In this live, I was joined by Elina, who writes the Leadership Capability System on Substack, to discuss our article on how to build trust when things go wrong.
The premise we started from is that almost all of us are coached, formally or informally, on how to present a win, yet hardly anyone is taught how to talk about a miss. That gap matters, because how you handle the misses tends to shape your reputation more than any win, since those are the moments that reveal your judgement and how you hold up under pressure.
We grounded the conversation in two real misses before getting to any theory:
Elina described a social-media campaign she ran early in her Amazon career that delivered strong top-of-funnel engagement but only single digits against its sales goal; when she presented the findings, her director fixed on the poor sales number and the whole thing landed as a personal failure, which cost her with that person for a long time afterwards. I shared a consulting report I was proud of that the client’s steering group rejected — not because anything was factually wrong, but because it didn’t serve the message they needed to land with their own stakeholders.
The heart of the discussion is a four-stage approach for the hours and weeks after something goes wrong: process, prepare, narrate, and follow up. The instinct is either to hide or to rush in and explain, and the argument we make is that two stages of work need to take place before you open your mouth.
1️⃣ Process is making sense of what happened, on two fronts. There is the factual side, collecting the data and understanding the scale and root cause, and the emotional side, understanding what the miss has stirred up in you. Skip the emotional part and it shows up anyway, as blame turned on yourself or deflected onto someone else.
2️⃣ Prepare turns the attention outwards to the who. The same miss does not warrant the same conversation with everyone, so this stage is about who needs to know, what matters to them, which format fits, who else is in the room, and how much trust you already have in the bank.
3️⃣ Narrate is the actual talking, and we offered a structure for it called FOCUS (Framing, Observation, Context, Understanding and Solution), which mirrors how people naturally want to receive difficult news.
Elina’s example of good framing was the difference between “a campaign that hit 2% of its sales goal” and “the results of a first pilot that integrated the sales funnel into social and surfaced the systemic obstacles to driving direct sales” — the same facts, framed to open a useful conversation rather than close one. I offered the two framings to avoid, the victim frame (“they rejected my report”) and self-flagellation (“I misjudged the brief, I’m terrible”), both of which leave the failure as the headline, against the one that worked: the analysis is solid and gives us the raw material, what it doesn’t yet do is serve your communications objective, so the next version will build it around the message you want to carry.
4️⃣ Follow up is what makes the trust genuinely rebuild rather than just patching the moment.
If you’d like the complete method, we have put it into The Setback Protocol, which is available on Gumroad. It covers the full four-stage protocol (Process, Prepare, Narrate, Follow up), the FOCUS structure with a before-and-after worked example, a ready-to-use AI prompt that reframes your draft and flags the gaps before you send, and a Harder Cases section.
You can get it below; it’s free for paid subscribers, and the price of a coffee for everyone else.
We also walked through the most common ways narration goes wrong: misjudging the audience (upstream of almost everything else), the surprise reveal of a miss you’ve sat on for weeks (which no narration skill can rescue, because the listener’s takeaway becomes “what else aren’t you telling me”), dumping unfiltered data without interpretation, skipping structure, and arriving with no credible next step, which simply hands your problem to the listener.
The through line is that a miss is rarely the thing that damages you. What damages you is walking in with your emotions first, talking to the wrong person, or handing over a problem with no plan attached. Do the processing, do the preparation, and frame things honestly, and the same failure can leave you more trusted than before.
Elina’s closing thought was to reframe failure not in a “fail fast and break things” way but as a measure of courage: the courage to attempt difficult things, and the resilience to deal with failure, learn from it and talk about it productively.
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