Project HEADWAY: Confronting Failure

Featuring Mark Mullaly - September 18, 2025

Overview

Failure is hard. We avoid it, we don’t like to talk about it, and we would prefer it didn’t happen. Every project manager must confront failure at some point in their career. Projects are risk undertakings at best, and not everyone will be successful. The challenge is that in many organizational cultures, failure has consequences: someone needs to be blamed. That is a hard burden at the best of times, and very often, the project manager is the target.

Learning Objectives

Failure is hard. We avoid it, we don’t like to talk about it, and we would prefer it didn’t happen. Every project manager must confront failure at some point in their career. Projects are risk undertakings at best, and not everyone will be successful. The challenge is that in many organizational cultures, failure has consequences: someone needs to be blamed. That is a hard burden at the best of times, and very often, the project manager is the target.

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