1. Point.

    Yes, it really is that simple. That is the point.

  3. The stage

    The winners from each group come to the front and share their f#!k-up with the whole room. Same five questions.

  4. The applause

    The audience decides who wins. The loudest applause wins the F#!K-UP FESTIVAL.

    No jury. No spreadsheet. No assessment criteria. Just the room.

    That escalated quickly.

  5. Wall of Shame

    The winning story earns a place on the Wall of Shame. The story is anonymized where appropriate.

    The purpose is not humiliation. The purpose is preserving useful lessons for others.

The method, such as it is

Your f#!k-up in five questions

  1. What went wrong?
  2. What was the consequence?
  3. How did you fix it?
  4. What did you learn?
  5. What should the rest of us take away from it?

No lessons were harmed in the making of this f#!k-up.

Exhibits

Wall of Shame

Our finest collection of things that absolutely did not go according to plan.

Not a wall for humiliation. A library of lessons.

Wall of Shame · fuf-0001

ONE WEEK IN. ALREADY THREW MY BOSS UNDER THE BUS.

The f#!k-up

I had just joined a new organization and asked about the status of a talent programme.

After asking around, I heard several different opinions. One person described it as “pulling a dead horse.”

Being new, enthusiastic and wonderfully naive, I found the programme owner and told them I was interested. I also mentioned that there were different opinions about the programme.

And of course — without any bad intentions — I told them who had said what.

The damage

Not much later, my manager was confronted about it. In front of the director.

I had been there for one week.

Reveal the lessonThe lesson

Transparency and repeating everything you hear are not the same thing.

When you are new somewhere, listening first is often smarter than immediately connecting every wire.

Shared anonymously.

Good news: you survived. Bad news: there may be a lesson in it.

Your turn

Enough laughing at everyone else.
Your turn.

Five questions. No word count. No polish required. Still pretending nothing went wrong?

Can we publish this story?

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The community

The entrance fee?
One f#!k-up.

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No CV. No pitch. No perfect story.

Your entrance ticket is one mistake of your own. No fuck-up? No entry.

  1. What went wrong?
  2. What was the consequence?
  3. How did you fix it?
  4. What did you learn?
  5. What should the rest of us take away from it?

What is shared here is treated with respect. We laugh with each other. Not at each other.

No success story disguised as a failure. No “my biggest weakness is that I work too hard.” Just a real one.

For organizations

BRING THE FESTIVAL TO WORK.

A room full of people saying that mistakes are allowed changes very little. A room full of people actually talking about them can.

One concept, different contexts:

  • Leadership event
  • Team session
  • Management day
  • Conference intervention
  • Transformation event
  • Psychological safety intervention
  • Learning event
  • Retrospective at scale

The format can work with 20 people or a room full of hundreds. The energy is light. The stories are real. The learning often isn’t.

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The f#!k-up is fun.
The lesson matters.

Psychological safety does not appear because someone puts “mistakes are allowed here” on a slide.

It starts when someone tells the truth about something that went wrong and discovers the world does not end.

Then someone else does it. And another.

Eventually the conversation changes.

The idea

Why this exists

Organizations are full of stories about things that went wrong. Most disappear.

They disappear into private conversations, corridor jokes, post-mortems nobody reads, lessons learned documents nobody opens, or people quietly making sure they never mention it again.

That is a waste.

The F#!K-UP FESTIVAL turns those stories into something people can actually learn from.

F#!K-UP FESTIVAL is an initiative by The Red Wire.

Helping organizations look honestly at what is happening, make it discussable and figure out what to do next.

The Red Wire →